Mr. Arnold A Romance of the Revolution
Francis Lynde
Belletristik / Gegenwartsliteratur (ab 1945)
Beschreibung
Excerpt: "e;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. "e;I'm telling you, Dick, we're miles deeper in the ditch than we've been any year since this cursed war began!"e; 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. "e;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?"e; "e;Gone home to get something to eat,"e; I laughed. "e;We need to hang a few commissary quartermasters, Jack."e; "e;It isn't all in the commissary,"e; he contended, "e;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."e; "e;But not Baylor's,"e; 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."e;
