Rabble in Arms, page 39
Nathaniel spoke up. “We’d have gone ashore, even if we’d been anchored. I never saw anything to beat her crankiness.”
Arnold turned to him almost deferentially. “I suppose you didn’t, by any chance, save my papers?”
Nathaniel looked horrified. “Your papersl Were your papers aboard?”
“Every document that bore on this campaign,” Arnold said gendy. “All my accounts: that’s all.”
Hawley cleared his throat and drew a long breath. “I—General—I didn’t know—these British—” He cleared his throat once more, stared at the sky and tried again. “They had me in Halifax, General. I was real anxious to fight ’em. Real anxious to fight.”
He stopped. I felt sorry for him. Arnold shook his head and turned away.
“We figured on taking her again,” Nathaniel broke in. “We figured on swimming out to her. We would have, too, only when we started back, we found those red skunks had cut us off—hundreds of ’em! The biggest men I ever saw!”
Hawley fumbled at the back of his neck. His eyes were fixed on his feet, and his voice was indistinct. “I’ll board her now if I can get enough boats. I’ll get your papers for you.”
Arnold jerked his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the Royal Savage. From her canted side slow jets of smoke puffed toward us: hung, billowing: then rolled up over her bulwarks and drifted south in ragged streamers.
“See that?” Arnold demanded. “They boarded her, and now they’re killing our men with our own guns!” He seemed to fly into a fury. “By God, if I have to abandon a vessel, I see to it that nobody else gets her!” He shook his fist at Hawley and Nathaniel. “Why didn’t you set her afire! Why didn’t you blow her up? What in God’s name was the use of making the British a present of a schooner and guns and powder and shot!”
He ran to the companionway. Steven Nason straightened up from the aftermost gun, his face a black mask except for his eyelids, which were still white. “Lay your guns on the Royal Savage” Arnold shouted. “I want every gun in this fleet laid on that vessel! Send word along the line! They can’t have her! Blow hell out of her!”
All along the deck the men turned the guns. We payed out two fathoms of spring, to let them bear more easily.
In his eagerness to have the Royal Savage destroyed, Arnold seemed to have forgotten Hawley and Nathaniel.
On the side of the British fine closest to Valcour, one of the British gunboats was in trouble. The men aboard her were scurrying like torhired ants. A puff of smoke rose from her stern, and two men fell overboard.
She surged slowly and distressingly. A dark mass of smoke rose up from her, and riding on the smoke was a powder chest. The smoke glowed and burned at the base, and spread enormously, as if pressed flat by the chest on its crest. It enveloped the boat. The chest popped sideways into the air, turned end over end, and fell into the lake. With the crash of the explosion came a tumult of shouting from our own and the British boats.
The smoke rolled away from the gunboat, and we saw that not only had her magazine exploded, but she was ablaze in her amidship section. The other British boats moved toward her, and she toward them. One of her men, in the water, made clutching motions with his hands and vanished.
When I turned my eye shoreward for a moment, to watch for Indians, I saw that Hawley stood alone, feeling his neck and staring up at the sky, as if the cannon that pounded on all sides of us were to be found somewhere in the heavens. I went to him, suspecting that he was, in a way, in greater distress than the British gunboat.
At the touch of my hand on his arm he drew away, walked past me and spoke to Nathaniel. “I got to take back the Royal Savage,” he said flatly. “If I can get the men, I’ll take her! Will you go to take her?”
Nathaniel looked from Hawley to me. “You’d better go,” I told him. “You’ll be safer in a small boat than you’d be right here.”
Hawley went to Arnold, who had his head through the hemlock screen on our taffrail, counting the shot-holes in our hull. When he pulled his head back, he seemed to have forgotten he had ever spoken sharply to Hawley. “Mark the holes,” he said, tapping Hawley on the chest. “Get ’em marked right away, and in an hour you can take your men over the side and put on some patches.”
“Sir,” Hawley said, “lend me three bateaux and I’ll take the Savage. I’ll get my men off the other vessels and take her back.”
