He shot a quick glance at the German camp, at the Americans hustling here and there to make the place secure against counterattacks, then asked, “Where’s General Arnold?”

Nobody answered. He saw Dearborn then, and whom he was holding. He swung himself from the saddle and pushed between us to stand looking down at the two men.

“General Gates presents his compliments to General Arnold,” he said, extremely formal and military, “and requests that he return at once to his quarters.”

“What for?” Arnold breathed. “What for?”

Armstrong coughed. “He was afraid you might do something rash.”

Colonel Morgan laughed hoarsely, then asked politely, “Did you just leave General Gates?”

“No,” Armstrong said. “No, General Gates sent me out from headquarters two hours ago. I just now caught up with General Arnold. Nobody seemed to know where he was.”

Arnold nodded and turned an ironic eye toward Colonel Morgan. “Under those circumstances you’d better send me back. I wouldn’t want to worry General Gates.” He pointed at Nason. “Let him take me. He’ll get me there somehow.”

Cap disappeared, floundering and stumbling, and was back in no time with blankets and a pair of gun-rammers, from which we made a litter.

It was dark when we got Arnold on it. Rain had begun to fall. We contrived to keep pine-knots alight, and there were fires along the route at intervals to guide the wounded, who were limping and crawling back to camp, through the darkness and the rain, like a groaning procession of the damned. We found more fires blazing in the wheat field where we had first fought; and by their light we saw women—American camp followers—stripping the dead men of their clothes. In the far distance wolves yelled and howled, like innumerable mournful dogs.

Arnold must have fallen into a stupor, for he said nothing, not even when Doc renewed the wet rags on his wounded thigh, which he did whenever we crossed a brook. He just lay there in the sagging blanket, muttering a little now and then, and the rest of the time puffing weakly as a child puffs to extinguish a candle.

LXV

THE next morning, in a drenching downpour, Burgoyne’s retreat commenced—a retreat that carried him only ten miles and left him stranded on the Heights of Saratoga, surrounded by an ever-tightening ring of Continentals and militia that picked unceasingly at his hungry, wearied, harried Britishers and Germans. Even then, thanks to Gates’s slowness in pursuit, Burgoyne might have safely drawn the remnants of his army off to Ticonderoga and so to Canada. But slow as Gates was, Burgoyne was slower; and Providence, which had so stubbornly refused to come to the aid of the American cause during our invasion of Canada, at Valcour, and in tthe retreat from Ticonderoga, now strangely and with a furious energy worked in our interests both day and night—and God knows we needed everything Providence could spare us.