exasperation_

than ten days."
Pakenham brought the glass back up and began studying the American battery across the great river. "Good. Then we'll take those guns, and New Orleans with them."
That same morning, in Ghent, John Quincy Adams stood on the docks staring out over an expanse of water that dwarfed even the mighty Mississippi. The North Sea, which was but an extension of the great Atlantic.
The ship carrying the peace treaty had left those docks two days earlier. Two days—and it would require weeks for it to cross the ocean, even if the ship encountered decent weather. Fortunately, it wasn't hurricane season. But the Atlantic in winter was still no sailor's paradise.
The American ambassador had come down to those docks the morning it sailed, and both mornings since, moved by an impulse that he fully recognized was pure superstition but could not resist. A ship was driven by winds and currents created by the will of God, not the heartfelt desires and wishes of a mortal human diplomat.
"Weeks," he sighed. "Six weeks at best, before the news can reach the Gulf of Mexico. If Jackson can hold New Orleans and the Mississippi until then..."
Pure superstition. So, as he had for three mornings, Adams scolded himself for his lapse into savagery, turned away from the ocean, and began walking toward his lodgings. He decided he'd spend the rest of the day—as he had the three previous ones—reading the Bible.
Chapter 40
January 1, 1815
The banks of the Mississippi near New Orleans
Robert Ross listened to men discussing his fate.
"Is it yellow fever?" asked one. Pakenham, he thought.
A voice he recognized as the doctor assigned to handle his illness replied: "I don't believe . . . no jaundice evident..."
Ross could sense the doctor shrugging, if not see it. His eyes were closed, and the effort of opening them seemed too much at the moment. The fever made it hard to think, especially with the sound of cannon and musket fire drowning half the sentences.
"Who knows...is, General?" continued the doctor, his tone one of helpless exasperation. "This whole land...festering ground... diseases of all sorts."
A cannon salvo