Following Verrieul’s instructions, we peeled bark from yellow birches and laid it over the rents in these dilapidated hulks, stitching it in place with wattape—the fine roots of red spruces; after which Nason and Verrieul daubed the seams with hot pitch. It was like a miracle to see these bargains of Cap’s changed, almost in a moment, from ragged wrecks into trim and glistening craft.

They were discouraging to handle; for with six men sitting high on the thwarts, they were so skittish that we needed practice if we didn’t want to end our days on the bottom of Lake Champlain. We were trying to get it when Cap bawled to us from the shore that a fleet of bateaux, loaded with supplies, had passed north the day before.

“There ain’t enough supplies here to feed a sick pee-wit!” Cap shouted. “We better catch up with those bateaux, Stevie, and find some food before the troops get ahead of us! You know how soldiers are, Stevie: never thinking of nothing but food!”

He bellowed and complained until Nason beached the canoes and ordered us to get our packs aboard and set off after the supply-boats.

To remedy their skittishness we lashed blocks to the bottom of the canoes and stepped a mast in each—a mast with a single yard, so we could lie in the bottom of the canoe and sail ourselves.

When Cap stowed himself in the after part of our canoe, between Verrieul and Nathaniel, who tended the tacks of our rude sail while I handled the steering paddle, he was in a bitter humor; for the suddenness of our departure had cut him short in some of his trading ventures. He had been forced, he said, to exchange the choicest of his supplies for a bundle of paper money corded up like old love letters, hundreds of dollars worth of it. It was all the fault of Congress, he said. Congress had taken a hand in financial matters, and printed money whenever anyone needed some, which was about as sensible as a man promising to marry every girl he saw. In such a case, he said, the girls soon got to know that his promises didn’t mean anything, and he couldn’t even get a howdy-do out of them, let alone anything more comforting; and that was the way with Congress money. People knew it didn’t mean anything, and in no time at all they would refuse to sell even a squash pie for less than two thousand dollars in Congress money.

Nason, who had taken Tom Bickford to handle the steering oar of his canoe, shouted to us to get along. “Keep going,” he told us, “till dark, or till your seams open up.”