Home was the one word in the mind of each; and they both came from Bonaventure.
The one was a tall, athletic young man, who had borne a captain's commission in Papineau's patriot army.

He rode a sorel horse--a great, wiry raw-bone, with a lunge like a moose, and legs that struck the ground with the precision of a piston-rod.

As soon as his nose was turned towards Bonaventure he smelt the wind of home in his nostrils; his hatchet head jerked till he got the bit straight between his teeth; then, gripping it as a fretful dog clamps the bone which his master pretends to wrest from him, he leaned down to his work, and the mud, the new-fallen snow and the slush flew like dirty sparks, and covered man and horse.
Above, an uncertain, watery moon flew in and out among the shifting clouds; and now and then a shot came through the mist and the half dusk, telling of some poor fugitive fighting, overtaken, or killed.
The horse neither turned head nor slackened gait.

He was like a living machine, obeying neither call nor spur, but travelling with an unchanging speed along the level road, and up and down hill, mile after mile.
In the rider's heart were a hundred things; among them fear, that miserable depression which comes with the first defeats of life, the falling of the mercury from passionate activity to that frozen numbness which betrays the exhausted nerve and despairing mind.

The horse could not go fast enough; the panic of flight was on him.