XIII

PHOEBE put me into Newburyport that night, pestering me all the way to take her to Cambridge, so she might see James Dunn.

“This is beyond me,” I said. “First you dawdled for years, threatening to marry him but not doing it. Then you up and married him and sent him off in a half-hour’s time, all brisk and businesslike. Now you want to tag along to see him when you have this sloop here to tend. You’d be a horrible nuisance to me and everyone else. You said once that men were terrible; and I say to you now that women are worse, for they change their minds every two minutes, and still they’re bound to have their own way in spite of hell and high water!”

“Then you won’t take me?”

“That’s what I’m trying to say. If you can’t understand my thoughts after the way I’ve spoken, I’ll unship the tiller and pound them into your head.”

When the sloop nosed into Tracy’s wharf at Newburyport I wasted no time in farewells, knowing she’d pester me. As I went up the wharf she called: “I’ll wait here until I have word from you.”

I turned and ordered her back to Arundel, while she played with her string of cat’s eyes and stared abstractedly at the peak of the mainsail. When I started onward, she let me reach the end of the wharf; then again said: “I’ll wait here until I have word from you!” I’d have spoken my mind freely, but when I turned to do it she was vanishing into the cabin. I said to myself she could lie there, for all of me, until the Eunice had barnacles on her bottom as thick as the mud on Ranger’s belly in the spring.

All Newburyport was astir: candles in the windows; carts rumbling through the streets loaded with provisions for the army; up and down the walks a passing of people, many of them hallooing to me when they saw my musket, wishing me good luck.

By Davenport’s Inn a man came out of a side street, carrying three muskets. He drank from a flask, and stood watching me as I swung toward the turnpike. Then he hailed me, calling me Brother and asking whether I was bound for Cambridge. He joined me, and between us we emptied the flask. Soon, he said, we must beg a ride in a provision wagon or a rum cart, so he could be relieved of the weight of his three muskets.

He had a hare lip, poor fellow, and was hard to understand; for when he wished to say “Brother” he actually said “Mruther.” I gave him a lift with one of his muskets, a cheap thing, expressing surprise that he should travel so heavily armed, whereupon he said: “Mruther, ain’t you min oun oo Amridge yet?”

I said I had not yet been to Cambridge; so he explained there was a shortage of muskets in the army, some of the farmers having arrived armed with rusty swords, bayonets on rake handles, and muskets that had needed cleaning and repairing since the days of the Plymouth Colony. Muskets brought such prices in Cambridge that he had come home and bought two for twenty-two shillings, lawful money. These, he said proudly, he would sell for fifty or sixty shillings apiece, lawful money.

While I was turning this over in my mind a cart came clopping up behind us. I surmise the driver, a villainous-looking man with matted hair and a drooping mustache, would never have stopped for us if we had carried fewer weapons. He looked even less amiable when my companion, after climbing into the cart and poking into the hay, uncovered four kegs. They held rum, the driver said; and he gave us a drink of it. It tasted something like rum, and was made, my companion said, from a little rum and a lot of water, to which had been added burnt sugar, tobacco, and certain chemicals to make it more powerful, so that those who drank much of it awoke on the following morning feeling as though the sweepings of a barber shop had been burnt in their mouths.

He downed a pint of it and then said gloomily he didn’t know what the world was coming to: that soon nobody at all would be honest.

I broke into his meditations on the growth of dishonesty by asking a question that had been preying on me: how, in short, it had been possible for him to leave the army in order to go home. This, he said, was simple: you told your captain you had to go home to tend to your haying, though you might have to promise to harvest the captain’s hay as well. When I asked him whether or not his crop had been good he said, “Hell, Mruther, I ain’t ut no hay: I’m a whew maker!”

“A what maker?”

“A whew maker!” he replied impatiently. “Whew! Whew! What you wear on your feet!”

At Ipswich we left the clean, fresh smell of the salt marshes and struck the broad fields and rich farms of Wenham, the odor of new-mown hay lying heavy and sweet under the maples and elms. We dozed through the long hills of Danvers and awoke at Salem to a great hurly-burly, for though dawn was not far off, the provision sloops and schooners were unloading, privateers were stocking up, and brigs that had stolen in from the Sugar Islands were discharging cargoes. Here my hare-lipped friend proposed we buy two gallons of rum and make it into five gallons with water and molasses and a substance he would buy at an apothecary’s: then sell it in Cambridge at a round profit.

