Rabble in Arms by Kenneth Roberts

Author:Kenneth Roberts [Roberts, Kenneth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-82455-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-08-16T00:00:00+00:00

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 litter 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 like 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,

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