They filled the lane completely and began to come out of it near us, passing between the silent fringes of countryfolk among whom we stood.

The officers who led them were colonels: handsomely dressed men whose white breeches were soggy and spotted from the crossing of a stream. They affected an utter indifference to their own circumstances and to the countryfolk on either side; but the younger officers who followed them displayed less reserve. Some muttered indignantly to brother officers; others, doubtless considering themselves irrevocably disgraced and ruined by their defeat at the hands of a rude and untrained rabble, wept openly. As for the long line of unarmed red-coats, their faces were bitter and resentful, and the glances they darted at us were truculent. They moved in a singularly oppressive silence—a silence somehow made more profound by the scuffing of their feet on the soft dirt, the faint screaking of their belts, the rubbing of cloth on cloth.

It was a silence that was soon broken; for although the long lines of American troops had no word to say to any of the thousands of British who passed them, the farmers all around us had a-plenty, especially when the British infantrymen, having come out from their bayonet-hedged lane, sullenly eyed the doltish-looking yokels who stared at them with mouths half open and began to curse them for a pack of lousy rebels.

On this there was so much retaliatory cursing from the farmers that Cap moved quickly from his coign of vantage to stand farther back, out of temptation, as he put it. Even more loudly did the farmers curse the Germans, when they came lumbering along behind the British regiments. They were a disheveled-looking lot, their uniforms dirty and in tatters from hard usage. With them marched their women, more slatternly, even, in appearance, than the camp followers of the New York regiments who stripped the dead after the battle we fought in the wheat field. With them, too, they had their pets—their squirrels, their weasels, their raccoons, their bear cubs, their tame ducks in cages of woven twigs: even a tame deer; and Doc Means swore that he saw one peer into a canteen and whistle at a tame fish.

My heart was in my boots as the camp followers, women, officers’ servants and rag-tag and bobtail passed us, for nowhere in the whole column had I seen Nathaniel. I even stared hard at the little group of Canadians and Indians that brought up the rear of the prisoners, striving to preserve an imperturbable aspect in the face of the howls of execration with which they were greeted; but all to no avail. Not only could I see no one who resembled Nathaniel, but I could find no trace of Ellen Phipps: none of Marie de Sabrevois. Even Lanaudiere wasn’t there.