“You seem to think,” Phoebe said, “that oakum and nails grow on trees down our way, and can be picked and sent up to you on five minutes’ notice. If I didn’t know you’d spent most of your life in Kittery, I’d think, from all these foreign ideas of yours, that you must be some kind of foreigner—most likely an Englishman. Oakum and nails aren’t too easy to find during the best of times; and now that everybody’s got the privateering fever, you’re as apt to stumble on a hundredweight of oakum as on a litter of sables. Don’t think you’re the only people in the world that have troubles! You don’t know what trouble is till you start interfering with somebody who’s making money out of the war!”

“Well, for God’s sake!” Cap roared. “They expect us to fight for ’em, don’t they?”

Phoebe ate the last of her corn pone and rose to her feet to re-tie her red knitted sash.

“I wouldn’t put it just that way,” she said. “They don’t know any more about war and fighting than a five-year-old girl knows about having a baby. They know they’ve got a lovely chance to make money privateering, and that’s all they want to know. What they expect is that somebody’ll keep the war from stopping till they’ve made all the money there is.”

She added dryly, “Their idea of a nice war is one that’ll last about fifty years.”

The semi-circle of men, sprawled on the ground before our bunkhouse, stared at her. Their eyes were glassy in the red glow of the cook-fire. Nobody, seeing their tattered breeches, their stockingless legs, the shreds of cloth that hung around their upper bodies, masquerading as shirts, could have dreamed that they were men who had known comfortable homes and a decent way of life: that Nason owned an inn, and a good one; that Verrieul had won the approbation of the president of Dartmouth College; that Tom Bickford had set his heart on being a clergyman; that Whitcomb had been a justice of the peace; and that my brother would even still be welcome in the mansions of his Salem classmates.

We looked to be, every last one of us, what Carleton called us in an open proclamation within that very month—“rebels, traitors in arms against their King, rioters, disturbers of the public peace, plunderers, robbers, assassins, murderers.”

And not only had all this happened to us in three short months of war, but it was only by the grace of God we were not rotting with a thousand other smallpox victims in the dead pits of Isle aux Noix.

“Fifty years?” Nason asked softly. “They want the war to last fifty years? It’s not quite that bad, I guess.”