When Natanis had questioned the squaw, Nason turned a speculative eye upon me.

“What is it?” I whispered. “Where’s Ellen? Does she know where Ellen is?”

“In the hospital,” Nason said.

“Hospital!” I cried. “Hospital! What hospital? What happened?”

“Wait a minute,” Nason told me. “She’s not sick. She went there with somebody.”

“Nathaniel!” I said. “She went there with Nathaniel! What’s wrong with him? For God’s sake, why doesn’t he ask her what’s wrong with him?”

“He did,” Nason said, “but we don’t know it was your brother she went with. Anyway, whoever she went with was hurt. He’d been shot.”

“It was Nathaniel!” I said heavily. “She said he was shot?”

“Yes,” Nason said, “he was shot.”

“In a battle? Was he shot in the battle we just fought?”

“No; before that.”

I stared at him. Nathaniel was shot. Nathaniel was shot before the battle.

Nason spoke reassuringly. “We can’t depend on anything this squaw says. She’s like all Indian squaws: she’ll give us the answers she thinks we want to hear. We won’t bother with her any longer. We’ll go to the hospital. It’s in Albany. The British sick and wounded have been sent there. We’ll go to Albany. Our orders permit us to go there.”

“Albany!” I exclaimed. “That’s thirty miles! It’ll take forever!”

“No it won’t!” Nason said. “We’ll run most of the way.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry. You can run hard enough to stop worrying, can’t you?”

LXVI

THE chief surgeon for the British in Albany, John McNamara Hayes, seemed to be in a perpetual state of indignation—indignation at the inadequacies of the church allotted to him as a hospital for his four hundred sick and wounded; indignation because of the high price of food and drink, the climate of America, the savagery of Americans, the outrageous distances between cities in this barbarous country of ours; and above all he was indignant because we dared to burst into his hospital at such an early hour and ask to see one of his patients.

He came to us in the vestry, which had been cut into two rooms by a rough partition. The outer room, where we were, had no cots and was apparently part laboratory, part receiving room. The very sight of our weather-stained garments, wrinkled and ripped from nights of scouting through Hudson Valley fogs, seemed to irritate Dr. Hayes almost beyond endurance.