In the opinion of some people, the winter had been providentially mild; but in another way it had been hard, for after the beginning of February the snow had so far decreased in the woods that the deer no longer yarded. With the steady hunting round German Flats, they had also become wild; and by March most of them seemed to have moved south to the grass flies on the Unadilla tributaries. It often meant a two days’ hunt for even good woodsmen like Joe Boleo and Adam Helmer to pick up one deer.
But to Gil Martin, the problem was more than one of food. He had worked hard and had his logs all cut and ready to roll for the new barn. Now, as the snow went down in the valley, bringing up to the eye the lay of the soil again, he wondered where he would find seed for his fields. There had been no wheat to plant last fall. He would have to find oats and barley. He had none left. During the first months Mrs. McKlennar had bought oats, and wheat and barley flour, not only for herself, but to help the neighborhood. There was no question of her paying Gil’s wages. Such things as wages and money belonged to a former time. But her supply of cash was nearly spent.
It was in Gil’s mind this Monday, the fifteenth of March, to go down to Fort Dayton. He wished that Captain Demooth were back from Schenectady; but failing him, Gil thought he had better talk to Colonel Bellinger.
He stood outside the shed, looking up at the sky. The blue was softer than it had been all winter, and a white cottony tier of cloud hung over the southern hills. Some of the brooks already had opened, loosening a smell of earth.
He said through the open door, “I’m going down to Dayton. I don’t know when I’ll be back. You’ll be here, Adam?”
“Till five o’clock,” said Adam. “I’ve got an errand over to Eldridge’s.”
Lana smiled over his head and Mrs. McKlennar tossed hers. They all knew that Adam was making his play at Mrs. Small. “Her and her red hair,” Adam would say. “And just wasting her time with Jake.” So far he had made no progress.
“I’ll be back,” said Gil.
Whenever he went to Fort Dayton, Gil realized how lucky they were at McKlennar’s. The stamp of hunger was bitten deep into all the people’s faces. You could see it at McKlennar’s, and you could feel it too, in the sharp answers they gave one another. But many of these people looked apathetic, or their eyes were like the eyes of ghosts.
Even Bellinger’s eyes were unnatural. He opened the door of his cabin to confront Gil. He was a big man, and rangy, with a great coarse-cut head on his stooped shoulders. He looked tired.
“Oh, it’s you, Martin. Come in. I’ve company.” His voice was dry. “But he’s about through here. Come in, will you?”
Gil entered.
A man in a brown coat was sitting at Bellinger’s plank table. He had a rather studious face and mild eyes. He didn’t look like a farmer or a soldier; but by the way he folded the papers before him, it seemed to Gil that the man’s soul was filled with a love of writing. For the papers were covered with neat, pointed script, precisely ruled.
Bellinger said tiredly, “Mr. Martin, let me acquaint you with Mr. Francis Collyer. Mr. Collyer has been sent up by the governor at the request of General Clinton.”
Mr. Collyer made a slight bow. He took no interest in Gil, but addressed himself to Bellinger.
“Thank you, Colonel. You’ve given me everything. I’m sorry that I shall be compelled to report as I have told you.”
“That’s all right, sir. It’s your business.”
“Of course, Colonel, I have no idea what action Congress will take in the matter. I merely report. I am leaving you a copy of my summation. You know the figures anyway, as you’ve obligingly supplied them yourself.”
“I don’t give a damn what Congress does,” Bellinger said suddenly. “You can tell the Governor so. Put it in your report, sir.”
Mr. Collyer wisely said no more. He took his leave politely and walked to the fort, where his horse waited for him. Bellinger closed the door on his back. He leaned against it for a moment, staring at Gil. Then he began slowly and wearily to swear.
“I’ve had that gentleman on my hands for a day and a half, Martin. He’s made me feel sick to my stomach. It’s queer how sick to your stomach you can feel when you’re half empty. Oh, he was very polite. A nice quiet gentleman. Mr. Collyer. Sent by Congress! Think of it!” He wiped his mouth and stepped to a stool and sat down. “Listen, you know I took things into my own hands in January and started signing requisitions for food from the army depot at the falls. But, by God, somebody had to do something! I signed the requisitions as on Congress. People had to have flour. I had to keep them. If I hadn’t done it they would have been forced to leave. It was the only wheat in this part of the country. Thank God I got a double requisition yesterday! Just in time.”
He stopped.
