“Here,” Cap said, “put him on my back. We can’t leave him here.”

The three of us followed Cap and his burden. He took us to a hole in the ground, no larger than the cellar of a cabin. There were two men in it; and one of them, as soon as he spoke, I knew to be Whitcomb.

“Who was it?” he asked.

Cap let Verrieul’s body slide to the ground. “Verrieul,” he said, and for a moment we were all silent.

It was Whitcomb who spoke first. “Who are these other men?”

Cap told him our names; Whitcomb remembered us, and said thoughtfully, “Missing since Valcour Island.”

Then he added briskly, “Never mind. You’ve come through the British lines?”

“Yes.”

“How many men have the British got?”

“They’ve got seventy-five hundred,” I said. “Thirty-five hundred British and not quite that many Germans—the rest Canadians and Indians, mostly Indians.”

Doc Means spoke placidly. “Which one of you killed Verrieul?”

Whitcomb cleared his throat. “I’ll tell you how it is. We got to go see General St. Clair right away, so we’ll bury Verrieul here and now. We’ll leave him here and just forget about him.”

“I don’t know about that!” Doc said. “I’d want to give that a little thought.”

“I’ll tell you how it is,” Whitcomb said again. “We got two militia regiments inside the fort—Massachusetts regiments. We’re trying to get ’em to stay and fight. Maybe we can keep ’em and maybe we can’t. They say their time’s up in two days, and they got to go home. If we take Verrieul’s body in, we got to tell ’em what happened—tell ’em we shot one of our men by mistake. Those Massachusetts regiments, they wouldn’t like to hear anything like that! They get scared easy. If they heard about Verrieul getting shot, they’d be afraid of getting shot themselves. They know they deserve to be. They wouldn’t stay here five minutes after they heard about Verrieul. That’s how it is. We can’t afford to lose a man: not a man!”

“How many have you got altogether?” I asked.

“Two thousand, not counting militia,” Whitcomb said. “Counting militia, three thousand.”

“Three thousand!” I repeated. “You’ve got three thousand?”

This confirmation of what Nathaniel had told me—of insane blundering on someone’s part—made me sick.

“Three thousand if you want to count militia,” Whitcomb said, “but if you know what’s good for you, you won’t count ’em.”

Doc sighed. “Well, where’ll we bury him?”

… We were outside the old French lines, the earthworks that protect Ticonderoga on the landward side. Whitcomb shouted a warning to those in the works, then led us across a low embankment and into the trenches. There were men on the fire steps. We saw them only as blurs against the stars.