We went into the bateaux like cattle, helter skelter, urged on by Sullivan, who marched up and down on the bank, as cheerful as though the British were in England, instead of a whisker’s width behind us. The sick lay at our feet, moaning and complaining; for not only were they seared and tortured by the internal fires of smallpox, but the bateaux were like furnaces from lying in the glare of the sun.

There was a sickening odor to those poor men, the overpowering stench of smallpox, and they were terrible to look at, because of the sores and swellings that made their faces unrecognizable. They croaked hoarsely for coolness and water, and for a hundred things we had no way of giving them; and to the accompaniment of this piteous faint chorus we pulled out into the swift current of the Richelieu.

XIX

EVEN though years have passed, I sometimes wake, even now, drenched with perspiration, from dark dreams that I am on the Richelieu once more, toiling until my muscles crack to reach the double goal that hangs like an unattainable mirage before me—for not only was I possessed, like all the others, to reach a place where we would no longer be at the mercy of the British, but I knew I could have no peace until I had again made inquiries at the Château de St. Auge.

The heat, the weakness of the men, the weight of the clumsy bateaux, made us slow enough in our struggle up that river; but slow as we were, we crept like giant waterbugs past the even slower schooners; for the wind, dropping with the sun, had left them nearly helpless. Anyone could see with half an eye that their progress soon must cease, and that unless something should be done about them, they must inevitably fall into the hands of the British.

Fortunately there seemed to be no end to the Canadian twilight; and Sullivan, slipping among us in a canoe, made a selection of bateaux—a hundred of them, and among them mine. We transferred our sick into other bateaux; and the well, all but the oarsmen, went ashore to make their way upstream afoot. Then back we pulled to the schooners; and far into that sultry simmering night we worked at shifting boxes and barrels, powder and shot, guns and gun-carriages, sick and well, from their decks and holds into the bateaux.

It is hard enough for healthy men, well fed, to lower heavy weights from a large vessel into a small boat in the bright light of day without accident. For hungry, weak men to do such work in darkness is not possible—or so I thought until the determination to escape the British burned like a flame in these men’s minds.