Gil asked, “What’s Mr. Collyer?”
“That’s it. What is he? He’s a damned accountant sent up from Albany to look into all my requisitions of wheat. We were very patient together. We visited people. He heard their stories. Then he made a report. There’s the summation. Read it! Read it, will you!”
What Gil read in the precise writing was this:—
Copy of the summation of my report to Governor George Clinton, March 15, at German Flats, Tryon County, State of New York, U. S. A.
(Re requisitions on Army depot at Ellis’s Mills by Col. Peter Bellinger, 4th Company Militia, for wheat for the inhabitants.)
Having thus collected all evidence and made due personal investigations thereof, with the aid of said Col. Bellinger, who was in every way obliging and whom I may say I believe to have acted in the best faith, it is my finding that undue employment of his power has been made by said Col. Bellinger and that from my investigation it is plain that most of the inhabitants drawing said rations were not sufficiently destitute to warrant the use of Continental Army supplies. Respectfully submitted.
FRANCIS COLLYER
Bellinger was regarding Gil with deep-set angry eyes. “I suppose we ought to have been dead to warrant using army food. My God! Can’t they realize that if we don’t stay here, the frontier will automatically drop back to Caughnawaga? Can’t they realize anything?”
Gil had nothing to say.
“I don’t care what they do to me. I’ve pilfered, stolen, robbed the damned Continental army of enough to see us through till April. They can’t hurt me, now. I’ll resign my blasted commission. It won’t make any difference if I do.”
He stared hard at Gil.
“What did you want to see me for?” he asked belligerently. “You aren’t out of food, are you? You haven’t been on rations yet.” Suddenly Bellinger smiled. “Come on. I won’t kill you. Though I’d like to, too.”
Gil felt better.
“Maybe this will kill you, sir. I came down to see where I could get twenty bushels of oats or barley for seed.”
“Oh, my God!” Bellinger burst out laughing. The little cabin rang with his deep voice. “That’s good.” He slapped Gil’s shoulder. “And I’d clean forgot about seed! Christ, what a man!”
“What can we do now?” asked Gil.
Bellinger got up.
“We’ll take some wagons down to the mills. We’ll beat the conscientious Mr. Collyer, who’s going to leave an order with Ellis not to issue any grain except for Continental use. And we’ll take along enough men to make the Continental guard surrender it, too, by God.”
It took them two hours to round up men and wagons, and then the half-starved horses went so slowly through the pawsh of snow that they did not reach the mills until late afternoon. Mr. Collyer had already been there. The sergeant in charge of the mills forbade the entrance of the German Flats men. But the sergeant wasn’t armed, and neither were the guard. They were sitting in the miller’s loft playing a chilly game of cards and drinking beer. Bellinger simply locked them in.
The sergeant watched them with grim eyes.
“What do you dumb-blocks think you’re doing?”
“We’re going to help ourselves to a little oats and barley,” said Colonel Bellinger, returning from the loft. “If we can find any.”
“You’ll catch it plenty if you do,” threatened the sergeant. “I’ll name the bunch of you by name in my report.”
“You’d better explain how you came to be caught like this. Garrison! As your superior officer I ought to have the lot of you court-martialed.”
“Superior bug-buttocks,” said the sergeant.
Bellinger’s shoulders suddenly hunched towards the man.
“What kind of buttocks did you say?”
The sergeant was furious with himself as well as the world for having been caught without a single guard on duty.
“I didn’t name no bug.”
“No? Why not?”
“I wouldn’t insult no bug,” said the sergeant.
The men had forgotten all about the grain and were now crowding the space between the bins to watch. It was too close quarters for them really to see. But even over the roar of the falls and the empty clack of the wheel ratchets, the impact of Bellinger’s fist against the sergeant’s middle was a solemn sound. The man’s wind shot out all beery in the floury atmosphere. His hands went to his middle and his jaw came forward and his eyes swelled directly at Bellinger’s fist. The fist traveled beautifully to meet the jaw. The sergeant straightened, went over backwards flat on his back, bursting a sack of flour in the process, so that a white cloud engulfed him. He lay there, dead to the world. The men yelled suddenly as Bellinger breathed on his knuckles. He turned on them. “Get to work,” he bawled. “And don’t waste any.” He waited till they started to the bins. Then he sat down beside the prostrate sergeant and studied the gradual discoloration of his face until the wagons were loaded.
Gil found him still sitting there when he came to report that they had barreled and sacked almost a hundred and fifty bushels of oats, and thirty bushels of barley, and about ninety of wheat they could store for next fall’s planting.
“Good,” said Bellinger. “We’d better start.” He took from his pocket a written requisition he had prepared before leaving the flats, and with a sharpened bullet filled in “150” and “30” in two blank spaces of his badly formed writing. At the foot of the paper he added: “P.S. 90 Bushels wheat too. PB, Col.” He bent over to slip the sheet into the front of the sergeant’s coat and dusted his hands as he rose. “You know, Martin, I kind of like that fellow now,” he said. “Well, we better get going.”
As they emerged from the door into the late afternoon air, all misty with the spray from the falls and vibrant with the thundering water, they found Mr. Ellis, the miller, anxiously regarding the five wagons.
“The boys tell me you’ve taken oats and barley and some wheat for seed, Peter,” he yelled.
“We took only ninety bushels of wheat,” Bellinger yelled back over the noise of water.
“Where’s the guard?”
“They’re locked up in the loft. I don’t know whether they finished their card game. The sergeant’s busted a bag of flour. But he’s got my receipt.”
“How’d he do that?”
“With his head, Alec.”
The men burst out laughing, but the roar of the falls swallowed their laughter. Ellis’s jaw dropped.
“You did that, Peter?”
“Sure we did. By the way, where did all those oats come from?”
“It was shipped in last week from Stone Arabia, Klock’s, and Fox’s Mills,” bawled the miller. “I was going to mill the wheat to-morrow.” He shook his head as though to clear it of the roar of water. “You’d better take it back, Peter. Honest you’d better. I can fix the sergeant so he won’t say anything.”
“Like hell I’ll take it back.”
“Listen. Don’t be a fool, Peter. Don’t you know they’re collecting supplies all over the valley? They say Clinton will muster the line regiments up here inside of six weeks.” He watched Bellinger swing onto his starved horse, which had been nudging up to the tail of the nearest wagon and snuffing with exalted shivers of its slatty sides. “Listen, Peter. That grain’s for them.”
Bellinger leaned out of his saddle, and stared at Ellis, then wiped spray from his eyes. “Where’s the army heading for?” he shouted.
“I don’t know for sure. Some say they’re going to wipe out the Indians.”
“What Indians?” yelled Bellinger, as the men crowded up to listen.
“The Iroquois.”
“By God,” shouted Bellinger. “How?”
“I don’t know. But you take that wheat back, anyway. There’s going to be five regiments. Maybe a thousand men. You’ll get into bad trouble, Pete.”
A lull in the wind made his words startlingly loud as the roar of the falls was swept north. Bellinger was leaning on the withers of his horse. He seemed to be thinking with his whole body. He looked tired again. All his men, including Gil, watched him. Bellinger lifted his reins. His voice was as resonant as it had been at Oriskany. They all heard it.
“Like hell I’ll take anything back. They can do what they like, Alec. It’s worth it to get seed into the ground.” He moved his horse to the front, regardless of his yelling men.
The men went at the horses with their whips. The wagons lurched and groaned inaudibly and gathered a semblance of speed against the foot of the hill. The miller, watching them leave, thought they looked like animated scarecrows. Not very animated, either. He lifted his hand.
Scattered bits of news that filtered in to German Flats during the next two weeks seemed to confirm the miller’s words. The First New York had gone into garrison at Fort Stanwix and Colonel Van Schaick himself had ridden through to take command. And on Captain Demooth’s return from Schenectady in the first days of April, they learned that a great many bateaux were being built in that town for army use. Demooth said it was no secret that Congress intended an expedition, though where and when it would start, nobody knew.
The people listened to the rumors without much heart. Nothing had ever happened before to lend credulity to such reports. More pressing things occupied them—the spring ploughing and the sowing of the stolen seed. Bellinger was anxious to have it in the ground before a company was sent to reclaim it. He himself waited for court-martial papers to be served on him with a kind of grim fatality, and in the meantime thought of ways to hide the seed until it could be sown. He never was court-martialed. He never found out why not. Probably no one knew.
On the sixth of April, Gil went down with the mare and cart to secure his allotment of seed. He had already had a talk with Bellinger and Demooth, and both officers agreed that he should stay on the McKlennar place. It was the one farm that had a stone house standing that could be defended, and the soil was of the best. The other people had marked off temporary land around the forts, each man with his field to cultivate, to raise communal food. “You’ll understand we’ll expect you to bring your grain into common stock next winter if it’s necessary,” said Bellinger.
On the seventh and eighth of April, Gil sowed the oats. The earth had dried fast and worked easily. All day he marched back and forth over the soft loam while the mare on the other side of the fence watched him wistfully. Poor beast, she had been worked to death on insufficient pasturage, hauling the plough and then the drag, until she could hardly stand. Gil had got Adam down to help, and one or the other had hauled with the mare. At that they were better off than some people who hauled their drags without beasts. Now Adam Helmer was resting on the sunny porch, and the women were down by the river gathering the early marigold leaves for their first green food in months. The baby lay on a shawl in the grass at a corner of the field where Gil could keep his eye on him. The boy looked thin, lately, and seemed dull, for they had been feeding him on meat broth since Lana’s milk had given out, and the cow would not freshen until June. They borrowed a little milk from time to time—enough, Gil thought, to keep the baby from getting too sick. But he was worried that it cried so seldom.
Lana did not seem worried. She was carrying another child; they thought it would be born in August. But she looked older. She had a queer look of frailness above the waist, while her hips and thighs had grown inordinately heavy. She took no interest in anything but food. But Gil hoped that, when they were getting plenty to eat again, she would brighten up.
He was glad that Demooth was back, for that meant that John Weaver could get work. Though his wife had died, Demooth was fixing up the Herter house, of which the stone walls yet stood, and he needed a younger man than Clem Coppernol now to work what farm he had left. The old Dutchman had not wintered well. He had always been a heavy eater and the thin winter had left him sour and difficult and given to unpredictable and dangerous flights of passion. He had nearly killed a horse that had lain down with him from exhaustion. They said he would have beaten it to death if he himself had not collapsed from the exertion of swinging the fence rail.
All these things had bothered Gil like a buzzing in his head, like the sound of bees outside a window on a hot afternoon. A good many others complained of the same buzzing of the head. They thought it might be weakness that made it, or the unaccustomed warmth.
Gil himself did not put much stock in the rumors of a Continental offensive against the Indians and Tories to the west. Not even when he saw an unusually large munition train hauling west to Fort Stanwix on the sixth.
But on the seventh he had forgotten about them. He had started sowing at dawn. At first he had cast badly and unsteadily. Later the old accustomed rhythm had returned to his tired arm. This morning at last he had felt like himself and the seed fell in even sweeps, and by afternoon, with only four bushels of barley left to sow, he had felt his confidence rise.
The women came back with baskets of green leaves, Lana, Mrs. McKlennar, and the negress, walking through the still evening air. He thought Lana looked better. She picked up the baby, slinging it on her hip, and stopped before him.
“Come back,” she said. “You’ve sowed enough to-day.”
“Don’t walk on the seeding,” he said. “I’ve only a little left to do.”
She obediently stepped off the seeding and let him pass. Her eyes brightened to watch the even swing of his arm, hand from the bag, over and round and back, making a sort of figure eight that the grain traced wide in the air and spread, in touching earth, to make an even sheet. To watch it soothed her. It was a familiar gesture, elemental in faith and hope.
She said, “I wonder how they’re fixed for seed at Fox’s Mills.”
“I guess all right,” he said, turning and coming back towards her. “How’s Gilly?”
“I think the sun’s doing him good. I wish he had more flesh on his legs.”
“Where’s Joe, to-day?”
“He was back of the house in the sumacs. He had a spade. I don’t know what he was doing.”
They let Joe Boleo’s activities drop. Then Lana went on to the house. She said over her shoulder, “Daisy’s going to bake a spinach pie with the greens.”
Gil was finishing the last row of the field, at the river-side fence. He thought the buzzing was coming back to his head, but he was tired. He stopped to let his ears clear, letting the last grain trickle through his fingers. After a moment, he turned the bag inside out and shook it. He could not waste a single seed. The field lay square before him, traversed in parallels by his own footprints.
A still clear light lay all across the sky, and a flock of crows traversing the valley from north to south caught rusty flashes from it on their wings. Gil watched them turn their heads to look at the field and wondered whether they felt hungry enough to steal his oats.
Joe Boleo came down the field and said, “Gil. Your wife wants you to come home and rest.”
“I’m resting right here.”
“I figured so. But a woman don’t think a man can rest unless he’s where she can talk at him.”
Winter had not upset Joe. He looked the same—gaunt, stooped, wrinkled, lackadaisical.
“I can’t get the buzzing out of my head, Joe.”
“What buzzing?” Joe was never bothered by buzzings.
“It’s so loud I’d think you could hear it,” said Gil.
Joe pretended to listen.
Suddenly his face tilted.
“By Jesus,” he said soberly, “I do.” He waited a moment. Then he climbed onto the fence and turned his face southeast, across the river. “It ain’t buzzing, Gil,” he said excitedly. “It’s drums. They’re coming up from the falls across the river. Hear them now.”
Gil’s head cleared. He too heard them. He climbed up beside Joe and stared with him through the infinite clearness of the evening air.
“There they come,” said Joe. A file of blue was marching up the road. They saw them, but it was hard to believe.
“They’re going to camp,” said Joe. “They’re falling out in that five-acre lot of Freddy Getman’s.”
Gil could see the drummers with their deep drums drumming beside the single black stud that was all that remained of Getman’s house. Behind them lay the lot. Into it were wheeling a company in blue campaign coats, their muskets all on shoulder. They began to stack arms.
“What are they doing?”
“Taking the fences apart for firewood, I guess.”
Another company with white showing through the blue, white gaiters and white vests, followed the first. Then came a swinging company of men in grayish hunting shirts.
The drums were now a stirring resonance throughout the valley. Adam came loping down the field. He asked excitedly what Joe had made out. “Let’s go over,” he said.
“Sure,” said Joe. “You coming, Gil?”
Gil said he would go home. He didn’t want to leave the place alone. He was tired, too.
The two woodsmen were like two boys. “We’ll come right back and tell you,” they shouted, and piled down to where the boat was fastened. Adam rowed, forcing shiny swirls with the oars, and Joe jerked his fur cap in the stern.
Supper was nearly over when the two men returned, but Daisy had kept a plate hot for each of them. They talked together like boys, both at once, both contradicting.
“There’s a hundred and fifty soldiers,” said Adam. “Two companies. The Fourth New York.”
“No, it’s the Fourth Pennsylvania. The New York Regiment’s the fifth.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Who gives a dang? You ought to’ve gone over, Gil. Their wagons come in right behind them. Remember how we had to wait for our wagons going up to Oriskany? These bezabors were sore as boils because they had to wait for fifteen minutes for the wagons.”
“That ain’t nothing. Do you know what they had for supper?” Joe Boleo’s small eyes blinked.
“No,” said Mrs. McKlennar. “How could we know, you crazy fool?”
“He’s just like a bedbug,” said Adam. “He gets ideas from humins, but they go to his belly. They had fresh pork. Yessir, Mrs. McKlennar. Fresh pork. I et some. And they had white bread. Soft bread. God, this country’s getting luxuries now the army has soft bread.”
“You big blond-headed bug-tit,” said Joe Boleo. “Anybody could have guessed that. What they had, Mrs. McKlennar, ma’am, was white sugar in their tea!” He pursed his lips. “They offered me some tea, and I said yes. And they said how much sugar in it? And I said, well, about two and a half inches of it, with a spoonful of tea. And the son of a gun gave it to me! I brought it home in my shirt.” Chuckling, he drew the cup from inside his shirt and handed it to Mrs. McKlennar.
Mrs. McKlennar began to sniff. She tried twice to speak, and then she said, “Thank you, Joe. I wish we had tea to go with it. But we’ll have it in water. Daisy, boil some water.”
“Yas’m, sholy does. It’s ready bilin’.”
Daisy in her ragged dress fluttered round the table laying the cups. She poured the water from the kettle. With great care Mrs. McKlennar put two teaspoonfuls in each cup. Nobody spoke as they stirred. They all watched her till she lifted her cup. Then they sipped together.
“It surely is a treat,” said Mrs. McKlennar.
Lana suddenly got to her feet.
“I’m going to see if Gilly likes it,” she said. She brought him to the table and sat him on her lap while he stupidly nodded his big head and rubbed his sleepy eyes. They all held their breaths when she put the spoon to his mouth, carefully cooled by her own blowing. He made a face, feebly, then stiffened and was very still. Then he started to cry. Their disappointment was intense.
Lana said defensively, “He’s never tasted any sugar.”
“Don’t be silly,” cried Mrs. McKlennar. “All he wants is more.”
