WE plodded back toward Fort Ann, this time going by the northern road, instead of the southern, by which we had come to Fort Edward, and the whole countryside seemed to me to weep at the near approach of war. Leaden clouds trailed through the towering tops of the pines, and we trudged through a downpour that softened the paddle-calluses on our hands. The road was a dun morass that clutched our sodden boots. Our clothes and blankets, water-soaked, bent us beneath their weight. Along that sparsely traveled track, the scattered farms would have been nothing to brag about, even beneath cloudless skies. In this steamy downpour the small log cabins, in clearings thick with stumps, were as dismal as the wretched folk they sheltered. I marveled, as we progressed from clearing to distant clearing, how it was that any living human being could sit supinely on his little square of dirt in blank indifference to an enemy that threatened death and destruction to him, his neighbors and his nation. Yet that was how too many of these farmers sat; and in addition they resented us, they and their wives and their mud-streaked children, when we pushed into their dark abodes, which smelled of earth, wet straw and sourness. Settler after settler was sullen and unresponsive when we delivered Schuyler’s message—that the British were at Skenesboro and maybe at Fort Ann: that all cattle must be driven off; all standing crops burned; all food destroyed, hidden or removed.

As we splashed onward through the rain, I was filled with a sharp resentment that we should starve and sweat and agonize to save such folk as these; and at the same time I knew it was possible to argue that they were as deserving of help as my own brother, whom I was so bent on saving. Confused, I stopped thinking, as one so often must in time of war.

We left our message at every farm that touched the northern route to Fort Ann, slept in a cow-shed on a heap of straw, and early on the morning of July 10th found ourselves once more on that swampy, brook-intersected road that leads through the giant pines and the soft morasses of Wood Creek valley. The road was silent, empty of human life, but the muddy hummocks that rose, here and there, above the brown pools, were trampled, showing that many men had recently passed that way, all going toward Fort Edward. At frequent intervals, too, were signs and traces—a worthless shoe; a powder horn from which the cord had broken; a bayonet sticking in the spongy soil. These were the marks of a night march; for bayonets and powder horns, even broken ones, were too precious to be thus left, nor would they have been overlooked by troops marching by daylight. Since troops don’t march by night unless of necessity, we concluded that the Americans must have retreated from Fort Ann.