“That’s the way of it with Nathaniel,” I said. “He hasn’t fought against us yet; and if I’m any judge of men, he never will. Yet it’s not because he’s afraid to fight, as you men here well know. You saw him try to take back the Royal Savage with Captain Hawley, and you saw him stand up to his guns on the Congress galley until a round shot came close to knocking him into eternity.”

“Nobody could have fought better, Cap’n Peter,” Tom Bickford said.

Nason made an impatient movement. “Then how in God’s name can he—–”

“I’ll tell you how!” I interrupted. “He thinks we’ll be beaten; and he thinks you told him the truth when you told him that if we were beaten, we’d all be hanged for rebels. That’s what you told him. That’s what everybody said before we went in the army. In lots of ways, Nathaniel’s credulous. He believes what he’s told, if he trusts the people that tell him. He trusted you, and believed you. Now he trusts Marie de Sabrevois and believes her. He’s like most fine people that haven’t had much experience of life—that haven’t learned there’s merit in bad men and a deal of rottenness in the good. She’s told him we’re already beaten. He thinks Burgoyne will march down this river”—I swung my arm toward the slowly rolling flood before us—“unopposed. He thinks there’s nothing to stop the British from governing this country again. And when that time comes, he told me, he’d like to have our own people—our Arundel people—guided by honest men: not by riffraff.”

Nason shook his head. “It’s too far-fetched. It doesn’t sound reasonable.”