Beneath the lofty headland, where Sponge-belly’s men had sprung on us to snatch us from safety and from civilization, I saw the canvas of tents; and before those tents moved figures less haggard than the scarecrow sailors who had fought at Valcour.

I felt Sponge-belly’s steering-paddle press hard to larboard.

Doc reached between his feet for his shaman’s headdress, and pulled it on. “Hi-yi!” he muttered. “Hi-yi! There’s women in this war! It’s time we got back if this is what’s going on!”

… A soldier can be sure of only one thing in a war: nothing ever looks the way it should, or happens as expected.

I was ready for red-coated sentries, for prowling Indians, for scowling officers, but not for anything as strange as those offscourings who were following the British army. They were all at Buttonmould Bay, on the ridge where Cap Huff had drawn up his marines to fight off the British fleet. Some portion of the army must have occupied this camping ground before the camp followers moved up to it; for it was stripped of brush and trees. The tents, in orderly array, were ranged in an amphitheatre, so situated as to look down on the very spot where we had dropped from the bow of the Congress galley. Even now a dozen blackened ribs protruded from the shallows, a sad memorial to a gallant fight.

The inhabitants of the tents were mostly women whose faces had the hardness that comes with long experience. They were scattered along the beach, some with skirts kilted up, wading in the water and hunting beneath rocks; others washing garments; a few bobbing for catfish. Some had the swarthy, defiant look of gipsies. Others, the noisiest, were Irish. Most of them, whatever their nationality, had voices rough as wood-files.

Several were drunk, and I suspected that a few who were stretched on the gravel, asleep in the rays of the westering sun, were sleeping off the effects of rum. It was easy to see where they got it; for the nucleus, so to speak, of the amphitheatre of tents was a group of sutlers’ marquees, rigged as shops, boards laid on packing cases forming counters across their open fronts.

How many women there were in this encampment, it was hard to tell, but from the number of bateaux stacked in the shelter of the headland, there were three hundred. The only men we saw were sutlers and a few French Canadians in buckskin, drinking at one of the marquees. While we lay off, drifting toward the beach, watching this motley assemblage of females, the Canadians launched their canoe, climbed in and came out past us, heading toward Crown Point, jocosely waving brandy bottles.

I was concerned only over one thing. Had Marie de Sabrevois placed Ellen among these women? The only way we could find out was to buy rum and use it freely.