Arnold eyed the western hills dubiously. A wall of dirty gray cloud had pushed up above them, and the sun had gone down into that darkling shroud. The color of the lake had changed to that of the slates on which we wrote in school; and in the gathering gloom the puffs of smoke that jetted from our own guns and those of the British were shot with a pinkish orange glare. The spruces on the island no longer stood out clear and distinct, but were a black barrier behind us: a threatening, saw-toothed barrier.
“No,” Arnold said. “By the time you’ve rounded up your attackers, it’ll be night, and I’11 need you right here. We’ve all got work to do—unless we want our bones to rest permanendy at Valcour.”
Hawley clasped his hands behind him. I marveled at the length of his arms. His stubby fingers, twisting together, seemed to reach nearly to his knees. “I wouldn’t choose to have the charge of—the charge of cowardice stand against me.”
“Nobody’s accusing you of cowardice!” Arnold said quickly. If it’ll make you feel any better, take two boats and half a dozen active men and try to get through her cabin windows just at dark.”
XXXVIII
WHEN darkness came at last, we had fought for five everlasting hours. The Royal Savage was in flames, set by the British when they saw Hawley s and Nathaniel’s boats approaching. The British gunboats, battered and leaking, had pulled slowly away to the shelter of the ship and the schooners, which lay at the entrance of the channel, watching our shot-torn crescent like three cats sniffing a basket of sardines.
The ship, her view of us at last unobstructed by her own gunboats, fired five broadsides before night shut down. The solid shot screamed above us; a few, almost spent, thudded against a hull with the sound of a gigantic horse kicking a cavernous barn. Such, however, was her distance that we made no answer, but lay there licking the wounds we could see and hunting for the others whose existence we suspected.
Notwithstanding our plight, there was something cheerful about the darkness and its myriad of small sounds, after the uproar of the day. Nine wounded men were stretched aft of the main hatch, with a staysail over them. Three had lost legs—one close to the thigh; and one was shot through the stomach, but he was out of his head and obsessed with the belief that he was building stone walls on his farm. Doc Means swore that since none of them had taken anything more nourishing than rum and water since the night before, and probably would receive nothing but water and rum for some time, they would all recover. Seven dead men had been thrown into the water and were already as good as forgotten, and the blood and fitter had been swabbed from the decks. A score of seamen were over the side in bateaux, nailing lead over shot-holes by the light of the column of fire that whirled upward from the Royal Savage.
We had twelve shot-holes, some big enough to put your head through; and to get at two of them it was necessary to tilt the galley by traversing the guns. Cap Huff, red and noisy from rum, superintended the cleaning of the fore part of the vessel while Nason worked a crew on the pumps. Cap kept his men in a good humor by telling them how he planned to go ashore as soon as he had time and catch an Indian and roast him for supper. Cap’s talk of Indians made our hunger easier to bear, especially since we could see the glimmer of fires far off among the trees of Valcour, and hear a steady yowling drifting down on the northeast wind. The sound was hke the squalling of distant seagulls.
Arnold had called a Council of War, and he waited for it in the cabin, scratching away at a letter by the light of a smoky lantern. The cabin had been swabbed down after Doc s labors, but it reeked of blood and saltpetre—an odor that would cling to it for many a day.
Arnold’s curly black hair was draggled, and his pale eyes sunken, but he was tilted forward on the edge of his bench, driving his quill across the paper as though freshly risen from a nap. There were times when he seemed to me to be made of steel, wire and teak, rather than flesh and blood.
Even when a blinding flash of light left the outlines of the stern windows seared blue against my eyeballs, Arnold’s pen scratched on without a break. “There she goes!” he said. The flash was followed by the roar of the Royal Savage’s exploding magazine. It echoed from the cliffs of Valcour and from the New York shore, rolling from shore to island and back again in swelling waves of sound; and through all its booming and reverberating Arnold kept right on with his writing.