Having no time for such diversions, I left him and went into a tavern, the Anchor and Can, to have a slab of bacon with eggs. There my attention was caught by a small, graceful young gentleman in a tight uniform. It was not his being somewhat in liquor that took my eye, nor the way in which he tongue-lashed the landlord with such an amiable smile that his words sounded like compliments. I think he was the prettiest man I had ever seen, his ears small as a girl’s, and his mouth large with smooth red lips. He looked a little like a wellshaped woman in his close-fitting doeskin breeches and blue broadcloth coat. The chief thing that drew me to him was his declaration, made in elegant language to the innkeeper, that if the chickens were not packed in five minutes he would go elsewhere, since he wished to be in Cambridge by breakfast time. At this I asked him politely to advise me how I could most speedily arrive in Cambridge.

“With pleasure!” he replied quickly and happily, being, as I have said, somewhat in liquor. “By running!”

“That would be bad training for the future,” I said.

The young man nodded. “True, but you Massachusetts men should be trained for all emergencies.”

“Sir, I’m from Maine, not Massachusetts.”

The young man struck an attitude. “Incredible! Don’t tell me you’re not a colonel—not a Massachusetts colonel!”

I had no idea what he was getting at; but liking his looks and knowing I was at liberty to show Arnold’s letter so long as I kept silent concerning the reasons behind it, I fished it from my pocket. The young man accepted it, declaring, even while he opened it: “I’ve met hundreds of Massachusetts men, and they’re all colonels. The blow of meeting, in the very heart of Massachusetts, a man who’s neither a colonel nor a Massachuser is like to unnerve me.”

He glanced through my note. “Oh, ho!” he cried. “To Mr. Steven Nason from a colonel, but not a Massachuser colonel! Oh, ho! Oh, ho! And secrecy in the air! Ah, hah! Well, sir, I’ll get you up to Cambridge behind the cleverest black gelding that ever outran a Massachuser colonel, and my name’s Burr, from New Jersey. We’ll have a drink on it, a drink of Spanish wine that doesn’t lie in your stomach for days, like this damned New England rum, a drink for ditch-diggers and pirates.”

“Captain Burr,” I said, “I think you’ve never drunk your rum buttered.”

“Not captain! Plain Aaron Burr of Princeton in New Jersey, sir. Since I’ve seen these Massachuser colonels strutting and blowing about, and giving all the rest of us to understand that God made Massachusetts first, working hard at the task, and then tossed off the rest of the world as a sort of adjunct to Massachusetts, sir, I don’t want to be any sort of officer unless I can be greater than a colonel. What’s more, sir, I know as much about buttered rum as the next man, and I say the drinking of rum, whether hot, cold, buttered, or unbuttered, is no better than swallowing a mouthful of powdered flints. To hell with rum and to hell with colonels, sir.”

“To hell with ’em, so far as I know,” I said, “barring Colonel Arnold.”

“Quite right! Quite right!” Burr said. “He keeps slipping my mind, what with the flux of Massachuser colonels! I except Colonel Arnold with pleasure; but since you wish to be specific, I’ll put another in his place—and a general.”

“A general? One of our generals?”

“Yes, sir,” Burr said, steadying himself against the table, “a general! Imposing manner—noble face—but one of the greatest windbags, sir, ever blown up! A stuffed weskit, sir: nothing but a stuffed weskit!”

While I puzzled over this injudicious speech he shouted for the landlord, who came running in with two baskets, one filled with chickens and ham and new-killed lamb and a goose, and the other with Spanish wine. “For a little dinner to-night,” Burr said, winking slyly at me, “with my friend Matt Ogden and some Cambridge young ladies whose mothers don’t know they drink. We’ll have one of the bottles and be off.”

