Cap looked politely interested. “I s’pose they think we got six toes on each foot, and all our womenfolks follow the army, and it’s a half hour’s walk from Maine over into Virginia, and it takes a whole afternoon to row around Rhode Island.”

“Yes, just about,” Nason said. Then he added something that made my flesh crawl. “They think nobody in America can build ships except people from Maine. They told us they knew we’d never be able to build a fleet that amounted to anything, because we couldn’t get enough Maine men to build it.”

At this Cap slapped his huge thighs and bellowed mirthfully; and at the sound of his laughter everyone laughed with him—Tom Bickford, Doc Means, Joseph Marie Verrieul, and Nason too. They drank from the rum bottles, choked, coughed and laughed until the tears ran down their cheeks; but I, remembering the thoughtless extravagance of my speech to Ellen Phipps, dimly sweet on the doorstep of the farm house in Skenesboro in the dark of a hot July night, found nothing at which to laugh.

My lips stiffened with horror at this final proof of all I had long feared and known, but had refused to face squarely, as is the way with most of us. Hopefully I had told myself that I might be wrong: that Nathaniel might not be in danger: that there might be two Marie de Sabrevoises. Now there could be no more such hopes.

I heard again the words of idle bombasto with which, thinking to bring a smile to her lips, I had replied to Ellen’s question as to how long it would take us to build the fleet.

“If we can get enough men from Maine,” I had told her, “we’ll build it in a month.”

And when she had scoffed at the abilities of men from Maine, I had added, with more than a little truth, “They know how to build ships, and that’s more than can be said for a lot of the men they’re sending us.”

And now here were these words, these idle, jesting words, incapable of being uttered by any American in sober truth, brought out of St. John’s by two Britishers, one of them a high officer, free to have access to the highest.