The captains who had that morning assembled in our small cabin had been an odd-looking lot; but they were even odder now, as they came straggling down the companion. Waterbury had hurt his back, so that he was humped over like an old, old man, supporting himself on the handle of a gun-swab. Burning powder had fallen on his coat, covering it with neat round spots, not unlike the dapplings of a young fawn. Wigglesworth, hook-nosed and sedate, had washed the powder from his face, but done it over-hastily, so that his nostrils were black, still, as well as his ears and his neck, and the inner corners of his eyes, which gave him the staring look of a startied owl. Poor Hawley, his hands swathed in dirty bandages, due to his efforts to board the burning Royal Savage, sat silent against the bulkhead, stroking one bandage with the other.
Captain Dickenson of the Enterprise sloop came down holding the skirt of his coat before him, to show us where an Indians bullet had struck a button at the small of his back and run halfway around him, leaving his coat tail hanging by a thread. Since the Enterprise had been on the right of our line, she had been close to shore, and those aboard her had seen more than they wished of the Indians.
“By Jody,” Dickenson said, wagging his coat tail at us, “they looked eight feet tall, and they had black faces! If I hadn’t known they were Indians, I’d have said they’d been spewed up from the bottomless pit!”
Red-headed Captain Davis of the Lee galley had a bandage around his head: a bandage so caked with blood that his hair seemed pale beside it. Simonds, who had been white and shivering with ague when we last saw him, was burning with fever now, and perpetually clearing his throat and muttering to himself, so that I think he was a little out of his senses.
Captain Rice might have been drunk, so thick was his speech: his eyes were glassy; and only the repeated nudgings of his friend Grimes kept him awake. Evidently he had been badly shocked. Grimes was smeared with blood from neck to knee, doubtless from helping a wounded man. Little Ulmer of the Spitfire wore a bandage on his thigh. Sumner of the Boston had been deafened by the close passage of a cannon ball, which had broken his ear-drums. Thatcher of the Washington, Warner of the Trumbull, Reed of the New York and Grant of the Connecticut were not to be seen.
Arnold spoke impatiently. “We’ll wait no longer. I wanted to make public acknowledgment to all of you together, but under the circumstances the missing ones will understand how it is. Gentlemen, you fought well! I’m proud of what you’ve done this day. I hope your country’ll have the sense to be grateful!”
An epidemic of throat-clearing broke out among the captains. They shuffled their feet and studied the rough boards on which they sat.
“Now, then,” Arnold said, “we’ve lost the Philadelphia. Captain Rice tells me she sank half an hour ago. And we’ve been so unfortunate as to lose the Royal Savage”—he glanced quickly at Hawley’s rigid face—”in spite of Captain Hawley’s effort to retake her. A brave effort, Captain Hawley: a brave effort against heavy odds.”
Hawley made a strangled noise in his throat and cast a pitiful glance at Wigglesworth, who sat beside him. Wigglesworth nodded soberly and said, “Good work.”
“From the appearance of things,” Arnold said, “they were a little more lavish in their attentions to General Waterbury and this vessel than to some of the others; but none of us were overlooked, I suspect.” He hesitated. “Captain Reed of the New York sends me word that all his officers were killed, and Captain Warner and Captain Grant have a few splinters in them, but the rest of us didn’t do so badly. Not so badly. What’s your situation, General?”
Waterbury tried to straighten up. The effort made him groan. “Bad! Capjtain Thatcher’s seriously wounded and the sailing master, too. My first lieutenant and three others are killed. I’ve got a twelve-pounder through my mainmast and God knows how many through the hull. My sails are shot to pieces, so far as I can see.”
Arnold disposed of Waterbury’s troubles. “I’ll give you Captain Hawley. He’ll get sail on her if she’s got a rag to set.”
Hawley laughed abruptly. “I guess we can get some on her somehow.”
Arnold nodded. “Yes, that’s right! Get some on her, even if you have to use the men s breeches for sails, because we’re going to move.”
Feet clattered on the companionway, and Tom Bickford’s face appeared. “Fog!” he said. “It’s drifted so thick we can’t see the Indian fires on the island.” He vanished.
“There you are!” Arnold cried. “Just what we need! I take it there’s none of you anxious to stay where we are!” He opened his mouth in a wide and silent laugh.
General Waterbury spoke sourly. “If we can go, we’d better. I don’t believe there’s a vessel in the fleet with fifty rounds left. I don’t believe I could fight two hours more—if it was the kind of fighting we did today.”