He told me about his health, which was not good, he said, inasmuch as his digestion was bad, so that he could eat only the finest and most delicate foods. I never knew a man so proud of a weak stomach, or so desirous of discussing it. He looked as slender and pale as though he seldom ate anything more substantial than chicken wings; but the two of us were only half an hour in wrecking a leg of lamb and two bottles of Spanish wine. That done, we got ourselves into a light wagon with the hampers. Burr cracked his whip smartly and we went off across the Lynn marshes in the rosy light of dawn, skirting slow-moving provision wagons and shouting greetings to travelers already on their way to join the army or visit friends in it, or match their wits against its seasoned traders.

With his tongue well loosened by his final bottle of wine, Burr dropped the subject of his delicate stomach and spoke largely of the Pennsylvania troops, whom he called a mongrel breed, and the Rhode Island troops, who were, he said, the meanest human beings ever spawned, and the Connecticut troops, whom he regarded as eaten up with hatred and spleen. He waxed eloquent concerning officers and men from Massachusetts, holding them to be braggarts and bigots, unbearably democratic and thoroughly unreliable; while the Virginians, in his opinion, were imitation cavaliers, and poor imitations to boot.

He had even more to say about the young men of Harvard College, a lot of loose-living, rum-guzzling rakes with an offensive and unfounded air of superiority; whereas the young gentlemen of the college which he had attended, at Princeton in New Jersey, were vastly superior persons, both aristocratic and democratic at the same time, as well as brave and learned, with only the natural instincts of gentlemen for wine and the companionship of the fair sex.

It further developed he had a strong dislike for General Washington, though he admitted there were few to share this opinion with him. Nevertheless he held to it that General Washington was a stuffed weskit.

I thought to myself it would not take him long to discover that the Maine troops, including myself, were somehow distressing, so there would be nobody in the world but himself and his friends from Princeton with whom he could be pleased. Yet he seemed sensitive, and I feared to speak my thoughts lest he burst into tears on my hands.

The gelding whirled us through the single long street of Malden and the rummy odors of Medford. When we had crossed the Mystic marshes and come into Cambridge the breakfast fires of the army were sending out a haze of smoke; and sharp odors of burning pine and coffee and roasting ham brought the water to our mouths. Burr dropped me at the beginning of the tents, so I could look for our Arundel men. He leaned down to shake hands. “We’re sick of this stale and dreary life, Sam and Matthias and the rest of us. If you know about this business of Colonel Arnold’s, give us a hint.”

“I know nothing,” I said, “but if you go along with him you’ll find little that’s stale and dreary about it.”

Burr saluted me with his whip, cracked it over the gelding so that it sounded like a pistol shot, and went racketing down between the tents as though off in a hurry for Colonel Arnold’s headquarters, which he may indeed have been.

This camp of ours was a strange sight, like a county fair, or a mass of Indian towns stretched out on either side of the road. Here and there were proper tents and marquees; but for the most part the men were housed in huts manufactured from sailcloth or from boards, or from boards and sailcloth put together, or from anything available. There were huts of sods, and huts of stone, huts of brick and of brush fastened together with laths. Three tents were made from the wicker casings of rum bottles; and near by were others built of willow withes in the manner of a basket, the doors and windows neatly wrought in the same material. Straw was used for the lower sections of some: likewise hay; and one was made from the joined halves of molasses barrels, still fragrant.

The soldiery, too, had a peculiar look of being masqueraders at a rout. A few boasted ancient blue militia uniforms, but more wore canvas smocks, or leather hunting frocks, or hickory shirts with the sleeves lopped off.

Seeing a gaunt man crouched over a fire, stirring strips of bacon in a pan with one hand and waving a swarm of flies from his head with the other, I asked him whether he knew the whereabouts of men from near York in Maine.

“Brother,” he said coldly, “they’re around these tents too much o’nights, looking for anything stealable. If you’re going to join up with ’em, keep away from these tents unless you want to be buried alive in our latrine.”

“You’re not from Maine, then?”

“Brother,” he said, removing his bacon from the fire, “if I was one of those mean Mainers I’d be ashamed to show myself in public. I come from Connecticut, Brother, where we eat civilized and act civilized and talk civilized.” He held a strip of bacon above his head and dropped it into his mouth.

