He showed us what to do. Verrieul raised and lowered Nathaniel’s arms, while I pressed against his ribs, forcing air out so that fresh air might be drawn into his lungs. I feared, from the way Doc drove us, that life was almost gone; and I wondered, in a detached way, what I would say to my mother. The thought of her grief—of the sorrows that would crowd her long days and her longer evenings when she sat sewing at the low table by the fire—goaded me to working at Nathaniel’s chest until my shoulders ached and the sweat poured from me.

His death-like inertness filled me with a tireless endurance. In my determination to save him, if he could be saved, I lost all sense of time. Hours may have passed before Doc caught our wrists and pulled us to our feet.

“I saw his eyelid move,” Doc said.

We hung over him, breathless.

He opened his eyes, staring straight up into the pines above him. He stared and stared—just an empty stare: then a bewildered gaze. He turned his head and saw me.

“I’m all right,” he said thickly. “Go on back to your gun.”

Another sort of look came into his eyes, and he feebly put out his hand to touch my knee. “What’s this?” he whispered. “Are we—did they—–”

I could see he thought he was dead, and that we were in another world.

“You got hurt a little,” I said. “We had to run ashore. We’re only ten miles from Crown Point.”

It came to me suddenly that I had heard no shouting from the beach: no sounds of gunfire: that I had heard not even the distant banging of British guns.

The silence of the pine thicket was more than the quiet of an October twilight: it was an unnatural silence, so heavy that there must have been a cause for it. It was the sort of breathless hush that enfolds a countryside before the bursting of a storm.

XLI

I TURNED and ran back over the ridge where I could have a clear view of the beach. It was empty—a trampled strand, with here and there a rag, and at the edge of the water a broken musket. In the shallows the five vessels still burned, but they were dismasted hulks, their bulwarks charred so that the guns stood high in air.

As I watched, a gun-carriage on the Congress collapsed in a flurry of sparks. The gun slid sideways, hung for a moment, then pitched into the water with a sharp hiss. A burst of steam floated off shore.