“No,” I said. I forced myself to meet the gaze of each one of those who stood before me. Their faces, I suddenly saw, had nothing hard about them. They were no different than they ever had been, and the eyes fixed on mine were both shrewd and troubled.

“That’s what I told ’em,” Doc said. “Your brother’s sick. Anybody’s sick if he’s in love. He falls in love because he’s sick, and just being in love makes him sicker.”

“Well,” Nason said, “let’s get straightened out.” He glanced suspiciously at the crumbling ramparts above us: then moved out into the grassy meadow between the ramparts and the river. He sat on the warm turf, motioning me to sit beside him. Tom Bickford came too, with his block of curly maple, and Cap with his trout, which he disemboweled neatly with an expert thumb. The others sat in such a way that no one could approach us unseen.

“Well,” Nason said again, “we’re mighty glad to have you back. We thought you were dead. I guess you’re lucky to be alive.”

“Yes,” I said, “I am. So are you. We were close to the brink, all of us. You and Cap and Tom and—and Nathaniel.”

“Yes, I’m coming to that. I know all about it. Cap told me. He told me who your brother got acquainted with. I used to know that woman.”

“Yes, I know you did.”

“Yes,” Nason repeated, “I used to know her.”

“She’s a bad woman,” I said.

“I guess she is. Yes, I guess she is.” He spoke, I thought, without much conviction and his questions began to seem irrelevant.

“How long have you been here?”

“We got here the 7th of July. Then we went back to Fort Ann to chop trees.”

“What have the men been saying about St. Clair and Schuyler?”

“Why, the usual things. Some talked about how St. Clair must have been pretty scared of the British if he went so far around ’em that nobody, including himself, knew what had become of him; and you hear a good many say we’ll never get any food up here till Schuyler hangs a couple of commissaries.”

“Listen,” Nason whispered. “Haven’t you heard about the silver bullets?”

“Silver bullets? What silver bullets?”

Nason moodily contemplated his stockings, caught together in a dozen places with shoemaker’s thread. “You ought to keep your ears open,” he said heavily. Then he went off on another tangent. “Probably you heard a few things about Arnold last year.”

“Yes,” I admitted. “I did.”

“Yes,” Nason said. “We all heard ’em—how he was a horse-jockey and a cheap gymnast: how he stole the communion cups from Montreal—–”

“And the baby’s rattles,” Cap Huff interrupted, “and all the handles off the front doors!”

“That’s not far wrong,” Nason said. “You heard those stories, didn’t you?”