Arnold had a compass in a bucket with a lighted candle, and over the whole a funnel of canvas lashed to a stick. In the canvas he had cut a flap, so he could see into the bucket and get his bearings. He was crouched down, peering at the compass, when I came to him. His face, in the dim light that shone from the peep-hole, had a look of pleased anticipation, though our situation was far from pleasurable, to my way of thinking. The truth was that Arnold took pleasure in anything dangerous, and seemed forever hopeful that something more dangerous would soon appear.

“What do you think?” he asked.

I told him I thought the wind was changing; that if we couldn’t get our pumps working, we’d soon be down by the head and making no progress whatever, except toward the bottom of the lake.

“Yes,” he said, “this is all a lot of nonsense. There isn’t a Britisher in sight, and there hasn’t been. We’re safely through them.”

He gave me the tiller and walked forward. “Get those sweeps in the water,” I heard him say in a high, repressed voice. “We’re safe away, but there’s to be no shouting or talking. There’ll be rum all round.”

The oars caught hold. The galley lurched a little from the water in her. In half an hour the pumps were thumping again. Behind us, where the British slept, there was silence, heavy and profound.

We kindled our lanterns once more, and in a short time made out the lights of the Washington, dead ahead. We rowed along beside her. The banging of her pumps sounded like coopers pounding heads on barrels. On her far side wallowed three gundelos in bad condition. Hawley left the wheel to speak to us. When the Washington passed the British, he said, she was a whisker’s width from sinking. He was not sure, even now, he said, that she could stay afloat till dawn.

We, too, shared his doubts when the wind shifted into the south and blew hard against us, kicking up a dirty chop against which we made small progress.

We clung together, five mangled wrecks, pumping and rowing, rowing and pumping through the endless hours.

When the pale morning broke, the Washington looked to us like the corpse of a vessel. Seen through the fog, she was the gray of a corpse. Her two triangular sails were in rags. Shreds of cloth, remnants of her muffling of the night before, hung draggled from her oar-ports. Holes yawned in her sides, where planks had been splintered by British shot. The hemlock fringe above her bulwarks was smashed, as if a moose had gamboled in it. She labored wearily against the head wind and the abrupt fresh-water waves, rolling from side to side, gravid with the water that filled her.