Chapter 47: Caught

Then Howe's big army just up and vanished. Captain Foster was fit to be tied and gelded. "What the hell do you mean, they're gone?" he yelled at me when I reported I could not find them. "Where did they go? When did they go? What the hell have you been doing? No, don' tell me."

"I think they got on ships," I said. "I was all the way down to Hazlit before I ran into pickets and sentries. Fellow in a tavern said he had seen two hundred ships out in the bay. I asked him if he counted them, and he said there were too many to count. At least two hundred, he said. Dirty Dick's, he said."

"Two hundred ships, and nobody seen 'em," Captain Foster yelled, his face turning white with red splotches, his eyes rolling back up into his head. I thought he was going to explode or pass out. He slapped a big map on the table between us. "Get your lazy ass down to," he studied the coast line with his finger, "Monmouth or Long Branch or Mahasquan or someplace along there. Get yourself a boat if you have to and set out a ways. If they are headin' south, I want to know. It'll be Philadelphia or Charleston. If you don' see 'em, I want to know that, too. Get going. I want you back here, no excuses, in two, no, three days." He tossed me a heavy purse and pushed me out the door. I did not even have time to ask where the other men were or what they were doing. The job was mine.

I made a wide swing south-eastwards toward Princeton, resisted the temptation to see Ginny, and rode through piney woods and around swampy areas to an shabby inn on the banks of the Manasquan which the tavern keeper assured me was a river although back home we would have called it a "crick." I had an ale and a gristly pastie and found out almost nothing about the local area. It was, I suppose, one of those taverns where all strangers were treated with suspicion, especially those carrying a long rifle.

At a narrow inlet on the coast, I found a fisherman sitting with his back to a boat that lay resting on its side. He was mending a net with some sort of pointed spindle of string.

"You been out today," I asked after offering him some of my tobacco. I had left my horse in the shade.

He nodded and kept mending.

"Catch anything?"

"Not a lot, made a dollar," he said.

"See any big ships going down the coast?" I asked squatting beside him and getting a chaw of tobacco loosened up in my cheek.

"Not today," he said.

"Yesterday?" I asked.

"Um," he said, "saw two frigates and xebec. Didn' bother me none."

"You loyal?" I asked him like I would ask if he was Irish or Welsh.

"You mean to the King?" He raised an eyebrow.

I nodded.

"Spose," he said. "He don' bother me none neither."

"I'm looking for a big fleet, British fleet," I said. "Must'a sailed from Sandy Hook Bay in the last day or two."

"Why?"

"Why what?" I asked.

"Why you interested in this here fleet?"

"I'm supposed to be on one a'them ships. They sailed 'thout me. I was, well, you know, enjoyin' myself. Time she woke me, they was gone. I'll get two dozen on my back if I don' find 'em. Might hang me for a deserter."

"You ain't British," he said, producing a pistol from behind him. Looking into that barrel was like looking down a well. I had left my weapons, cartridge box and bayonet hanging on my horse, and that decision now looked like another mistake.

"No," I said, putting on my friendly and innocent smile. "I'm a Marylander. Got pressed."

"Don' believe it," he said. "Wait, here come Michael Morrisey. He's with the local committee. Jus' sit still."

Morrisey was a tall, lean man of middle years, maybe fifty or so. His hair was white and his skin was dark and wrinkled. His eyes were marble hard.

"Feller says he's looking for the British fleet," the fisherman said.

"That right?" said Morrisey as I stood and offered him my hand. "We don' tolerate Tories or that kind'a scum hereabouts."

"Glad to hear it," I said, letting my untaken hand fall.

"Tole me he belonged on one a'them ships," the man said as he tied another knot.

"Lemme see your hands," Morrisey said. I held them out, and he felt them. "How'd you loose that finger?"

"Redcoat cut it off with blacksmith nippers," I said, "up in Trenton."

"Your hands is right hard, but you ain't no sailor," Morrisey said.

"That's true. You Committee of Safety?"

He nodded.

"Last countersign I had was 'Liberty or Death, ' but that's been a while," I said. "Cap'n didn't give me a new one for this job."

"What's the job?"

"Finding the British fleet, like I tole him."

"Why?"

"Cause Howe's army's done disappeared."

"What do you want?" he asked, very serious.

"I guess to get as far out to sea as I can and watch for a big fleet to go on by unless they already have."

"Doubt they have," Morrisey said. "I'd a'heard. Winds' been contrary for sailin' south. Maybe they went up north, toward New York.

"Maybe," I said. "Anyhow, I got two days before I'm to report again."

"Where?" the tall man asked.

"Don't think you need to know that," I said.

He nodded. "Jasper," he said. "Let's us go fishin' tonight."

The net mender put away his gear and stood, tossing his net up into the boat. He had a twisted leg and his face bore the reminder of smallpox, but he and Morrisey, with a little help from me, got the big, wooden boat through the shallows and into the surf, and we all clambered aboard. It sure was good to deal with people who did not talk an idea to death before they did something.

"You steer," Jasper said to me. "Aim right square for the middle of the waves and hold tight." With the setting sun in their eyes, the two men sat next to each other on a bench and manned long oars, pulling till their faces showed the strain. We smashed through a series of waves and then the sea was suddenly calm and the breakers were crashing and rolling behind us. The rowers slowed and eased their pace.

After a half hour or so, Jasper and I changed places, and after a another half hour during which my hands began to scream for help, Jasper took Morrisey's place and then after a while we stopped rowing, and he tied the tiller down. There seemed to be very little wind, but the two men raised a worn and tattered sail on a tall, thin mast, and we all rested.

"The wind's from the northwest," Morrisey said, "what little there is. It's enough. The fleet will all have lights on their sterns. We ought to be able to see them if they're out here and heading south."

The little boat, I guess it was about eighteen feet long, rocked gently in the swells, and we waited, taking turns dozing and standing watch, roughly one hour on and two hours off as the stars wheeled overhead.

It was not yet dawn when I awoke to the sound of a distant cannon. "Jasper," Morrisey said quickly, "get your damn net over the side." Morrisey and I rowed while the fisherman payed out his long net, hand over hand. "They've seen us, I think," Morrisey said. "That was likely a signal gun. Keep rowing and do not look about. You ain't the least bit curious. You're fishin'."

The small, dirty sail flapped back and forth, and Jasper lowered it and bundled it in his arms after he got his net into the calm water.

"Ahoy," came the call, "where are you from?" I had to look and did. A large, low, two-masted warship was about fifty yards away with a row of ten or twelve large cannon pointed right at us and a number of men sitting on the yardarms. The ship was black with a checkerboard pattern of white squares across the gun ports. When I was able to pull my eyes away from that I saw, in the lifting fog, dozens and dozens of ships, all headed south and sailing in a loose formation. I had done part of my job.