Mrs. Irons had said of the latter that she was a most amiable and useful person.

“The Little Cricket has won our hearts,” she added.  “We love him as we love our own.”

When Jack and Solomon were setting out in a hired sloop for the Highlands next morning there were tears in the dark eyes of “Mis’ Scott.”

“Ain’t she a likely womern?” Solomon asked again when with sails spread they had begun to cut the water.

Near King’s Ferry in the Highlands on the Hudson they spent a night in the camp of the army under Putnam.  There they heard the first note of discontent with the work of their beloved Washington.  It came from the lips of one Colonel Burley of a Connecticut regiment.  The Commander-in-Chief had lost Newport, New York and Philadelphia and been defeated on Long Island and in two pitched battles on ground of his own choosing at Brandywine and Germantown.

The two scouts were angry.

It had been a cold, wet afternoon and they, with others, were drying themselves around a big, open fire of logs in front of the camp post-office.

Solomon was quick to answer the complaint of Burley.

“He’s allus been fightin’ a bigger force o’ well trained, well paid men that had plenty to eat an’ drink an’ wear.  An’ he’s fit ’em with jest a shoe string o’ an army.  When it come to him, it didn’t know nothin’ but how to shoot an’ dig a hole in the ground.  The men wouldn’t enlist fer more’n six months an’ as soon as they’d learnt suthin’, they put fer hum.  An’ with that kind o’ an army, he druv the British out o’ Boston.  With a leetle bunch o’ five thousand unpaid, barefoot, ragged backed devils, he druv the British out o’ Jersey an’ they had twelve thousan’ men in that neighborhood.  He’s had to dodge eround an’ has kep’ his army from bein’ et up, hide, horns an’ taller, by the power o’ his brain.  He’s managed to take keer o’ himself down thar in Jersey an’ Pennsylvaney with the British on all sides o’ him, while the best fighters he had come up here to help Gates.  I don’t see how he could ‘a’ done it—­damned if I do—­without the help o’ God.”

“Gates is a real general,” Burley answered.  “Washington don’t amount to a hill o’ beans.”

Solomon turned quickly and advanced upon Burley.  “I didn’t ’spect to find an enemy o’ my kentry in this ’ere camp,” he said in a quiet tone.  “Ye got to take that back, mister, an’ do it prompt, er ye’re goin’ to be all mussed up.”

“Ye could see the ha’r begin to brustle under his coat,” Solomon was wont to say of Burley, in speaking of that moment.  “He stepped up clus an’ growled an’ showed his teeth an’ then he begun to git rooined.”