There was another silence. I looked at Wilkinson; but he only stared at me owlishly, his jaw muscles throbbing. I think he saw something reasonable and noble in Sullivan’s willingness to sacrifice the lives of eight thousand men in order to save the pitiful vanity that he miscalled “honor.”

When Arnold spoke again, his voice was deferential: almost too deferential. “I think I see what you mean, General. You can’t retreat unless General Schuyler or General Washington orders you to retreat: that’s what you mean, I take it.”

“If General Schuyler should order it,” Sullivan admitted, “I would, of course, obey.”

“In that case,” Arnold said, “I have only two suggestions. One is that you start your sick for Crown Point at once. At once! You can do that without orders. The other is that you send me to Albany to tell General Schuyler what’s going on. You’ve got to have those orders with no loss of time, or orders won’t do you any good—not any good at all!”

“You think he’ll order a retreat?” Sullivan asked.

Arnold only laughed.

“Then I suppose you’d want to go tomorrow, General?” Sullivan said.

“Tomorrow!” Arnold cried. “I’m a seaman, General, and I’ll take seamen with me. We’ll go today and sail all night.”

“Good!” Sullivan said. “I’ll start the sick for Crown Point—ah—I’ll start them tomorrow.”

XXII

WE FOUND a twenty-seven-foot bateau and calked her with old rags dipped in pork fat. We made a rudder for her, and a tiller, and ballasted her with cannon balls. We made sail from tarpaulins—a patched leg-of-mutton that looked as if it might have done duty as a staysail for Henry Hudson himself, and a jib fit for nothing on any deep-water vessel except to swab the galley stove. We bought a door from the Frenchman who lived on the island, and decked her forepart with it, in case she tried to put her nose under water.

In this craft we pushed off into the gathering dusk and headed toward Champlain, the general and Wilkinson, with the rest of us as crew—Tom Bickford, Doc Means, Verrieul, Cap Huff and myself. I knew she was rickety from her wobbly feel when we overturned her for calking; so I put in an oar for each of us, to give us something to hold to if she sank. How rickety she was I didn’t know until we reached the lake, and there caught a light breeze from the northwest. Slight as it was, it made our lobster-pot of a vessel squeak with pain, and flap like a flounder.