The British breastworks on that other hilltop, a quarter mile away, were protected on one side by an abatis of trees, felled so their tops, pointing down the hill toward Arnold, were interlaced. Arnold had chosen this slope for his attack, even though it was protected by the abatis, because it was the gentlest slope and also the one nearest him.

Dragged and driven onward by Arnold, that horde of Continentals and militia went swarming upward, and crawled into the abatis like ants crawling beneath a wall. They crawled in and crawled in, vanishing from our sight.

Arnold plunged into it, horse and all; probably he found a sallyport through which British pickets had come and gone. We lost sight of him and his horse, but it seemed to us that he and his men were snared and held in that web of tree-tops.

Then Arnold broke through. That hill was shallower than ours, and even from the base of ours we were on ground high enough to let us see the tossing head of his horse, the familiar figure in the saddle and the flashing bright sword as he came out into the cleared space between the abatis and the British breastworks.

In my imagination I heard that high, harsh voice of his, calling the men forward: calling them out of the abatis. We saw their hats and heads and shoulders, and the glint of bayonets. We saw them duck for cover and knew they were crawling on the ground: lying behind rocks and stumps, singly and in groups. And yet that single figure on the horse had no cover, and marvelously did not fall, though the breastworks thundered and covered themselves with clouds.

Arnold rode his mare up and down, as if to be sure his men were planted as he wished them. Then he wheeled her and, passing between the breastworks and the abatis, set off toward us, galloping across the whole British front—between two hedges of smoke and spurting flashes. He passed, we knew, through a waist-high hail of bullets that should have tumbled him from his horse at every step he took, ripped open in a score of places. That it did not was some sort of miracle, as when a partridge, once in a thousand times, flies unhit through a charge of shot, even though such a thing can be proved to be impossible.