Arnold’s eyes, in that dark cabin, seemed to absorb most of the fight from our tin lantern. “Look at that, now! Everything’s turning out just as it should! We’ve got a northerly breeze still, a fog to hide in, and there’s no moon till tomorrow. What’s more, none of us want to stay, and the British think they’ve got us bottled up!”
He laughed again, that silent, open-mouthed laugh: then abruptly became grim.
“So we’ll get away! We’ve got to get away! We’ve delayed ’em one day: we’ve got to delay ’em some morel Their army can’t move while we’re at large on the lake, and the way to stay at large is to get away—give ’em the slip! And we’ll do it! We’ll do it, because they’ll never expect us to do it!”
He banged his fist on the table. “By God, gentlemen, I’d like to see the faces of those British captains when they wake up tomorrow and find their noses stuck in an empty fox-hole!”
The captains chuckled. In a few short sentences Arnold had banished all their doubts and filled them with confidence and eagerness to be gone.
He took a paper from the table. “Listen to this, now, and for God’s sake make no mistakes. I want every captain to take the helm of his own vessel, and I want each one of you to put his best officer in the bow with a lantern screened in a canvas sack. We’ve got to go through that British fleet without a sound: understand? Without a single damned sound! If any of you runs ashore, the whole British fleet^will be down on us like hornets, and have half of us aground in ten minutes. If anyone shouts: if anyone talks: if anyone shows a fight, it’s all the same! We’re gone! Our goose is cooked! Understand?”
Nobody said anything.
“All right, then,” Arnold said. “I want each of you to put six stout men on your starboard bow with six spare oars. That’s to fend you off if you start to run ashore. Tell ’em to keep their mouths shut in case they have to do any fending, unless they want their gizzards blown out. Put your wounded under cover, where their groans can’t be heard, if they’re inclined to groan. Put ’em in the cabins, if you’ve got cabins. Put your look-out on your larboard bow with his screened lantern, to give you your steering directions. If he moves his lantern up and down, go straight ahead: if he circles it to larboard, steer to larboard: if to starboard, go to starboard. That’s easy enough, isn’t it?”
The captains agreed that it was.
“You’ll want one more lantern in your stern,” Arnold told them. “Screen it well, so it can only be seen from dead astern. Then all that’s necessary is for those with square sails to set ’em, along with your steering sails, run before the wind, and follow the lantern. Those with lateen rig need only the foresail. Understand?”
“Oars out or in?” Hawley asked.
“Be careful of your oars,” Arnold warned. “You’ll have to have ’em out, so to hold off in case you run up too close on the vessel in front of you; but don’t use ’em till you must. And whatever you do, plug shirts and breeches around the oars, so they won’t rattle if you need to use em.”
General Waterbury coughed dryly. “If they discover us—”
“General,” Arnold said, “I know the British pretty well. They don’t think much of us. They’re tired tonight—tired and battered; and when Englishmen are tired and battered, they like to have a cup of tea or a quart of rum and go to sleep. Since they don’t think much of us, that’s just what they’re going to do, General. They’re going to sleep. I think we’ll go through them without the least trouble: without any trouble at all.” He stared around at us: then he, too, coughed. “If they should discover us, I know you’ll make it as expensive a discovery as possible.”
He moved close to the lantern to read from the paper in his hand. “Here’s your sailing order. It’s the same order in which you now lie, barring the Trumbull, the Washington and this vessel. Colonel Wigglesworth in the Trumbull will pass across your front at seven o’clock. When he reaches the west shore, he’ll turn due south, and the rest of you will follow. You’re to keep as close to shore as possible. There’s six fathoms of water ten yards off shore. I sounded it myself. With this northeast breeze there’ll be waves on the rocks, and you can gauge your distance from them.” He read the order in which the gundelos and the schooners were to follow: then read it again, more slowly. “All clear?” he asked.
The captains muttered that everything was clear.
“The Washington and the Congress will bring up your rear,” Arnold said. “You can depend on General Waterbury and me to do all we can for you in case—in case—” He changed the subject abruptly. “If there’s any uncertainty, or any doubt about anything, this is the time to speak.”
