This was high praise; for like Schuyler, Varick had distinction and breeding, as did Livingston, who later became a justice of the Supreme Court.

When Varick had given me the receipt I requested for our horses, he pushed back his stool, and looked me over appraisingly. “General Arnold’s gone out to take a look at the British lines,” he said. “He’ll want to see you tonight. How did you find things to the eastward? Can we count on more men?”

“They’re pouring out,” I told him. “They’re moving up by the thousands. Who won the battle?”

Varick went to the door and looked out at Doc and the horses. When he came back he said, “Nobody won it, but the British would have won it if it hadn’t been for General Arnold. Make no mistake about that! As it is, we’re just where we were before the battle, except that the place where we fought stinks with dead bodies. It was a hell of a fight! Don’t think it wasn’t! And if it hadn’t been for General Arnold, the British army’d be in Albany right this minute.”

His voice sounded bitter—not at all as it should have sounded after such a feat.

“I’m certainly glad to hear it,” I said. “Congress can’t refuse to give General Arnold his proper rank after he’s done a thing like that.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure of that! They won’t have to do anything about it if they don’t know he was in the battle.”

“I don’t believe I get what you mean.”

Varick snorted. “I’m not surprised you don’t. I’ll tell you what happened. Last Friday morning, the 19th, your friend Nason and his scouts came running in to say the British had started for us. General Gates wanted to sit here and wait: sit behind the entrenchments while the British brought up their artillery without hindrance. Why, they’d have blown us to bits!

“General Arnold went to Gates and begged him to send men to attack the British before they could get their cannon out of the woods. Arnold said we could beat ’em in the woods, but not if we waited for them to attack us when and where they pleased. He said we didn’t have enough men to fight the British way: we’d got to fight our own way. He kept at Gates for two hours before Gates gave in. Even then Gates wouldn’t let Arnold have as many men as he needed and asked for.”

Varick’s voice rose. “If Gates had given him the men he asked for, we’d have run the British off the top of Freeman’s Farm right then and there! We’d have pitchforked ’em into the Hudson River, lock, stock and barrel. That would have been the end of Mr. Burgoyne, Esquire!”