midnight
He spent an unusual length of time at every spring at which they watered their horses ; an unseen break in his harness engaged a prolonged halt on the road ; he stopped at an unroofed hut to rouse sleeping Passover pilgrims who had taken refuge within to ask how far they were from Jerusalem , and wrangled with the sleepy Jew for many minutes over the hazy estimate the man had given him . With each of these pretenses the Maccabee 's conviction grew that the girl had something to do with the altered behavior of his cousin . And with that growing conviction , he became the more convinced that he ought to maintain an espionage of Julian . At midnight they were both tired , exasperated , moody , and determined against each other . They had not journeyed thirty furlongs . In one of the high valleys in the hills a great well bubbled up from a hollow by the road , overflowed the stone basin that the ancients had built for it and wasted itself in the undrained soil about . Here , then , was one of the few marshes in Judea .