I unshipped an oar and made fast a rope-end to it. Cap Huff came charging aft, caroming into oarsmen and upsetting water buckets. His sweaty great face was distorted, so that he had the look of a blackened moon-faced baby on the verge of bursting into tears. He took me by the front of the shirt and shook me. “Why don’t they stop the ship? Is he dead? He ain’t dead, is he?”

“Get back to your marines where you belong,” I said. “Tom Bickford’s got him.”

He clung to me, breathing heavily: then, almost fearfully, looked over the side. What he saw seemed to frighten him, for he whimpered and clumsily threw a leg across the bulwark. When I looked too, I saw Tom not only had Nason by the arm, but had hooked his fingers into one of the ragged shot-holes that honeycombed our side.

I pulled Cap back. “Can’t you see Tom’s got him? Go forward and get your men ashore.”

cap hiccupped. “By God, if Stevie’s dead, I’ll take it out of England’s hide!”

He lumbered forward. We were close under the headland by now, so close that suddenly and strangely there was the odor of pine woods in our nostrils. The four gundelos were drawn against a marshy bank, their crews pouring from them like ants, and, like ants, carrying heavy burdens we knew to be wounded men. I felt our own bow scrape bottom. Our stern settled a little, and slowly the deck canted to starboard.

Arnold had a canvas speaking trumpet, and through it he shouted to the gundelos, ordering that they be set afire. We might have lain at a deserted dock, for all the excitement in his voice when he issued his orders—for marines to be lined up on the bank to hold off the British in case they tried to attack in boats before the vessels burned: for ten men to remain on board with him to set the ship afire: for the wounded to be lowered from the bow in canvas slings.…

To me he said, “You’d better look after your brother yourself. I don’t believe he’s dead.”

That picture of him, haggard, hollow-eyed and unshaven, hungry and sleepless, but always steady and calculating, taking us ashore at Buttonmould Bay after days and nights of planning, fighting and responsibility such as might drive the best of men insane, is one that has never left me.

At that time I knew only one thing: that he was a seaman and a general fit to rank with the world’s best. I know more now, after years of meditation in the quiet of a vessel’s cabin.