I chewed my ham and remembered how Arnold had spoken of those in Canada who found it impossible to obey orders. “In that case,” I told Hersom, “I never heard of De Woedtke! I’ve got to get that vessel to pieces and loaded onto barges.”

“I just thought I’d tell you,” Hersom said.

When we had finished our ham, Hersom brought us black paint, and by nightfall we had numbered every timber on the half-finished vessel.

… We slept beneath her keel, the night being foggy, but not enough to trouble us; and on the following morning, after we had drawn sour beef from Hersom for breakfast—beef that looked and tasted like anchor-rope ripened in the mud of Liverpool Harbor—we went hunting assistants.

Out beyond the shipyard we found six men sitting around a fire. Their breeches were worse than dilapidated, and they had sailcloth wrapped around their lower legs and feet. Only one of them had a tied queue; it was tied with a snake skin. They looked bristly and dirty, as if they had lived in caves for years, but I’d seen worse.

“Where you men going?” I asked.

They sat silent, peering stupidly at a kettle on the fire.

“All right,” I said. “Since you’re going nowhere, just hurry up with that kettle. Then step over to the shipyard and give us a hand dismantling a vessel.”

One of the men turned a hostile eye upon me. “Not us, brother. You got the wrong men! We’re York troops. Our time’s up. We’re going home.”

“Before you go,” I said, “I’ll get you to help me out with this vessel. General Arnold wants it shipped to Crown Point, where it’ll be some protection to the people down York way.”

“To hell with General Arnold,” the same man said calmly. “We don’t give a damn what he or any other general wants.”

I contemplated reaching down and getting him by the collar, so to haul him up where I could take a swing at his ear: then it occurred to me that these men were, after all, able to account for themselves, whereas Arnold had said to use men who couldn’t.

“Shall we start on ’em, Cap’n Peter?” Tom Bickford asked.

“No,” I said. “We don’t want trouble if we can avoid it.” I made another appeal to the York troopers. “Here, this I’m asking you to do is to help your country. Seems as if you’d do that without urging.”