The Captain said good-bye and was gone for two days.
Meanwhile the story was told by the troopers and soon repeated at the campfires, where the men amused themselves mightily with the twins and their narratives.
Tom held his tongue, and wandering saw the earthworks, and the ragged soldiers making shoes out of old blankets and plaited straw, or cooking frozen potatoes and decayed pickled herring, and growling over their diet.
He saw the army wagons come in with wood, the worn-out traces replaced by grapevines. He saw men on guard relieved every hour for fear of frozen feet, which were shoeless, and more than once a sentry standing on his hat for relief, with feet double wrapped in bits of blanket. He ate of horse beef at their fires or rode proudly at the head of McLane troops down the hill and into the lines of General Greene’s brigades.
The twins, too, kept him busy. They climbed with him the slope of Mount Misery and saw the bridge over the Schuylkill, and on the posts which supported it burned in the names of favorite generals—Washington, Putnam, Greene, and Lafayette. Once Harry, in delicious fear, was allowed to touch off the evening gun.
At dusk on December twenty-eighth the lads found McLane again in his hut.
“Hurrah, boys,� he cried, “I have a bag of flour, four sausages, and an aged hen. Let’s make slapjacks. After we have fed I have a story.�
They had been better fed than their soldier hosts, for, if it was not much at a time, there was something to be had at every hut or campfire, and by this accumulation of forage they kept themselves fairly supplied. But sausage and slapjacks and fried chicken! The boys had their fill for the first time since they left home. Then they lay on the floor before the fire. The twins looked expectant.
“You promised us a story,� said Bill, “when you came back.�
“I shall be as good as my word.