“This one,” I said. “Any one of ’em. It doesn’t matter which, does it, so long as we hold back the British?”

Kidder’s face turned gray, and his voice, when he spoke to Colonel Long, trembled with rage. “He’s crazy!” Kidder said. “We got only five vessels, and he wants to throw one of ’em away without so much as firing a shot! I’m captain of this galley, Colonel Long, and I won’t allow no such talk on this quarterdeck!”

When I would have appealed to Long, he shook his head. “You’re going out of your way to hunt trouble,” he said kindly. “Captain Kidder’s right. We’ve got too few vessels to waste one.”

It seemed incredible that men could be so blind; but even in my despair I remembered how Arnold, on the day I first met him, had said: “Such officers cannot understand the precautions necessary to successful defense.” It was barely possible that if these officers were unable to comprehend the defense that seemed to me so sure and simple, they might still be made to realize the advantages of another equally obvious plan.

“Colonel,” I said, “there’s one place in particular, between here and Skenesboro, where a cliff sticks into the channel. A vessel of any size has to be warped around. It’s almost a right-angled turn. Two eighteen-pounders on top of that cliff could tear a vessel’s deck to pieces. You could chop up the yards and rigging of a whole fleet—throw it into a tangle it would never get out of. Let me try it, Colonel. Colonel, the British’ll be trying to come through there after a while.”

The colonel showed signs of impatience. “You’re overlooking a thing or two. In the first place, we need all our guns for the protection of the fort at Skenesboro. That’s a big fort, with a stockade that stretches over all outdoors. In the second place, two guns wouldn’t hold the British back for long. All they’d have to do would be to land a few men, get around behind you and capture the guns and you too. No, no, my boy, it wouldn’t do! It wouldn’t do!”

“Colonel,” I said, forcing myself to make one more effort, “I could hold ’em back two hours. Before the day’s over, you might find those two hours mighty valuable. Just that much delay might give you all night to work on the fort. And by the time they get landing parties ashore to cut us off, we could lever the guns into the lake and slip off into the underbrush ourselves.”

The colonel sighed. “There you go again! How on earth do you think they’re ever going to catch up with us!”

“What about those fish?” Captain Kidder interrupted. “There’s nigh onto forty of ’em been hauled in—big ones!”