They came striding over the rise in a loose line, dark against the last of the light, and Abraham Slack felt it in his chest before he could make out which young man was which.

From this distance they were all just shapes: hats pulled low, muskets slung, arms swinging a little looser than Captain Vansant would have liked. The snow took the sound of their boots and gave back only a faint, ragged crunch, as if the earth itself were muttering about the way things were going.

John stood a few yards off, coat buttoned to his throat, hands behind his back. He squinted toward the road the same way he squinted at a line in his account book, as if the boys might straighten up from sheer awareness of his gaze.

“You’d think they’d march home as straight as they march away,” he said.

Abraham snorted. “You ever try to keep a line when the smell of your mother’s stew hits you halfway down the lane?”

John’s mouth twitched. “You and your stew.”

“You and your lines,” Abraham said. “They’re here, and that’s the important part.”

He did not say what else was important: that the boys came back with the same number of heads they’d left with; that no rider had galloped up from Newtown with a folded, hurried note; that the sky, for the moment, held only clouds and no British sails.

The line of them broke as they drew near the house. Timothy jostled Philip on purpose. Joseph turned to say something over his shoulder, and Noah laughed too loud for a December afternoon when war and winter were both in the hedgerows. The elder Cornelius walked in the middle, as he always had, the one his brothers unconsciously bracketed. Beside him, Abraham’s Cornelius matched him stride for stride, fair head bent, lips moving as if he was still going over the captain’s commands. James Henry and Abraham the younger brought up the rear, arguing in low voices about some point of drill—how close the buttstock should sit to the shoulder, or whether Vansant had ever actually fired at a man.

“Look at that,” Abraham said. “Two Corneliuses together. You can hear the Dutch heaven laughing already.”

“Dutch heaven’s been laughing at you since Hurley,” John said. “And if you think I’m calling them ‘the old Cornelius’ and ‘the young Cornelius’ every time, you’re madder than our grandfather was.”

“That might be,” Abraham said, and did not mind it.

The nearer the boys came, the more the light gave back. Philip had lost a button off his coat. Thomas’s right boot was soaked through at the toes. There was a smear of powder on Noah’s cheek. The sort of small, ordinary damage a man expects from a day’s militia drill; the sort a father pretends not to see because the repairs keep his hands busy in the evening.

One detail he could not pretend about: the way Abraham younger’s shoulders sat a little farther forward than they had a month ago, as if there were a rope tied from his sternum to the river.

“You see that?” Abraham murmured.

John followed his gaze. “I see a boy who will have a permanent stoop if he doesn’t learn to stand up straight.”

“He’s already standing where his orders put him,” Abraham said. “You just can’t see the rope from here.”

John did not answer at once. The boys were in earshot now; words had to be chosen as carefully as seed in a dry year.

“Afternoon, Father,” Cornelius called. “Uncle.”

“Afternoon,” Abraham said. “You look half-frozen and half-smoked.”

“That’s Captain Vansant’s doing,” Timothy said. “He has us fire, then stand in our own smoke so we learn not to cough.”

“Seems to have worked for some of you,” Abraham said. “Noah, did he beat the laughter out of you yet?”

Noah colored. “No, Father.”

“Good,” Abraham said. “We’ll need it.”

He let them clatter past with their muskets and chatter, each peeling off toward the stable or the pump, the old rhythm of farm and family reasserting itself over the new rhythm of drill and command. The only ones who hung back were Abraham younger and James Henry.

James had the look Abraham knew too well: eyes bright, jaw set, as if he were already pushing a boat off gravel in his mind, already feeling the cold bite of river spray. Abraham younger stood a half-step behind his brother, but there was nothing shy about him. He just took other men’s measure before he spoke.

“Captain’s pleased,” James said. “Says we’ll be called up soon. Not just for exercise.”

“I’ve heard that said before,” John answered. His tone was mild; his eyes were not. “The king’s men have been ‘coming any day now’ since ’75. They take their time.”

“They’re in Trenton,” James said. “That’s not ‘any day.’ That’s now.”

He said “Trenton” as if he could see it from the yard. Abraham knew he couldn’t; still, the word shortened the distance between here and there all the same.

“There’s word General Washington’s in Bucks in earnest,” Abraham younger added quietly. “Men say he’ll strike or be struck before the year’s out.”

Abraham felt something twist inside, a familiar knot. It had been there in Esopus for their grandfather Hendrick when they’d whispered about the Indians and the English both; it had also been there for Hendrick when their great grandfather Cornelius Barentse Slecht had stood in a doorway, listening for bootsteps on the road. It was a knot made of dread and hunger all at once.

“Men say many things,” John replied. “They like to borrow trouble ahead of its time.”

“And some trouble comes right when it’s due,” Abraham said. “Don’t it, brother?”

John shot him a look. The boys, feeling the air shift, went still.

Abraham could see their storied great great grandfather in them then, as clear as if Cornelius himself were standing behind their shoulders: the quick way James’s hands moved when he talked; the way Abraham younger watched the horizon and the faces around him at the same time. It was as if the old man’s stubbornness had split and re-rooted itself in new soil.

“You boys get your kit hung up and your boots off,” Abraham said. “Your mother will have my hide if you track that drill field into her kitchen. We’ll talk after supper.”

“Yes, Father,” Abraham younger said.

James hesitated. “If orders come—”

“They’ll find you,” Abraham said. “And if they don’t, you’ll hear the cannons without a courier.”

James’s jaw worked. He nodded once and went after his brother.

When the boys were halfway to the house, Abraham said, softly enough for only John to hear, “You think I shouldn’t have said that.”

“I think you like to fan coals that are already catching,” John answered. “They don’t need your help to burn.”

“They do if the wind’s been blowing against them for a year,” Abraham said. “You remember how it felt when you were their age and the world tried to tell you to sit still. You just didn’t have a king on your back to go with it.”

John didn’t answer, because the truth of that sat too close. He had come out of a different kind of fire, in a different valley, but the heat was the same.

From far off, so faint they might have been thunder, came the first test report of some distant gun. It might have been a drill from the river. It might have been nothing at all. Still, it shaved the hairs on Abraham’s arms upright.

He watched his sons and nephews climb the porch steps, stamping their boots, banging muskets carefully against the jamb instead of the latch, minds already halfway to stew and hearth and the retelling of Vansant’s latest bark. He loved them in that moment with a sharpness that bordered on anger.

“You hear that?” he asked.

“I hear a farmer who needs to think about whether he’s ready to have empty chairs at that table,” John said.

“I’ve been thinking about that since the day I held them over the font,” Abraham said. “You think baptizing a child is anything but giving him back to God ahead of time?”

John’s mouth tightened. “You always did preach better than half our pastors.”

“And you always did think you could argue a storm back into the sky,” Abraham said, softer now. “The storm’s here, John. We don’t get to pick that. We only get to pick whether our boys stand in it with their eyes open or their backs turned.”

He let the words hang there, knowing they would sour in his own mouth by lamplight, when Elizabeth doled out stew and he counted heads without meaning to. Knowing that in a few nights’ time, everything might be changed beyond what either of them could imagine.

For now, the only thing he could do was stand in his own yard, on his own land—the land their people had fought and bled and bargained for from Kingston to Newtown—and watch the next generation come home from drill, river-smell clinging to their coats, the Ten Crucial Days not yet named but already moving toward them with the implacable tread of an army.