The officer fixed him with an angry stare. “You can laugh, but that’s what Butterfield did! Yes sir: that’s what he did! He surrendered! Never fired a gun! Had four hundred men and a fort, and he surrendered to two hundred and fifty! Every last one of the four hundred was took prisoner! The Indians stripped ’em and killed a few. Sculped ’em! Chopped ’em up the way you would a halibut! They say the men were crazy at Butterfield—wanted to kill him.”

Nason clucked, as a man does when he learns of a friend’s misfortune.

“That must have tickled Arnold,” Cap Huff said.

The officer shrugged his shoulders. “God knows! It was only last week this happened. No word’s come through yet. We heard the British warned Arnold not to attack ’em, or they’d turn the prisoners over to the Indians and let every last one of ’em be butchered; but maybe ’tain’t true.”

We stood there silently beneath the heavy gray skies of Canada; behind us, squatted over their miserable fires, the dejected soldiers who waited for the scant supplies so parsimoniously provided for a hungry and frightened army. If this was war, I thought to myself—this muck of hunger, distrust, disease, raggedness, cowardice—it was different from all my imaginings: so different that a little was already more than enough for me.

I looked at Nathaniel. He was fingering his pocket and staring across the river to the small farmhouses here and there along the ridge. There was something in his mind, I could see, besides the war: something important enough to veil the darkness of the prospect before us; and what that something was, I was sure I knew.

At length Nason laughed, but his laugh had a false and hollow sound. “We’ll soon know what happened. We’ll soon know! We’ve got to have food to get us to Montreal, and when we’ve got it—–”

The officer interrupted him. “You might get it across the river in Iberville, from one of the French farmers, but only if you’ve got hard money. Since the retreat from Quebec, the French won’t touch Congress money. They’ve turned against us, the lousy frog-eaters! That’s why we’re in such a hell of a mess! There ain’t a cent’s worth of hard money in sight anywhere, and none of us can buy anything. When Greaton’s men went up to Montreal from Sorel the other day, to help Arnold, the only thing they could get to eat was thirty loaves of bread the Commissioners bought for ’em out of their own pockets.”

“I’ve got a little hard money,” Nathaniel said. “I think I can go across the river to those farms, yonder, and pick up enough corn meal to get this detachment to Montreal.”