Apart from that, too, there was something heartening about the sight of this enormous, brilliant camp. We could hear a band playing gay music, as though upon some gala excursion. A band, tootling tunes in a trackless forest, within sight of enemy guns! The English, I told myself, were a strange and incomprehensible people!

We had our fourth bottle of rum. “Take it easy,” I called to Doc.

His reply was indignant. “I ain’t hardly touched the stuff!” He coughed weakly and hiccupped again, a hiccup that sent a tremor along the canoe, as if we had scraped a rock.

We pressed on past the glittering lights. They must, we knew, belong to the main army, whereas what we wanted was the light troops—the advanced corps, with whom the scouts and Indians always traveled, thrown out as a protecting cloud to screen the movements of the heavier troops behind.

The camp we sought seemed to burst out at us from the dark shore, as fireflies appear from nowhere on a hot spring night. At one moment there was nothing ahead of us, only darkness: then lights flickered and moved. They were on and then over the water: then on all sides of us. We could feel the loom of Ticonderoga, dead ahead. The lights over the water were the lights of vessels: of a fleet stretching all the way across the strait. I could see, dimly outlined against the star-sprinkled sky, the masts and yards of a ship; of another ship; of a brig.

Sponge-belly muttered and turned the canoe toward shore. I took a deep breath and tightened my stomach muscles, to quiet my misgivings.

“Don’t let ’em talk to white men,” I whispered to Verrieul.

He laughed. “They’ll talk to whoever they want to talk to, but you’ll find the white men won’t want to talk to us!”

A sentry challenged from the dark bank: challenged hurriedly again. I braced myself for the shot. Doc whooped hideously from the bow. Tiny, Sponge-belly and Verrieul howled discordantly, rattling their paddles on the gunwale. We heard nothing more from the sentry.

Then we slid in among a nest of bateaux, from which sweating Britishers were dragging supplies by the light of blazing pine-knots, held by perspiring soldiers. The workers stared at us, stumbling with their burdens.

Tiny stepped clumsily over the side, reeled, and recovered himself. He stood there grinning, clutching the canoe so it might not scrape upon the shingle. Doc staggered ashore, waving his last bottle of rum. Lewis Vincent and Verrieul, ruffled and malevolent in appearance, stamped unsteadily in the shallows, brandishing drawn knives and squalling.

“They’re drunk,” I heard a soldier say. “They ain’t never nothing else!”