Cap shook his head. “It certainly beats hell the way these fellers blame everything in the world on Arnold, and how they find out so many things to blame him for! They couldn’t been madder about Whitcomb shooting the general if the general had been their own dear little sweetheart. It was all Whitcomb’s fault, they said, but it was all Arnold’s fault, too, for sending Whitcomb to Canada. Wilkinson and Hazen and Easton and Brown, they were talking about how Whitcomb wasn’t a gentleman, and ought to be turned out of the army. They’re afraid if he’s kept, the British army’ll look down on us for low, general-shooting riffraff. I think they heard some Englishman say so. By God, there’s people in this country that just ain’t right in their heads! They’ll believe anything an Englishman or a Frenchman tells ’em: anything! The foolisher an Englishman talks, the apter they are to believe him. Wilkinson’s one of ’em. If some Englishman told Wilkinson that pork wasn’t being baked with beans no more, Wilkinson would go around hollering that nobody who et pork with beans oughtn’t to be associated with, not by nobody!”

Cap spoke plaintively. “Now you take this general that Whitcomb shot! He wouldn’t have died, ever, if one of those damned doctors hadn’t got hold of him; so what’s the use trying to blame Whitcomb for it! And for God’s sake, what did they expect Whitcomb to do: wave his handkerchief at this general? If Englishmen want to be so all-fired sporting, why don’t they hang the doctor that couldn’t cure the general of a plain ordinary gunshot wound in the shoulder!”

“How did Arnold feel about all this?” I asked.

“Arnold? Why, Arnold felt just the way I did! He knew the doctor done it. He never accused Whitcomb of killing no generall Arnold’s a sensible feller! He’s got more sense than all the officers in both these armies, all put together. Arnold said it was too damned bad Whitcomb didn’t bring the general back. Whitcomb felt bad, too. He said he and Stevie’d go up to St. John’s again and catch a couple of live ones. Yes sir: it certainly was a disappointment to Whitcomb. He said when he winged that general and saw him go riding off, hell bent, he felt as bad as he did the time he missed his first moose. Anyway, Whitcomb’s safe, because he’s gone back to St. John’s, where there ain’t nothing to worry about but the British; but I ain’t going to feel safe till I get afloat—not while Easton and Brown and Hazen and Wilkinson go snooping around Ticonderoga, thinking up lies to tell about Arnold or anybody that works for Arnold!”