… Nason shook me. He had been speaking to me, and I, in my absorption, had heard nothing. “I asked you,” he said, “whether you ever scouted out as far as this?”

When I said I hadn’t, he said that the two hills were the British right flank: that he and Natanis had often worked close to them at night.

I had forgotten Natanis. I looked around for him, and saw his red and white cap, and Lewis Vincent’s, close behind, as though they kept watch on us.

“It’s not the main camp,” Nason said, looking at me curiously. “Their main camp’s off to our right, closer to the river. It’s in the main camp that they have their hospitals and stores and—and camp followers.”

I knew why he said what he did. He wanted to warn me not to expect to find Nathaniel easily.

Cap Huff twisted his upper body, as he ran, and gazed eagerly into Nason’s face. “All we got to do,” he said hopefully, “is to throw ’em off those hills, ain’t it? If we throw ’em off those hills, they ain’t got no right flank, have they? If they ain’t got no right flank, we can run right around ’em, can’t we?”

“We certainly can!” Nason said.

“Yes, by God,” Cap said, “and if we do, we can get what’s left of those hundred and twenty-five thousand gallons of rum! I bet they ain’t got more’n ten thousand gallons left—not hardly enough to make your breath smell!”

I heard Doc Means muttering as he wavered along beside Cap. “I don’t scarcely ever touch rum, on account of it distressing me; but feeling the way I do, I dunno but what I could drink quite a lot of those ten thousand gallons—maybe a thousand of ’em.”

“Like hell you could!” Cap said. “I’m going to drink all ten thousand of ’em myself!”

*    *    *

… We weren’t long left in doubt as to what we’d receive from the hill we approached. The stockade at its top opened on us with musketry at two hundred yards. The rattling and clattering of those muskets seemed to me mild and harmless by comparison with the turbulent roaring still echoing from that other hill where Arnold was.

Nonetheless, I was glad to crouch, with Nason and Cap and the motley throng with whom we had run, behind a shelf at the foot of the hill—a shelf made by the gnawing of a brook. It was a God-sent breastwork, almost shoulder-high, behind which we could stand and fire up the slope at the stockade above us. So far as I could see, we were wasting our bullets on the stockade; for it was a stout one, made of fence-rails packed lengthwise between ten-foot posts. It was defended, Nason said, by Hessians.

How we’d ever have scaled that hill and taken the Hessian stockade, except for what happened, I have no way of knowing, nor do I know what otherwise would have befallen those of us that tried. I only know our chances of living through the scaling would have been smaller than I liked.