I say we came there safely; but the safety that our harried company had hoped to find within the fort was nowhere in evidence. We were back to civilization again: that we knew from the fields of wheat and potatoes that stretched up and down both banks of the river. There were settlers’ cabins, near the fort and in the distance. But the fort itself was nothing but ancient log barracks set down in a ring of grass-grown ramparts over which I could have leaped a horse; and near by was a hill from which a score of men with small arms might have picked off anyone who sought shelter within those walls. Therefore it was less a fort than a trap. What was worse, there wasn’t a cannon inside or outside it; and its garrison was a single regiment of soldiers that looked askance at us, as though we were Tories instead of fellow-fighters in the same cause. I think the reason for their attitude was partly that we had abandoned the strongest post in North America to the onrushing English, and partly that we were mostly New Englanders, who are loathsome in the eyes of York troops.

At all events, we found nothing at Fort Edward to raise us from our melancholy state; and I, standing beside this waterway to the south, down which the British planned to rush, was filled with a sort of desperate stubbornness—an obstinate determination never to admit that my countrymen could be so lacking in courage and wisdom as to make possible what apparently had occurred.

Here was the Hudson. Burgoyne and his troops were only twenty-three miles behind us. “It’s all over!” Nathaniel had insisted to me. “After Burgoyne marches down the Hudson—–”

I thought farther back—back to St. Leger’s British troops and Tories we had seen setting off up the St. Lawrence, to pounce on the colonies by the back door. It was all over, they, too, had told us: they’d see us soon in Albany.

And here we were, defenseless, backed up against the Hudson, with Albany less than forty miles down stream. Here we were, without food, without powder, without an army, and on the verge of being without a country. Yet I couldn’t and wouldn’t admit, even to myself, that Nathaniel had been right. It wasn’t all over! It would never be all over, not until they had driven the last man of us into the trackless wilderness, or put a bullet through his brain. More than ever I realized how deeply rooted, in many New Englanders, is that strange trait that some call mulishness, others call cussedness, and still others know as bigotry; and for once in my life, I was willing to admit that I had my share of it.