Arnold threw down his pen and dried his second letter. His face, when he spoke, had a queer lumpy look to it. “Sullivan doesn’t want to go! He wants to stay right where he is, and fight the British. He thinks they’ll do what he wants them to do; but they won’t! If he stays where he is, they’ll sail past him up the St. Lawrence. He can’t seem to realize the St. Lawrence turns south, beyond Sorel, so that for every mile the British sail, once they’re past him, they’re a mile in his rear as well!

“If they pass him before he starts to retreat, he’s lost—he and his men and his guns and his stores! We’re all of us lost—ruined! They’d capture every last man of us—every last man! There’d be nothing between them and Albany! All they’d need to do would be to go there, march down the Hudson, join Howe, cut Washington’s forces to pieces, and start hanging rebels. They’d have nothing to worry about except which of us to hang!”

He jumped to his feet, took his sword from the table and fastened it to his belt. “Well, they won’t do it, not if I have anything to say about it! I’m going back to Montreal. I’ll do what I can to protect Sullivan’s rear until I’m ordered out or wiped out. I can’t do much with three hundred men—not against ten thousand; but I might delay ’em a little!” A light seemed to glow behind the swarthiness of his face. “I’ll kick up a dust somehow!”

He pulled on his gauntlets. “Get a horse somewhere! Seize it if you have to! Take that letter to Sullivan; and on your way, stop at Chambly and give this”—he pushed his second letter at me—“to Colonel Hazen. He’s to move all his supplies and stores back here at once! Damned quick, too!”

He bolted from the room. By the time I reached the front door, his black horse was pelting down the river road at a gallop; and Captain Wilkinson, his jaw-muscles throbbing, was still hard at work freeing his own brown mare from a hitching post.

My heart and head, I knew, should have been filled with martial and patriotic emotions; but what I felt was a great wistfulness, wholly personal to me. I was ordered to Chambly and thence to Sorel, with an ache inside me that longed for me to carry it back to St. John’s—St. John’s and Ellen Phipps, who had blushed and assented when Marie de Sabrevois asked her whether she didn’t like my brother Nathaniel.

XVIII