The colonel turned from me in evident relief. “Yes, tell your cooks to take ’em ashore and get ’em on the fire,” he told Kidder. “Everybody’ll feel a lot better with a good mess of salmon inside him!”

I wondered bitterly how many cases of stubborn blindness, like that of these two men, were helping to bring defeat upon the American cause.

… By mid-morning our straggling flotilla had made another six miles. By noon it had made another six and we were at the sharp turn in the lake, close to Skenesboro. The narrow channel, overhung with rocks and trees, bent at right angles. Heaven, it seemed to me, had put that elbow there as an instrument for the confounding of invading Britons; but we left it behind us, carelessly, as a spendthrift wastes the patrimony that others worked to save.

It was between one and two o’clock when we drew up under the shoulder of the limestone mountain, and saw again the sprawling, straggling stockade of Wynkoop’s comic fort. In that pocket among the hills the heat was suffocating, just as it had been in the days when we worked ourselves to skeletons to build our gundelos and galleys, including this very one on which I now returned, an ignored subordinate.

Since I had last seen it, the place had changed, though not greatly for the better. The scars and slashings from our timber-cutting were still in evidence; and Skene’s yellow house looked down on them, pallid in the noonday glare. Now there were sister buildings to the airless barracks Wynkoop had built—warehouses, in which were stored supplies for this scattered Northern Army. The rude docks by the shipyards, from which we had rowed away to delay the British at Valcour, were stouter now, and larger—large enough to let all five of our vessels crowd against them.

The colonel hurried off to join his troops. He had seen more than enough of me, I was well aware. I would have helped Kidder get his cargo out from under hatches, but he seemed to have nothing for me to do—nor for his own men, for that matter, since he made no move to break bulk. Food, I saw, was uppermost in his mind.

“Well,” I told Doc, “there’s nothing to do but go ashore and get ourselves a place to sleep. We’ll wait for the rest of the army; and when it gets here, we’re bound to find Cap and Joseph Phipps and Tom Bickford, and probably Steven Nason; and maybe somebody’ll give us work again.”