When we stood in the black, milk-warm water, we soaped ourselves from head to foot while Cap, a disembodied hoarse voice on the bank, urged us to lather our heads well so he could shave off our Indian crests. “That razor was a piece of luck,” he said. “There it was, laying right alongside those three cakes of soap, and it struck me you’d be needing a razor before the night was over, on account of having come away so sudden, without packs or nothing.” Then he was silent, and somehow his silence had something furtive about it.

I had thought of Cap, always, as the most outspoken of men, unfailingly ready, when with friends, to be passionately critical of shortcomings in others. Yet now, in spite of being in a dark and comfortable spot, he seemed wholly changed. When we questioned him about the army and the fort and the American cause, he gave us replies so sickeningly cheerful that I wondered what had come over him.

He told us first of men we knew. Nason, we learned, was alive, fully recovered, and now on a scouting party to the eastward. He spoke of others; then generalized.

The army, he said loudly, was fine: the food was fine: St. Clair was a lovely man and a great general: the fort was fine and strong. Everything was lovely.

I was irritable because of the tremendous distance we had come since dawn, our lack of food, and the shock of losing Verrieul, and I couldn’t stand his use of the word “lovely.”

“Lovely?” I asked. “How about those two Massachusetts regiments that won’t fight? Are they lovely? Where’s Arnold? Where’s Tom Bickford?”

“They’re lovely,” Cap said abstractedly. “Lovely: just lovely.”

He stumbled to the water’s edge to stand close beside us. “Keep your mouth shut!” he whispered fiercely. “Keep it shut till we get over on the other side.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. I was silent, more from weariness than from Cap’s warning, which to me seemed senseless.

We must have been odd sights when we finished our scrubbing—three bald-headed white men, all smooth, slick and shiny, clad in Indian leggins, moccasins and belt cloths. With the paint gone from me, I felt naked and uncomfortable; and certainly Joseph Phipps and Doc, deprived of their garish decorations and their strange head-gear, seemed to have shrunk in size and lost something of dignity.

“Now,” Cap said, “you look civilized again. We’ll get across the bridge and hunt up something to eat.” He led us along the shore to the spot beneath the fortifications where, in October, the Congress galley had been fitted. From what had been the shipyard, a floating bridge jutted out across the dark water toward Mount Independence. Sentry fires burned at either end, and on the heights across the water there were spots of light.