What the others thought, I had no way of knowing, for not even Cap Huff had a word to say; but what I thought was that we, too, had more to be thankful for than I had hitherto realized.

XXIX

PHOEBE’S INFORMATION proved to be as accurate as it had been welcome, and in two days’ time Skenesboro was not only alive with Connecticutters; but from a distance the little row-galley and two of the gundelos had the appearance of pale bee-hives a-swarm with bees. Men clung and crawled on them from bulwarks to keelson, plunking the new oakum into them with calking irons Steven Nason had made in Skene’s old iron-foundry.

General Waterbury, attended by Wynkoop, came down among us, a gray-headed man with gray sidewhiskers, walking with his left shoulder thrust a little forward, as if pushing into a gale of wind. He was as old as my father, nearly; and from the way he eyed Wynkoop, he was no more favorably impressed by this fresh-water admiral than the rest of us had been. I could hear Wynkoop talking and talking, in that strange, half-foreign language of his, telling about gundelos, and about some mighty brave fighting he had done in the last war against the French.

It seemed to me that Waterbury’s face, as he listened, grew grayer and grayer; but he said nothing: just went pushing ahead, crab-like, his eyes darting quick glances at the partly finished vessels.

There was a sour look about Waterbury’s mouth that should have been a warning to Wynkoop; but being the sort of man he was, Wynkoop talked on and on, making no effort to understand the things he saw.

Now I don’t know whether Waterbury sent for Arnold, sensing that there would be grievous trouble and delay unless Wynkoop was removed entirely from the neighborhood, or whether Steven Nason, on reporting to Arnold, had told him how Wynkoop had insisted that only gundelos be built and so spurred him to quick action. The fact remains that Waterbury was scarcely settled in Skene’s big house when a human bombshell burst in the middle of our shipbuilding.

… It was five weeks to the minute from the time when we had left St. John’s, half a jump ahead of the British light infantry, that a bateau with a patched lug sail came running into the narrow end of the lake on the wings of a hot northwest wind. She headed straight for the finished row-galley, veered sharply inshore and hit the shingle with a clatter.

The lug sail came down on the run, and at the same moment the stocky, blue-clad figure of Arnold leaped from the bateau, ran limping to the galley, and, without bothering with a ladder, went up one of the posts of the staging hand over hand.