“That’s good,” Nason said. “We’ll be obliged to you.” Then, as if to ease Whitcomb’s embarrassment, he added: “If you still want to be a scout, you’d better get leave and come to Skenesboro, where we can say a good word to Arnold for you.”

XXVI

SKENESBORO, Doc Means said, looked to be afflicted with something halfway between the yellow-jaundice and rigor mortis; and the place caused so much anguish before we were finished with it that Doc’s description came to seem high praise.

The southern end of Lake Champlain is a narrow appendix, more like a river than a lake. For twenty miles it holds the center of a pleasant valley; but at Skenesboro a ragged limestone mountain rises abruptly in its path, and the lake, as if overawed, crawls into a rocky ravine and ceases to exist.

The Philip Skene for whom Skenesboro was named was an English army officer who had married a rich wife and been granted thirty thousand acres of land at the tip of the lake, by the King; but because of his loyalty to the English, he and his family had been arrested early in the war and imprisoned in Hartford.

On the lower slope of the mountain, sheltered from north winds, stood Skene’s house and barn, built out of yellowish stone that did indeed have a jaundiced appearance. They looked down on the narrow lake-end and on a cove into which the waters of Wood Creek tumbled in a cascade of yellow foam. Wood Creek was more important than its name implied, for there was a sawmill, an iron-foundry and a gristmill at the falls, and the creek itself was the one natural roadway between Skenesboro and the south. Once past its cascade, travelers could row from Skenesboro to Fort Ann; and Fort Ann was halfway to the Hudson. If we received supplies for building ships, they could only reach us by way of Wood Creek. Consequently Wood Creek, to our minds, was the very heart and forefront of Skenesboro.

When, however, we rowed our timber-laden whaleboats into the rocky ravine beneath the limestone mountain, we were appalled. The gristmill and iron-foundry were empty and haggard-looking. Scattered among the trees were cabins in which lived Negroes imported by Skene from the Sugar Islands. Except for Nathaniel and Zelph, who waved us to a landing near the falls, Skenesboro seemed lifeless and hopeless—the last place in the world in which to conjure into existence a fleet for the halting of the British. Yet a fleet must be built, for in no other way could the British be stopped.