“Well, sir,” I said, “I’ve just arrived, and I’m unaware of these things. Till now I’d always heard you Connecticutters hated everyone else, and sold clay coffee beans for a living. I’m glad to hear you’re growing civilized.”

When I started off, he called after me, his mouth full of bacon: “How’ll you trade for that musket, Maine?”

I shouted back I couldn’t for fear of being paid with wooden nutmegs, and at this he bellowed that I’d find my friends in Colonel Scammen’s regiment, three streets down and two streets over, and to sew up my pockets before I went there.

I found them comfortable in tents made of boards and sailcloth; and when Jethro Fish, looking up from mending a pair of shoes, bawled that here was Steven Nason come from Arundel, the Arundel men came out of their tents and away from their morning chores as though an Arundel man were as rare a sight as the great Cham of Tartary.

First they satisfied their curiosity as to how their corn was looking and whether the pollocks had been running and was there plenty of seaweed for fertilizer and how their children and wives were doing and whether anybody else was going to join the army and when money would be raised for the purchase of uniforms. Then they began to acquaint me with their own troubles; for our Arundel people are disgruntled, whatever their condition. I truly believe that if ever our Arundel men become angels in heaven, they will complain that the clouds are over-lumpy for sitting purposes, and that the golden harps are too small for good harping and out of tune to boot.

One thing that irked them was the need of serving under officers they had not elected themselves, so that they were unable to consult with them and advise them as they might otherwise have done. We New Englanders like to choose our own leaders; and I know that in past wars many Maine men wouldn’t fight unless they could name their commanders.

“Why, hell, Steven,” said young Pierce Murphy from Cleaves’s Cove, “this Colonel Scammen, he’s a good enough soldier, I guess, but I don’t know him and I can’t go up to him and call him Charley and tell him he’s got to let me go home for a couple of weeks, same’s I could if you was colonel, or Jesse Dorman, or somebody I know!”

“Yes,” growled Noah Cluff, “and not knowing ’em, you got to salute ’em. Hell, I’ve saluted so many of these dod-rotted colonels since George the First took holt that my trigger finger’s all stiffened up!”

“George the First?”

“Washington,” Nathaniel Lord explained.

“What’s the matter with him?”

“Oh, hell; nothing!” Sile Abbott said. “For a Virginian, he’s pretty good.”

“He’d be good, even if he was a Connecticutter,” said Murphy. “General Ward, he commanded before Washington. You never saw old Artemas Ward out on the lines all day, the way Washington is. Ward kept himself planted in a chair so tight that if Washington hadn’t come along he’d have sprouted. Washington don’t pay attention to cannon balls, any more’n he would to mosquitoes. Only thing wrong with him, he’s a crazy fool about saluting. What I say is, if you know an officer, it don’t do no good to salute him. If you don’t know him, what’s the use?”

“Anyway, he’s got the British bottled up so’s they can’t move,” said Dorman proudly. “He runs a couple thousand of us up on a hill around dusk, and by daylight we got a new fort dug.”

“Those lousy British take a month to dig what we dig in a night,” Noah Cluff said.

“They can’t get no food nor nothing,” Nathaniel Lord told me.

“Yes,” said Abbott, “and there ain’t anything for us to do except watch to see those damned Connecticutters don’t steal the locks off our guns! I’m sick of hanging around here digging forts and saluting! I want to go home!”

“Who don’t?” growled one of the Burbank boys.

James Dunn’s face rose impressively behind his fellow troopers. “If we’re not going to march, I’d ruther work in a shipyard. People in shipyards ain’t as mean as soldiers.”

“By gravy!” Murphy said, “that ain’t far wrong! I don’t know how they got so many downright mean men in this army! The Rhode Islanders ain’t a damn bit better than the Connecticutters; and there ain’t nuthin meaner’n a New Yorker.”

“Except a Pennsylvanian,” Cluff observed dryly. “If the British don’t come out, I’d just as lief fight the Pennsylvanians.”

“I was directed here,” I said, “by a soldier who complained Maine men would steal anything.”

My neighbors looked baffled.

