Then, still clinging together, we went back slowly to where the cart waited for us. I had heard Benedict Arnold’s voice for the last time.

LXIX

THE Arundel Company of Colonel Brewer’s Twelfth Massachusetts regiment went home by way of Bennington, Portsmouth, York and Wells, and we went with them, Ellen sitting by Nathaniel in a tumbledown chaise, gray with age, while I plodded along beside them to give our ancient mare the necessary attention when she showed signs of stopping, which she did too often to suit a man who is eager for his home.

When we set off through the Berkshires, the main road on which we traveled was populous with homeward-bound militia, drinking and brawling in the neighborhood of taverns, hurroaring and hurrooing around fires at night, beating on drums and tootling on fifes, as martial and swaggering as though they longed for a chance to meet all the armies of Europe in mortal combat. Then they began to drift away in twos and threes. They slipped off down side roads, bawling farewells to those who still went onward. We saw them moving around to the back doors of farm houses, where friendly dogs fawned on them and barked ecstatically, and children ran adoringly beside them. They drifted away and drifted away, and we went on and on to the eastward, over roads on which there were fewer and fewer to keep us company. Only Brewer’s regiment, then, was left; and that thinned out and thinned out, until the Kittery company turned off up the Piscataqua, and we went on alone—on down the road that skirts the long marshes and the tumbled sand dunes to the westward of Arundel.

Luke Hitchcock, the captain, came back to me when we had our first glimpse of the breakers that lie like lace along the far-off inlet of Wells River. “We’ll take ’em in together, Cap’n Peter,” he said. “It’s been a long time since you been home. Come on up and march alongside me.”

“No,” I said. “No. You take ’em in alone. I’ll stay back here with Nathaniel.”

Hitchcock halted his straggling, talkative soldiers on the windswept plains that guard the Upper Village, and sent his lieutenant, young Joshua Nason, to bring up the provision carts so the men might be rid of their encumbrances—the unsightly camp kettles that clinked and bumped on their hips, the three wives that trudged in the ranks, the tame bear cub that rocked and snuffled by the side of young Nathaniel Davis, who was only fifteen years old, but had killed his first Britisher at Bunker Hill and been in the army ever since. The bear sat heavily on his worn pincushion of a tail, moving his upper lip nervously at the thought of leaving his master.

“He ain’t no harm, Cap’n,” young Davis protested. “He minds real well.”