Those to whom I talked had little to say, after the manner of New Englanders, and it was hard to tell how my appeals affected them. The men, at times, seemed uncomfortable, and stared white-eyed at their neighbors. The older women listened with tight-pressed lips and shoulders drawn up. I couldn’t be sure whether they disapproved of me, Burgoyne and his Indians, or the whole war. Occasionally, when I told how the Indian had put his foot on Jennie’s shoulder and torn off her scalp, a child would squall with fright, and there would be considerable throat-clearing and foot-shuffling among the grown-ups. But on the whole, we seemed to be accomplishing nothing.

Others, we learned, had been sent by Schuyler into various sections of New England to tell the story of Jennie McCrae. I hoped they were making more impression on their audiences than was I. We were wasting our time, I told Doc over and over: wasting time that might have been spent in doing something—though God knew what—for Nathaniel.

But Schuyler had said to take five weeks, and so we spent five weeks riding, talking, riding, talking. And then we had three pieces of news that put a different aspect on things.

The news of Bennington was the first. Burgoyne, still at Fort Edward, had sent a thousand Germans and a few Indians to the eastward, to capture horses and provisions that our people had collected at Bennington. John Stark with militia from New Hampshire and Vermont had surrounded both the slow-moving Germans and the Indians and had either killed or captured every mother’s son of them.

The second piece of news had to do with Arnold. He had set out to relieve Fort Stanwix, accompanied by a brigade of Massachusetts troops. By a trick he had led St. Leger’s troops and Indians to think his force was enormous; and because of this, St. Leger and all his men had turned and raced precipitately back to Canada. Thus Arnold not only relieved Fort Stanwix, but robbed Burgoyne of one of the weapons with which he had planned to stab us to the heart.

The third piece of news was that Congress had removed General Schuyler from the command of the Northern Army, replacing him by General Gates; and from the jubilation with which this news was received in New England, Schuyler might have been a Nero and Gates a Cæsar. Hearing this jubilation, and knowing what a fumbling fuss-budget Gates really was, I wondered whether this monstrous New England lack of understanding could by any chance mean that Nathaniel was right after all, or whether it just meant that all mankind was incurably ignorant.