Arnold turned to him almost deferentially. “I suppose you didn’t, by any chance, save my papers?”
Nathaniel looked horrified. “Your papersl Were your papers aboard?”
“Every document that bore on this campaign,” Arnold said gendy. “All my accounts: that’s all.”
Hawley cleared his throat and drew a long breath. “I—General—I didn’t know—these British—” He cleared his throat once more, stared at the sky and tried again. “They had me in Halifax, General. I was real anxious to fight ’em. Real anxious to fight.”
He stopped. I felt sorry for him. Arnold shook his head and turned away.
“We figured on taking her again,” Nathaniel broke in. “We figured on swimming out to her. We would have, too, only when we started back, we found those red skunks had cut us off—hundreds of ’em! The biggest men I ever saw!”
Hawley fumbled at the back of his neck. His eyes were fixed on his feet, and his voice was indistinct. “I’ll board her now if I can get enough boats. I’ll get your papers for you.”
Arnold jerked his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the Royal Savage. From her canted side slow jets of smoke puffed toward us: hung, billowing: then rolled up over her bulwarks and drifted south in ragged streamers.
“See that?” Arnold demanded. “They boarded her, and now they’re killing our men with our own guns!” He seemed to fly into a fury. “By God, if I have to abandon a vessel, I see to it that nobody else gets her!” He shook his fist at Hawley and Nathaniel. “Why didn’t you set her afire! Why didn’t you blow her up? What in God’s name was the use of making the British a present of a schooner and guns and powder and shot!”
He ran to the companionway. Steven Nason straightened up from the aftermost gun, his face a black mask except for his eyelids, which were still white. “Lay your guns on the Royal Savage” Arnold shouted. “I want every gun in this fleet laid on that vessel! Send word along the line! They can’t have her! Blow hell out of her!”
All along the deck the men turned the guns. We payed out two fathoms of spring, to let them bear more easily.
In his eagerness to have the Royal Savage destroyed, Arnold seemed to have forgotten Hawley and Nathaniel.
On the side of the British fine closest to Valcour, one of the British gunboats was in trouble. The men aboard her were scurrying like torhired ants. A puff of smoke rose from her stern, and two men fell overboard.
She surged slowly and distressingly. A dark mass of smoke rose up from her, and riding on the smoke was a powder chest. The smoke glowed and burned at the base, and spread enormously, as if pressed flat by the chest on its crest. It enveloped the boat. The chest popped sideways into the air, turned end over end, and fell into the lake. With the crash of the explosion came a tumult of shouting from our own and the British boats.
The smoke rolled away from the gunboat, and we saw that not only had her magazine exploded, but she was ablaze in her amidship section. The other British boats moved toward her, and she toward them. One of her men, in the water, made clutching motions with his hands and vanished.
When I turned my eye shoreward for a moment, to watch for Indians, I saw that Hawley stood alone, feeling his neck and staring up at the sky, as if the cannon that pounded on all sides of us were to be found somewhere in the heavens. I went to him, suspecting that he was, in a way, in greater distress than the British gunboat.
At the touch of my hand on his arm he drew away, walked past me and spoke to Nathaniel. “I got to take back the Royal Savage,” he said flatly. “If I can get the men, I’ll take her! Will you go to take her?”
Nathaniel looked from Hawley to me. “You’d better go,” I told him. “You’ll be safer in a small boat than you’d be right here.”
Hawley went to Arnold, who had his head through the hemlock screen on our taffrail, counting the shot-holes in our hull. When he pulled his head back, he seemed to have forgotten he had ever spoken sharply to Hawley. “Mark the holes,” he said, tapping Hawley on the chest. “Get ’em marked right away, and in an hour you can take your men over the side and put on some patches.”
“Sir,” Hawley said, “lend me three bateaux and I’ll take the Savage. I’ll get my men off the other vessels and take her back.”