“We borrowed a barrel of cider from the Rhode Islanders a couple nights ago,” Abbott admitted.

“It wasn’t a Rhode Islander. It was a Connecticutter.”

A contemptuous growl greeted this information. “We caught three Connecticutters trying to steal our extra stockings last week,” Jesse Dorman complained. “They’d cut the buttons right off your pants if you didn’t watch ’em!”

Our conversation was interrupted by a rasping shout of: “Don’t you ever salute officers?” It came from a red-faced man in a blue militia coat, with a yellow band on his sleeve. He hated us: no doubt of that.

“This is a deliberate insult,” he said loudly. “After all the orders issued concerning saluting, you turn your backs on me! It’s intolerable!”

He was rewarded by vacant stares and a thick silence.

“I demand an answer!” he roared, looking blue around the gills.

“Sir,” Jesse Dorman said plaintively, “we didn’t see you!”

“That’s no excuse! A soldier’s expected to see what’s going on around him. You’d be in a fine pickle if you didn’t see the British sneaking up on you some night!”

“Colonel,” said Noah Cluff, “our backs was to you.”

“Well,” the officer said, “they ain’t now! You see me now, don’t you!” He stared at me, prodding a fat forefinger toward my chest. “Why don’t you salute?”

“Sir,” I said, “I’m not in the army. I don’t know how to salute.”

A shrill whisper came from somewhere behind me. I recognized Asa Hutchins’s voice. “Kiss him, then!” it said.

The colonel, purple as a huckleberry, peered furiously at the line of expressionless faces, but seemed to find them little to his liking. Muttering something about “whooping, holloing gentlemen soldiers,” he took himself down the street, and I, misliking the appearance of his back, set off in the opposite direction.

Desiring no trouble, I touched my hat to everyone I passed and so arrived without incident at the common, where I was shown the square house in which General Washington had his headquarters.

My all-night journey had made my eyes sticky, so after washing down a pork pie with two quarts of beer at the Laughing Dog Tavern, touching my hat to every man who bore a military air and several who did not, I went into a hay field, put my arms around my musket and pack, so no Connecticutter or Rhode Islander could steal them from me, and slept four hours.

I was awakened by what I thought was a slamming door; but on hearing a louder slamming near at hand, I knew it for an explosion. Here was the war at last, I thought; so I hastened to General Washington’s headquarters, preferring to be under a roof with others if there was to be any extensive dropping of cannon balls.

There were sentries in the general’s headquarters, neatly uniformed, like Mr. Burr, and extremely military, rattling and slapping muskets whenever an officer passed. I showed one of them my letter and was directed to the office of General Gates, Adjutant General of the army. He was a fussy-looking man with a sly eye and stringy gray hair: better fitted, it seemed to me, for sewing buttons on General Washington’s shirts than for fighting his battles. None the less, he received me politely, bidding me wait in a corner room.

I waited an hour, dozing in the warmth of the late August afternoon, when there was a prodigious clatter and crash in the hall. Thinking a British shell had burst through the wall of the house, I snatched up my musket and pack and fled into the entryway. There, rising from the floor, was the hugesome bulk of Cap Huff, gorgeously attired in a gold-laced blue coat, doeskin breeches and shiny black boots, a sword at his belt and spurs on his heels the size of cooky-punches. He greeted me with a clanking of spurs and accoutrements, and by tripping over his sword.

“By God! Stevie!” he shouted, clapping his vast paws on my shoulders and giving me a squeeze that almost broke my neck, “I bet they’re going to give us another clout at that fox-faced Frenchy!”

“Look here,” I said, pushing him away with the butt of my musket, “have they made you a general? What are you doing, falling down this way?”

Before he could answer, the door of the front room was jerked open and the face of Colonel Arnold popped out and glared at us from round eyes; then popped back again.

At the same time General Gates came up beside Cap and said coldly: “Colonel, may I know your name and organization?”

“Why, yes,” Cap said carelessly, “Huff.”

“Colonel Huff?” Gates persisted.

“Yes; Huff!” Cap declared.

