“Oh, ain’t there!” Cap cried. “Well I hope to die if there ain’t! This feller Arnold can skate better than any Canadian that ever lived. Even with a hole shot through one leg he’s stronger’n quicker’n any other three men in the world! He’s the only feller ever I see that could jump all the way over an ammunition wagon without touching a hand to it.”

He moved closer to the cart and stared at Nathaniel with bloodshot eyes. “If you don’t believe there ain’t nothing in it, just take your time going back to Montreal! If you don’t get there quicker’n scat, that gymnast’ll jump all over you. You’ll deserve it, but you won’t like gymnasts any more than Hazen does.”

He hiccupped portentously: then stingingly slapped the white mare on the rump; and the last I saw of Nathaniel, he was sprawled with the pig-tailed Canadian in the bottom of the cart, and the cart itself was bouncing around the turn in the river road on its way to Montreal.

XVII

IF ST. JOHN’S had been a madhouse during early June, it became far worse in the next few nightmare days.

First came the smallpox regiments, sent back from Sorel to die or get well—Greaton’s Massachusetts regiment and Poor’s New Hampshire regiment. For the most part they had inoculated themselves, so that some could walk, and some had to be carried; but in the regiments there were less than three hundred men able to be out of the hospital. They had the look of men dug out of graves, as they dragged themselves into town.

Hard on their heels came the reports that Sullivan’s new regiments had been hacked to pieces at Three Rivers. We had the news fragmentarily, some from Ellen Phipps, who had been there when it happened; some from deserters, who pretended to be sick, and were trying to make their way on foot through the wilderness between St. John’s and Albany; and some from Canadians, who turned their coats with the news and now jeered at us openly.

They had gone down river, those beautiful regiments, eager to fight and confident of driving to Quebec through any force that might oppose them. In the dead of night they had landed a few miles from Three Rivers. General Thompson and Colonel St. Clair, leading the advance, had picked up a Canadian Frenchman as a guide. He led them into a swamp, through which they struggled for hours, up to their thighs in mud and tangled roots that wrenched their clothes from them.