Mr. Arnold A Romance of the Revolution (ePub)

Excerpt: ?If there were nothing else to recall the day and date, December 14, 1780, I should still be able to name it because it chanced to be my twenty-second birthday, and Jack Pettus, of the Virginia Hundreds, and I were breaking a bottle of wine in honor of it in the bar of old Dirck van Ditteraick?s pot-house tavern at Nyack. The afternoon was cold and gray and dismal. The wine was prodigiously bad; and the tavern bar, lighted by a couple of guttering candles in wall sconces, was a reeking kennel. I was hand-blistered from my long pull down the river from Teller?s Point; and Jack, who had ridden the four miles from General Washington?s headquarters at Tappan to keep the mild birthday wassail with me, was in a mood bitter enough to kill whatever joy the anniversary might be supposed to hold for both or either of us. ?I?m telling you, Dick, we?re miles deeper in the ditch than we?ve been any year since this cursed war began!? he summed up gloomily, when we had chafed[2] in sour impatience, as all men did, over the sorry condition of our rag-tag, starving patriot army. ?Four months ago we had eight thousand men fronting Sir Henry Clinton here in the Highlands; to-day we couldn?t muster half that number. Where are all the skulkers?? ?Gone home to get something to eat,? I laughed. ?We need to hang a few commissary quartermasters, Jack.? ?It isn?t all in the commissary,? he contended, ?though I grant you there are empty bellies enough among us. But above the belly-pinching, it?s the example set by that thrice-accursed traitor, Arnold, in his going over to the enemy. Not a night passes now but some troop breaks the number of its mess by losing a man or two to the southward road.? ?But not Baylor?s,? I qualified. Pettus was a lieutenant in Major Henry Lee?s Light Horse Legion, and I a captain in Baylor?s Horse, at the moment posted at Salem on scouting duty.