The colonel paid no further attention to us. Doc and I went aboard the Gates. I hurried aft, hoping to find an officer I knew—Thatcher, perhaps, or Colonel Wigglesworth; but instead I found the quarterdeck in possession of a lantern-jawed fisherman from the Chesapeake who had served as mate under Thatcher on the Trumbull galley, a year before. I remembered him as a conscientious mate, though over-fond of describing how he purified his blood by eating dandelion greens, and of reciting villainous patriotic poetry written by himself.

When I recalled myself to him and told him what Colonel Long had said, his sour, tight-lipped grin stretched his mouth like a scar across his face. “Glad to see you, Captain, but Colonel Long ain’t got no authority over me! I been acting captain of this vessel nigh onto three months, and I wouldn’t feel like taking orders from nobody, not unless he had some higher authority.”

I began to have an inkling of how a man must feel when somebody whose ability he mistrusts has been pushed ahead of him in the peculiar collection of jealousies and false pride called an army. “Make yourself easy, Captain,” I told him. “All Doc Means and I want to do is help these troops get away to Skenesboro safely. If there’s anything you’d like done, say the word.”

He eyed me suspiciously still. He was wondering, I knew, whether my presence aboard was a threat to his position. “Well,” he said grudgingly, “keep an eye on them that’s stowing baggage in the hold. Don’t let ’em just dump it in, the way they been doing. Make ’em do it ship-shape.”

Doc and I went forward. Sick men were coming over the side, some on stretchers: some walking, using their muskets as crutches. “Look after those sick men as much as you can,” I told Doc. Then I went to the main hatch and did what Kidder had ordered me to do.

The guns pounded and pounded. Knots of soldiers stumbled out of the darkness to mill around on the dock while officers directed them in subdued, fretful voices; then came aboard, muttering, to lower their burdens to the crew that sweated in the hold. Freed of their burdens, they went ashore again, discussing the whereabouts of Hubbardton. That was where they had been told to go—Hubbardton, then Castleton, then Skenesboro. I wondered how many of them would get there.

At two o’clock in the morning I wondered still more. High above us on the crest of Mount Independence, I saw what, for a moment, I took for the edge of the moon, red through the heat haze. Then I remembered that the moon had been new that day and must, necessarily, be long since set. With the thought, the red sliver of light leaped upward; waned again: then broadened and licked up in a tongue of flame.