Mr. Hamilton might save me from a deserter’s death; I supposed he would find means to do that much, though all the army would be clamoring for vengeance on me. But every other humiliation the wrath of man could devise would be mine; and in all the mad hurry of the moment one grim determination stood apart in my brain and held itself in readiness to act. I would never be taken alive. If the bullets which would presently begin to spit from the muskets in the watchboat should not put me out of misery, I could at least go overboard with the skiff’s anchor stone to hold me under for the necessary choking time. The bullets came quickly enough, a ragged fire of them buzzing high overhead to emphasize Seytoun’s second warning. If the marksmen in the watchboat had been my men, I thought I should have a word to say to them about holding well down on a target when powder and lead were worth their weight in gold--as they were with us in that winter of 1780. They wasted a dozen shots on me, I think, before a long drum-roll boomed across the water to tell me that now the camp was aroused and more boats would be coming. That was only an incident, however. My business was to put my heart and soul into the oars and to keep the narrow gap between me and Seytoun’s boat from closing any more swiftly than it had to. It was closing certainly enough, and by leaping boat-lengths, when my straining ears caught the sound of other oars rolling in muffled row-locks, and a guarded hail came from somewhere in the darkness just ahead of me. I dared not turn around to try to descry the fresh peril. Seytoun’s marksmen were doing better now, and coincident with the low-toned hail ahead a bullet struck the stern of my shallop and neatly stuck a splinter in the calf of my leg. Another volley from the guardboat would have settled matters, but the volley was never fired--at me. At the flint-snapping crisis my boat’s bow crashed in among banked oars, dark shapes loomed suddenly all around me, and a gruff voice shouted, “Avast there, you lubber! Heave to, or we’ll sink you!” I needed no command to stop me. The collision with the banked oars, and a dozen hands gripping the gunwales of my shallop, did that for me. What I most needed was the discretion to throw myself flat in the bottom of my boat to escape the storm of lead that was promptly hurled at my pursuers--and that I had, too. When it was all over, and Seytoun’s boat had turned tail to claw out of harm’s way in frantic haste, I learned to what I owed my opportune deliverance. I had pulled straight into the midst of a British boat expedition (one of the many since Admiral Sir George Rodney had come to Sir Henry Clinton’s aid), sent up from New York to take a chance of surprising some one of our outpost camps. I was rejoicing secretly that my ill-luck had killed the chance of such a surprise, when I was brought roughly to book by the officer in command of the expedition.