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buckets,” Josiah Flint added hurriedly.
    “And buckets!” Revere called after the boy. “And not leaking buckets either!” He took the boy’s vacated chair and watched as Josiah Flint bit into a chicken leg. Flint was an enormous man, his belly spilling over his belt, and he seemed intent on becoming even fatter because whenever Revere visited the arsenal he found his friend eating. He had a plate of cornbread, radishes, and chicken that he vaguely gestured towards, as if inviting Colonel Revere to share the dish.
    “You haven’t been given orders yet, Colonel?” Flint asked. His nose had been shattered by a bullet at Saratoga just minutes before a cannon ball took away his right leg. He could no longer breathe through his nose and so his breath had to be drawn past the half-masticated food filling his mouth. It made a snuffling sound. “They should have given you orders, Colonel.”
    “They don’t know whether they’re pissing or puking, Mister Flint,” Revere said, “but I can’t wait while they make up their minds. The guns have to be ready!”
    “No man better than you, Colonel,” Josiah Flint said, picking a shred of radish from his front teeth.
    “But I didn’t go to Harvard, did I?” Revere asked with a forced laugh. “If I spoke Latin, Mister Flint, I’d be a general by now.”
    “ Hic, haec, hoc ,” Flint said through a mouthful of bread.
    “I expect so,” Revere said. He pulled a folded copy of the Boston Intelligencer from his pocket and spread it on the table, then took out his reading glasses. He disliked wearing them for he suspected they gave him an unmilitary appearance, but he needed the spectacles to read the account of the British incursion into eastern Massachusetts. “Who would have believed it,” he said, “the bastard redcoats back in New England!”
    “Not for long, Colonel.”
    “I hope not,” Revere said. The Massachusetts government, learning that the British had landed men at Majabigwaduce, had determined to send an expedition to the Penobscot River, to which end a fleet was being gathered, orders being sent to the militia, and officers being appointed. “Well, well,” Revere said, peering at the newspaper. “It seems the Spanish have declared war on the British now!”
    “Spain as well as France,” Flint said. “The bloodybacks can’t last long now.”
    “Let’s pray they last long enough to give us a chance to fight them at Maja.” Revere paused, “Majabigwaduce,” he said. “I wonder what that name means?”
    “Just some Indian nonsense,” Flint said. “Place Where the Muskrat Pissed Down Its Legs, probably.”
    “Probably,” Revere said distantly. He took off his glasses and stared at a pair of sheer-legs that waited to lift a cannon barrel from a carriage rotted by damp. “Have they given you a requisition for cannon, Mister Flint?”
    “Just for five hundred muskets, Colonel, to be rented for a dollar each to the militia.”
    “Rented!”
    “Rented,” Flint confirmed.
    “If they’re to kill the British,” Revere said, “then money shouldn’t come into it.”
    “Money always comes into it,” Flint said. “There are six new British nine-pounders in Appleby’s yard, but we can’t touch them. They’re to be auctioned.”
    “The Council should buy them,” Revere said.
    “The Council don’t have the money,” Flint said, stripping a leg-bone of its flesh, “not enough coinage to pay the wages, rent the privateers, purchase supplies, and buy cannon. You’ll have to make do with the guns we’ve got.”
    “They’ll do, they’ll do,” Revere said grudgingly.
    “And I hope the Council has the sense to appoint you to command those guns, Colonel!”
    Revere said nothing to that, merely stared at the sheer-legs. He had an engaging smile that warmed men’s hearts, but he was not smiling now. He was seething.
    He was seething because the Council had appointed the commanders of the expedition to rout the British from