Chapter 11

CHAPTER 11 The days at the army camp started at dawn, when the drummers sounded the wake-up song. Nate chopped wood, dug trenches, and hauled water. By the end of the day, his muscles quivered like pudding. His hands were covered with bloody blisters. At night he'd collapse into his little droopy tent next to Paul's.

At first Nate felt himself under the watchful glare of Captain Marsh. He was the gruff and unsmiling head of the Connecticut 5th, Paul's army company. Captain Marsh made it clear from the start that he had doubts about hiring a boy so young. "This is the army," he'd told Paul. "Not a nursery." Nate's cheeks burned, but he was determined to prove the captain wrong. At the end of the first week, he caught the captain watching him as he helped dig a trench under the roasting sun. "Good work, son," Captain Marsh said, with the flicker of an almost-smile. Nate felt like he'd won a medal. Nate missed Eliza and Theo. But he soon felt at home in the camp. The eighty men of the Connecticut 5th welcomed him. Paul hardly let Nate out of his sight. A few of the other men kept their eyes on Nate, too.

The oldest of the group was Samuel. He was fifty-three — ancient! But he was strong and fast and the best shooter of the group. There was James, the youngest of the soldiers. He came from a rich family — the other men made fun of the silver buckles on his boots. But James wasn't all fancy. He had the loudest burp of the bunch. He was always leaving little gifts in Nate's tent — a pair of wool socks, a tin canteen. He even managed to get Nate a frontier shirt, one of the tie-front shirts most of the men in the army wore with pride. Nate was happy to throw away the rough, stained shirt he'd been wearing for months. Another man who looked after Nate was Martin. He cleaned and bandaged Nate's blistered hands and patched up the holes in the bottom of his boots. Up until a few months ago, Martin had been a slave. His owner had freed him so he could fight in the war. But that same man had refused to free Martin's wife and daughter. Now Martin

hoped his meager soldiers' pay would help him save up to buy freedom for his family. There were a few hundred other black soldiers in the army. Many more worked in the camp. They were mostly slaves, sent by their masters to dig trenches and build walls. Watching those men work gave Nate an uneasy feeling — like he'd bitten into something rotten, something he couldn't spit out or swallow. He'd learned more about the Declaration of Independence. It said that all men were created equal. Why didn't that include people like Martin's wife, like those men digging trenches for George Washington, like Eliza and Theo? Trying to answer that question was like looking for buried treasure without a map. Nate searched his mind for an answer, but he couldn't find it anywhere.

When Nate wasn't busy with his chores, he sometimes watched the men do their practice drills. They'd march through the streets to the different drum songs. Those drums songs weren't for fun. In a noisy battle, the officers couldn't just shout out their orders; their voices would be drowned out by the explosions. It was those different rat, tat, tats that told the men which way to turn, how fast to march, when to load their muskets, and when to shoot. When they were done marching, the men would practice loading their muskets quickly, which seemed to Nate to be the hardest part of being a soldier. One mistake and the musket could blow up your hand. The ammunition came wrapped in little paper packets called cartridges. Inside was a single musket ball and just enough gunpowder for one shot. The men had to tear those packets open with their teeth. And, boy, was it hard to get the muskets to fire right! No wonder Paul almost blew his hand off

when he was learning. Of course, Nate didn't have a musket. But Samuel was determined to teach him how to load and fire one perfectly. He spent hours teaching Nate how to pour in the gunpowder. He showed him the right way to ram the musket ball down the gun's barrel. Samuel couldn't let Nate actually shoot — gunpowder was too precious to waste on an eleven-year-old.