Arnold eyed the western hills dubiously. A wall of dirty gray cloud had pushed up above them, and the sun had gone down into that darkling shroud. The color of the lake had changed to that of the slates on which we wrote in school; and in the gathering gloom the puffs of smoke that jetted from our own guns and those of the British were shot with a pinkish orange glare. The spruces on the island no longer stood out clear and distinct, but were a black barrier behind us: a threatening, saw-toothed barrier.
“No,” Arnold said. “By the time you’ve rounded up your attackers, it’ll be night, and I’11 need you right here. We’ve all got work to do—unless we want our bones to rest permanendy at Valcour.”
Hawley clasped his hands behind him. I marveled at the length of his arms. His stubby fingers, twisting together, seemed to reach nearly to his knees. “I wouldn’t choose to have the charge of—the charge of cowardice stand against me.”
“Nobody’s accusing you of cowardice!” Arnold said quickly. If it’ll make you feel any better, take two boats and half a dozen active men and try to get through her cabin windows just at dark.”
XXXVIII
WHEN darkness came at last, we had fought for five everlasting hours. The Royal Savage was in flames, set by the British when they saw Hawley s and Nathaniel’s boats approaching. The British gunboats, battered and leaking, had pulled slowly away to the shelter of the ship and the schooners, which lay at the entrance of the channel, watching our shot-torn crescent like three cats sniffing a basket of sardines.
The ship, her view of us at last unobstructed by her own gunboats, fired five broadsides before night shut down. The solid shot screamed above us; a few, almost spent, thudded against a hull with the sound of a gigantic horse kicking a cavernous barn. Such, however, was her distance that we made no answer, but lay there licking the wounds we could see and hunting for the others whose existence we suspected.
Notwithstanding our plight, there was something cheerful about the darkness and its myriad of small sounds, after the uproar of the day. Nine wounded men were stretched aft of the main hatch, with a staysail over them. Three had lost legs—one close to the thigh; and one was shot through the stomach, but he was out of his head and obsessed with the belief that he was building stone walls on his farm. Doc Means swore that since none of them had taken anything more nourishing than rum and water since the night before, and probably would receive nothing but water and rum for some time, they would all recover. Seven dead men had been thrown into the water and were already as good as forgotten, and the blood and fitter had been swabbed from the decks. A score of seamen were over the side in bateaux, nailing lead over shot-holes by the light of the column of fire that whirled upward from the Royal Savage.
We had twelve shot-holes, some big enough to put your head through; and to get at two of them it was necessary to tilt the galley by traversing the guns. Cap Huff, red and noisy from rum, superintended the cleaning of the fore part of the vessel while Nason worked a crew on the pumps. Cap kept his men in a good humor by telling them how he planned to go ashore as soon as he had time and catch an Indian and roast him for supper. Cap’s talk of Indians made our hunger easier to bear, especially since we could see the glimmer of fires far off among the trees of Valcour, and hear a steady yowling drifting down on the northeast wind. The sound was hke the squalling of distant seagulls.
Arnold had called a Council of War, and he waited for it in the cabin, scratching away at a letter by the light of a smoky lantern. The cabin had been swabbed down after Doc s labors, but it reeked of blood and saltpetre—an odor that would cling to it for many a day.
Arnold’s curly black hair was draggled, and his pale eyes sunken, but he was tilted forward on the edge of his bench, driving his quill across the paper as though freshly risen from a nap. There were times when he seemed to me to be made of steel, wire and teak, rather than flesh and blood.
Even when a blinding flash of light left the outlines of the stern windows seared blue against my eyeballs, Arnold’s pen scratched on without a break. “There she goes!” he said. The flash was followed by the roar of the Royal Savage’s exploding magazine. It echoed from the cliffs of Valcour and from the New York shore, rolling from shore to island and back again in swelling waves of sound; and through all its booming and reverberating Arnold kept right on with his writing.
The captains who had that morning assembled in our small cabin had been an odd-looking lot; but they were even odder now, as they came straggling down the companion. Waterbury had hurt his back, so that he was humped over like an old, old man, supporting himself on the handle of a gun-swab. Burning powder had fallen on his coat, covering it with neat round spots, not unlike the dapplings of a young fawn. Wigglesworth, hook-nosed and sedate, had washed the powder from his face, but done it over-hastily, so that his nostrils were black, still, as well as his ears and his neck, and the inner corners of his eyes, which gave him the staring look of a startied owl. Poor Hawley, his hands swathed in dirty bandages, due to his efforts to board the burning Royal Savage, sat silent against the bulkhead, stroking one bandage with the other.
