“Well,” Cap said, “you know how Arnold is when he makes up his mind to do something. If he decides to go to St. John’s, he sails in five minutes!” To Hawley he added: “If I was you, and wanted to be sure not to have to chase him a hundred miles in a row-boat, I’d start for Crown Point right now!”

At the mention of St. John’s Nathaniel, without another word, had turned and gone to the bunkhouse for his blanket and musket. That night I could rest without keeping myself awake with disturbing thoughts. I’d had fears that Ellen Phipps was a means of communication between Marie de Sabrevois and my brother. What messages might thus pass, I dared not think; but if Ellen came back from Albany now, charged with a secret errand to Nathaniel, he’d be away, thank God!—and on that thought I slept.

XXXI

THE heat and thunderstorms of August gave way to September’s clear days and cold nights. The young maples were frost-nipped; the air heavy with the scent of dying leaves. Skenesboro was a desert of stumps and scrub, stripped of trees for Wynkoop’s preposterous stockade and barracks, as well as for ships, stocks, cabins, firewood, oars. The slashings lay everywhere, like wreckage; war had put a blight upon the land, as upon the people.

Barracks and cabins were filled with shipwrights, soldiers and sailors, flat on their backs with intermittent fever: shivering fit to shake themselves to pieces, their fingers dead white, their nails blue, their eyes black-ringed in pallid faces—and the next minute burning up with heat, howling for water, unable to talk sensibly; and we, knowing the day was not far off when the British would attack, were begging for doctors to cure these men so they could help us with the galleys.

Of all the vessels we had built, only five were left in Skenesboro: the four big row-galleys, crouched in a group, as if at bay at the bottom of this devastated valley, and beside them a single gundelo, like the unweaned calf of one of the larger hulks.

How we got them in the water, God only knows. Zelph persuaded Negroes to come in from the hills and help. Farmers, in for a day to sell corn and potatoes, lingered to pass up planks to the few of us who still could work. Waterbury himself, lame from falling off a ladder, toiled with a hammer when free of commissaries and letter-writing.

On the 10th of September the Trumbull galley slid in. She was sturdy, and though high in the water because of her lack of guns and ballast, she was steady as a rock while her crew ran aimlessly about her deck and clapped onto ropes to work her back to shore. She was no yacht; nor was there anything about her that was beautiful; but with her guns aboard, she would at least be dangerous.