That was another good thing about Arnold: in spite of his pride in his dress and his personal appearance, he would work like the commonest laborer, but twice as fast and twice as hard as any laborer was able to work, in order to achieve an end on which he had set his mind.

He stopped when the look-out bawled that the British had put back toward Valcour.

“Back?” he shouted. “You mean come about on the other tack, don’t you?”

“Not by a damned sight,” the look-out said. “They went back. They all went back!”

Arnold scrambled up the mast to see for himself. One quick glance was enough for him, and he dropped to the deck, as light as a cat. “He was right,” he said, examining the plank we had fitted to the mast. “Every Britisher’s on his way back to the anchorage! Every last one of ’em turned around!”

He showed his teeth in that soundless laugh of his. “I’ll bet you a dollar Carleton was so mad he went off and forgot something! I’ll bet you anything he had to go back to tend to it!”

That, we later learned, was the fact. Carleton had been in such a rage over our escape that he forgot to leave orders for the troops and Indians that had been landed on Valcour; and, lacking definite knowledge of our whereabouts—for our bare poles were invisible against the pines of Schuyler’s Island—he had returned to rectify his blunder.

Arnold was in high good humor. “Now,” he said, “we can eat our potatoes in peace; and if God only sends us a north wind in place of this damned draft out of the south, we’ll play hide-and-seek with those gentlemen until they’re frozen stiff!”

Three potatoes apiece we had, without salt, and two gills of rum and water to wash them down. In spite of being half blighted and half cooked, those potatoes seemed to me the sweetest fare I had ever eaten. They melted to a delicious paste on my tongue, and vanished almost like a mist. Even the skins were sweet, and disappeared as quickly. I could have eaten a hundred, I thought, and then slept for a week.

Sleep, alas, was scarcer than potatoes. By noon our sails were mended, our masts fished, our broken sides patched. We scuttled the Providence and the New York; then laid the Congress against the Washington, so to help her in her tribulations. That sorry vessel put me in mind of an ancient farm wagon tied together with rope, its spokes and axles nailed and wired: on the verge, to the unknowing eye, of falling to pieces at a touch; yet able to screak and wabble onward for months if not for years.