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the camp earlier. He sounded mildly amused. “
Le capitaine
sent me to find you.”
    “Why?” Grey asked shortly. His heart was still pounding from the shock. He disliked being taken at a disadvantage, and disliked even more the thought that the man could easily have killed him before Grey knew he was there.
    “The Abenaki set your tent on fire; he supposed they might have dragged you and your servant into the forest.”
    Tom uttered an extremely coarse expletive and made as though to dive directly into the trees, but Grey stopped him with a hand on his arm.
    “Stay, Tom. It doesn’t matter.”
    “The bloody hell you say,” Tom replied heatedly, agitation depriving him of his normal manners. “I daresay I can find you more smallclothes, not as that will be easy, but what about your cousin’s painting of her and the little ’un she sent for Captain Stubbs? What about your good hat with the gold lace?!?”
    Grey had a brief moment of alarm—his young cousin Olivia had sent a miniature of herself and her newborn son, charging Grey to deliver this to her husband, Captain Malcolm Stubbs, presently with Wolfe’s troops. He clapped a hand to his side, though, and felt with relief the oval shape of the miniature in its wrappings, safe in his pocket.
    “That’s all right, Tom; I’ve got it. As to the hat … we’ll worry about that later, I think. Here—what is your name, sir?” he inquired of the Indian, unwilling to address him simply as “you.”
    “Manoke,” said the Indian, still sounding amused.
    “Quite. Will you take my servant back to the camp?” He saw the small, determinedfigure of Sergeant Cutter appear at the mouth of the trail and, firmly overriding Tom’s protests, shooed him off in care of the Indian.

    In the event, all five fireships either drifted or were steered away from the
Harwood
. Something that might—or might not—have been a boarding craft did appear upstream but was frightened off by Grey’s impromptu troops on the shore, firing volleys—though the range was woefully short; there was no possibility of hitting anything.
    Still, the
Harwood
was secure, and the camp had settled into a state of uneasy watchfulness. Grey had seen Woodford briefly upon his return, near dawn, and learned that the raid had resulted in the deaths of two men and the capture of three more, dragged off into the forest. Three of the Indian raiders had been killed, another wounded—Woodford intended to interview this man before he died but doubted that any useful information would result.
    “They never talk,” he’d said, rubbing at his smoke-reddened eyes. His face was pouchy and gray with fatigue. “They just close their eyes and start singing their damned death songs. Not a blind bit of difference what you do to ’em—they just keep on singing.”
    Grey had heard it, or thought he had, as he crawled wearily into his borrowed shelter toward daybreak. A faint, high-pitched chant that rose and fell like the rush of the wind in the trees overhead. It kept up for a bit, then stopped abruptly, only to resume again, faint and interrupted, as he teetered on the edge of sleep.
    What was the man saying? he wondered. Did it matter that none of the men hearinghim knew what he said? Perhaps the scout—Manoke, that was his name—was there; perhaps he would know.
    Tom had found Grey a small tent at the end of a row. Probably he had ejected some subaltern, but Grey wasn’t inclined to object. It was barely big enough for the canvas bed sack that lay on the ground and a box that served as table, on which stood an empty candlestick, but it was shelter. It had begun to rain lightly as he walked up the trail to camp, and the rain was now pattering busily on the canvas overhead, raising a sweet, musty scent. If the death song continued, it was no longer audible over the sound of the rain.
    Grey turned over once, the grass stuffing of the bed sack rustling softly beneath him, and fell at once into sleep.

    He woke