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Systematic reconnaissance paid off within a half hour. Three streets from the riverfront, they discovered a building with the right sign over the door.

“That’s a factory?” Alexander ridiculed. “It’s so small!”

Indeed, the word implied a massive complex to people of the 24th century, but here in 1777 a factory was something entirely different. The linen factory was a narrow threestory clapboard building, painted blue but weathered to gray, with a nicely carved business sign: COVERMAN TEXTILES.

Sergeant Leonfeld gazed at the sign with his cousin’s name upon it and murmured, “Jeremiah …”

Alexander smiled in empathy for his relative, glad that the sergeant had found what he needed to see.

Picard, though, realized that the fact that Leonfeld’s cousin’s business was still here said precious little about whether or not the cousin was still alive. This could be the man’s family running the business, or an entirely new owner who had kept the name.

“When last I heard from Jeremiah, he had employed four people,” Leonfeld said. “I know it seems insignificant …”

“Perhaps to the landed aristocracy of Europe,” Picard commented, annoyed.

Leonfeld cast him a crabby glare, but said nothing. Of course, the sergeant still believed he was speaking to a lieutenant of the Royal Navy. What would he have thought if he knew he was speaking to a captain of Starfleet?

They were hiding behind a wooden slat fence, watching men dash back and forth, carrying tools and boxes. The boxes probably held precious ammunition with which the fort would be defended. They thought there was a British ship coming in, but of course that wouldn’t be happening now. These colonists had been victorious with their frontal assault, but didn’t even know it yet. They were still afraid. Picard saw it in their faces. Afraid, defiant, dreading a battle while anxious to get it started.

“Perhaps we should go around back, sir,” Nightingale offered. “After all …” He touched the facing of his blue uniform jacket.

Picard nodded. “Mr. Leonfeld, your recommendation?”

Leonfeld studied the cobbled street, the front of the linenworks, the house on the other side that they needed to get to, and the sporadic activity in the street. “The back. Yes. My cousin wrote that he lived in a house beside the factory …” He pointed to a house made of split logs, rather small, with two stories and square windows with painted shutters.

“Alexander,” Picard murmured, taking the boy by the arm, “you stay close to me.”

The boy looked at him, then turned longingly to the sergeant, who was obviously the person he really wanted to keep close to. However he made no protests, and the landing party moved out on Picard’s signal.

Staying under cover of darkness and any structure that would hide them, they picked their way clumsily around the back of the factory, stumbling several times in the darkness over packing barrels and mechanical parts, until they found the aft end of the log house.

There, they crouched and surveyed the house.

A small back window beside a clay chimney glowed with the light of two candles on tin sconces. So someone was awake.

But there was no noise of movement, talking.

“Mr. Leonfeld,” Picard murmured, “look in that window. See if there is anything or anyone you recognize.”

Leonfeld nodded, but couldn’t find his voice. He handed his rifle to Nightingale, and picked his way to the window. Even at his height of nearly six feet, he had to stand on tiptoe to see into that small window. He pressed his fingers against the painted wooden sill and looked straight in, then left, then right.

“No one,” he said. “No one at all … but candies burn within … and there is a pitcher and some papers on a table.”

“Inside,” Picard said. He made straight for a very narrow back door and gripped the latch.

The door opened hospitably before him, and the scent of a wood fire drew him inward, where he stood beneath a claustrophobic ceiling, scarcely tall enough to admit Sergeant Leonfeld. Until this moment, when the warmth of the crackling