What happens
Captain Peter Merrill and his brother Nathaniel are American soldiers in 1776, serving in Canada during the Revolution. Peter, who has come to deliver a letter from a Frenchwoman to a young woman named Ellen Phipps in St. John's, grows suspicious of his brother's attention to her. The episode is the Campbell Playhouse presentation of Kenneth Roberts's novel Rabble in Arms, broadcast on March 3, 1940, as part of the Mercury Theatre on the Air series, with Orson Welles as producer and Frances Dee as guest star. Peter and Nathaniel's journey through the campaign turns on a bargain for food, a secret message and a growing tangle of loyalties. The story's tensions around Benedict Arnold and the failing American campaign are developed in the broadcast.
Canada and the Lake Champlain region during the American Revolution, 1776, including St. John's, Montreal and Crown Point
Characters: Captain Peter Merrill, Nathaniel Merrill, Ellen Phipps, Marie de Sabrevois, General Benedict Arnold, Harpe
Listen for: The exchange in which Peter questions Ellen Phipps about her letter and her family, and Peter's later confrontation with his brother over the trip to Albany
Written from the episode itself; it never gives away the ending. Every recording is remastered for the stream: cleaned of rumble, hiss and mains hum (and the old TV whine where we found it), then levelled in two passes to steady broadcast loudness, so one show is never quieter than the next.