Mr. Arnold: A romance of the Revolution

“Mais j’y suis, et, mes bons camarades, par tous les dieux, j’y reste!”
CHARLES K. JOHNSTON.
MR. ARNOLD
A ROMANCE OF THE REVOLUTION
By FRANCIS LYNDE Author of The Grafters, The Master of Appleby, The Quickening, Etc.
Frontispiece by John Wolcott Adams
INDIANAPOLIS THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1923 By The Bobbs-Merrill Company Printed in the United States of America PRESS OF BRAUNWORTH & CO. BOOK MANUFACTURERS BROOKLYN, N. Y.
MR. ARNOLD
MR. ARNOLD
IF THERE were nothing else to recall the day and date, December 14, 1780, I should still be able to name it because it chanced to be my twenty-second birthday, and Jack Pettus, of the Virginia Hundreds, and I were breaking a bottle of wine in honor of it in the bar of old Dirck van Ditteraick’s pot-house tavern at Nyack.
The afternoon was cold and gray and dismal. The wine was prodigiously bad; and the tavern bar, lighted by a couple of guttering candles in wall sconces, was a reeking kennel. I was hand-blistered from my long pull down the river from Teller’s Point; and Jack, who had ridden the four miles from General Washington’s headquarters at Tappan to keep the mild birthday wassail with me, was in a mood bitter enough to kill whatever joy the anniversary might be supposed to hold for both or either of us.