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.

It was a gentle hillslope, without cover, and it seemed to me that those behind the stockade could no more miss a man who set foot on it than a housewife could fail to sweep a crumb from a table.

What happened was this, and we could see it as though it took place on the palms of our hands: