To the west of Deerfield, where the Mohawk River made the great bend from north to east, the wooden ramparts of Fort Stanwix, striped with new palisades to patch the old, rose on their embankment above the swampy, snow-filled clearing. Beyond the cleared land the woods looked contracted in the frosty air. Sentries on the walks looked out at them through clouds of their own breathing, lethargically, for there was nothing, as there had been nothing since November, for them to see. Not even the river, which ran under ice; no movement about the two small deserted farms lying under the protection of the fort. Nothing at all but the snowshoe tracks of the five Oneida Indians who that morning had approached the glacis from the west and been admitted through the sally port.
Now they were in the commandant’s quarters, a low frame building, of the shape of a cattle shed, set against the north wall. The smoke from the end chimney rose in a blue, thin, transparent tape against the gray sky.
The commandant’s office was also the officers’ messroom, walled with hand-hewn boards, furnished with tables of milled plank, and heavy chairs, the product of the garrison. There was not one in which a man could be comfortable. At the end of the big table, Colonel Elmore, of the New York line, sat in his shirt sleeves, his back to the roaring fire, with his coat hung over his chair. Down the table before him four of the Indians huddled in their blankets, sweating, putting their odor in the room, staring with eyes that missed nothing while they seemed to be unseeing. The fifth Indian stood at the end of the table opposite the commandant.
This Indian was an old man, but his bearing was like a young brave’s. His thin, tan, hawk-featured face was turned steadily toward Colonel Elmore. He spoke in a slow deep voice that rose and fell rhythmically, while one of the officers of the garrison, at another table, scratched down his own translation with a squeaky goose quill.
“We are sent here by the Oneidas in conjunction with the Onondagas. They arrived at our village yesterday. They gave us the melancholy news that the grand council fire at Onondaga has been extinguished.…” His voice was raised for a moment. “However, we are determined to use our feeble endeavors to support peace through the confederate nations. But let this be kept in mind, that the council fire is extinguished. Brother, attend: It is of importance to our well-being that this be immediately told to General Schuyler. In order to effect this, we deposit this belt with Tekeyanedonhotte, Colonel Elmore, commander at Fort Stanwix, who is sent here by General Schuyler to transact all matters relative to peace. We therefore request him to forward this intelligence in the first place to General Herkimer.… Brother, attend: let the belt be forwarded to General Schuyler, that he may know that our council fire is extinguished, and can no longer burn.…”
Joe Boleo, the news runner, was a thin man whose joints seemed always on the point of coming loose. He used snowshoes of the Algonquin shape, with spurs at the back, that left prints in the snow like the hind finger of a heron’s foot. He went out from the fort while the Indians were still working their jaws on the salt pork Colonel Elmore had served them. He did not take the road along the south bank. He followed the river, where the snow was packed hard on the ice by the wind.
At noon the old Indian, Blue Back, sticking his nose outside the door of his bark shanty at the mouth of the Oriskany, saw the runner and looked long at the bent lank figure, shuffling past beneath the big coonskin cap, at a steady four miles an hour.
“By damn it,” he said to his wife. “Joe Boleo’s in a hurry.”
“Why don’t you holler for him to come in?” she said, gathering spit to work into the doeskin.
“It’s too cold to holler,” Blue Back said, shutting the door. “Besides, he always knows if there’s any rum.”
“We haven’t got any,” she said.
Blue Back sat down and put his hand on his stomach.
“No,” he admitted, “but when I smelled Joe Boleo I’d want some myself.”
He lay back on the bed and looked from the peacock’s feather over his head to his young wife. She was growing a belly. The sight of it filled Blue Back with conflicting emotions. It was gratifying at his age to be able to show the tribe a legitimate offspring; but at his age, too, it was going to be hard work hunting for three people.
Joe Boleo had seen the group of Indian shanties and his squirrel-like, round, small black eyes had noticed the closing chink in Blue Back’s door.
“God damn,” he thought, “that old timber beast has got some likker and he’s afraid I might turn round and visit with it.”
He glanced up two hours later to see what was left of Martin’s cabin at Deerfield. A corner of the log wall, charred away in sloping angles, thrust broken black teeth through the snow. The sight meant nothing to Joe. If anything it made him feel pleased to think that the settlers for a few years would be held back from the trapping country.
Joe Boleo hadn’t many convictions in life, beyond the fact that he was the best shot in the Mohawk Valley; that women couldn’t get along without him—not in their right minds, they couldn’t; and that if rum wasn’t a very good substitute for whiskey, whiskey was a first-rate substitute for rum. He was also annoyed at the British efforts for regulating the Indian trade and price of peltry. If it hadn’t been for that he might as well have tailed along to Canada with the Johnsons. But if you couldn’t cheat an Indian, who in the name of God could you cheat in this Godforsaken country?
Men were coming in from barns and cattle sheds when he passed Schuyler Settlement, and the setting sun drew Joe’s shadow long before him on the crust. It put a spark of red on the lip of the alarm bell in Little Stone Arabia Stockade. The farmers were hurrying so that the milk would not freeze in the pails. Farming, Joe considered, was a hell of a life. You milked and milked at a cow for half a year, and just about as soon as you got her dry, the animal would get herself a fresh supply. But when he saw the warm vapor left in the evening air by the closing doors, it seemed to him there were advantages. A farmer in winter could sit at home and order his womenfolks around, while a scout might have to be running thirty miles to tell General Herkimer that a fire in an Indian lodge had gone out.
Joe wondered whether that had been an accident, or whether the old women watching it had gone to sleep, or whether the God-damn thing had been put out a-purpose. The Indians said the fire had been lit in the early life of mankind, and the Iroquois had kept it alive ever since. Even when they moved they had carried it around with them in a stone pot.
An hour after black dark he slogged his way up to Fort Dayton, handed in the news, and asked for a sleigh to take him down to the falls. The commandant got him the sleigh and a driver and packed him off with a pan of rum in his inside and called in the members of the Committee, Demooth, and Petry, and Peter Tygert, and gave them the news in front of the fire in his own quarters.
Their faces animated, even at the bad news, for having a new thing to talk about. The commandant said, “I’m from Massachusetts, but maybe I’m wooden-headed. What difference does it make?”
Demooth answered him soberly.
“It means that the Six Nations can’t act together any more without the fire to confer around. That means that the Senecas and the Mohawks and the Cayugas and anyone else are free agents. While the fire was lit, no single tribe could go to war unless the other five were in agreement.”
Herkimer, who had been appointed Brigadier General of the Tryon County militia in September, wrote a letter in his crabbed English to Schuyler and then had Eisenlord the clerk translate it and transcribe it while he and Joe Boleo did a little sober drinking.
Herkimer wanted Joe’s opinions.
The scout, sprawling at the table in the white-paneled room whose windows looked out on the river and towards the falls, rinsed the liquor slowly round what teeth he still had claim to.
“If you want to know what I think,” he said, “it just ain’t safe hanging onto Stanwix. The wall’s rotten. They’ve spiked in enough pickets to keep the others from falling down. If a man’s got a cold he dassn’t do sentry work there, for fear he’ll sneeze and level the whole shebang. Poor old Dayton done a lot of complaining, but that ain’t never stopped a leaky roof so far’s I know.”
Herkimer said he hadn’t seen the fort.
“You needn’t,” said Joe. “Because I’m telling you about it. It would take a regiment four months to fix that place. And it don’t do nobody any good way up there. It might have been a pertection for John Roof while he was living there, but he’s come down here to your farm, since Deerfield got burnt. If the British was to come that way they could march right round with their pants off.”
Herkimer said, “Maybe they won’t think of that. Not if they send an army officer. An army officer has got to keep his line of communications open.”
“My God!” exclaimed Joe. “What’s that?”
“Well, he don’t want anybody cutting in on his back trail.”
Joe scratched his head.
“Oh, you mean he wants to know which way he’s going when he has to run home. I thought it was a bowel complaint. But you could cut off his communications if you had a decent garrison at Dayton and Herkimer. They’re a whole lot better forts, and they’re handy for us to get to if we have to help them out. Take Stanwix, now: it’s way the hell off from nobody’s business. It stands to reason that it ain’t sense making two armies in a war walk a long ways just to kill each other. Somebody ought to have some comfort.”
Herkimer was looking older than his fifty years. It wasn’t the liquor. His face was grim; the firelight showed it cut all in angles, the big nose, the heated black eyes, the long lips closed.
“I guess our militia ought to have one good fight in them, anyways. Verdammt! If they get in deep enough.” He looked at Joe. “Have you heard from Joseph Brant? Any news anywhere?”
“We ain’t had any word of him,” Joe Boleo said. “What’s on your mind, Honnikol?” He gave Herkimer his old name, the one he had had when they went hunting together as boys, before Herkimer got to be a successful man, a landholder, second only in wealth to Johnson. It was queer how the young lads diverged as they grew up, he thought—look at Honnikol, a brigadier general; and look at Joe Boleo, a plain scout. Just the same, Joe bet he could outshoot Honnikol nine times out of ten at a hundred yards.
“Listen, Gil,” said Captain Demooth, “you’re a fool even to think of going back to Deerfield. You’ve seen George Weaver, haven’t you? And Reall?”
“Yes.”
“They aren’t going, are they?”
“No.”
“Well, I’m not. I’m going to stay down here until it’s over. Even if we all went up we wouldn’t have a chance when they turn the Indians loose.”
“Do you think they will?”
“Everything goes to show so. Schuyler believes it. Herkimer believes it. You’d be as good as murdering your wife to take her up there. If you’ve got to go, leave her down here.”
“I can’t afford that, Mr. Demooth.” Gil stood beside the table, touching it with his hands. He wanted to lean on something, but he didn’t know whether it would look polite. His face had thinned during the winter. The lines beside his mouth had deepened, and under his eyes. His eyes had a misery in them. “When I think about my land,” he said. “All the work I put in it. Burning off the new piece. And letting it just go back to woods.”
“I know,” said the captain. “I feel like that. But look here, Gil, the militia’s bound to be turned out. You’ll have to come. You’ll have to bring Lana down with you then.”
“Oh, damn the militia!”
“That don’t do you any good.”
“I’ve got to live. I’d made a good start. We were real happy up there. There’s no land for me to work around here, and there’s no real work for me on your place, you know that.”
“Well, now look here, Gil.” The captain crossed his legs and tapped the table with his fingers. “I don’t suppose it’s any good if that’s how you feel, but I’d been thinking about you. I just heard that Mrs. McKlennar’s man has left her. No doubt he’s run off to Canada. Ever since they started rounding up the disaffected people down the valley, others have been leaving here.” Gil knew about that. The Albany Committee had taken charge of four hundred wives and children of departed Tories. The idea was to hold them as a kind of hostage. “Mrs. McKlennar asked me about a man to work her place. I said I’d speak to you.”
Gil frowned. “I don’t want to work for a woman.”
“Think it over. She’s a decent woman, and she’s able to do well in the world, Gil. She’s got a temper, but that’s because she’s Irish. And listen, things have changed. There’s going to be real war. Now Carleton has driven Arnold off the Champlain Lake, the British are bound to make a try for this country. There’s already action starting at Oswego. Spencer writes that Butler’s moving out of Niagara in May. They’ll surely bring an army down this way, and if they do, Deerfield’s right in the track of it. Now if you take a job with Mrs. McKlennar for a year or two, you’ll know your wife’s handy to a decent fort. Eldridge Blockhouse is close by, and she could also get to Herkimer or Dayton, if you were off on militia duty. It’s a small farm, but it’s good.”
“I don’t want to work for a woman,” Gil repeated.
The captain was exasperated.
“It won’t hurt you to go and talk to her, will it?”
He spoke so sharply that Gil looked at him.
“No,” he said slowly.
That was what Lana said to him after he had told her about the captain’s suggestion. Her face was sweet and comforting. Even though it was subdued, though her mouth had a downward bend, he could rely on her eyes, the honesty in them. The winter had been like a nightmare to Gil; it must have been to her; he thought it was time they moved out of this shack, and there was nowhere else to go, if they did not go back to her family. He didn’t want to use that argument even to himself, but she helped him by reminding him.
“We won’t have to go back to Fox’s Mills,” she said. “If we like the place we can stay, and maybe we can save up for what we’ll need when we go back to Deerfield.”
They walked down to Mrs. McKlennar’s farm on a Sunday. The river had opened, spring was in the air. That spring of 1777 had come with a rush. One night when Gil and Lana were going to bed they had seen mist over the river ice. And before moonset in the early morning, they had been awakened by the breaking of the ice. It had cracked first in one long traveling report that carried eastward nearly to the falls.
In the morning the whole valley had changed. The air had been soft and moist; and the rising sun, a red ball on the misty hills, already warm. But the wonder, after the long silence of the snow, had been the sound of water. Water was everywhere. It was flowing in its accustomed channel of the river, dark and soiled against the white banks, but catching a red glitter on the rift below the ford. It came across the low land with a steady seeping sound, overflowing the frozen marshes and putting long lakes in the sleigh ruts. And everywhere on the dark slopes of the hills arched yellow falls burst downward.
Gil and Lana dressed themselves carefully, he in his good black jersey coat, and she in her striped blue and white short gown and striped petticoat. She wore her shawl over her head, but she had a white cap on her black hair, and to Gil she seemed unexpectedly dainty as she walked beside him, for all her muddy feet, and carried her chintz pocket before her, almost with demureness. He kept looking down at her, as if in the soft air he had rediscovered the girl in her body, and she looked to him too fine and gentle for a hired help.
In Lana must have run some inheritance from the old Palatine persecutions. The history of her race was one of oppression and of the struggle to survive against it. It was that which made the Palatines strong—through suffering they had preserved their personal independence.
So now, instead of arguing with Gil, she let him take his own way, contenting herself with the presence of spring, the steady drip of trees, the shimmer of the water, the scent of earth unfettered of the snow, and the clear infinity of the April sky. It was good to be walking so, beside Gil. It was the first time all winter, except when they had gone to church. Through her own contentedness she softened his resentment, and they were walking almost peaceably when they first saw the McKlennar farm.
The land lay prettily for a small farm, bordering both sides of the Kingsroad, its back against the sudden rise of river hills, its front upon the river. At a single glance the eye could comprehend the system of the land. The pasture went along the river on a long low round that carried above flood water. Enough willows grew there to give shade. The great trees spread wider, and their branches to-day lifted their upthrusting twigs like brassy arrows against the violet shadows on the southern hills.
Behind the pasture the fields lay level to the plough, rich black bottom land. In spite of himself, Gil felt his heart swelling when he saw them, with an ache for Deerfield. This land had been worked for many years. And there was a good hay bottom, with bluejoint in the wet and a sod that looked like English grass in the higher portions. He could see that the fences had been well set up.
Gil found himself eagerly searching out the farm buildings. What he saw was even better than he had supposed. The house he let pass; it was a stone-walled house, with a piazza facing the road. Behind it in a slope of ground was a farm barn of hewn logs, laid up with plaster joints and a pine shingle roof. The very look of it was warm.
But Lana was looking past the barn to the small house that stood to the right of the springhouse. It also was built of hewn logs, but she could tell by the way it sat above the ground that it had a board floor laid on actual sills. And in front of the door, in the sunny place, were reddish-orange fowls busily prospecting in the dirt.
“Gil!” she cried. “They keep poultry.”
Now she began to be afraid that Gil would shy off from the place, that he wouldn’t like the woman of the place, or that the woman of the place would not like them. She closed her lips tight, and she said a small prayer in her heart, and she dared not look ahead.
When she did look up again, it was because a woman’s voice had roused her.
“Good morning. Is your name Martin?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Gil was saying.
“I’m glad you’ve come,” said Mrs. McKlennar.
From her appearance there, Lana would never have supposed that she was gentry. Her boots were muddy, the tops of them showing plainly underneath her petticoat, which Mrs. McKlennar had pinned up all around, nearly to her knees. Her hair she wore clubbed up at the back of her head in a string net that looked as if some birds had put it together in a hurry. She looked hot and she smelled of her stable.
“Yes,” she said, suddenly meeting Lana’s gaze. “I’m hot and I smell and I look like the devil and I’m mad as well. Every time I lift a fork of cow manure I am reminded of that damn man of mine. He sneaked out of here without so much as a word. The first I knew of it was the freshened heifer bellowing in the barn. I thought he was drunk and I went down to haul him out of bed. I don’t mind a man having his likker, Martin, but if he doesn’t do his work he can go somewhere else. The quicker the better, for him.”
She snorted like a bell mare and stamped her feet as she went up the steps.
“Come inside.”
She led them into the kitchen of her house, a lovely place, to Lana’s eyes. The stone walls had been sheathed in wide pine paneling and painted a snuff brown. Overhead the beams were painted black with bright red undersides. Mrs. McKlennar sat on one settle. She pointed to the other, and Gil and Lana sat down side by side.
“Now,” said Mrs. McKlennar, “you’re here on business. Let’s get down to it. I want a man. Demooth says you need a job. Is that so?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You’re a passable farmer?”
“I had my own place.”
“I heard about it being burned. Too bad. Well, it’s an ill wind. And it’s neither here nor there. Mark wouldn’t have sent you here if you hadn’t known something about it. I don’t do much farming. Just keep up the meadows and feed my stock. I’m a widow woman. My husband was Captain Barnabas McKlennar. He was with Abercrombie. I may as well say I’ve had army life all my life, and I expect to get an order obeyed when I give it. Whether you like it or not. Is that understood?”
Gil flushed. “If I take your pay, I’ll do the best I can.”
“Well, I don’t want you coming around afterwards and complaining. How much do you want?”
“I’ve never worked for anyone else,” Gil said. “What did you expect to pay?”
“Well, I asked Mr. Demooth and he suggested forty-five pounds a year, with the house, with the wood, and with the food. It’s not a big wage, but if you work well you’ll have a good home here. Besides, if your wife can sew, I’ll pay her for sewing for me. Can you sew, what’s your name?”
“Lana.”
“That’s a nickname. Magdelana, I suppose.”
Lana nodded, blushing.
“Well,” said Mrs. McKlennar tartly, “can you sew, Magdelana?”
“Yes,” said Lana.
“Would you do sewing for me?”
“I’d like to,” Lana said shyly.
“That’s understood. I hate to sew. I hate housework, so I do the barn myself and let Daisy, my nigger, do the cooking. I took care of my husband, but now he’s gone I’ll do as I like. I’ve got a long nose, Martin, and I poke it where I like. You may think I’m a nuisance.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Gil, at a loss for what to say.
“A nuisance?” she said sharply.
Gil flushed.
“I hadn’t meant it.” Then, meeting the glitter in her eye, he couldn’t help but grin. “But I guess I’ll think so if you do.”
Lana’s heart contracted. She looked quickly towards Mrs. McKlennar and was surprised to find the woman’s bold stare fixed upon herself. For a moment the face seemed more horselike than ever. Then the weathered cheeks twitched a little, Mrs. McKlennar put a large hand to Lana’s hair and gave it a pat, as she would have patted a dog’s head.
However, her voice was uncompromising.
“Your thoughts are your own property, Martin. But keep them to yourself when they arise. And don’t presume on your good looks.”
“No, ma’am,” said Gil.
Lana sighed. She could tell that Gil was amused, that he had made up his mind.
“Perhaps,” said Mrs. McKlennar, “you’d like to see your house?” She glanced at Lana and lifted her voice. “Would you, Magdelana?”
Lana bestirred her senses. “Yes,” she said timidly.
Mrs. McKlennar snorted, rose, and led them out the back door. As she did so, she said, “I’ll expect you to use the back door when you want to ask me for anything. I don’t want muck tracked through my kitchen. I track enough myself.”
A stout negress in a bright bandana watched them from the woodshed. But Mrs. McKlennar ignored her, and walked with hard-heeled strides towards the little house.
“It’s a mess. McLonis never cleared out. A single man. You’ll have a sight of work here, Magdelana. But there’s water running through a puncheon, a good spring. Have you got bedding?”
“Most of our things were burned,” said Gil.
“Well, I’ll help you out with a bed.” She opened the door. “It’s a good chimney, and it’s a dry house.”
The inside surfaces of the logs were mellowed. Mrs. McKlennar stalked to the middle of the floor and stood there. “You’ve got a good-sized bedroom upstairs. It’s light and airy. It’s the original house. Barney was possessed to build the stone one, but I always fancied this house. I lived here a good many years.”
Lana looked round her. It was a good chimney, the kind that would be easy to cook at. It had an oven. It made her think of her mother’s oven. She turned to look at Gil.
“It’s a nice house,” she said softly.
“I’m glad you’ve sense enough to see it. Well, as for me, you can consider the job yours. It’s up to you, now, Martin.” She paused. “Maybe you’d like to ask some questions.”
Gil said, “Yes. I’m in Mr. Demooth’s company. If the militia gets called, and I go out with it, will I get paid my wages?”
“Fortunes of war.” Mrs. McKlennar nodded. “I’ll expect Mrs. Martin to do the milking.”
“I will,” Lana said eagerly.
“There’s another thing.” Gil spoke hesitantly.
“Yes?” Mrs. McKlennar was gruff.
“I’d have to know if you were in the right party.”
“A woman hasn’t got political opinions. I run my farm. And I’ll shoot the daylights out of anybody, British or American, that thinks he can come here monkeying with my business. Does that satisfy you?”
Gil said, “Yes,” quite seriously.
“Then maybe you’d like to talk it over.”
“That ain’t necessary, Mrs. McKlennar. We’ll do the best we can for you. I like the farm. And you’ll find my wife useful, I guess.”
Mrs. McKlennar grinned.
“That’s fine.” She held her hand out like a man. “When can you move in?”
“To-morrow. I’ve got a mare.”
“You can keep her here.”
Lana said, “Would it be all right for me to mind the chickens, ma’am?”
“Yes. I used to mind them at home. I missed them up in the woods.”
The widow snorted.
The people had sat down. Now they bowed themselves forward. The pews stopped creaking. Inside Herkimer Church, there was no sound at all but the sudden cracking of the Reverend Mr. Rozencrantz’s knees as he got down from his chair, buttoned his coat, and folded his hands in front of him; and through the open windows the tread of military boots upon the sentry walk of the surrounding fort sounded like the impersonal slow laborious ticking of a clock.
Mr. Rozencrantz was a well-advised man, who knew as well as anyone did that to hold his congregation a preacher must give them something to talk about on their way home. Hell and damnation didn’t get far when followed by a Sunday dinner.
In the forefront of the church, high up, in the shadow of the sounding board, he knelt—his white hair hanging to the collar of his shirt, his thin face, his high arched nose, his eyelids stretching tight over his eyeballs as he closed his eyes, the easy mobility of his colorless lips forming themselves for the first word:—
“O Almighty God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, hear us, we beseech Thee, answer our prayers and bring succor and guidance and consolation according to the needs of those we are about to bring to Thy divine notice.”
The domine’s stertorous breathing punctuated the pause. He gathered himself visibly, raised up his voice again, and then let it get to business.
“O Almighty God, we are thinking right now of Mary Marte Wollaber. She is just fifteen years old, but she is going with one of the soldiers at Fort Dayton. He is a Massachusetts man, O God, and it has come to my attention that he is married in the town of Hingham. I have had her father and mother talk to her, I have talked to her myself, but she won’t pay attention. We ask Thy help, God Almighty, in bringing her back to the path of virtue, from which, we believe, she has strayed pretty far.
“O Almighty God, You have brought us an early spring, keep off the frosts until the fruit is set. O Lord, the English codlin Nicholas Herkimer has grafted onto his Indian apple tree has bloomed this year. May it bear fruit. It is a wonderful example of Thy ways, and worth our going to see, and Nicholas Herkimer will show it to anybody. Also, God Almighty, our Heavenly Father, we return thanks for the good lambing we have had this year, particularly Joe Bellinger, who has had eleven couples lambed from his twelve ewes, which is a record in this county.
“O Almighty God, we ask Thy compassion and aid for all of us who are in sickness. We ask it for Petey Paris, who got the flux real bad on Saturday. His Uncle Isaac Paris sent the news up to us and asks our prayers and says that he has got in a new supply of calicos, French reds, broadcloths, Russias, fancy hank’chers, some new hats and heavy boots, scythes and grindstones.
“O Almighty God, give comfort to the following women, both expecting mighty quick, especially Hilda Fox, who is only sixteen next July and getting close to her time. It is her first. And also for Josina Casler, who is due the end of this month.”
The domine halted once more, let go a strong breath, and resumed:—
“O Almighty and most merciful God, Lord Jehovah, who is also God of Battles, come to our aid, we beseech Thee, hear the prayers of Thy people, gathered here before Thee, bring them aid against the British. It surely looks like war was coming on us directly. There is activity, O God, at Crown Point, and they say General Burgoyne is bringing an army of 10,000 men, with Russians and Indians, against Ticonderoga St. Clair is in charge there, so help him, God. And we thank Thee, O God, for sending up the Third New York to Fort Stanwix. We have faith in them, let it not be displaced. For Spencer sends us word that Butler and Guy Johnson and Daniel Claus are meeting at Oswego, and they are hard men, as we know. They aim to bring the savages. It certainly looks like war.
“O God Almighty, our own Colonel Peter Bellinger wants the fourth company to muster at Dayton to-morrow, June sixteenth. He is marching them to Canajoharie to meet up there with Herkimer, and they are going to try to see Joseph Brant, the chief of the Mohawk savages, who has been making trouble down to Unadilla. May all the militia be punctual to assemble and let them come back in time to defend this settlement if Butler comes quicker than we do expect him. O Lord, we ask only to be allowed to lead our lives here in peace and fruitful cultivation of our land.
“The muster will be at eight o’clock sharp on Monday morning.
“For Christ’s sake, Amen.”
Gilbert Martin, bowing behind the back of Mrs. McKlennar, who sat by herself in her own pew, looking stiffly elegant in her black silk dress and smelling violently of a rose scent, felt Lana’s hand come quickly into his. He did not move; he did not look at her; he felt the same surprise that the whole congregation, by their utter stillness, showed. It was the first time that the realization of the imminence of war had been brought home to them.
In the stillness, the cracking of the Reverend Mr. Rozencrantz’s knees could be distinctly heard as he got to his feet.
The militia had no uniform. Demooth’s company came nearest to it, with the red cockades they had adopted. They marched better because of them; nearly half the company were keeping step. The Massachusetts garrison of Fort Dayton, lined up in front of the palisade, gave them a cheer, the derisiveness of which was entirely lost on George Weaver. “Hup,” he said, “hup, hup, hup.”
Half the women of the valley were there to see them off, and while he watched the shrill adieus, Gil Martin felt glad that Lana had not come to say good-bye to him. He had persuaded her not to, saying that she would see him pass Mrs. McKlennar’s anyway. And Mrs. McKlennar had backed him up, with one of her snorts.
“Mush,” she had said. “I remember when Barney went off on Abercrombie’s expedition. He kissed me in bed and gave me a wallop behind and he said, ‘You stay here, Sally, old girl, and keep it warm against the time I get back.’ He couldn’t stand anything sentimental, you see.”
But when she heard the ragged tapping of the militia drums coming along the Kingsroad, she went stamping down to the fence behind Lana like an old warhorse, to wave at the officers and clap her hands like any girl.
The colonel’s mare went past, blasting air in her excitement at the drums behind her tail, while astride her Colonel Bellinger himself tried to look as if he were unconscious of her failing, as well as of Christian Reall’s bawling that it was too bad they didn’t have a trumpet for the mare to blow on.
The two women stayed by the fence, watching the familiar faces of the men, with the red flag of the regiment flapping at its head against the green river hills, and the slant of their rifles, until they saw Gil walking towards them between George Weaver and the angular Jeams MacNod. Gil looked so dark and tall between them, and his face was so set, that Lana’s throat grew tight. She was grateful for the squeeze of Mrs. McKlennar’s large hand on her arm.
“He’s a handsome man,” she said. “God save him.”
The German Flats company was five days marching down to Unadilla. At the evening of the first day they encamped at Palatine Church, above Fox’s Mills, where on the following morning a detachment of the Palatine company joined them under Colonel Jacob Klock. The two companies together, nearly two hundred men, continued east, and reached the rendezvous at Canajoharie at noon. There they pitched camp again, between the Canajoharie company and a company of regulars from the First New York Line sent up from Albany under Colonel Van Schaick. The presence of the regular troops in their uniform blue campaign coats was inspiriting, particularly on the following morning when the drums beat them to parade. The regular troops had three-foot-deep drums with a resonance beyond compare, finer than the militia drums. All that day, the militia marched south from the Mohawk behind the drums. Again and again they found themselves keeping step as they went up through the hills.
But at Cherry Valley, Colonel Van Schaick halted his men and announced to General Herkimer that he could go no farther as he had to wait for his provisions. However, he would be ready to back up the general if the Indians got out of hand.
Herkimer, on his old white horse, sat moodily staring away from the colonel towards the palisade that enclosed the Campbell farm and made the only fort for the protection of the settlement. He listened without comment, his black eyes staring on the landscape, the green field set in a saucer of the hills. Since winter a foreboding sense of gloom had come over the little German, and now it seemed to him it was fulfilled.
He touched the cocked brim of his hat to the army colonel and swung the old horse to the road. Waiting for him, Colonel John Harper stood at the head of a small company of rangers, and the sight of him and his men seemed to brighten Herkimer. He asked him whether Brant were still at Oghkwaga, and when Harper nodded asked him if his company, knowing the land, would act as scouts. Harper agreed. Herkimer gave the word.
The militia started forward like the disjointed parts of a snake. Twenty minutes later, the head of the little army of three hundred men was past the settlement on the path to Otsego Lake. In half an hour they had all disappeared into the woods.
On the twentieth they pitched camp on the south shore of the Susquehanna, three miles below its junction with the Unadilla. A runner was sent out that afternoon to Oghkwaga to announce to Brant that Herkimer was waiting to see him and talk as neighbor to neighbor.
The militia had no tents, except the general’s. They peeled hemlocks and laid the bark on poles, facing the north, for the weather was hot. The next morning, under orders, they set up a bark shed, fifty feet long, on a knoll a quarter of a mile below, in an irregular growth of apple trees, some of which were still in bloom.
During the course of the morning the runner returned from Oghkwaga and went at once to Herkimer’s tent. The general was sitting alone in his shirt sleeves, a field desk on his knees and a quill pen in his fist. He never felt like writing, and writing this way made it pretty near impossible.
Joe Boleo sat down.
“I seen him.”
“Will he come talk with me?”
“Oh, sure, in a few days, he says.”
“Did you get a look around, hey?”
“Not much last night. But I looked around pretty good this morning. He ain’t got so many Injuns there.”
They looked at each other.
“Honnikol,” said Joe Boleo earnestly, “you want to tie up this twerp, don’t you?”
“Yes. But if I go after him now and don’t catch him it’s an act of war.”
“He ain’t got two hundred with him.”
“Yes, but Congress still thinks they’re going to get the Indians on their side. A bunch of them went down last year and called John Hancock a great tree, or something.”
“Is that all they called him?” asked Joe Boleo. “My God, they missed their chance.”
“Yes, I’m to get Brant to agree to keep neutral. But, by God, I’d like to shut him up somewhere.”
“Why don’t you grab him when he comes over?”
The militia lay around for seven steaming days and didn’t do a thing. Then, on the morning of the twenty-seventh, the scouts fell in towards camp with the news that Brant was coming up four miles below. At noon an Indian walked into camp and asked for General Herkimer.
He stood like a post under his blanket, his small dark eyes flickering here and there over the camp. General Herkimer emerged from his tent, pulling on his coat as he came.
The Indian asked, “What do you want to talk to Brant about?” in English as good as Herkimer’s.
“I want to talk with him as an old neighbor.”
“That’s fine,” said the Indian. “I tell him all these men be his old neighbors too?”
He did not look amused, but Herkimer grinned.
“Yes, tell him that.”
The Indian turned. In half an hour he was back suggesting that the already erected shed would do as a meeting place if Herkimer came with fifty unarmed men, which Brant also agreed to do on his part. The shed was out of shot from the surrounding woods, and the bare approach to it was a guarantee against any treachery.
A little after noon, Herkimer walked up the hill and sat down in the shade of the shed roof. He took with him Colonels Cox, Harper, Klock, and Bellinger, and each colonel brought a squad from his own company. Gil was in Bellinger’s squad.
They sat around on the benches for ten minutes before Brant appeared at the edge of the woods.
It was the first time Gil had ever seen the man whose name since winter had come to be on everybody’s tongue. He was under six feet, but he walked like a taller man. His clothes were made in the Indian fashion, but, except for the deerskin moccasins, they were made of English cloth, and instead of the traditional headdress he wore a cocked black hat bedizened with gold lace. His blanket was a vivid blue, turned back from the shoulders to show the scarlet lining.
Behind him his companions were dressed like shabby replicas. There were five of them, in front of the warriors. A white man in deerskins, whom Brant introduced as Captain Bull, and who smirked a little as he bowed; a half-breed Indian who turned out to be Sir William Johnson’s bastard son by Brant’s sister, a dark-skinned fellow with an Irish face; a Mohawk chief whose name Gil didn’t catch; and a half-breed, negro-Indian, whom Brant didn’t bother about.
Brant smiled a little as he looked down at Herkimer and shook him by the hand. His features were straight, well shaped, and full of animation. He kept looking round on the militia as if to see what their reactions were. But their reactions to himself, not to the situation. It took but one look at him to see that he was vain.
Though he was pure-bred Mohawk, Joseph Brant could easily have been mistaken for a white man, and he talked more educated English than old Herkimer could have mastered had he been thrice reborn and three times sent to college. He had a great dignity of behavior, too, that made the militia look like simple men; but it was not the natural dignity of a plain Indian. It had the manners of a white man who has been to a royal court. It was filled with pride, which even so meaching-minded a man as Christian Reall could see was an unnatural thing.
Joe Boleo, watching his back, grunted to George Weaver, “Brant used to be a nice lad, too. But now he wants the world to know he’s a nice man.”
Joe Boleo had put his finger on Brant’s weakness. He wanted to be admired, by both Indians and whites, gentlemen and farmers. He wanted to be a great man, by both standards, with whatever person he was at the moment engaged. It was an attitude that later would account for his irrational kindnesses and friendships, as well as his cruelties and hates. The mistake he always made was his utter inability to understand that forthright people like Boleo or Herkimer or Gil could see straight through him. Vainer people, he enraged.
Brant’s complaints had been that the Mohawks who had stayed at the Indian town in friendliness to the colonies were held as virtual prisoners, together with their minister, Mr. Stuart; that Butler’s wife and children were kept as hostages; and that forts were being erected on Indian property.
Herkimer had asked if the Indians would remain neutral if these complaints were met, to which Brant replied that the Six Nations had always been allied with the King of England, that they still were. Beyond that he could not go. Herkimer then asked him whether he would talk again to-morrow, and Brant agreed. But as he turned to go, he said quietly, “I’ve got five hundred men. If you start trouble, they’ll be ready.”
That night Herkimer talked with Joe Boleo and another man named Wagner, and George and Abraham Herkimer. “It’s no use at all,” he said. “Brant’s made his mind up. And there isn’t a damn thing we can do about it. He’s got five hundred men, and if he wants he can wipe us out.”
“I could draw a bead on him,” Joe Boleo suggested.
Herkimer shook his head.
“Shucks,” said Joe. “We can lick them Indians. If we get Brant, the rest of them will run like rabbits.”
“I can’t take the chance. I’ve got to get these men back to the Mohawk. We’re going to need them all.”
His nephew George said, “What if he starts trouble to-morrow?”
“That’s what I want to see you about. If he does you’re to shoot him. You can lay behind the top of the hill. They won’t see you if you go before sunrise. Lay in those ferns. But don’t you start anything.”
Nothing happened on the next day. Brant greeted Herkimer blandly with the announcement that the Indians under no circumstances would break their allegiance to the King. Herkimer shrugged.
“All right, Joseph,” he said. “There’s no sense in talking any more.”
That was all there was to it. Three hundred men had marched southward ninety miles; they would march ninety miles back.
“No sense,” Brant agreed. “It was nice to have the visit.” The sarcasm was barely veiled. “Seeing you’re old neighbors, all of you, we’ll let you go home. And we won’t bother this country now. As a matter of fact, I’ve got to go to Oswego to meet Colonel Butler.”
Herkimer nodded, stood up, shook hands, and watched Brant calmly walking down the knoll towards the woods with his fifty men behind him. As if he had half a mind to signal to Joe Boleo and Wagner, he kept his hands clenched in his trousers’ pockets. He did not move until the last Indian had stepped into the underbrush.
Then he said, “Call up the men.”
The militia, held under arms, came quickly up the hill and formed companies. At the same moment, a wild yelling burst from the woods; the brush suddenly disgorged a band of Indians. As they came into the open, they brandished their muskets, tossed up their tomahawks, and yelled again.
“Don’t anybody notice them.”
Herkimer’s voice was calm and contained. He had lit his pipe and now he stood in front of the militia, puffing it and staring up at the sky.
“God damn,” he said. “I didn’t see that storm coming up. But I guess we’ll all get wet anyway. Let’s break camp and go home.”
The Indians were still yelling and prancing at the woods’ edge. But now they too heard the thunder. The clouds suddenly engulfed the sun, a still sultry light came over the rolling valley, and then the rain, in large drops, like a volley from heaven, struck the land. The Indians dove back into the woods and the militia were left alone in the falling rain.
Then they too broke for their own camp. They heard the Indians popping off their rifles through the woods, but the sound was like play in the noise of wind and thunder.
When the last man got into camp, the general’s tent was struck and he was hunched on the back of his miserable old white horse. Joe Boleo said, “They’ve all skedaddled.”
Herkimer grinned. “They’re touchy as women about their paint when they’ve just put it on.”
“It was war paint,” said Cox.
“Yes, I saw it.” He was unruffled. “It’s time we got back home.” He raised his voice above the rain. “This trip ain’t altogether a waste. We’ve learned to march together and get along without scrapping between ourselves.” He grinned and rubbed the rain off his mouth. “Boys, it looks like a bad time was coming. But you’ve seen painted Indians, now, so you’ll know what to shoot at.”
Plenty of the men had been wondering what the expedition had been for. But as they listened to the little German talking to them through the rain, they realized that they had a man who could take them into the woods, and who wasn’t scared of Indians, and they felt that when the time came he could set his teeth in a situation and hang on. “Boys,” he said, “go back and get your haying done as early as you can. Peter,” he called to Colonel Bellinger, “I’m going back the way we came by. We have food waiting for us at Cherry Valley if the Continentals ain’t ate it all. But I give you enough extra so you can take a short cut. Follow up Butternut Creek. If these Indians ever make a shy at German Flats they’ll come that way. You ought to see the country. Joe Boleo’ll show you how to go.”
So the German Flats company crossed the Susquehanna at the ford above the Unadilla and headed home straight north without more than an Indian trail to follow the course of the Creek.
It was wild land. Gil, floundering through a swamp, found Adam Helmer, whom he had hunted with during the winter, beside him. “It’s great hunting country,” Helmer said. “I’ve hunted it for years. I know it like my fist and I’d like to see the Indian who could catch me in it. Or that I couldn’t catch.”
When they came out at Andrustown Helmer asked permission to leave the ranks. He wanted to visit one of Bower’s girls. When he got permission he dropped back to Gil’s side. “Why don’t you stop off? Polly’s got a sister that can give you fun.”
Gil grinned and said, “I’m a hired man, Adam. I got to get back to work. You heard what Herkimer said about hurrying the crops.”
“You mean you’re married.” Helmer shook his big blond head. “But you’re kind of behind with your sowing, mister.” He laughed, stepped out of line, and entered the woods. All girls were does to Adam, and some had to be still-hunted.
The company tramped through the little cluster of eight farms while the women and children ran to the fences. For the Indian trail turned suddenly into a road that ran straight to Fort Herkimer.
That evening, on the second day of their march, the company disbanded. By dark, Gil had got home. There was no light in his house, so he went to the stone one. Looking through the door, he saw Lana and Mrs. McKlennar and Daisy, her negress, sitting together.
They all made much of him, and Mrs. McKlennar went down cellar for some sack, which all three white people drank. She snorted a good deal at his description. “It sounds just like rioters trying to get up their nerve. What we need is regular troops.”
“Herkimer has nerve enough,” said Gil.
“I don’t doubt it, when he gets pinched. But you don’t win wars by pinching.” She snorted, sipped, and grinned, showing her teeth. “But we’re glad to have you back, my lad. Ain’t we, Magdelana?”
Lana seemed subdued, and at the question she dropped her eyes to her sewing and flushed.
“Hup, hup,” said Mrs. McKlennar. “Leave that and go to bed. That’s where he ought to have found you, anyway. Go on.”
Gil hardly felt Lana’s light touch on his arm. She was looking up with tenderness in her eyes. “I’m glad you’re back, Gil.” And then, “Gil, are you glad? Because I’m real glad.”
“Yes,” he said. “But I’m hungry as sin, too.”
The summer was like any other summer in the upper Mohawk Valley, except for the heat. No one remembered such heat as came in that July. Day after day of it, that even dried the woods so that ranging cattle returned early to their barns. The air was sultry, and there was a dusty smell in it, as if a spark dropped anywhere could set the whole world blazing.
Men swinging their scythes through standing grass could feel the brittle dryness of it through the snathe from blade edge to palm; and the women, at work with the rakes, found the hay cured almost as fast as they could handle it.
In German Flats, people, starting the haying, found it hard to believe that war was going on in other places. The plain farmer, thinking of his hay and wheat, had no real idea of what the war was about. In the evenings, reverting to the subject listlessly, all he recalled was the early days of 1775, when the Butlers and the Johnsons and their sheriff, Alexander White, had ridden the length of the valley to chop down the liberty pole in front of Herkimer Church, as they had done at Caughnawaga. But now they were all skyhooted off to Canada for these two years.
It seemed they couldn’t take account of the messengers riding horseback up and down the Kingsroad. Men who went at a gallop and didn’t stop to drink. All they thought of it was that you couldn’t find day labor any more for love or money. Congress was paying men to work up in the woods around Fort Stanwix, a crazy notion for a crazy place—as crazy as the heat.
Up at Fort Stanwix two men had taken charge. One was an apple-faced young Dutchman with a chin as sullen as a growing boy’s and very bright blue eyes. His name was Peter Gansevoort, he wore a colonel’s epaulets, and was so gentrified about his linen that one soldier, whose wife (by courtesy) had come along, was doubling the family pay. The other was the second in command, Lieutenant Colonel Marinus Willett, a man who looked like a farmer, with a lantern-like face of rusty red all over, and a nose like a grubbing hoe. When he first appeared the settlers said the very smell of him was Yankee; but he came from New York, and he was able to laugh and enjoy himself.
The five hundred men in the garrison considered that their commanding officers were slave drivers. Not only did they start rebuilding the entire cheval-de-frise, they burnt John Roof’s place to the ground, they cleared the scrub laurel from the clearing, and worse than that they sent two squads out every day to fell trees across Wood Creek. To the local labor, that didn’t make sense. What was the use of repairing the fort if, at the same time, you made it impossible for the British to get there?
Then like a thunderclap, on the seventh of July, word came up the valley that Fort Ticonderoga had been taken by Burgoyne. Though half the people did not know where Ticonderoga lay, the very sound of the sentence had the ominous ring of calamity.
All at once, George Herkimer’s company of militia was mustered and turned into squads of rangers. They blocked the roads to the four points of the compass—west at Schuyler, east at Frank’s tavern beside Little Falls, south at Andrustown, and north at Snydersbush. Rumor said that the Butlers and the Johnsons were returning to the valley, bringing their Indians and the wild Highlanders of whom the Germans were as fearful as they were of the Senecas themselves.
Reports came in of men in the woods at Schoharie, and at Jerseyfield. Overnight the little town of Fairfield was deserted. A man named Suffrenes Casselman had led the Tory villagers westward. The word was brought down by a settler on Black Creek, who described them: twenty men, women and children with them, carrying what they could.
As they finished the haying, the people of German Flats were aware of the rebirth of their old racial fears. The Committee of Safety began enforcing their new laws. A negro was shot for being out after dark without permission. Communities began repairing the old stockades. The hammering at Eldridge Blockhouse came up the valley on those still days, so that Gil Martin, struggling with Lana to get the last of the hay under the barrack roof, heard it plainly.
That evening Jacob Small rode down from Eldridge. He said, “We’ve got a cannon set up in the tower,” as proudly as though Betsey Small had borne another son. “If you hear it go off, it’s Injuns. If she shoots twice, don’t try to fetch anything, but run like sixty. If she shoots three times, try to get across the river. It means they’ve got so close you couldn’t get inside the fort.”
After supper Gil got down the Merritt rifle. And seeing him clean it, Mrs. McKlennar, who had dropped by in the dark, nodded her head from the door.
“Don’t look so scared, though, Magdelana. They haven’t got here yet.”
A canoe came down the river in the dark, cutting an arrow through the moon. In the bow a big-shouldered man stroked steadily. In the stern, Joe Boleo was paddling with his usual appearance of exhaustion.
They ran the bow aground above the falls and took the path down the hill by Warner Dygert’s. They found Nicholas Herkimer sitting on his porch.
“Who’s that?”
“It’s Spencer, Honnikol.”
Herkimer got up. The big man shook hands.
“Where you from, Tom?”
Spencer said, “Onondaga.”
“What’s up?”
“The Indians are at Oswego. Both the Butlers. Sir John Johnson.”
“How many all together?”
“They’ve got four hundred regular soldiers. The Eighth Regiment and the Thirty-fourth. There’s about six hundred Tories. They’re wearing green uniforms. All the Senecas are there. Brant and his Mohawks. The Cayugas and some Onondagas. A thousand, maybe.”
Herkimer grunted.
“Who’s in command?”
“A man named Sillinger.” (Spencer gave the local contraction of Colonel Barry St. Leger’s name.) “He has a big tent and five servants.”
“I never heard of him,” said Herkimer. “Is he an army man, Tom?”
The Indian blacksmith said, “I don’t know. He wears a red coat with gold strings.”
“Thank God for that,” said Herkimer. He yelled for a negro.
“Go get Mr. Eisenlord. He’s at Frank’s. Go quick.” He turned to Joe. “I can’t write this myself. It’s too damned hot to-night.”
Eisenlord’s neat hand made English of the general’s dictation:—
Whereas it appears certain that the enemy, of about 2000 strong, Christians and savages, are arrived at Oswego, with the intention to invade our frontiers, I think it proper and most necessary for the defense of our country, and it shall be ordered by me as soon as the enemy approaches, that every male person, being in health, from 16 to 60 years of age, in this our country, shall, as in duty bound, repair immediately, with arms and accoutrements, to the place to be appointed in my orders; and will then march to oppose the enemy with vigor, as true patriots, for the just defense of their country. And those that are above 60 years, or really unwell, and incapable to march, shall then assemble, also armed, at their respective places, where women and children will be gathered together, in order for defense against the enemy, if attacked, as much as lies in their power.…
Spencer had already started back to the woods to watch Wood Creek for the first arrival of St. Leger’s advance guard.
Eisenlord had been ferried over the river with copies of his proclamation to be distributed through the county. There was nobody left but Joe Boleo. As he said to himself, he was dry enough to make a hen quack; but old Honnikol sat so grim and still in the darkness that he couldn’t bring himself to make any suggestion. He tried to think of a funny story, but the only one he remembered was the one about Lobelia Jackson and the hired man, and Honnikol had never taken much to dirty stories.
So in the kindness of his heart Joe Boleo set himself to thinking about a draft of beer. He thought about it in steins, and in a blue glass, and a pewter mug; and by and by he got so thirsty with his thoughts that he thought of beer in a keg, with the bung open and his mouth the same and the beer establishing a connection.
Herkimer shook himself. “Yah,” he said. “You’re thirsty, Joe.”
“How’d you guess that, Honnikol? I didn’t say nothing.”
For a moment the little German’s voice was deep with amusement.
“Yah,” he said. “That’s how.”
“Well,” Joe admitted, “if you come to mention it.”
“Maria,” called the general.
His wife came out on the stoop. She was a young, plump, serene woman, who might have been the general’s daughter. She came to the steps and he reached out and put his arm round her knees.
“Maria, Joe Boleo’s thirsty. And I think I am. Bring us both beer. In the two big mugs.”
“All right, Nicholas.”
He said apologetically, “I don’t want the niggers round just now.”
“I know,” she said.
It seemed to Joe she was a long time coming back. But she came. Her husband made her sit down beside him and held her in his arm.
“Well, Joe”—holding up his mug.
Joe almost made his usual reply about a catamount’s biological necessities; he restrained himself in time.
“Here’s to you both, Mister and Missis.”
The beer was cool from the cellar. The night was dark. The moon was low upon the falls and the rapids were a living shine. The sound of broken water reached dimly towards the house.
“I’m getting to be old,” Herkimer said quietly. “Maria’s young.” His arm tightened. “When my wife died I never thought I’d marry her niece.”
“All in the family.” Joe was trying to ease the general’s voice.
“Yes,” said the general gravely. “That’s how it is here—too. Schuyler won’t send help. He writes I ought to be ashamed to ask it. He says I had no right to agree to anything with Joseph Brant. And now Cox and Fisscher and some others are blaming me because I did not shoot Brant, because I don’t get troops from Albany. They will send some Massachusetts people up to Dayton, that’s all. But everything else I do is wrong.”
“Hell, Honnikol, all the people are back of you. The dirt farmers and timber beasts like me.”
“That’s good. We’ll have one damn fight anyway. All in the family, Joe. Our side and Johnson’s. There won’t be any soldiers at all. You could say it’s got nothing to do with a war at all.”
FORT STANWIX
July 28, 1777
SIR:
We have received accounts which may be relied on that Sir John Johnson has sent orders to Colonel Butler to send a number of Indians to cut off the communications between this place and German Flats who are to set out from Oswego in five days from this, perhaps sooner, and that Sir John is to follow them with 1000 troops consisting of regular Tories and Vagabone Canadians with all the Indians they can muster. I hope this will not discourage you, but that your people will rise up unanimously to chastize these miscreants and depend upon it we will not fail to do our part.
I am, Sir, etc.,
MARINUS WILLETT
When General Herkimer received this he blew through his lips and put on his best coat. He rode right up to Fort Dayton and walked in to speak to Colonel Weston.
Colonel Weston was a man of sense—the first Massachusetts soldier that had managed to grasp just what the German settlers faced. He didn’t like Germans, particularly, but he liked still less anything that smacked of British aristocracy; and he agreed at once to send up provisions from his commissariat and two hundred men under Colonel Mellon, as soon as he could get them ready.
On the twenty-ninth, Tom Spencer sent down a message to Herkimer. It was the first definite assurance of the friendly stand of the Oneida nation in the face of war.
At a meeting of the chiefs, they tell me that there is but four days remaining of the time set for the King’s troops to come to Fort Stanwix and they think it likely they will be here sooner.
The chiefs desire the commanding officers at Fort Stanwix not to make a Ticonderoga of it; but they hope they will be courageous.
They desire General Schuyler may have this with speed and send a good army here, there is nothing to do at New York, we think there is men to be spared, we expect the road is stopped to the inhabitants by a party through the woods, we shall be surrounded as soon as they come. This may be our last advice.…
There was one thing left to do. Before night, Herkimer sent men down the valley as far as Johnstown to muster the militia on the third of August at Fort Dayton.
It gave Gil a strange feeling, on that Sunday morning, to hear the church bell ringing across the river at Herkimer; to look out from his doorway and see the farm peaceful in the still hot August air, the blue river, and the wooded hills beyond. Children, playing outside the ramparts of the fort, were stilled by the ringing bell and began their reluctant straggling into church.
The sight brought back the bitterness he had felt when his own place was burnt; it made him think of the winter and of the happiness he and Lana had had together before that time. It had seemed to him, lately, that she was slowly regaining her old ways. But since Adam Helmer, now become a ranger, had brought the muster word, she had grown quiet again.
She was so quiet now, working in the kitchen, that he wondered what she was doing. When at last he turned back, he found that she was sewing a new cockade on his hat, while the tears dropped slowly down her cheeks. Her bowed shoulders and her silent crying made him tender.
“You mustn’t be like that, Lana.”
“I know,” she said. “I hadn’t ought.” She did not look up in replying. “But the last two days, Gil, I’ve been remembering. I’ve been feeling different. And now I wonder if it isn’t going to be too late.”
“Too late?” He tried to understand. “Oh. You mean I might get killed.… I won’t get killed, Lana.”
“No, no, no. Not that. I wondered if it was too late for you to love me again.”
“I do,” he said.
“I know. No girl ever had a better man, Gil. I want you to know that.” She got up swiftly, her hand like a head under the hat. She smiled and wiped the tears away with the back of her hand. “Put it on.”
He obeyed, standing in front of her the way he had before that first muster down in Schuyler. But it was different now. They both felt it.
“Lana. You’ll be all right. You stick to Mrs. McKlennar.” He paused. “If anything goes wrong …”
“Yes, Gil.”
Mrs. McKlennar strode down the path from her house.
“Still here?” she asked. “I’m glad. I wanted Gil to have this.”
She held out a small flask fastened to a loop of rawhide.
“It’s brandy,” she said. “Brandy’s the next best thing to powder in a fight.”
Lana said politely, “Isn’t it a pretty flask?”
“It used to be Barney’s.” There seemed to be some kind of stoppage in the widow’s long nose. “It’s no good to me, now,” she said briskly. “I thought it might come handy to you.”
Gil thanked her.
They stood a moment awkwardly. Then Mrs. McKlennar’s head lifted.
“Drums,” she said.
The steady rattle of the drums came up the Kingsroad. Gil stepped to the door. His voice lifted a little.
“That’s Klock and the Palatine regiment,” he said. “I’ve got to go.”
He turned to kiss Lana, but Mrs. McKlennar stepped between.
“I’m going to kiss you, Gilbert Martin. I’d better do it now. You don’t want to go off tasting a widow on your mouth.”
She took his face and kissed him firmly.
“Good-bye, lad.”
She stepped through the door with a snap of skirts.
Bright crimson, Gil stooped down to his wife.
“Good-bye, dear.”
Lana lifted her lips. Her eyes closed suddenly. He saw the tears welling at the roots of her dark lashes.
“Good-bye,” he said again. “We’ll make out all right. The both of us.”
He caught the rifle up and tossed the blanket roll across his shoulder. He tramped down to the fence. He turned there, waved his arm, and stepped over into the road, not a hundred yards beyond the oncoming Palatines.
Lana could only stand and watch. He was walking along the road behind the railings, rifle on his shoulder, the long barrel like a finger pointing back towards home. Then for a moment the ragged rattle of the drums submerged her senses.
She felt an arm round her waist, and Mrs. McKlennar was breathing harshly beside her ear.
“It’s hard on a woman,” said the widow. “Many a time I’ve seen Barney go off just the same way. Good-bye. And he’s off. Maybe he waves, but he ain’t seeing you. He’s thinking about the men, you see. All the men together.”
The arm tightened.
“It’s bad enough when he’s your son, or even your father.” Her stoppage seemed to trouble her again. “A man can’t help it if he’s your son—and almost any man can be a father. But there are so damn few good husbands in a woman’s life.”
Gil was by the turn of the road now; he hadn’t looked backward again. In his place the uneven files of Palatine farmers trudged along the road, bent over in their walk, as if they followed a plough. Men and officers were indistinguishable—except the colonel, who sat like a sack of meal on the thumping black mare he used to draw manure with.
The men made an uneasy, sprawling mass throughout the little settlement. On the edge of the knoll the fort had been built on, Nicholas Herkimer straddled his old white horse, leaning his hands heavily on the somnolent withers.
He was using his deep voice to good effect, now giving orders in English to an officer, locating the muster ground of each company, now checking the list of supplies that trundled past in carts drawn either by oxen or by horses, now hailing in Low German some neighbor or acquaintance.
When Gil preceded the Palatine company into the village, he saw the general in the same position, in his worn blue campaign coat, warm enough in the stifling heat to keep the sweat steadily rolling down his cheeks. He was listening to the bombastic voice of Colonel Cox.
“All right, Colonel,” he said finally. “If you want to push ahead to-night, you can. But don’t go beyond Staring’s Brook. And don’t go until your whole regiment’s here, either. Leyp’s and Dievendorf’s companies haven’t showed up yet.”
Cox, flushed with heat and drink, said loudly that they were wasting time, he’d undertake to lick the Tories with his own company, and he could look out for his company, too, without being told.
“Those are orders,” Herkimer said, tartly, for once. “I make Colonel Weston witness, if you don’t like them.”
The commandant of the Dayton garrison nodded brusquely, met the embattled colonel’s eye with a Yankee gleam in his own, and said, “I’ve noticed them already.”
“Where’s Bellinger’s regiment?” asked Gil.
“Beyond Doc’s house,” replied a delighted farmer from Snydersbush. “Cox had to haul his tail down that time.” He grinned. “He used to hunt around and raise hell with young Johnson, and now he thinks he’s drawn title to being a gentleman.”
But Gil noticed what the Snyders man had not, that several of the other officers were looking after Cox with sympathetic eyes. Like him they rode good horses, with English-made saddles and polished riding boots. In their company, Herkimer’s faded outfit, horse and coat, looked like a shabby imitation. No doubt they thought him one.
George Weaver greeted him. “You’re only just in time, Gil. How’s Lana? We ain’t seen her in a month, now.”
“She’s fine,” said Gil. “How’s Emma?”
“Just the same. She’s been considering going down to visit Lana to get a quilting pattern off her. She said she might go down while I was away.”
“That’s fine,” said Gil.
Finding the company mustered took him back more clearly than ever to the time before his house was burnt. Reall, with his gun clean for once, was there; and Jeams MacNod, looking a little pallid at the thought of war; and Clem Coppernol.
Gil said, “I thought you were over sixty.”
The white-haired Dutchman said, “Too old? By Jesus a Dutch man ain’t ever too old to take a pot at the British.”
Weaver said, “We’re to camp along the road to-night, right here. We’ve got to wait for Fisscher’s Mohawk company, and Campbell’s Minutemen.”
“I thought they’d have to stay, with Brant around there.”
“Brant’s cut back west again,” said Weaver. “He’s at Stanwix now.”
A man gaped. He said, “That Indian can move through the woods faster than you get the news of him.”
“He’d better look out where he shows his head,” said Reall in a boisterous voice, raising his gun and aiming at a cabbage in the doctor’s garden.
George Weaver smacked the barrel down, roaring:—
“Do you want to kill somebody?”
That evening it looked as if the drought might break. Slate-colored clouds with traveling veils of white lifted their heads over the southern hills. There was a distant rumble of thunder, but no rain came. Fires broke out beside the ox carts. Eatables were unloaded. Pork and bacon frying made an odor through the village. Men sat together, grumbling because they had been kept out of decent beds—men like Fred Kast who couldn’t see the sense of walking east seven miles one day to walk back seven miles the next, merely for the sake of sleeping in a blanket on the ground.
“I ain’t complaining of your company,” he explained. “It’s just the idea.”
“You ought to have brought your bed along,” a man said.
“Yes, with Katy in it,” said Christian Reall.
Kast laughed.
“I thought of that, and then I thought I couldn’t find no room in it, with all you ground pigs trying too.”
George Weaver looked down the slope of ground to the river, where Peter Tygert’s house was. Herkimer was staying there. Few noticed the late arrival of the Mohawk regiment until they saw Colonel Frederick Fisscher, dapper and dandy for all his gray hair, go cantering down to Tygert’s.
“Well, they got here,” Weaver said. “I’m going to bed.”
He rolled over in his blanket. Reall said, “You’d better pull your feet out of the road, though.”
Demooth came round at breakfast time, wearing the homespun coat he used around the farm. The men were pleased to see him. They had got sick of the handsomely outfitted officers of the other regiments. It made them feel too much like the plain bush Germans the others claimed they were.
“All present?” he said to Weaver.
“Yes. There’s nobody missing.”
“That’s fine.” His dark face, lean, alert, quick-eyed, looked them over.
“Boys,” he said, “Herkimer was going to put us in front. But the way feeling is, he had to let Cox go up ahead. Bellinger’s regiment and Klock’s are going to be the main guard. Fisscher’s so tired he’ll just naturally have to come behind. You can fall in when you hear them cheering Herkimer off from the fort. When he goes by, you just drop in behind him. I’ve got to send Cox off now, but I’ll join you up the road.”
“Yes, Captain,” said George.
They both grinned.
It took them all one day to get to Staring’s Brook. Ten miles. The companies straggled along the road, taking it easy in the heat. Up ahead, Cox lead the Canajoharie men, festering all the time in his wounded vanity. Then, after a long gap, came Herkimer, musing on the old white horse who picked his footing with such caution. With Herkimer rode half a dozen officers, Colonels Fisscher, Veeder, Klock, and Campbell, and Paymaster Isaac Paris, talking volubly on how a campaign of this sort should be conducted, making a bright patch of blue coats, like out-of-season gentians in the woods; and then the German Flats regiment and the Palatine, perhaps five hundred men. Then another gap, and the long line of ox carts jolting on the road, making their painful crawl, beasts and drivers choking in their own dust, stung by horse and deer flies. And after another gap, the Mohawk regiment, taking its ease along the way.
The total force of the army was eight hundred men. The number weighed heavily on Herkimer’s mind that morning. He knew that St. Leger had four hundred regulars, that he had six hundred Tories, men just as good or better than his own straggling militia, and in addition almost a thousand Indians.
At Fort Stanwix, Gansevoort had seven hundred men under arms, but Gansevoort couldn’t be expected to send them all out. His duty was to hold the fort. But if it were put up to him in time, he might be willing to spare a couple of hundred of them for a diversion.
The advance guard crossed Staring’s Brook early in the afternoon. It took three hours for the train of carts and wagons and the rear guard to arrive. The army pitched camp wherever they could find room along the road, a scattering, unorganized mess of men, nearly two miles long. The fires were like glowworms in the big timber—the men lying beside them, talking softly, hugging close to get in the smoke, cursing the flies, and wondering how things were going at home.
In the morning camp was broken at ten and the troops set out at a good pace. A little before noon, Gil and Weaver, marching side by side along the road, came out in Deerfield, on their own land.
It was incredible how quickly the land had become overgrown, as if the mere fact that men had moved away had emboldened the weeds. The burnt acres on Gil’s place already had a scrub of blueberries, and tall clumps of fireweed were flourishing among the charred stumps where corn by now should be beginning to tassel out. The houses were no more. Only the black lines of dead coals marked the squared outlines where the walls had stood.
“It don’t do any good to look at it, Gil.”
Weaver turned his face towards the alder bottom, through which, deep-rutted by the army carts that had passed that way last fall, the road headed straight to the river.
In the ford, a mile away, Cox’s regiment was stirring up the mud.
“Thank God the water’s low,” said Captain Demooth. “All these wagons going through at once are going to cut the bottom out of the river.”
The passage of two hundred men had softened the bottom. By the time Klock’s and Bellinger’s regiments had waded over, the mud was getting pulpy.
Klock and Bellinger halted their companies on the bank and ordered them to stack arms and take their pants off. But with the way the mosquitoes were taking hold, the men preferred wet leggings and shoes to bites, and raucously refused.
They had to wait an hour before the horns of the first yoke of oxen appeared at the bend of the Kingsroad. The animals came on, snuffing the corduroy and planting each hoof as if they wished the things to grow there. When they reached the riverbank, they came down willingly enough, then stopped and drank.
The teamster swung his bull whip on them, but they refused to stir. Behind the tailboard yoke after yoke was halted, until the train filled all the alder swamp, a dozing mass of beasts, with switching tails. Other teamsters came forward and applied their lashes to the first yoke. The cracking of the whips banged like musketry. There was no room to bring another yoke around the first cart. The whole army was held up by a pair of lousy steers.
Even Colonel Fisscher had time to overtake them. He came storming and swearing along the edge of the road on his bay horse and stared and said loud enough for all the men to hear, “You’d think they were a couple of brigadier generals to look at them.”
The men looked up. This militia business, with its high-toned colonels all over the lot, was new to them. They couldn’t think what to say. But Bellinger had also heard him. He jumped off his horse and waded into the ford.
“Just what did you say, Fisscher?”
“I said they were like brigadiers, the way they take their time.”
“Perhaps they wanted to see whether you’d catch up,” said Bellinger.
The Palatine and German Flats outfits guffawed. But the teamster, who was embittered by the whole concern, turned the situation off. “It’s got me beat,” he said, helplessly. “The buggers don’t even want to move their bowels.”
Fisscher splashed his horse through the water to find Colonel Cox.
“Can’t you do anything?” Bellinger asked the teamster.
“I’ve licked them. I’ve twisted their tails. I bit the off one by the ear. It’s got me beat.”
Old Coppernol crossed the ford. He said, “I’ve cut me an ox gad. If you bush twerps will make two lines and look like fences, these critters might mind a sensible man.”
People laughed. But Demooth called to Bellinger, “Clem knows oxen. Let him try.”
Clem said, “You see, these animals have got intelligence. They wasn’t born for Baptists and they have to be convinced. Besides, they’re kind of bored with all the colonels around.”
“Meaning me?”
Clem looked at Bellinger.
“Hell, no. You ain’t even a brigadier’s nephew. You only married his niece.”
In the laughter, Bellinger said good-humoredly, “All right, Clem. Try a hand.”
The men waded into the ford and formed two lines, like fences for a lane, but Clem Coppernol acted as if he didn’t see them. He talked to the oxen, patted them behind their horns, and then he walked the length of the ford and back, between the lines of men. He said to the oxen, “If an old man like me can do it, you two God A’mightys ought to.”
Then he pricked the off ox with the stick and said, “Hup.”
The oxen, miraculously, blew their breaths out, lowered their heads, and lifted their knobbed knees. The cart creaked, sank into the mud, but did not stop. The beasts had got to work again.
Clem bawled, “The others will come now, but don’t let one get stuck. If it starts to stop, lay hold of the spokes and pull like God A’mighty.”
To the admiring teamster he said tolerantly, “You can fetch my muskit for me. Somebody’s got to show these twerps the way.”
He went ahead as unconcernedly as the slow brown beasts, talking to them happily, as if for the first time since the muster he had found something he could do.
That night the head of the straggling column got as far as the Oriskany Creek. Colonel Cox picked his camp site on the eastern bank, opposite the little hamlet of Oneida huts. But the huts were empty, and Joe Boleo explained that the Oneidas had cleared out the same day the British Indians left Oswego.
Along the road the rest of the army bivouacked as they had the night before, wherever there was room. It was nearly dark when Demooth’s company were finally fed and ready to lie down in their smudges. But as they sat on the ground, quietly in the dark, with the firelight streaking the boles of the trees, and a white mist creeping towards them from the river flats, a man floundered down the line, calling over and over, “Captain Mark Demooth. Captain Mark Demooth.”
“This way,” Demooth answered for himself. “What is it?”
“Herkimer wants to see you in his tent.”
“Who are you?”
“Adam Helmer. Do you know where Joe Boleo is?”
“Right here,” said Joe. “Has Herkimer got any likker on him?”
Herkimer’s tent was pitched in a natural clearing a little behind the Canajoharie militia. His old white horse, ghostly and gray in the mist, was grazing stodgily beside it. They could hear the steady crunching of his teeth, and the small tearing sound of the parting roots. There was no sentry. Nobody hailed them. Even the horse didn’t trouble to prick his ears.
Joe pulled the flap open and asked, “What’s bothering you, Honnikol?”
“Come in, Joe.”
Seated on his blanket, the little German was thoughtfully smoking his pipe. “Sit down,” he said when they had entered. “Spencer’s bringing Skenandoa.”
The low tent was rank with the tobacco, but none of them noticed that. Even Joe Boleo, when he saw the general’s troubled face, forgot the liquor question.
“Those bug-tits been dripping again?” he asked.
“If you mean Cox and Fisscher and Paris,” the general said quietly. “Yah.” He pushed the tobacco down in the pipe bowl with a calloused thumb. “It ain’t them bothers me.”
But they could tell by his voice that the officers were getting under his skin.
“It ain’t them,” he said. “Spencer says Skenandoa thinks that Butler has moved out of camp and that he’s waiting for us.” He cocked his head towards the west and for a minute all four men were so still that the flowing of Oriskany Creek on its rift in the mist was audible in the tent. And queer mingling sounds come with it: the clink of a halter link on a tied horse; the raised voice of a distant man; the hooting of a small owl back in the hemlocks; the grumble of a frog by the waterside.
“Spencer’s bringing Skenandoa.” Herkimer stopped again. “That must be them outside.”
The two Indians had come quietly. Turning, the four white men saw Spencer’s blacksmith hand pull back the flap. Then the old chief of the Oneidas stepped in. He bent his head with dignity. He was wrapped around in his blanket, and he scarcely seemed to crease it as he squatted down in the door, so that they saw his dark-skinned wrinkled face, and the red head covering against the fire on the ground.
Spencer said above him, “Skenandoa’s young men have come back.”
Herkimer said nothing. After a minute more, Skenandoa nodded his head. “They say Butler and Brant have moved the Indians down the road from the camp. They are doing it now. The white men are coming along soon.”
Herkimer thanked him quietly.
“That’s all?”
“Yes.”
“Have you Oneidas made up your minds?”
The chief seemed to have withdrawn inside his own old thoughts.
When he replied, his voice was low. “The Mohawks and the Senecas have sent threats. Mr. Kirkland is my good friend. Some of us will go.”
“Thanks.”
The two Indians departed, almost as quietly as they had come.
“You see,” said Herkimer. “It’s what we would expect. But these military gentlemen, they want to ride right through, banging on drums. Cox says it is disgraceful we ain’t got trumpets!”
“What do you want us to do, Honnikol?”
“I’ve been thinking, all day. I think if we could get Gansevoort to send out men against their camp, eh?”
“You, Joe, and you, Adam, you know these woods. Do you think you could get into the fort? With the Indians coming this way, you could go round and get inside?”
Helmer laughed.
“Sure,” he said offhand.
“I can’t let Bellinger or Klock go. Mark, will you? You’re the only other officer that knows these woods and Indians.”
“What’ll we tell him?” Demooth asked.
“Send out men if he can, and fire three cannon to let us know.” He got up and walked to the door. “It’s misty. You’ll have good cover.” The pipe smoke mingled with the mist. “You better get going now.”
In the morning, Herkimer sent out a call for all commanding officers to come to his tent. While the men were cooking breakfast they arrived. They made a knot of uniforms, bright, light-hearted, against the dark hemlock boughs. Cox with his bellicose flushed face and staring eyes; Bellinger, raw-boned, simple, honest, looking worried; Klock, stodgy, chewing snuff and still smelling faintly of manure and already sweating; Campbell’s gray face freshly shaved; Fisscher, dapper and dandy in his tailor-made coat and new cocked hat; and the black-coated, clerkly, calculating Mr. Paris. Behind them assorted captains and majors waited, watching.
Cox had the first word, as he always did.
“Well, Herkimer. Going to give us marching orders?”
“Pretty soon.”
“Why not now? The sooner we get going, the sooner we’ll have Sillinger making tracks for home.”
“Listen, the Oneidas told me last night that Brant and Butler have got the Indians somewhere up the road. They moved down after dark. Johnson’s troops ought to be there by now.”
“Fine,” Cox said boisterously. “We can lick the Tories and then we can tend to the regulars. Like eggs and bacon for breakfast.”
Herkimer looked thoughtfully from face to face, looking for support, perhaps, or perhaps just looking for what was there. Only Bellinger was attentive—and maybe Klock.
“We won’t break camp for a while,” Herkimer said. “I’ve sent Demooth and two men up to the fort. They’ll send a party out and shoot off three cannon when they do. We’ll move when we hear the guns.”
For a moment no one said a word. But they all looked at Herkimer in the sunshine, while the morning birds cheeped in the surrounding trees.
“You mean we’ve got to sit here on our arses?” demanded Cox.
“If you like to wait like that,” said Herkimer. “I do not mind.”
“Personally,” said Fisscher, “I’m getting sick of waiting.”
Herkimer said nothing.
“It’s a good idea,” Bellinger said loyally.
“You getting scared too?” said Paris.
Herkimer held up his hand with the pipe in it.
“There’s no sense fighting among ourselves.”
“What’s the matter? We’ll outnumber them. The whites. We can handle the Indians on the side.”
“You’ve never seen an Indian ambush,” said Herkimer.
“Oh, my God,” cried Cox, “this isn’t 1757! Can’t you get that through your thick German head?”
Rumor had gone down the road that the gentry were having words. The men abandoned their fires to hear the fun. Many of them left their guns behind. They pushed off the road, surrounding the clearing, till the little German seated before his tent was the focal point of over a hundred pairs of eyes.
Gil Martin, coming with the rest, listened among strangers. For over an hour the silly fatuous remarks went on. Some said you could not hear a cannon that far; some said that the three men would surely get captured; some said that probably they’d never gone to the fort at all. That was Paris’s voice.
Herkimer sat in their midst with the voices flinging back and forth above his head; his shirt was still unbuttoned, showing his stained woolen undershirt. Now and then he took his pipe from his lips to answer some remark that had a rudiment of sense behind it; but the rest of the time he kept his head turned to the west, listening. Apparently he was unheeding; but the men close to him could see his cheeks flexing from time to time and the slow even reddening of his skin.
It was Cox who finally touched the match.
“By Jesus Christ,” he shouted in his roaring voice, “it’s plain enough. Either he’s scared, or else he’s got interest with the British. I didn’t bring my regiment this far to set and knit like girls.” He looked round with his staring eyes. “Who’s coming along?”
Fisscher cried, “I am.”
Suddenly all the officers were shouting; and the men, following their voices, filled the woods with shouts.
It seemed to Gil that nobody was looking at Herkimer but himself. He saw the old man sitting there, his face pained, his eyes worried. He saw him knock the pipe out on his hand, blow out his breath, and lift his head.
“Listen to me, you damned fools.” He used German. He was getting on his feet and yanking his coat over his arms. But his voice was enough to stop them. “Listen,” he went on in English. “You don’t know what you’re doing, you Fisscher, Cox, the bunch of you. But if you want to fight so bad, by God Almighty, I’ll take you to it.”
He climbed aboard the old white horse and sat there, looking down on them for a change.
“God knows what’s going to happen. But I’ll tell you one thing,” he said bitterly. “The ones that have been yelling so much here will be the first to pull foot if we get jumped.”
For a moment they gaped up at him.
“Vorwaerts!” he shouted, and put the horse toward the creek. Some of them were still standing there when he splashed through and waited on the other side. Then the officers were running to their companies, yelling, “Fall in. Fall in.”
The men went scrambling through the brush to find their guns and blankets.
“March! March!” The word was in all the woods where the abandoned breakfast fires still sent up their stems of smoke among the tree trunks. Up ahead at the ford, a drummer gave the double tap or the flam. It was like the first nervous beating of a drummer partridge. It was too early for such a sound, but there it was.
Then the whips began their rapid fire along the wagon train. The cartwheels screeched in starting. The still heat in the woods was overflowed with shouts, stamping hoofs, the rattle and slam of carts along the corduroy, the treading feet. The dust rose over the column. All at once it was jerking, getting started, moving.
At the head of the army, Cox moved his big horse beside Herkimer’s. His face was triumphant, almost good-humored once more, because he had planted his will on the column. He felt half sorry for the little German farmer. But he would help the little bugger out.
The rough road went nearly straight along the level ground of the Mohawk Valley’s edge, following the course of the low hill. Now and then it dipped down sharply to get over a brook. But the bottom was solidly corduroyed. The wagons didn’t get stuck. They had even moved up a little on the marching men.
Blue jays squawked and fluttered off, cool spots of angry blue against the leaves. Squirrels, chattering, raced from limb to limb. A porcupine took hold of a tree and climbed it halfway, and turned his head to see the thronging, jumbled mass that heaved and started, checked, and went again along the narrow road.
The men marched in two lines, one for either rut, their rifles on their shoulders, their hats in their hands. When they came to a brook, the thirsty fell out and drank. Nobody stopped them. When they were through they wiped their mouths and looked up, startled, to see their company replaced by another. They got out of the way of other thirsty men and floundered in the bushes to catch up. There was no room left on the road to pass.
Even George Herkimer’s company of rangers, who were supposed to act as scouts, would stop at a spring. And when they went ahead they crashed in the undergrowth like wild cattle. There was nobody to stop them. There were no tracks. The woods were dusty. Branches, whipping on hot faces, stung like salt. The heat grew. Not a breath of air in the branches anywhere, not a cloud in the bits of sky high overhead, nothing but leaves, nothing in all the woods but their own uproarious, bursting, unstemmable progress on the narrow road.
Gil, pushed on from behind, pushing on George Weaver just ahead of him, heard the birds singing in the dark swamp ahead. The ground fell steeply to a quiet flowing brook with a cool moss bottom. He felt his own step quicken with the instinct to drink and cool himself. Looking over George Weaver’s thick round shoulders, he had a glimpse of the road turning into a causeway of logs across the stream; of George Herkimer’s rangers crowding down on the crossing to make it dry-shod; of the Canajoharie regiment floundering in the swamp and drinking face down by the brook; of Cox turning his red sweaty face to Herkimer and bawling, “Where did you say Butler was?”; of the two banks, precipitous and thickly clothed with a young stand of hemlocks, so soft and cool and damp and dark that it made one wish to lie down there and rest. Now he felt the ground falling under his feet, and the resistless push at his back thrusting him out on the causeway. They had passed half of Cox’s regiment and were plugging up the other side. The stamp of Klock’s regiment came down the bank at their backs. Behind in the woods the jangle and rattle of the carts, the steady cracking of whips, and little futile rattle-tats of Fisscher’s drummers. All in the moment: “I meant to get a drink of water,” Reall’s voice was saying at his shoulder. “So did I,” said Gil. “My God,” said Weaver, “what was that?”
At the top of the hemlocks a little stab of orange was mushroomed out by a black coil of smoke. They heard the crack. Cox’s voice, caught short in another remark, lifted beyond reason. His big body swayed suddenly against his horse’s neck. The horse reared, screamed, and, as Cox slid sack-like off his back, crashed completely over.
A shrill silver whistle sounded. Three short blasts. The young hemlocks disgorged a solid mass of fire that made a single impact on the ear. Gil felt George Weaver slam against his chest, knocking him sidewise on top of Reall. A horse screamed again and went leaping into the scrub. As he got up, Gil saw the beast fall over on his head. It was Herkimer’s old white horse, galvanized into senseless vigor. He felt his arm caught and Bellinger was shouting, “Give me a hand with the old man.” The old man was sitting on the causeway, holding on to his knee with both hands. His face was gray and shining and his lips moved in it.
But the voice was lost.
Gil stood before him with his back to the slope and stared down into the ravine. The militia were milling along the brook, flung down along the bank, like sticks thrown up by a freshet, kneeling, lying on their bellies, resting their rifles on the bellies of dead men. They were oddly silent. But the air around them was swept by the dull endless crash of muskets and a weird high swell of yelling from the woods.
Then beyond them he saw the Indians in the trees, adder-like, streaked with vermilion, and black, and white. From the head of the rise the first orderly discharge went over his head with a compelling, even shearing of the air, as if a hand had swung an enormous scythe. He saw the green coats on men firing at him; but he bent down and grasped the general by the knees and heaved him on up the bank while Bellinger lugged him by the armpits.
The colonel was swearing in a strange way. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and said, “By God, Fisscher has pulled foot!”
East of the causeway, where the rear guard had been, a dwindling tide of yells and firing fled backward into the woods. They dumped the general down behind a log and fell beside him. Gil put his rifle over the log and pulled the trigger on the first green coat that filled the sights. The butt bucked against his cheek. He yanked the rifle back and tilted his powder flask to the muzzle. He saw the man he had fired at lean forward slowly in the bushes, buckle at the hips, and thump face down. He felt his insides retract, and suddenly had a queer realization that they had just returned to their proper places; and he thought with wonder at himself, “That’s the first shot I’ve fired.”
“Peter.”
“Yes, Honnikol.”
“It looks as if the Indians was mostly chasing after Fisscher.
You’d better try and fetch the boys up here.”
The little German’s voice was calm.
There was no sense at first in any of it. The opening volley had been fired at ten o’clock. For the next half hour the militia lay where they had dropped, shooting up against the bank whenever they saw a flash. Their line extended roughly along the road, beginning with the disrupted welter of the wagon train, and ending at the west, just over the rise of ground, where a mixed group of Canajoharie men, and Demooth’s company of the German Flats regiment, and what was left of Herkimer’s rangers, made a spearhead by hugging the dirt with their bellies and doing nothing to draw attention to themselves. If the Indians had stayed put or if Fisscher had not run away, the entire army would have been destroyed.
But the Indians could not resist the temptation of chasing the terrified Fisscher. More than half of them had followed his men as far as Oriskany Creek before they gave over the attempt. And a large proportion of the rest, seeing easy scalps ready for the taking, started sneaking down out of the timber. When, at last, Bellinger began to rally the men and get them up the slope, the Indians made no attempt to follow them, for they had discovered that killing horses was an intoxicating business.
The ascent of the slope was the first orderly movement of the battle. It also revealed the initial mistake of the British side. Their flanks made no connection with the Indians, and they had to retire from the edge of the ravine to the bigger timber. It gave the Americans a foothold. They pushed to right and left along the ravine and forward with their centre, until their line made a semicircle backed on the ravine.
No single company remained intact. It was impossible to give intelligent orders, or, if that had been possible, to get them carried out. The men took to trees and fired at the flashes in front of them. And this new disposition of the battle, which remained in force till nearly eleven, was the salvation of the militia. They began to see that they could hold their own. Also it was borne in on them that to go backward across the valley would be sheer destruction.
The general, by his own orders, had been carried still farther up the slope until he could sit on the level ground under a beech tree, and see out through the tall timber. His saddle had been brought up for him to sit on, and Dr. Petry sent for. While the doctor was binding up his shattered knee, Herkimer worked with his tinder box to get a light for his pipe. Then, finally established, he looked the battle over and gave his second order of the day.
“Have the boys get two behind each tree. One hold his fire and get the Indian when he comes in.”
It was an axiomatic precaution that none of the militia would have thought of for themselves. Gil, moved up behind a fallen tree, heard a crash of feet behind him, turned his head to see a black-bearded, heavy-shouldered man plunge up to him carrying an Indian spear in one hand and a musket in the other.
“You got a good place here,” said the man.
He drove the butt of the spear into the ground.
“It may come handy.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“Off an Indian.” He turned his head. “Back there. They’re scalping the dead ones. There’s one of the bastards now.”
He pushed his gun across the log and fired.
“Christ! I missed him. You’d better do the long shots, Bub. You’ve got a rifle there. I ain’t a hand at this stuff.”
Gil had found a loophole in the roots. He poked his gun through and waited for a sign. While he waited he said, “My name’s Martin.”
“Gardinier,” said the bearded man. “Captain in Fisscher’s regiment. Don’t ask me why. We didn’t have the sense to run when he did. There’s fifty of us left, but I don’t know where they are. Old Herkimer told me to get up in front. He said he wanted to see us run away next time.”
Gardinier cursed. Gil saw a shoulder, naked, and glistening with sweat, stick out on the side of a tree. He pressed the trigger, easily. The Indian yelped. They didn’t see him, but they saw the underbrush thresh madly.
“Pretty, pretty,” said Gardinier. “We ought to make a partnership. You take my musket and I’ll load for you. Jesus, you ain’t a Mason, are you?”
“No,” said Gil.
“You ought to be.” He touched Gil’s shoulder with the rifle barrel. “Here’s your rifle, Bub.”
Gil caught a spot of red over a low-lying bough. A headdress. It was a pot shot, but he let it go. The Indian whooped and the next moment he was coming in long buck jumps straight for the log. He was a thin fellow, dark-skinned like a Seneca, and stark naked except for the paint on his face and chest.
Gil felt his inside tighten and rolled over to see what had become of Gardinier. But the heavy Frenchman was grinning, showing white teeth through his beard.
He had set down his musket and taken the spear. The Indian bounded high to clear the log and Gardinier braced the spear under him as he came down. The hatchet spun out of the Indian’s hand. A human surprise re-formed his painted face. The spear went in through his lower abdomen and just broke the skin between his shoulders. He screamed once. But the Frenchman lifted him, spear and all, and shoved him back over the log.
“Hell,” he said. “No sense in wasting powder.”
Gil turned back to face the woods. The Indian, with the spear still sticking out of him, was trying to crawl under some cover. The odd thing was that he wasn’t bleeding. But he kept falling down against the spear, as if his wrists had lost their strength.
The Frenchman stuck his head over the log.
“Jesus!” he remarked. He made no motion.
The Indian heaved himself up. He half turned toward the log. Then his mouth opened, and, as if a well had been tapped by the spear, and all this time had been necessary for the blood to find its level, it poured through the open mouth, down the painted chest, turning the front of his body wet and red.
Gil yelled, jumped up, and fired straight down into the pouring face. The Indian jerked back and flopped, raising the needles with his hands.
Gardinier said, “You hadn’t ought to have done that. Wasting ball that way.”
“For God’s sake kill the next one, then.”
“All right, all right. You don’t need to get mad.” But after a moment, he muttered, “I wish to God I’d pulled that spear out first, though. It was a handy tool.”
All a man could see was the section of woods in front of him. The woods were dark with a green gloom, made by the high tops of the hemlocks, through which the sun came feebly. The heat was stifling. There was no movement of air. Only the bullets ripped passionate sounds out of the heat.
The ravine behind the militia had long since quieted with the death of the last horse. But now and then a solitary war whoop lifted in the trees to right or left; and the answering shot was like a period marking off the time.
