My dulled brain told me that we were still ten miles from Crown Point; that in spite of rowing and fighting for eighteen miles, we were still ten miles from safety. I vaguely wondered whether any place in the world was any longer safe.

The jerk of the guns, pounding from our stern with slow irregularity, helped kick us into the shelter of the headland. The four gundelos, sails brailed up and oars all awry, moved before us, disheveled and wild-looking, like ragged mad women. Our deck, except for the gabbling of a man with a bullet through his hand, was nearly silent. The pumps had stopped at last, since every man was needed on the oars.

The oarsmen, now that the end of all our labors was at hand, panted and pushed hard at the sweeps. With each British shot that passed us, howling an angry malediction at our final effort, they crouched over their oars to make themselves smaller.

Behind the northern point of the bay I saw a shelving beach: one on which we might almost run our bow on land and still be sheltered from British fire. I called a seaman to take the tiller, and went to the cabin. The place was a sulphurous corner of hell. Wounded men groaned in the corners; and at the far end, gun-crews moved like demons against the smoke that filtered through the ports.

“One more!” Arnold said, when I told him we were close to shore. He dragged upward at the gun’s breech. The gunner tapped the quoin; the crew jumped clear, and the gun bellowed and bounced back among us like a black dragon.

“All right!” Arnold shouted. “Get the wounded forward! Cut off the sails to use for stretchers!”

He climbed the ladder into the bright afternoon sunlight. A British ball passed near us with a diabolical squeal. I felt the rasping wind of it. Arnold’s hat fell off, so he must have felt it more than I.

Steven Nason stood on a bow bulwark, hacking strips from the lateen sail that hung in brails above him. The long yard of the foresail, struck by the same shot that so narrowly missed us, whipped around like the tail of a windmill. It struck Nason and hurled him backward, in spite of his size, as if from a catapult. His body turned slowly in mid-air, cleared the bulwarks, fell against two sweeps, which broke short off, and dropped straight down, out of sight.

I ran forward, but Tom Bickford was before me, hanging over the side where Nason had vanished. He jumped back on deck, ran around two guns, scrambled onto the bulwarks and dove overboard. When I hung over to look, I saw, between the slowly moving oars that drove us onward, Nason’s dark bulk, under water, distorted and wavering against a background of gray sand, and above him Tom Bickford, sprawling and kicking, reaching and reaching for him.