“Ha, ha!” Kosciusko said. “I theenk that is vairy well! Vairy well hindeed! The pipple who are tol’ about thees dead lady will be vairy motch hannoy! I, too, am ’orribly hannoy about thees dead lady. You weel see: they weel come hout, vairy motch hangry.”

“It’s high time they got angry!” Arnold said. “High time!”

Schuyler turned to Varick. “You’ll have to find a uniform for Captain Merrill somewhere. God knows where you’ll find such a thing, my boy, but I want it found. You’ve got to make him look like a soldier somehow. We can’t send him on such an errand looking like a scarecrow.”

“Let me attend to it, General,” Arnold said. “You’ve got enough on your mind. I think I can find horses and a uniform for Captain Merrill, and I’d like a word with him before he goes.”

When Schuyler nodded, Arnold said to me carelessly, “Be at my tent at eight o’clock tonight. Wait there till I come.”

Doc and I climbed back to the high land above the river, leaving Schuyler, Arnold and Kosciusko studying the drawings on the cartridge paper.

As we went, Doc was puzzled. “Now what would any feller want to be a general for?” he asked. “It looks to me like it ain’t much different from being tied to a runaway horse, except you don’t get so much exercise out of it.”

Doc’s thoughts were of no account to me. I could think of nothing except that on top of all that had happened to me, I was now to be sent ignominiously off for five long weeks on duties that any preacher or wordy lawyer could perform—off to places where I could be of no more help to Nathaniel, if he needed me, than a mouse would be—where Ellen Phipps, now only twenty miles away within the British lines, would be as distant as the stars.

… It was ten o’clock before Arnold came back to the log house in which he had his headquarters, and where Doc and I waited on a bench outside. We thought he had forgotten about us, for he stalked into his cabin without giving us a glance, and we heard him telling his aide to do this and do that. The aide came hurrying out; and a little later Arnold’s Negro servant appeared in the doorway and called us in. We found the general with his coat off, writing at his little field-desk.

“Here’s your orders,” he said, and didn’t even look up. “Your uniform’s over there in the corner. It’s a plain blue one. If it’s too small, you can have it made larger in the first town you come to. My servant’s got your horses. They’re in the barn with mine. Sleep there tonight and be on your way by sun-up tomorrow.”