In the American line, out of the disruption, figures began to grow into command that had no bearing on their rank. A man who shot better than his neighbors began to give orders. Jacob Sammons on the left began the first outward movement by taking twenty men in a quick charge against the Indian flank and halting them on a low knoll of beech trees. They started a cross fire against the white troops in front, and the militia in the centre, finding the woods cleared for a space, moved forward. Gil went with them. Gardinier stood up and scouted.
“There’s a first-class maple up in front,” he said.
They took it in a rush. Then they had a breathing space in which they could look back. They were surprised to find that this new view disclosed men lying on the intervening ground.
Back at the edge of the ravine, old Herkimer was still smoking his pipe. He had taken his hat off and his grizzled head showed plainly from where Gil and Gardinier had taken stand.
Gardinier laughed out loud.
“Look at the old pup,” he said. “I wish Fisscher was here.”
Both of them realized that they had one man they could depend on, though there was nothing one man could do for them. But it was a feeling all the same.
The lull did not endure.
In the woods ahead they heard a whistle shrilling. The firing had stopped, except for sporadic outbursts way to right and left, where a few Indians still persisted.
Then Herkimer’s voice came to them surprisingly loud.
“Get out your hatchets, boys. They’re going to try bayonets.”
To Gil it seemed as though the fight had begun all over again. Lying behind a tree was one thing. Standing up in the open was something he had not thought of.
But Gardinier suddenly found something he could understand. He heaved his great bulk up and asked, “What you got, Bub?” When Gil merely stared, “Hatchet or bagnet, son?”
Gil reached for the hatchet at his belt with stiff fingers.
“All right. You give them one shot with your rifle. I’ve got a bagnet.” He was fixing it to the muzzle of his army musket. He wheeled back and roared, “Come on.”
He seemed surprised when some of his own company came round the trees behind.
Gil saw them coming. They all saw them, in the green gloom under the trees which covered their faces with a pale shine. They were like water coming toward the militia, flowing round the tree trunks, bending down the brush, an uneven line that formed in places and broke with the shape of the ground and formed.
There was a moment of silence on both sides as the militia rose up confronting them. It was almost as if the militia were surprised. Herkimer’s warning had suggested to them that regular troops were going to attack. Instead they saw only the green coats they knew belonged to Johnson’s company of Tories, and men in hunting shirts and homespun like themselves.
As the line came nearer, they saw that some of these men were the Scotch from Johnstown who had fled with Sir John. They weren’t Sillinger’s army at all. They were the men who had passed threats of gutting the valley wide open. For a moment the militia could hardly believe what they were seeing.
Then it seemed as if the senseless glut of war would overflow. Men fired and flung their muskets down and went for each other with their hands. The American flanks turned in, leaving the Indians where they were. The woods filled suddenly with men swaying together, clubbing rifle barrels, swinging hatchets, yelling like the Indians themselves. There were no shots. Even the yelling stopped after the first joining of the lines, and men began to go down.
The immediate silence of the woods was broken afresh. Gil, jostled and flung forward, saw a face in front of him met by a musket stock. The face seemed to burst. He swung his hatchet feebly against the arm that clubbed the musket and felt the axe ripped from his fingers. The man he had struck cried out, a small clear sound as if enunciated in a great stillness. Then Gil’s ears cleared and he heard a man crying and he stepped on a body and felt it wince under his boot. The wince threw him, and he hit the dirt with his knees, and at the same time a gun exploded in front of him and he thought his whole arm had been torn away.
The boughs of the hemlocks heeled away from him, and the back of his head struck the ground and a man walked over him, three steps, down the length of his body, and he felt sick and then he forgot entirely everything but the fact that he was dying.
He did not feel any more. He was lying on the ground. It seemed to him that every needle leaf and twig on the ground stood up with painful clearness beyond any plausible dimension. A little way off someone kept yelling, “For God’s sake, oh, for God’s sake.” He thought that if he could look he could see what the sound was, but he could not look.
Then the forest darkened. There was a blinding flash. He felt a man’s hands taking hold of his shoulders. He felt himself moving backward while his legs trailed behind him. He was jerked up and put on his feet, and he knew that it was raining. He thought, “The drought’s broken.”
Peal after peal of thunder shook the hemlocks. The rain fell directly down, hissing on the dry ground, and raising mist in the trees. There was no sound left but the pouring rain and the continuous devastating thunder. You couldn’t see when you opened your eyes. Only the tree trunks rising close to you, shining black with wet and the falling rain and the distortion of the lightning glares that lit up crooked alleys in the woods and shut them off again.
He felt himself being shaken, and a voice was saying, “Can you walk, Bub?”
He tried to walk, but his feet were overcome with a preposterous weariness.
“Put them down, Bub, put them down. Flat on your feet and stand up. Have a drink; you’re all right.”
He opened his eyes again and saw the beard of Gardinier matted with rain, and the wild white teeth and staring eyes of the Frenchman.
“Brandy makes the world go round,” said the Frenchman. “It makes the girl handy, it makes for boys and girls, Bub. It’ll fix you. Hell, you ain’t only creased in one arm, and me, I’ve lost an ear.”
The side of his face was streaming blood into his collar.
“They’ve quit, Bub. They’re all to hell and gone. We’ve licked the pus clean out of them. Come on. Doc will fix you.”
He sat Gil down on a mound, and then Dr. Petry’s big fleshy face, muttering, looking enraged and tired, bent down. The Doc was splashing alcohol of some sort on his arm. He was being bandaged. The stinging revived him, and he looked up and saw just above him old Herkimer, white in the face now, but still puffing at his pipe, which he held in his mouth inverted against the rain.
“They’ll come back,” Herkimer was saying. “They’re bound to. But we’ll rest while it rains.”
A little way off a man was eating on a log. The rest were standing, lying on the ground, steaming in the rain. Everyone looked tired, a little sick, and ugly, as if there had been a tremendous drunk a while before.
Nobody was keeping watch. They merely stood there in the rain.
The rain passed as suddenly as it had broken. The men got up and kicked other men to get up, and picked up their rifles. They drew the priming and reprimed, or loaded entirely fresh.
Gil got to his feet shakily, surprised to find his rifle still in his hand. It seemed a long time since the rain. The woods had changed so that he did not know where west lay, or east, or any direction.
Then he saw that Herkimer had moved the position so that the militia were in the centre of the level ground between the first ravine and a smaller, shallower watercourse. Any new attack would have to take them on a narrow flank, or directly up the new slope on top of which their line was formed.
The first shots came scatteringly. The Indians were firing from long range. They seemed to have lost their taste for war. They were being very careful now. Everybody was being careful. The militia stood their ground, but kept to cover.
In a line running north and south through the new position, a broken mass of men lay on the ground, like an uneven windrow of some preposterous corn. They seemed almost equally made up of militia and the green-coated troops that had come through the hemlocks. They lay in queer positions, on their arms, grasping knife or hatchet or musket, the purpose still on the blank face like an overlying plaster; or else they lay on their backs, their empty hands flung out as if to catch the rain.
The militia stepped over this line impersonally. There was an Indian transfixed to a tree by a bayonet, waist high, with his legs dangling lifelessly against the ground. But he kept his eyes open and the eyes seemed to Gil to turn as he went by.
A little way along a face struck him as familiar. He looked at it again. The possessor of the face had fallen with his chin over a log so that the face was tilted up. Gil looked at it curiously before he recognized it for Christian Reall’s face. He had been scalped. The top of his head looked flat and red; and the circumcision of the crown had allowed the muscles to give way so that his cheeks hung down in jowls, tugging his eyes open and showing enormous bloody underlids.
The two armies merely sniped at each other for an hour. Then the second attack by the enemy developed from the southwest along the level ground. At first the militia mistook them for reënforcements from the fort. The direction they came from and the fact that they had pinned up their hat brims to look like the tricorn hats of Continental soldiers were deceptive.
The militia broke cover, cheering, and rushed forward to shake hands, and the enemy let them come. There was no firing. It was only at the last moment that the sun came through the wet trees, dazzling all the ground and showing the bright green of the approaching company.
Gil was not in the direct contact of the two companies. From where he stood he seemed divorced from the whole proceeding.
But another company of green coats was coming round the first in his direction, with the same quiet march, and the same bright glitter on their advanced bayonets.
He became aware of the instinct to run away. It suddenly occurred to him that he was hungry. Not merely hungry as one is at supper or breakfast; but a persisting, all-consuming gnawing in his intestines that moved and hurt. He felt that it was not worth staying for. He was too tired. And the oncoming men looked tired. And it seemed to take forever for them to make a contact. But they came like people who couldn’t stop themselves, while he himself could not make his feet move to carry him away.
They made less noise. The rainstorm which had broken the drought had not had power to take the dryness from their throats. They seemed to strike each other with preposterous slow weary blows, which they were too slow to dodge, and they fell down under them preposterously.
It couldn’t last.
Gil found himself standing alone in the militia. There were a few men near him, but there was no one whose face he recognized. They kept looking at each other as if they would have liked to speak.
On the flank, the firing continued where the Indians still skirmished. But that, too, broke off except for stray shots, the last survivors of all the holocaust of firing.
The Indians were calling in the woods. A high barbaric word, over and over. “Oonah, Oonah, Oonah.” Suddenly a man shouted, “They’ve pulled foot!”
At first they thought another thunderstorm had started. Then they realized that what they had heard, with such surprising force, had been three successive cannon shots.
The messengers had reached the fort, and the garrison was making a diversion.
A deliberate understanding gradually dawned on all their faces. They leaned on their rifles and looked round. The woods were empty, but for themselves, for their dead, and for the enemy dead. The living enemy had run away.
Those that could walk began a retrograde movement to the knoll on which Herkimer was sitting under his tree. The old man was looking at them; his black eyes, yet ardent, passing feverishly from face to face, and then turning slowly to the lines of dead.
One of the officers spoke fatuously, “Do we go on to the fort now, Honnikol?” He paused, swallowed, and said, as if to excuse himself, “We know they know we’re here.”
The little German swung his eyes to the speaker. The eyes filled and he put his hand over them.
Peter Bellinger and Peter Tygert came up to him and touched his shoulder. They said to the officer, “We can’t move forward.”
They picked Herkimer up by the arms.
“I can’t walk, boys.” He swallowed his tears noisily. “There’s still Sillinger up there. With the British regulars there ain’t enough of us. I think we’d better go home.”
He asked first that the live men be assembled and counted. It was a slow business, getting them to their feet and lining them up under the trees. The earth was still steaming from the rain. There was a sick smell of blood from the ravine.
The naming of men took too long. The officers went along the wavering lines, cutting notches in sticks for every ten men. They figured that after Fisscher pulled foot with the Mohawk company there had been about six hundred and fifty concerned in the ambush and battle. Out of them about two hundred were judged able to walk. There were forty more who were not dead. How many had been killed and how many taken prisoner no one could say.
Stretchers were made of coats and poles, and the worst wounded were piled onto them. Those who were not acting as bearers dully reprimed or loaded their guns. They started east.
It seemed a long way to the ravine where the battle had started. It seemed a long time, longer than they could remember, since they had seen it last. It was sunset by the time they reached Oriskany Creek.
From there men were sent ahead to order boats rowed up the Mohawk, to meet the wounded at the ford. The whole army lay down when they reached the ford. They lay in the darkness, along the edge of the sluggish river, until the boats came up. They were apathetic.
Only when the boats arrived did they get onto their feet and help put the wounded men in. Several of them afterwards remembered Herkimer’s face in the light of the fire. He had stopped smoking, though the pipe was still fast in his teeth. He wasn’t saying anything. He sat still, holding on to his knee.
At the time they had just stood around watching him being loaded aboard the boat and laid out in the bottom. Then they had been told to march through the ford, and along the road. They went wearily, too exhausted to talk, even to think. And tired as they were, they were forced to do the same march they had taken three days to make on the way up.
They did not look at the terrified white faces of the people when they came to the settlement. They were too exhausted to see. The word had already gone down the river. People were expecting the appearance of the enemy.
It was a calamity. The army had looked so big going west that nobody had thought they would not get through to the fort. Now they were back; they looked licked, and they acted licked, and they had not even met the regulars. It was pointless to think that the enemy had left the scene of battle before they had.
An officer, some said afterwards that it was Major Clyde, yelled from the foot of the fort stockade that they were dismissed. They were to go home and try to rest while they could. They should expect another summons very soon.
But the men did not stop to listen to him. Ever since they had come out of the woods at Schuyler they had been dropping from the ranks. The instinct to get home was irresistible. They weren’t an army any more, and they knew it better than anyone could have told them.