“Certainly,” I said. “It’s like the stories that went around about Arnold.”

“Like ’em? Oh no! It’s the same damned thing. And it’s the twin of another story that came pretty close to doing us a terrible lot of harm. For all we know, it did do us a lot of harm. It may have delayed us just long enough to keep us from taking Quebec!”

He turned and looked at Natanis, placing his hand affectionately on the red man’s knee. “This friend of ours,” Nason said, “is faithful and brave. He’s been my friend since he was a young man. In the whole Province of Maine there isn’t a man who knows the trails and the streams and the mountain passes as does Natanis: no man who could guide an army to Quebec so quickly and surely. Yet two years ago, when we set out for Quebec under Arnold—who was a colonel then—there were letters sent to Washington and to Arnold, and the letters said that this good friend, this best of guides, was a spy and a traitor. They said he’d taken British gold in payment for his services.”

He leaned back in the warm grass, plucked a blade and nibbled reflectively at its tender lower end. “There you are—the same old story. Natanis was the one man who had the brains and ability to guide us to Quebec—but it was only by the grace of God that our own men didn’t shoot him. If they had, we’d have left our bones in the swamps of Lake Megantic.”

“That’s right,” Cap said. “I went thirty days without a drink of rum, as it was! Yes sir: I was wasted away till you had to look at me twice to see me.”

“Now then,” Nason said, “all these things fit together. We found out, in Quebec, who it was that wrote the letters about Natanis. It was a man who said he was—a man who claimed to be—–”

“It was a fox-faced French bastard named Guerlac,” Cap said suddenly. “He lived with this Marie de Sabrevois, just the way I told you up at Skenesboro. We killed Guerlac, and we’d ought to killed Marie.” He eyed Nason defiantly. “It stands to reason that if a woman’s satisfied to live with a bad feller, she’s as bad as he is, and usually a hell of a lot worse.”

“You talk too much,” Nason said. He turned to me. “Guerlac wrote the letters; but of course Marie knew all about them. There’s no doubt that she made herself useful to Carleton in ’75, and that she has kept on making herself useful ever since. She learned her lesson from the false information Guerlac sent out about Natanis, and if she’s traveling with the British army, it’s for no good purpose. I’ll bet my last dollar it was she who sent out the false information about Arnold; that it’s she who’s been sending out the stories about Schuyler, St. Clair and the silver bullets.” He looked at me sharply.