“Thanks.” He drew a quivering breath. “Glad to get away from the British. They don’t like us. Very hard people to live with.”

I began to feel choked, but did my best to speak naturally. “We’ve been trying to find you for weeks, Nathaniel, all of us. Don’t worry. We understood how it was. We understood how everything was, Nathaniel.”

“No—I don’t think anyone can do that. What’s happened to me—and what I’ve done—it’s been strange. I don’t think—it could be understood.”

Nason cleared his throat. “Yes—it could be,” he said gravely. “Strange things happen to a good many people: we think things are strange because they happen to us—but they happen to other people too. We’re your friends, Nathaniel. We’ll help you all we can, and by that I mean you must count on us for everything that human beings can do.”

Nathaniel’s head was sunk on his breast. “Thanks,” he whispered.

“We’ll take you to see Arnold,” Nason said. “He’s in the American hospital, and it’s not far from here. We’ll go to Arnold.”

LXVII

THE military hospital for the Northern army stood on a hill looking down on Albany and on the silvery ribbon of river that curved around the town, and I thought for a time that our long drive was to be in vain; for the attendants who came out to meet us insisted on regarding us as patients—perhaps because Ellen sat beside Nathaniel, her arm around him to support him against the bumping of the cart—and were determined to send our cart away and back to the town again, with the address of a private house where we could receive medical treatment from army doctors.

“Not another bed!” a distracted young man kept telling us, slapping the horse’s rump to start him off. “Not another bed in the place! We’ve sent away eleven other carts this morning! Not another bed to be had! The place is full of our own men, and prisoners too—British, Germans, Canadians. Just keep going right back into town.”

At this repeated rump-slapping, the horse backed and filled, joggling us so that our protests were jounced from our mouths, until Cap Huff leaped from the cart in a rage, shouting, “Keep your hands off that horse’s tail if you don’t want something serious to happen to your own!”

When we got it into the attendant’s thick skull that we wanted to see General Arnold, he became as dubious as he had been officious. “I dunno about that! He’s been raising Ned, General Arnold has. Anybody that goes near him gets his head snapped off!”