Seeing something was not as it should be, and fearing I might be somehow hindered in my interview with Colonel Arnold if Cap grew restive under this questioning, I swung my musket butt against the small of his back. Cap groaned and sank to one knee. Dropping my musket and pack, I caught him and steadied him.

“Sir, I think the heat made this gentleman ill,” I said.

“I think he’s mad!” Gates said.

“It may be,” I admitted. “With your permission I’ll take him out doors.” It was in my mind to guide him to the field where I had taken my nap, and tie him so he’d be there on my return. My planning went for nothing when the door of the front room was again jerked open by Colonel Arnold.

“General,” he said to Gates, “General Washington asks that these two gentlemen, whom I’ve had the pleasure of meeting, be admitted to his room.”

“Certainly, Colonel!” Gates said, “but I fear, Colonel, the gentleman in the colonel’s uniform is ill.”

I kicked Cap as hard as I could and helped him to his feet. He blinked and felt of his back. “Sir,” I said to Colonel Arnold, who was examining Cap’s uniform with as much interest as Gates had shown, “he’s recovering: he’ll soon be himself.”

Colonel Arnold nodded and led the way to the front room, into which he ushered us, Cap still leaning against me, groaning and pressing his hand to his back. General Washington sat behind a long table and watched us come in. He was an imposing man with broad, square shoulders, powdered hair and a ruddy face a little marked with smallpox—taller than Cap Huff, though smaller seeming from the fineness of his features and the lack of coarseness about his hands or waist. I thought, when I saw the straight line of his lips and the intentness with which he watched Cap, that I wouldn’t like to give him reason for speaking harshly to me.

“General,” Colonel Arnold said, when he had closed the door, “this is Steven Nason of Arundel, who had been far up Dead River when I first met him, as I told you, and has reasons to wish to go safely to Quebec. And this gentleman,” he added, pointing at Cap, who passed his hand clumsily over his face, “is Squire Huff of Portsmouth, who helped seize the powder in Fort William and Mary, as you already know.”

General Washington nodded. “I hadn’t heard,” he said to Cap in a pleasant, deep voice that vibrated as though from overmuch giving of orders in harsh weather, “I hadn’t heard you’d been made a colonel.”

Cap shook his head like a dog with a fly on his ear. “Who hit me?” he asked.

Colonel Arnold tweaked his sleeve. “The general asked you a question.”

Cap fumbled for his sword and leaned on it. “I hadn’t heard it, either,” he said, “and damned good reason! A scurvy rat in Ports mouth bribed the gaoler to lock me up and let no word reach my friends. I’ve heard nothing since Jonah got out of the whale!”

“Then you’re not a colonel?” General Washington said impassively.

“Why, hell, General,” Cap growled, “I’ve been in gaol! If it hadn’t been for Colonel Arnold sending me a letter I wouldn’t have this sword or this uniform, or be out of gaol, even, the dirty weasels!”

“In time of war,” General Washington said, “a person found within the lines in a uniform to which he’s not entitled is liable to be shot for a spy.”

“A spy!” Cap bawled. “I’ll go back and kill that damned son of a goat!” He threw his sword on the floor with a clatter, and wrenched an arm from his coat.

General Washington got up from behind his table and placed a hand restrainingly on his arm. “Let’s have the full tale,” he said. He glanced grimly at Colonel Arnold; but it suddenly came to me there was no grimness about his look; merely a sober intimation that what he was about to hear would be enjoyable.

“Well, sir,” Cap said, “there ain’t much to tell. There was a tailor that dealt with the British officers, and I suspicioned he’d been the ringleader of them as put me in gaol. So when I was let out I went to his house and took him by the collar and held him over his stove, and he promised to make me a uniform. Well, General, he done it, and gave me a sword and a hat to boot. Yes, sir, and to show his affection he let me have a silver tea set and a bag of hard money that your honor might find handy for the army.” Growling ferociously, he finished stripping off his coat and threw it on a chair, placing his sword across it. Under the coat he wore a shirt of India goods. I wondered where he got it. “Anybody that wants that coat can have it,” Cap said.

“We’re all needy,” the general said. “I make no doubt we can find a taker.”

“Is there anything the matter with it?” Cap asked.

