Before first light, on Washington’s orders, a patrol of 120 men slipped below the lines through the thick forest fronting the Hudson. They were Rangers, a New England troop newly created for scouting and woodland skulking, modeled on a similar unit in the last French war. Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Knowlton, the rangy, thirty-six-year-old Connecticut farmer celebrated for his rail-fence valor at Bunker Hill, led them south. At daybreak British pickets on the Bloomingdale road spied shadows darting through the trees. Shots flew back and forth. Four hundred regulars scampered up the road to
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