We watched them straggle off, leaving their hospital tents, full of their sick and wounded. We watched their fires at night; and during the day we peered at them through rain squalls so violent that the heavens seemed dissolved in tears at the wretched plight of that stricken army.

It was when, staring across the river, we saw British bateaux set off upstream that my hopes rose high. Not only were they piled with stores and ammunition, but they carried women camp followers as well. Any one of the draggled women, perched so disconsolately in the clumsy boats, might, I knew, be Ellen; and with her might be Nathaniel. Indeed, every woman I saw, huddled in a boat on the far side of the Hudson, seemed, at first glance, to look like Ellen.

Nason and Cap and the others shared my excitement. “Pick out the boat you want, Cap’n Peter,” Tom Bickford said. “We’ll get it somehow.”

I settled on a bateau that bore three women and a man, in addition to a heap of stores and two bateau-men. We followed along the bank as it poled slowly up river; and at a shallow spot, Tom and Joseph Phipps and Lewis Vincent dashed in with leveled muskets and ordered it ashore while the rest of us, stepping into view at the water’s edge, threatened its passengers with death if they resisted.

It came ashore fast enough. The women were Irish slatterns who wept and squalled. The man was a sutler.

Militiamen, quick to profit by our example, splashed into the river and captured all the rest, so that we quickly abandoned the one we had taken and raced from boat to boat, looking for Ellen and Nathaniel.

All our efforts were unavailing: we might have been searching for a needle in a haystack—for one particular grasshopper out of a meadowful. All the women in all the bateaux were haggard, frightened harridans: the men were a cowed and red-eyed lot, glad enough to be captured: to be freed at last of the burden of sleepless nights and constant fear of death that had weighed on them for weeks.

We questioned some of the women concerning the whereabouts of Ellen Phipps, but they either didn’t know or wouldn’t answer. Before we let them go to add to the burdens of the British, the militia had stolen not only the stores from the bateaux, but even the thwarts and thole pins. Given a little more time, they’d have pried out all the nails.