Conceived in Liberty by Howard Fast Page B

money. Our Continental paper wouldn’t buy a loaf of bread to the thousand dollars.”
    â€œWe don’t need money. We’ll take our muskets. Men with muskets can find food.”
    â€œI’m no thief,” Charley said stubbornly. “By God, I’ve become a rotten mock of a man, but I’m no thief.”
    â€œNo plunder. I’m not meaning plunder, Charley. Old soldiers could find a little bit of food.”
    Then we sit close to the fire, looking at each other, looking around the tiny smoke-blackened dugout. Ely is out on sentry duty. I try not to think about Ely; I try to think only of freedom—of an end to the awful monotony that’s rotting my soul. Jacob lies in his bed, a cloak drawn over him, his feet protruding—ragged, bandaged stumps. His eyes are closed, and he lies without moving. Smith groans softly. Henry Lane is sick with the French disease. He has been sick and silent that way for weeks now—a living dead man lying quietly in his bunk.
    We three look at each other and measure each other.
    I say: “How long? I’m afraid to die here. Outside—anywhere outside. I’m not afraid to go to sleep in the snow, not wake up—just sleep in the snow. That’s easy. There was no pain in Edward’s heart for his dying.”
    â€œWe’d start without food,” Charley says.
    Kenton grins. “We’re used to that.”
    â€œYou’d go to the Mohawk?”
    â€œOr to Boston until the winter’s over.”
    â€œNo women——”
    I stare at them, and they both look at me, and I glance over my shoulder; if Bess is awake.
    â€œNo women,” Kenton says dully.
    I get up, and I go to my bed. Her arms are round me. I watch the fire, pretending not to know that she is awake. I lie there for a long time, not moving, watching the fire, until I think she is asleep.
    Ely comes in. Slowly, painfully, he gets out of his clothes. He is very tired; his face is sunken and drawn. Each step he takes draws a grimace of pain from him. I had thought of pleading with Ely to come along with us. But his feet wouldn’t carry him a dozen miles.
    He puts wood on the fire. He stands there for a little while, wiping the smoke out of his eyes. Then he walks to Jacob’s bed. He and Jacob are both older than the rest of us, both of them apart from us. He watches Jacob, draws the cloak up to Jacob’s neck. Smith groans. Ely takes a cup of the thin corn-broth that we keep by the fire—when we have corn—and holds it to Smith’s lips. The man drinks a little.
    Ely takes something out of his pocket. “A bit of onion,” he says to Smith. “I got it from a Massachusetts man for a few Continental papers. A rare good thing for the scurvy.”
    Ely sits down by the fire, puts out his legs in front of him. He closes his eyes and leans back, his hands spread on his thighs. I look at him until he blurs in front of my eyes, and then I say:
    â€œEly——”
    He turns to me. “Allen? I didn’t think you were awake.”
    I don’t say anything now.
    â€œYou wanted something, Allen?”
    â€œNothing—nothing, Ely.”
    I turn round. Bess is awake. I see her wide-open dark eyes.
    She whispers: “When will you be going, Allen?”
    â€œGoing? Where would I be going?”
    â€œAllen, when I came to you that night, and my feet were bleeding, like a pain all through me, and you bound them up, Allen, and said that I was your woman——”
    â€œI said it to keep men from putting hands on you.”
    â€œHowever you said it, I swore I would make no claims on you, Allen. I swore I would love you as long as I lived, Allen, but make no claim. What they were all thinking—that I was a bad woman and a slut. But it didn’t matter about those Virginian men, Allen. It didn’t matter, their having me. After you, there’s nobody else, Allen. When you go away, I