Carts, loaded with provisions and livestock, creaked southward along that dusty thoroughfare—carts bound, our driver said, for Boston to feed the army. Between the carts were knots of men with muskets, packs on their backs and kettles tied to their belts with string—shoeless, some of them; disreputably clad, and all moving south.

In Wells, where the inland road branches off from the sea road, there was a sizeable gathering of men and women before Littlefield’s Tavern, listening to a behemoth of a man who stood on the steps bellowing at them. His face was round and red: his garb a loose smock of dirty brown cloth, with a high pointed hood that gave him a look of a person from another world. The smock was belted at his waist, and below it were Indian leggins ending in moccasins the size of a punt.

From time to time he hesitated in his bellowing to rub his face with a hand like a bundle of sausages. Whenever this happened, a man who sat near by, dressed similarly, made a quiet remark, at which his hulking companion coughed portentously and resumed his bawling.

I recognized the quiet one as Steven Nason, who owned all the land at the mouth of our river, and maintained a tavern and garrison house behind the dunes across from Cape Arundel—a tavern which for food and cleanliness was the equal of any I knew.

Unable to pass because of the crowd, we sat and listened to the bellower. “Look here, now!” he roared. “We got eleven men agreed to go back to Canada, but that ain’t enough! We got to have twenty! What’s the matter with you, anyway? You’re rebels, all of you, just the same as me and Steven! If the British ain’t drove out of Canada, they’ll come down here and hang every damned rebel there is, and that means the whole kit and caboodle of you! Ain’t it better to go off on a nice long trip, that you’ll get paid for making, and have a pretty uniform to wear, and free rum, and learn to talk French? Ain’t it better than getting hung? I hope to die if it ain’t!”

In the midst of his noisy discourse, his eye fastened on mine. He hesitated, rubbed his forehead with vast hands as if to clear his mind of cobwebs: then pushed toward us through his audience.

He thrust his head and shoulders in at the open window of the coach, darting his eyes from our faces to the packages at our feet. “Where you from, brother? What’s your name? Where you live, and what’s your father do?” His breath was so redolent of rum that a whole distillery seemed to be crowding into the coach with us.