We went past the sentries into a long stone hallway hung with Indian robes: some made of pieced-together wolf skins, and some of raccoon, with a few beaver and two or three squirrel robes, one black, the most valuable that Indians make.

On one side of the hallway was a large room in which sat half a dozen men, business men seemingly, waiting for someone. They eyed us as we came in; then went back to glowering at the floor or fondling their chins. In the room across the corridor was a young man in a plain blue uniform, as serious and busy as a dog burying a bone. He may have been nineteen years old, but he had the ponderous gravity of an English butler contemplating the insignificance of all mankind. He came out to us, carrying papers in his hand, and walking with cool deliberation, the picture of importance.

“You’ll have to wait outside,” he said, speaking with a southern accent. “The general’s given orders that if there’s food for distribution to unattached soldiers, the word’ll be announced at sundown.” He dropped his head to peer at us, and there was a movement of the muscles over his jaws, which gave him a determined air.

Cap Huff coughed portentously and whispered hoarsely to Nason, “Tell the major we ain’t hungry.”

The young man looked severe. “Not major. Captain. Captain Wilkinson: aide to General Arnold.”

Nason nodded. “If the general can spare a minute, we’d like to see him, Captain. Nason’s my name. I’ve got scouts for him—and some information. I guess he’d better have the information right away. I guess I’d say something to him about it, if I was you.”

Captain Wilkinson stared at us, his jaw muscles throbbing. As he stared, a closed doorway at the end of the hallway banged open. “I can’t promise, Doctor,” a voice said. It wasn’t loud, but it was high-pitched, with a sort of suppressed shrillness to it as though it could cut like a knife, if unleashed, through stone walls.

An officer popped from the open doorway, wheeling to look back into the room, as if impatient at the slowness of the man for whom he waited. Even before Nason told me, I knew he was General Arnold.

“I can’t promise,” Arnold said again in that high-pitched, suppressed voice, “but if you say they’ll die unless they have medicines, we’ll get medicines somehow! They’re our men and they’ll be looked after, even if I have to pull every drugstore in Montreal to pieces!”