“I am not so sure,” returned Clotilde gravely. “I liked not the look he gave us before he turned away, and do you know, Mère Jeanne, I think he was of our race.” “I thought of that too,” said the old woman, “and I blushed for our kind, although we need not call him a fellow-countryman. He is one of those renegades who are half French, half Indian and wholly the Evil One’s. The English have been trying to make use of them, but little good will come of it. That poor-spirited animal can never do us harm!” “I trust not,” said Clotilde with a sigh, and went back to her work. There was so much to be done, it was scarcely worth while wasting time in dread of what might happen. Too much was already happening every moment. It was true that, whatever highways and byways the Tory pedlars travelled in New England, their efforts against the cause of Liberty were of little avail. No matter where they went, Stephen Sheffield had either been before them or came after to undo their work. People listened to him eagerly wherever he went; he stopped at cottage doors, he spoke in market places, he held meetings at country crossroads and convinced men everywhere that now, if ever, they must throw all they had into the struggle for freedom. And everywhere men heard him, they turned away to say good-bye to their wives, to shoulder their old muskets and set forth to join General Washington. “Alack that I am too old to go,” said one richly dressed and elderly gentleman who stood listening to Stephen’s speech before the door of an inn. “I would indeed that I were a young man again!” “If you can not go, you can give,” responded Stephen quickly. “How can these lads go to the war unless we at home promise to see that their wives and children do not starve?” The old gentleman looked at Stephen’s shabby coat, the one over which Mother Jeanne had wrung her hands even last year, and at his threadbare ruffles and said nothing, but went home to do his part. He remembered that before the war the Sheffield estate had been called the wealthiest in Massachusetts. “I verily believe that Stephen Sheffield would melt the head off his cane if he thought it would help,” he chuckled as he unlocked his money box. People who knew Stephen and were aware of how frail he was at the outset of his campaign, could now see that he was worn to little more than the ghost of a man, fired and kept alive only by the passion of one purpose. Even strangers and the rough-mannered country folk could see how he was spending his last strength in this mighty effort for the success of the war. “You may think,” he said in one of his speeches to a gathering of men before a blacksmith’s shop, “that it scarce seems right that I should ask you to go into danger when I stay behind myself.” “Nay,” returned one of the men bluntly, “it is not hidden from our eyes, Master Sheffield, that you too are laying down your life in the cause.” Stephen answered him with a happy smile.