Toilers in the gundelos swore exasperated oaths; boards came loose from broken bulwarks with the screech of reluctant nails; hammers slammed a hurried tattoo against the hulls; and Arnold sat at his desk, writing, watching everything, jumping to his feet at intervals to send that shrill, hoarse voice of his like a whiplash among the workers; and always returning to his eternal writing.

There were wisps of blue sky overhead by eight o’clock, and the wind was stronger from the south, whirling the thinning fog in streamers around the rocky point of Schuyler’s Island. Then, in a moment, the fog was gone, and to the east of us the white walls of the Green Mountains were like a distant cloud against the pallid blue that accompanies a south wind.

Arnold craned his neck to see the men at the mast-head. They were plainly anxious. One took the telescope from the other, wiped it well against the rags of his jacket, and stared and stared into the north. Arnold went back to his letter.

“Sail!” cried one of those at the mast-head. My heart sank. It was not yet nine o’clock, and the British had only eight miles to come.

Arnold laughed. “By God! I’d give a hundred dollars, hard money, to see Carleton’s face right now. If I could hear him as well, I’d make it a thousand!”

He chuckled. “Two blunders in one day—passing us to leeward in the morning, and not keeping a proper watch at night! That’s something to be proud of!”

He called up to the look-out, “What are they doing?”

“Ship and two schooners beating to the eastward on the starboard tack,” the look-out replied.

Arnold fixed me with a speculative eye. “It seemed to me that there was something more than blundering to the failure of that other schooner to get in and attack us. I don’t know who commanded her, but if I’d been his superior officer, I’d have had him court-martialed for his day’s work!”

He went back to his letter, read it, added a few words with a neat flourish, and folded it carefully. From his manner, no one would have dreamed the British fleet was threatening him again.

He called the captains of the gundelos, gave them his letters and told them to tell Wigglesworth to hurry on to Ticonderoga with all possible speed.

He sent them off in their boats—Simonds of the Providence, his face death-like because of his intermittent fever, which would set him to shivering again on the morrow: Grimes, his clothes still smeared with blood stains: Reed, neat in his overall.

He watched them step their little leg-of-mutton sails in their longboats and go reaching off into the south wind: then hustled from end to end of the Congress, urging the men on, and lending a hand where there was need of it.