We drew the loads from our muskets and reloaded, eight buck-shot to a load, not knowing what to expect. Then we went on through that damnable marsh, lurking behind trees to listen. The whole forest, save for the rushing of Wood Creek, swollen from the rains of the day before, was silent.

Doc, peering from behind a tree, hissed at me. “There’s the sawmill, but there ain’t no fort there: no fort at all!”

The fort had stood at the spot where Wood Creek grows too narrow for navigation in bateaux. We could smell the odor of wet, charred wood. The place had been burned. We were aware, too, of another odor—a foul, unpleasant stench.

“Look there!” Doc said softly. “What’s that! It’s red!”

I looked where he pointed, and saw a gray animal, like a furtive dog with weak hind legs, drift silently and for a fleeting moment from behind a bush. “Why,” I said, “it’s a wolf! There’s no one hereabouts if that’s a wolf!”

Then I saw what Doc had seen before I saw the wolf. Half sunk in the swamp beside the road was the body of an Englishman, a lieutenant, his scarlet coat darkened by the water to the color of blood, his white breeches tinged with pink. The wolf had been at him.

The sight of this boy, four thousand miles from his home and family, face-down in the dark water of a blood-stained swamp, food for a wolf, filled me with a vague wonderment that any man could of his own free will embark in a war except in defense of his home, or in support of principles that to him seemed vital.

“There’s another,” Doc said, “and another!”

I began to see bodies, then. They wore the leather breeches and rough shirts of American militia. Here and there among them were patches of scarlet—the scarlet coats of British infantrymen. They had not been long dead; but they smelled horribly; for hot weather and swarms of flies had worked upon them quickly.

“We ought to bury ’em,” Doc said.

“We haven’t time,” I told him. “They’ll be gone in a few days, anyway, what with the heat and the wolves. We’ve got ourselves to look out for, to say nothing of those at Fort Edward. Probably the British went back to Skenesboro for provisions and ammunition; but they might advance again, any minute.”