ords.

"Bad, bad as hell!" he muttered, fingering his sword-hilt and staring
off into the darkness. "What's the situation above us? Gansevoort's
holding out, isn't he? I sent him a note to-night. Of course he's
holding out; isn't he?"

I made a short report of the situation as I knew it; the General looked
straight into my eyes as though he were not listening.

"Yes, yes," he said, impatiently. "I know how to deal with St. Leger and
Sir John--I wrote Gansevoort that I understood how to deal with them. He
has only to sit tight; I'll manage the rest."

His dark, lean, eager visage caught the lantern light as he turned to
scan the moonlit sky. "Ten minutes," he muttered; "we should strike
German Flatts by sundown to-morrow if our supplies come up." And, aloud,
with an abrupt and vigorous gesture, "McCraw's band are scalping the
settlers, they say?"

I told him what I had seen. He nodded, then his virile face changed and
he gave me a sulky look.

"Captain Ormond," he said, "folk say that I brood over the wrongs done
me by Congress. It's a lie; I don't care a damn about Congress--but let
it pass. What I wish to say is this: On the second of August the best
general in these United States except George Washington was deprived of
his command and superseded by a--a--thing named Gates.... I speak of
General Philip Schuyler, my friend, and now my fellow-victim."

Shocked and angry at the news of such injustice to the man whose
splendid energy had already paralyzed the British invasion of New York,
I stiffened up, rigid and speechless.

"Ho!" cried Arnold, with a disagreeable laugh. "It mads you, does it?
Well, sir, think of me who have lived to see five men promoted over my
head--and I left in the anterooms of Congress to eat my heart out! But
let that pass, too. By the eternal God, I'll show them what stuff is in
me! Let it pass, Ormond, let it pass."

He began to pace the ground, gnawing his thick lower lip, and if ever
the infernal fire darted from human eyes, I saw its baleful
flicker then.

With a heave of his chest and a scowl, he controlled his voice, stopping
in his nervous walk to face me again.

"Ormond, you've gone up higher--the commission is here." He pulled a
packet of papers from his breast-pocket and thrust them at me. "Schuyler
did it. He thinks well of you, sir. On the first of August he learned
that he was to be superseded. He told Clinton that you deserved a
commission for what you did at that Iro