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and all of them shaven clean, and all of them wigged, and all of them with lace at the cuff and lace at the throat, and all of them with wine in the glass and wine in the bottle, and I am standing there when in there comes a roast of mutton with the very smell enough to break me poor heart. But not even to smell it am I permitted, for I am rushed out of there like I am the plague, which maybe I am from the look of me, and as for Kelly, they said to me that the dirty dog got what he deserved.… So there it is, Jamie Stuart, who is not like myself, a dirty foreigner, but native born out of Pennsylvania. Where have we been and where are we going?…
    They looked at me, all of them fanciful people – some good, some bad, some bright and some dull – but all of them fanciful folk or they would not have been there, and I looked back at the thick of their upturned faces, half seen in the dim firelight, with passion and anger wiped out through the mood of Danny Connell’s tale, and only a question left. But the question was not new. With high hope and high heart, we answered the call to come to Boston in 1776 where the Yankees had hemmed the British tyrant into the tidewater town; and each and every one of us came with that curious, unspoken, unformed dream that is in the heart of every man with a foot on his neck. They were farmers around Boston town, but we were a different crew, and I came with a dream that no more would an apprentice work for grits and beatings; the sailors came with the dream that free men would sail ships with no lashes on their backs; and the Scottish buckskin men came with a dream of land, so that they would no longer hire out as hunters and pack animals, and so that some day they would wear woven Christian cloth instead of animal skin. The Jews came with a dream of standing up as men free, and so did the black men; and in the bellies of the Irish estevars and ropewalkers was a hunger ache a thousand years old and a hate almost as ancient. And the Poles and the Germans came with their heads bowed, but they would hold them upright now, and all of it because the British were hemmed in Boston town. We did not reason it out. Here was talk of freedom and we knew what side we were on, and we had nothing to lose. But then the years went by, and the question began to burn in us; still we were the poor led by the rich, the disinherited led by those who did inherit, and here were curses and whiplashes and blows from those who spoke the pretty words of freedom. Here was worse hunger, and we knew hunger; here was worse cold, and we knew cold.
    The others went home; they came and they went, did the Yankees, which is something that is forgotten now, but the Pennsylvania Line stayed: the foreigns stayed. They had no place to go, and now the foreigns looked at me out of the shadows and out of bloodshot eyes, and I looked at Handsome Jack Maloney, who sat as I did on an uppermost bunk, his small, sharp face the only clean-shaven one among us, his little black eyes observing me narrowly, his mouth twitching a little, as it did in the excitement of an engagement – he who had been a master sergeant in a British regiment, and had deserted and had come to us and our hell with the cold logic of a man who chooses between two sides. That he was, cold and logical and hard as rock.
    The first to do, Jamie, he said, is to lay poor Tommy out in the cold, for the lad is beginning to stink, and then we will talk it over until we get it out of our systems.
    I am tired of talk, growled big Angus MacGrath.
    It helps.
    If we talk in a straight line then it may help, said the Jew Gonzales. If we talk in a circle, we come back to each other where is no solution. We must lift up our heads.
    And our eyes, I agreed.
    Jim Holt picked up the drummer lad in his arms, and the women wept.
    When you return, said Jack Maloney, bring with you men from the 1st and the 3rd and from the artillery company. Tell them there’s a