I remember that road to the south as a river of frightened settlers, awake at last to the consideration they would receive from the British: a torrent of distraught humanity fleeing from the wrath to come, scuttling, trudging, dragging themselves away from Burgoyne and his Indians, through mud and rain, through blinding heat and dank fogs, sleeping huddled together beside the road, crowded around little fires. I seemed to stumble endlessly past sour-faced old women: young mothers carrying children high up against their necks: still older mothers, frantic and harried, calling admonitions to their inattentive broods: past screaming children, snuffling children, children in paroxysms of sobbing: past men and women driving carts, urging forward sway-backed mares, goading cows and oxen, leading pigs by halters; clutching hens to their bosoms. Everything capable of bearing burdens bore them—men, women, carts, cows, children, oxen. They were laden with every conceivable variety of household stores and belongings—pots and pans: bedding and head-boards: spinning wheels, scythes, grindstones, mirrors, chairs, milking stools, sleigh seats.

Alongside them straggled disheartened Continentals and the thieving, pocky, ragged, lousy lot that called themselves militia; and if ever God made travesties of the fighters on whom a nation ought to rely for its safety and its very existence, he must have packed them into those militia regiments. They were dirty, they were furtive, they were draggle-tail, they were out of hand. They limped and shuffled along, paying no attention to their officers; and for that matter, their officers were no better than the men they were supposed to lead. They, too, were shambling and morose; disheveled, unshaven and shifty-eyed. Never a word did those militia officers say when their men snatched food and rum, blankets and kettles, chickens and young pigs from the fleeing settlers.

Cap Huff was in a rage. “By God,” he said a score of times—and he bawled it out at the top of his lungs, in the vain hope that a militiaman or militia officer would take offense, “by God, I’ll take anything off a Tory, or off a Britisher, or off a dirty, nit-headed, stinking militiaman, or off anybody that’s got more’n he knows what to do with; but before I’d take anything off of one of my own people that had just been druv out of his home by a feller I was supposed to keep away, by God, I’d join the militia and suck eggs! I’d join the militia and be a tit-head! Damned if I wouldn’t try to get to be a militia officer, so’s I could respectfully be called a poop-head by my men, and so’s I could run foot-races with ’em to set ’em a good example—yes sir: an example in running away from the British right when I was needed most!”