“Are you badly hurt, mon ami?” he asked, with a slight French accent.
“I don’t know,” said Adrian, faintly. “I feel stupid and weak, but there is little pain. I think I have a cut on the head.”
De Cavannes advanced and examined the wound of the other with great care, and nodded his head as if reassured.
“There is no great harm done,” he said. “The sword must have turned in his hand, and your cap helped you. But you cannot go into battle to-day. Your General has been superseded by the vain fool, Gates. Let us depart. When the battle is over it will be time to see to our purpose.”
Slowly he led the hussar away to his horse just as the first scattering rifle-shots told that the contest was opening in earnest, and when the volleys of musketry pealed out from the wheat-fields, Adrian Schuyler was resting by a spring in the forest, while the beautiful Diana was bathing his head and binding up his wounds.
It is not our purpose to describe the battle of Saratoga in these pages. That has been well done in the glowing pages of Irving, Headley, and Lossing; and to attempt the task were but a repetition of their words. Let the reader imagine the increasing thunder of answering guns, the rapid roll of the volleys, and the charging cheer of the English, Hessian, and Yankee volunteer, the field wrapped in bluish clouds of smoke, where the fierce powder-smell stings the nostrils, and the spiteful red flashes answer each other out of the haze, where the bullets hiss and the round shot hum, while the grape-shot come by with a heavy swish, and in the midst of all, wild Arnold rages up and down like a lion at bay, driven to frenzy by his foes.
Alas for Arnold, that his greatest and most glorious field should have been his last! Nevermore to direct the tide of victory thereafter, on that stricken field he leaped to a light of glory, from whence, three years later, he was to plunge into an abyss of infamy, covered with the curses of honest men, his only hope of mercy lying in friendly oblivion.
Let the field of Saratoga go by, with its well-known result, while we turn to the few characters of our story around whom our plot has revolved, and draw the shifting drama to a close.