The wraith-like events of the last few days flooded David's mind and he rubbed his unshaved chin and felt again the ache in his kidneys caused by his saddle odyssey from Boston. Pensive, introspective, he ached. He had sent the dispatches downtown to the proper people and had slept. Now there was more to do. Orders not written down had to be transmitted to the local provincial government. He scratched his mosquito plagued neck.

From the saddlebags, hung on a Hitchcock chair, David took out a good English razor, a present from John Hunter. He found tepid water in a pitcher and a last bit of soap, and he lathered his face and stood stropping the razor on his broad leather belt, its buckle held firm by a knob of the bedpost. He hoped he was free of self-deception.

Here he was, suddenly caught up in the delirium of a war, in the spite and calumny of Whigs and Tories. There would be great need soon for his skill as surgeon, but somehow he had not planned to use his knowledge merely for war. David Cortlandt had certain psychic intuitions that this rebellion was not wholly what it appeared on the surface. He knew that many were using it for their own ends. But it did not matter. He stropped the razor slowly; what mattered was that a new concept of Americans was being born. That some men did not want it he could understand. The moral aridity of merchants made them loyal usually to their ledgers. Yet some, like Morris Manderscheid, would bankrupt themselves for the new ideas. Unique circumstances would test us all, he decided. Injury and ingratitude would occur. No doubt John Hancock would do well now; war was a smugglers' heaven. And what of that poor tarred and feathered wretch he had seen on the road driving down from Schuyler's? Things like that would increase rather than be done away with. One had to believe in final events or one was stranded in the abyss of nothing. He saw with John Hunter now that the perfectability of man was a dream. Life was a short play of tenebrous shadows. David began to shave with great sweeping strokes.