Cap Huff shook his head over the behavior of those militiamen. “Stealing’s like killing,” I heard him tell Doc. “There’s times when you can kill a feller in spite of the Bible, and nobody’ll think any the worse of you for it, except maybe the feller that gets killed don’t take no liking to you for it. Then, again, there’s times when it’s kind of a public duty to steal a little here and a little there; but you got to use judgment about it, same as about killing and kissing and everything else. There’s some of these soldiers, not Continentals, that ain’t got no judgment about nothing—not about nothing whatever! They’d steal anything from anybody, even from each other; and I wouldn’t trust ’em to use a mite of judgment about who they kiss and who they kill.”

It was true that the militia had no social graces whatever; but they were there to plague Burgoyne: not to display their breeding and gentility; and plague him they did.

Harassed by unending musketry fire, and by the pounding of artillery which by now had come up the eastern bank to make life more hideous for the hard-pressed invaders, the retreat became chaotic. We saw those hounded Britons abandon wagons that had stuck in the quagmires to which the river road had been turned by the incessant rain. They burned baggage, camp equipage, wagons, carts. They destroyed their bridges behind them. We watched them stumble at last up the low hills of Saratoga, burning Schuyler’s fine house and buildings as they did so; and there on those heights, with their cattle and horses dying among them for lack of forage, they stayed day after day.

Even the greatest chowder-head among the militia, by this time, knew Burgoyne had to surrender. But beaten and helpless though the British were, they were under discipline as strict, within their camp, as though they planned to fight at any moment. Not only did we find it impossible to approach them; but from none of the many British deserters or prisoners could our party on the eastern bank find out anything about Nathaniel or Ellen.

So I, of all the thousands of Americans ringed around Burgoyne, was in despair. If the British surrendered, Nathaniel, of course, would be with them, and so, too, would Ellen. In such a case, I could see but two eventualities. Either Nathaniel would have the protection of the British and so would be imprisoned with them, or he would be taken from them as a deserter, perhaps hanged, and certainly disgraced. As for Ellen, she would go into captivity with the other camp followers; and what would happen to her, God only knew.