“Why, no,” the general said. “It’s fitting enough, in the proper place. It happens to be the field uniform of a colonel in the Royal Marines—the rarest of all military ranks. There are only four marine colonels in the entire British army. I think, sir, you’ll find a leather hunting shirt more suited to your needs.”

He turned to me then; and I repeat now what I have always said: that a man had to be careless and thoughtless not to straighten up under his cold blue eye and do the best he could.

“Sir,” he said, “Colonel Arnold tells me you set off for Quebec as a boy by way of the Kennebec.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You had no fear of making this trip successfully?” he asked.

“Why, no, sir. My father was with me.”

“Would you be as sanguine to-day, without your father?”

“Certainly, sir, if I could pick my companions.”

“So you wouldn’t travel that route to Quebec with anyone?”

I studied for a time. “Sir, I’d prefer to go with somebody who knew the woods or had some special desire for going. Then I’d be sure of getting there.”

“Would you be willing to go with Colonel Arnold?”

“Not only willing, sir, but happy.”

“And with your friend here?” The general meant Cap Huff.

“I’d count myself fortunate.”

General Washington turned to his desk and consulted a small map. “Now,” he said, “when you traveled toward Quebec as a boy did you experience any difficulties?”

“No, sir. Not while our canoe was driven by good paddlers.”

“How did it happen you never got there?”

“We learned the man we pursued had got clean away.”

“But you could have made it?”

“Easily, sir, so far as we knew.”

“In how long a time?”

“From Swan Island, near the mouth of the Kennebec, in eight or nine days, sir, if all went well.”

“What do you mean by ‘If all went well’?”

“If we found no drought, sir, and no floods. If we got food when we wanted it. If we hit no rocks—kept from spilling in rapids. If all our muskets weren’t lost, and none of us broke a leg.”

“And if such things happened?” the general asked. “How long would you be then?”

“God knows, sir.”

“Do you know others who made the trip?”

“Yes, sir: the Abenaki Natanis, my friend, made it several times.”

“Several times?” the general asked quickly. “Then this Natanis has been in Quebec more than once since the British have held it?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. I saw him shoot a quick look at Colonel Arnold.

“Do you know of others?” he asked.

“Many others. Lieutenant Hutchins of Rogers’ Rangers took a message from Amherst to Wolfe by way of the Kennebec three weeks before my father and I went up. I’ve read the wampum rolls of the Abenakis, and seen the records of how Father Drouillettes went twice from Cushnoc to Quebec and back, and how Father Rale went up from Norridgewock. There was an Englishman named Montresor who traveled that road a year after my father and I. Natanis says Montresor drew a map, though I never saw it. Many Norridgewock Indians traveled to Quebec each year to trade or see relatives. Now all of them have gone to St. Francis, which means they went by way of the Kennebec, squaws and all. Assagunticooks from the Androscoggin make the trip often. It’s no great trick for a woodsman; but no one ever made it without knowing he’d been on a journey that near graveled him.”

“Let me ask you, sir,” General Washington said, “whether there are men in your section capable of making such a trip?”

“Plenty, sir; good woodsmen and hunters, hardy in the woods.”

“Then if we could get an army of such men, they’d all be capable of making it?”

“An army!” I cried.

“An army, sir, capable of taking Quebec.”

“What would it do for food?” I asked, thinking of the tumult an army would make in passing through the forest; thinking of the tumbled mass of rocks at the carrying places: of the bogs, the rapids, the trackless wilderness.

“It would carry its own food,” the general said, “but that’s not the question. The question is whether, if we could get an army of men like Colonel Arnold and you and Huff, it would be capable of traveling to Quebec by way of the Kennebec?”

“Gosh all hemlock, Stevie!” Cap exploded. “Yes! Capable of traveling there and carrying Quebec away in our pants pockets!”

“Sir,” I said, “with favorable conditions, I think an army could do it.”

Colonel Arnold had sat gnawing his nails while the general questioned me. Now he spoke. “General, we’ll make our own favorable conditions!”

“Colonel,” the general said, “I know you’ll try, and I hope you’ll have better fortune at making favorable conditions than has fallen to my lot when I’ve attempted it.”