Read Online The Silver Bullet by Jim DeFelice - Free Book Online

huge split of ice that fitfully gave way to a puddle of cold water huge enough to be considered a sea. The remains of that Laurentide ocean stretched to Jake’s right as dusk began to come on, visible through the trees and the occasional meadow. He and van Clynne were approaching the fringes of patriot territory and could feel the boundary in the growing chill as an evening wind began kicking up from Canada.
    How much colder it had been ten thousand years before, when Mother Nature began blowing her warm breath on the ice, pushing back the invading ice so she could experiment anew with life in the valley? Her soft breath left behind huge deposits of scraped-white rock, booty and symbols of the struggle. Representatives of those rocks greeted them now, gleaming in the last red rays of the day – Fort Ticonderoga, the American stronghold and key to the defense of upper New York.
    The patriot victory at the fort two years before was already celebrated in song and legend. A pair of American forces had combined in the capture – one under Benedict Arnold, the other under Ethan Allen. Taken together, they had not more than two hundred men under them, but the fiercest fighting was between themselves; the fifty or so defenders of the fort were mostly old pensioners put out to pasture with what was considered, until that moment, easy duty. The Americans’ booty was not merely the fort, which protected Albany and the Hudson headwaters, but something on the order of eighty bronze cannon. Those weapons had become the backbone of the American artillery corps.
    Jake and his guide were admiring the stone walls from a distance because they had made a strategic decision to avoid the fort and surrounding settlements. People there, officers especially, had a tendency to ask questions and look at papers, and even if there were all in order – as van Clynne assured Jake they were – still, such matters were best not continually put to the test.
    “ Can we hire a boat north of here?” Jake asked as van Clynne directed him to take a left at the next fork in the road. Even though they’d made remarkable time, he wanted to go faster still, and a boat would shorten the journey.
    Van Clynne held off answering as a wagon approached. He nodded at the man driving it as if he knew him and continued on.
    “ We’re not taking a boat,” he said. “Too many warships of both sides on the lake.”
    Last fall the British had come as far south as Crown Point, about fifteen miles north on Lake Champlain. They were halted by caution, the approaching winter, and an American flotilla. Jake was unsure of the exact status of hostilities on the water, but as his traveling companion seemed extremely well-informed, he followed along without comment.
    The Dutchman knew not only every highway and byway here, but also the deer paths and spring streams. They splashed up one of the latter as night came on, avoiding a small village whose population, according to van Clynne, consisted entirely of very nosy housewives. Their immediate destination was a house two miles farther on. It was owned by a Dutchman whose formula for brown porter was unrivaled in the state, according to van Clynne, who began proclaiming the virtues of its brewer as they pushed through the dark woods.
    As the lane narrowed, Jake’s sixth sense of danger detection began to assert itself. He didn’t fear a double cross from his companion riding ten yards behind him so much as another ambush, this one more easily accomplished in the blackness. Placing a pistol in his left hand, Jake reined his horse carefully with the other. His eyes scanned for movement and his ears tuned to the specific frequency of human footfalls.
    It was just such a sound thirty yards to his right that caught his attention. When he heard the second step he leaped off his horse and sped silently through the woods, gun in hand.
    Van Clynne jabbered on, not even aware Jake had dismounted. His first notice of the ambush came with