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that aside from the officer gentry, there were none the people hated more than the foreigners of the Line, as witness the way they let us starve and die in the midst of their plenty.
    After we were set on to rob their trees and pilfer their stock, said Goulay.
    Be that as it may, we do not represent them, and it will be our burden in the future to see if we represent them or if their own guns are turned against us.
    Then who do we represent?
    The soldiers of the Line, said Danny Connell, and then only if they follow us.
    When we ourselves don’t know where we be going, but sit here quacking away?
    Then let us get to where we are going and the hell with the shape of it, whether we are a Congress or a Committee or a Board, Jack Maloney said. And if ye want a president to sit over it, Jamie Stuart is as good for me as any other.
    No, no, I said. Give it to some other.
    Dwight Carpenter is Pennsylvania man, said Prukish slowly. So is Jamie. So is Button Lash.
    Carpenter I remember well – a long, bony man, with a great hatchet chin and a somber way of speech. He had been a powder maker before the war, and he went as powderman for the first cannons we rolled from Philadelphia. Now he was a layer and a sergeant, but always to follow and never to lead; and, knowing this, he shook his head and made the point that linemen would want no cannonmen over them.
    Nobody is going to be over nobody, said Jim Holt. Over us is too many and too long.
    Then let it be Jamie, said Jack Maloney, and I said:
    To hell with that! Let it be you, for I tell you it shouldn’t be any man of the 11th, which has had ten whiplashes for what any of you had – and tell me different!
    But they looked at me out of the dark, hairy faces and said never a word.
    â€¦ And ten wounded for each of yours; so they’ll say, It’s a good grievance the 11th has, but why should we thraw for them? And that’s why it shouldn’t be me, and maybe Jack neither, him being British; so what about Billy Bowzar, who can read and write to boot?
    They agreed to that. Bowzar was a native man, quiet and not looking for a fight, but a good soldier and a way of talking that made folks listen. They voted him, and he climbed up onto the table and said:
    I accept and I call you to order in a sober way, my good comrades. Now I say to you that we must bind ourselves together here and become like one man, for it’s the way old Ben Franklin said now, and maybe now for the first time. If we don’t all hang together, just as sure as there’s a God in the heavens above, we will all hang separately.
    He stood with his head under the peaked roof, his head all dark and somber up there, but the edges of his red beard catching a glint from the tallow wick.
    I pledge you together, he said. Take the pledge.
    And we all of us raised our right hands and pledged that we would stay together and see this thing through, come what might, even if it meant that we must die together.
    Then who wants the floor to speak? he said.
    But since we were committed now, since we had all of us already done a thing for which many of our comrades had died in the past – spoken and plotted and organized against the gentry who led us – we fell to brooding upon our position instead of giving voice to thoughts and plans. Silence and cold crept over us. Rum would have loosened our thoughts and our tongues, but we had no rum; and thereby arose at that moment a danger point, where the whole thing might have simmered out, each running to unbraid the particular piece of hemp he wore as his own collar. Sensing this, I began to speak without having any clear orderly notion of what I would say. I only knew that someone had to talk, ease them out, start their own tongues. I knew no more than they did where we were going or what awful road we were preparing to explore; but I did know that as soldiers we had things in common, and soldiers we were, and maybe the best in the whole damned