“That’s not true! I see things more clearly than I ever did! I see things in their proper proportion! It’s you that’s out of your head! You, with your pig-headed ideas: you’re doing your damnedest to ruin everybody you pretend to love!”

“What in God’s name are you talking about?”

He swung his arm toward the seven partly finished hulls ranged along the shore like the picked carcasses of giant turkeys. “I’m talking about these little walnut-shells of boats we’re trying to build, so to fight the greatest nation in the world—trying to build without men or nails or tools or cordage or sails; that we’re going to try to sail without sailors!”

He laughed contemptuously. “Fighting England! Us fighting England! How long do you suppose we can fight England with men half armed, half clothed, half fed! With men rotting away with smallpox! With money worth next to nothing, and nine-tenths of our people unwilling to fight—unwilling even to give a keg of nails or a coil of rope to help us fight! How long? How long can we fight England?

“Out of my head, am I? They’ll hack us and hang us! They’ll wring our necks as if we were a flock of pullets, and then what’ll happen? Then what’ll happen to Mother—to Father—to Jane and Susanah: to my father—my sisters—my mother! They’ll be hanged for rebels! Our land’ll be confiscated. They’ll be driven out—driven to Halifax, as our people drove out the Loyalists. Insane, am I? Why you fool, we haven’t a chance!”

“Lower your voice,” I said. “I don’t choose to have every Patriot between here and Crown Point know I’ve got a traitor for a brother!”

Nathaniel shivered. “Now wait, Peter! This is my country! It’s as much mine as it is yours. I was born in it and brought up in it! It’s mine! I love it just as much as you love it! Do you think, for God’s sake, that somebody made a special deed of gift of it to you? That you’re the only one entitled to have affection for it?”

“Certainly not,” I said, “but—–”

“Listen,” Nathaniel said, “it’s my country! I wouldn’t live anywhere else in the whole damned world if you gave me all of it! What right have you to call me a traitor! Do you think you’re the only person in the world with eyes and judgment—the only person competent to think?

“Do you think it’s because I love the British that I say we can’t whip ’em? All the people with brains have been sent out of the country, and we’re being governed by rats. From the way this army has been treated, what we need is a rat-charmer to coax the rats out of Congress and drown ’em!”