In those days, even, there were some who hated Arnold for no reason that anybody could see, just as many hated General Washington, and just as there have always been and always will be people who take pride in hating the best and kindest of men with a hatred that stops short of nothing. But even those few who hated him—Nathaniel among them—could never deny that his was the genius of a true commander-in-chief. We had a chance to see many leaders before the war was over, but we never saw one like Arnold. When a crisis arose—when something had to be done on the instant: something bound to have a serious effect on subsequent events—most of the others, by comparison with Arnold, were no good. In one way or another, paralysis struck them. Either they couldn’t make up their minds; or they were assailed by doubts; or in seeing a part of the picture, they were blind to other parts. But Arnold saw everything. He made up his mind in an instant; and he did everything without doubting or flinching.

Not daring to trust the work to anyone else, I had taken Nathaniel to fish the mainmast pierced by British shot; and before we had finished cutting our plank, Arnold had called all the others around him on the quarterdeck—Nason, Tom Bickford, Verrieul, Cap Huff and Doc Means. He rapped out his orders as if he had been through this same situation a dozen times before: two men to the mast-head with the telescope to watch for British: two men ashore from each vessel to boil all our remaining potatoes so that we might have something to put in our stomachs: a measure of rum and water all round—mix it two and one.… All the time he talked, he worked at his field-desk, opening it up and propping it against the carriage of a stern gun, sharpening his quills with a silver pen-knife, prying up the cover of his ink-well, setting out a pad of paper: driving his words at us with stabbing movements of his pen.… The New York and the Providence were beyond repair: lay ’em alongside the galleys: take from ’em the canvas necessary to repair our sails, the planks needed to plug our shot-holes: sway up the guns from the gundelos and mount ’em at our spare ports; transfer powder and shot; send off the gundelo captains in boats to take a message to Crown Point, asking for bateaux and men to tow us the next day, in case the wind held southerly; scuttle the gundelos so the British wouldn’t get ’em; carry a letter to General Gates—–

Men crawled fumblingly on the sails to patch them, looking like clumsy slow caterpillars. Ragged scarecrows thumped and banged at the pumps. Seamen silently spliced and knotted rigging, contemplative specters in the fog.