Captain Dickenson of the Enterprise sloop came down holding the skirt of his coat before him, to show us where an Indians bullet had struck a button at the small of his back and run halfway around him, leaving his coat tail hanging by a thread. Since the Enterprise had been on the right of our line, she had been close to shore, and those aboard her had seen more than they wished of the Indians.
“By Jody,” Dickenson said, wagging his coat tail at us, “they looked eight feet tall, and they had black faces! If I hadn’t known they were Indians, I’d have said they’d been spewed up from the bottomless pit!”
Red-headed Captain Davis of the Lee galley had a bandage around his head: a bandage so caked with blood that his hair seemed pale beside it. Simonds, who had been white and shivering with ague when we last saw him, was burning with fever now, and perpetually clearing his throat and muttering to himself, so that I think he was a little out of his senses.
Captain Rice might have been drunk, so thick was his speech: his eyes were glassy; and only the repeated nudgings of his friend Grimes kept him awake. Evidently he had been badly shocked. Grimes was smeared with blood from neck to knee, doubtless from helping a wounded man. Little Ulmer of the Spitfire wore a bandage on his thigh. Sumner of the Boston had been deafened by the close passage of a cannon ball, which had broken his ear-drums. Thatcher of the Washington, Warner of the Trumbull, Reed of the New York and Grant of the Connecticut were not to be seen.
Arnold spoke impatiently. “We’ll wait no longer. I wanted to make public acknowledgment to all of you together, but under the circumstances the missing ones will understand how it is. Gentlemen, you fought well! I’m proud of what you’ve done this day. I hope your country’ll have the sense to be grateful!”
An epidemic of throat-clearing broke out among the captains. They shuffled their feet and studied the rough boards on which they sat.
“Now, then,” Arnold said, “we’ve lost the Philadelphia. Captain Rice tells me she sank half an hour ago. And we’ve been so unfortunate as to lose the Royal Savage”—he glanced quickly at Hawley’s rigid face—”in spite of Captain Hawley’s effort to retake her. A brave effort, Captain Hawley: a brave effort against heavy odds.”
Hawley made a strangled noise in his throat and cast a pitiful glance at Wigglesworth, who sat beside him. Wigglesworth nodded soberly and said, “Good work.”
“From the appearance of things,” Arnold said, “they were a little more lavish in their attentions to General Waterbury and this vessel than to some of the others; but none of us were overlooked, I suspect.” He hesitated. “Captain Reed of the New York sends me word that all his officers were killed, and Captain Warner and Captain Grant have a few splinters in them, but the rest of us didn’t do so badly. Not so badly. What’s your situation, General?”
Waterbury tried to straighten up. The effort made him groan. “Bad! Capjtain Thatcher’s seriously wounded and the sailing master, too. My first lieutenant and three others are killed. I’ve got a twelve-pounder through my mainmast and God knows how many through the hull. My sails are shot to pieces, so far as I can see.”
Arnold disposed of Waterbury’s troubles. “I’ll give you Captain Hawley. He’ll get sail on her if she’s got a rag to set.”
Hawley laughed abruptly. “I guess we can get some on her somehow.”
Arnold nodded. “Yes, that’s right! Get some on her, even if you have to use the men s breeches for sails, because we’re going to move.”
Feet clattered on the companionway, and Tom Bickford’s face appeared. “Fog!” he said. “It’s drifted so thick we can’t see the Indian fires on the island.” He vanished.
“There you are!” Arnold cried. “Just what we need! I take it there’s none of you anxious to stay where we are!” He opened his mouth in a wide and silent laugh.
General Waterbury spoke sourly. “If we can go, we’d better. I don’t believe there’s a vessel in the fleet with fifty rounds left. I don’t believe I could fight two hours more—if it was the kind of fighting we did today.”
