“Where’s our fleet,” I asked Nason, “and how’s it look?”

“It’s moving south, hunting for a likely place to fight, and it might look worse—lots worse! General Arnold’s a seaman if ever I saw one, and he’s got another seaman to help him. His name’s Wigglesworth. He’s a colonel, but he used to sail ships for Nathaniel Tracy in Newburyport. I wouldn’t wonder if Arnold and Wigglesworth are better than anybody the British can produce.” Meditatively he added, “They’ve got some smart men, though, the British have. They’ve got a man named Schanck. He’s made himself a flat-bottomed boat that he can turn into a keel-boat in five seconds.”

“How, for God’s sake?”

“There’s a little slot of a well in the center of it,” Nason said. “There’s a board pinned in the well. If he takes out the pin, the board drops down and makes a keel, and then he can beat to windward. He calls it a centerboard.”

While I was storing this discovery in my mind for future reference, Cap Huff snorted. “Hell, that ain’t nothing! Anybody could ’a’ thought of that—if he’d ever just a-happened to think of it.” He was almost right, and I was surprised it had never occurred to anyone before.

“Did you find out anything about the British fleet?” I asked Nason, little dreaming he had acquired information of even greater moment to me than the number of vessels we must fight.

Nason nodded. “They’ve got seven real vessels. They’re big, but we couldn’t be sure how big. It was hard to tell from where we were. Then they’ve got a lot of little gundelos, each one mounting a single heavy gun. Six of the big vessels are in the water, and one’s on the stocks still. Whitcomb says the one on the stocks wasn’t even started three weeks ago. They must have laid down her keel after they saw our vessels.”

“How many guns do the big ones carry?”

“We couldn’t be sure. There’s so many British troops around that it’s kind of risky to try to see all you’d like to see. There’s women, too, and children! Their regiments brought three hundred women from England with ’em: camp followers. Nearly every soldier brought a dog, and some of the officers brought two or three. Seemed as if you couldn’t get within a mile of the shipyard without falling over a camp follower or stepping on a dog! To tell you the truth, there were times when we felt kind of shaky, trying to keep those lobster-backs from catching us.”

“That ain’t such a hell of a lot of women!” Cap said. “Only three hundred?” Then he brightened. “What kind of looking women was they, mostly?”