My disappointment was so bitter that I refused to admit I had seen correctly. “We missed ’em,” I said, after Nason, Cap, Doc, Joseph Phipps, Tom Bickford, Lewis Vincent, and Natanis had made the same report.

Nason shook his head. “If they’d been here,” he said, “I’d have seen ’em. I’d know your brother, even back-to and in a British uniform; and as for that other one—–”

“You mean Ellen?”

“No,” he said, “the other one.”

Cap winked at me. “He means the hellcat.”

“She wasn’t there,” Nason maintained. “She couldn’t have put on any disguise thick enough for me not to know her.”

Cap grunted cryptically.

“You’re wrong!” I insisted. “You’re all wrong! They’ve got to be there! If Nathaniel’s feelings had altered, since I talked to him at Buttonmould Bay—if he’d decided to leave that woman—he’d have found some way to tell me. He’s there, and we’ve got to find him! Go the whole length of that column again, all of you. Run ahead, all the way to the front of the line, and work back to the rear again. If we can only find one of them, we can find all the others.”

They did what I asked; and I, of course, did what they did, but without result. Neither Nathaniel, Ellen, Marie de Sabrevois nor Lanaudiere was with the British.

“If you want to know what I think,” Cap said, “I think that hellcat sneaked back to Canada long ago and took your brother with her.” He smacked his lips. “If I didn’t have to do so much fighting, damned if I wouldn’t kind of like to get on friendly terms with that hellcat and let her take me back to Canada with her!”

“He never went back to Canada with her,” I said. “Never! That would have made him out a traitor, and he’ll never be that. What he’s done, he’s done because he thinks all of us will be helped by it.”

Joseph Phipps nodded. “My sister never go back to Canada. She American now, same as me: same as you.”

Cap was exasperated. “All right, if they ain’t here, and ain’t gone back to Canada, point ’em out! I got some nice jewelry off that slick lady once, but I heard afterwards there was some left! Where’d you say she was?”

An outburst of angry yelling distracted us. A mob of farmers and American camp followers were pressed close around the little unarmed group of Indians and squaws who marched in the rear of the long line of British prisoners. Some of the farmers were beating on tin pans, and we heard them shouting, “Burn ’em! Sculp ’em! Slaughter ’em!”