Arnold’s eyes, in that dark cabin, seemed to absorb most of the fight from our tin lantern. “Look at that, now! Everything’s turning out just as it should! We’ve got a northerly breeze still, a fog to hide in, and there’s no moon till tomorrow. What’s more, none of us want to stay, and the British think they’ve got us bottled up!”
He laughed again, that silent, open-mouthed laugh: then abruptly became grim.
“So we’ll get away! We’ve got to get away! We’ve delayed ’em one day: we’ve got to delay ’em some morel Their army can’t move while we’re at large on the lake, and the way to stay at large is to get away—give ’em the slip! And we’ll do it! We’ll do it, because they’ll never expect us to do it!”
He banged his fist on the table. “By God, gentlemen, I’d like to see the faces of those British captains when they wake up tomorrow and find their noses stuck in an empty fox-hole!”
The captains chuckled. In a few short sentences Arnold had banished all their doubts and filled them with confidence and eagerness to be gone.
He took a paper from the table. “Listen to this, now, and for God’s sake make no mistakes. I want every captain to take the helm of his own vessel, and I want each one of you to put his best officer in the bow with a lantern screened in a canvas sack. We’ve got to go through that British fleet without a sound: understand? Without a single damned sound! If any of you runs ashore, the whole British fleet^will be down on us like hornets, and have half of us aground in ten minutes. If anyone shouts: if anyone talks: if anyone shows a fight, it’s all the same! We’re gone! Our goose is cooked! Understand?”
Nobody said anything.
“All right, then,” Arnold said. “I want each of you to put six stout men on your starboard bow with six spare oars. That’s to fend you off if you start to run ashore. Tell ’em to keep their mouths shut in case they have to do any fending, unless they want their gizzards blown out. Put your wounded under cover, where their groans can’t be heard, if they’re inclined to groan. Put ’em in the cabins, if you’ve got cabins. Put your look-out on your larboard bow with his screened lantern, to give you your steering directions. If he moves his lantern up and down, go straight ahead: if he circles it to larboard, steer to larboard: if to starboard, go to starboard. That’s easy enough, isn’t it?”
The captains agreed that it was.
“You’ll want one more lantern in your stern,” Arnold told them. “Screen it well, so it can only be seen from dead astern. Then all that’s necessary is for those with square sails to set ’em, along with your steering sails, run before the wind, and follow the lantern. Those with lateen rig need only the foresail. Understand?”
“Oars out or in?” Hawley asked.
“Be careful of your oars,” Arnold warned. “You’ll have to have ’em out, so to hold off in case you run up too close on the vessel in front of you; but don’t use ’em till you must. And whatever you do, plug shirts and breeches around the oars, so they won’t rattle if you need to use em.”
General Waterbury coughed dryly. “If they discover us—”
“General,” Arnold said, “I know the British pretty well. They don’t think much of us. They’re tired tonight—tired and battered; and when Englishmen are tired and battered, they like to have a cup of tea or a quart of rum and go to sleep. Since they don’t think much of us, that’s just what they’re going to do, General. They’re going to sleep. I think we’ll go through them without the least trouble: without any trouble at all.” He stared around at us: then he, too, coughed. “If they should discover us, I know you’ll make it as expensive a discovery as possible.”
He moved close to the lantern to read from the paper in his hand. “Here’s your sailing order. It’s the same order in which you now lie, barring the Trumbull, the Washington and this vessel. Colonel Wigglesworth in the Trumbull will pass across your front at seven o’clock. When he reaches the west shore, he’ll turn due south, and the rest of you will follow. You’re to keep as close to shore as possible. There’s six fathoms of water ten yards off shore. I sounded it myself. With this northeast breeze there’ll be waves on the rocks, and you can gauge your distance from them.” He read the order in which the gundelos and the schooners were to follow: then read it again, more slowly. “All clear?” he asked.
The captains muttered that everything was clear.
“The Washington and the Congress will bring up your rear,” Arnold said. “You can depend on General Waterbury and me to do all we can for you in case—in case—” He changed the subject abruptly. “If there’s any uncertainty, or any doubt about anything, this is the time to speak.”