When Lana lifted the spoon again the child opened his mouth eagerly. “See!” cried Mrs. McKlennar. “I told you.”
Everybody felt jubilantly happy.
“Did you find out where they were going?”
“Stanwix,” said Joe and Adam together.
“Just there? There’s two hundred men there already.”
“That’s what they said,” said Adam.
“It’s my idea they’re going to make some kind of pass against Oswego,” said Joe.
“What would they send Rangers for against a fort?” Adam was scornful.
Gil said, “Do you suppose they’re going to go against the Onondagas?”
“By God!” said Joe.
They all remembered what Ellis had said. The Iroquois.
“They’ll need scouts, I’ll bet,” said Adam. Joe met his eye.
“It would be fun going with an army like that and wiping out some Indians,” said Joe quietly. “I always wanted to do some destruction against them.”
He turned to Gil. “If they do, will you come along with us?”
Gil shook his head. Adam said, “You got your planting done, ain’t you? Come on.”
“The womenfolks will be safe enough with an army that size flogging around the woods. You ought to see them. They ain’t like those Massachusetts boys.”
“We ain’t been asked,” said Gil.
“Shucks,” said Joe, blushing, because he had thought of something else to say and barely saved it before women. “You come along. I fixed something for the women in case they should get cut off. It’s a hide-hole. I been working on it for three days.”
“Really?” Mrs. McKlennar was interested. “What is it?”
“Come out,” said Joe. “No, damn it, it’s dark. I’ll show you to-morrow.”
“What’s that, Gil?” Lana had risen.
Adam said soothingly, “That’s just the tattoo, Lana.”
They all went out on the porch with the tattoo of the drums thudding faintly across the valley towards them. It was pitch-dark, but the regularly spaced fires seemed very near.
They stood a long time watching them, in the damp coolness of the night. They saw the sentry figures small and silhouetted. They could even see the stacked rifles.
“They been a long time coming,” said Joe.
Back in the house there was a scraping of silver against china as black Daisy scraped the cups for her own taste of sugar. She was humming softly.
Half an hour after sunrise, young John Weaver galloped into the McKlennar yard, waving a letter for Gil. It was a hasty scrawl from Colonel Bellinger asking Gil, Adam, and Joe to report to him immediately at Fort Dayton. While Gil was reading it, the calling of the robins was hushed by a long roll from the drums across the river. Gil ran round the house. He found Adam and Joe watching the camp. They could see the men breaking away from the fires and rolling their blankets.
“It’s the general,” said Joe. “I’ve heard it before.” He answered Adam’s question scornfully. “Not General Washington, you dumbhead. It just means the army’s going to march.”
Gil gave them Demooth’s orders and the men went into the house together to get their rifles.
Lana confronted them in the doorway.
“Gil!”
“Don’t get worried,” he said.
“Where are you going?”
“Bellinger wants to see us. That’s all.”
“You’re going with the army,” she said accusingly.
Adam interposed awkwardly, “Aw, now, Lana. Nothing can happen to Gil with me and Joe along.”
She looked white and stiff and her arms hung straight at her sides. Gil said to Mrs. McKlennar, “If we do have to go I’ll send John Weaver back. He’ll let you know if you ought to move to the fort.”
Mrs. McKlennar nodded her gray head.
Joe slapped himself. “Lord, ma’am, I’d forgotten clean about it.”
“What, Joe?”
“That hide-hole I made. It’ll only take a minute to show it to you. Come along.”
He led them quickly out into the sunlight and up through the sumac scrub. “You want to come this way, so you won’t leave tracks.”
He stopped a hundred yards up the slope.
“There it is,” he said modestly.
He pointed to a fallen tree whose roots had lifted a great slab of earth.
“I don’t see anything,” said the widow.
Joe beamed. “That’s it. You don’t see nothing. Come here.”
He led the two women to the roots of the tree, round to the trunk, and pointed. There was a small hole in the ground. “Don’t walk out there,” he cautioned them. “That’s just poles laid over with dirt. There’s room inside for the bunch of you. You can drop right down. I made it soft.”
Mrs. McKlennar said, “Thank you, Joe.”
Joe said, “You want to remember the way up here. Go over it in your heads so you could do it at night. I don’t reckon you’ll have to use it, though.”
“I don’t think so.”
“It’s a good thing to have handy, though.”
He went back down the hillside and found Adam and Gil ready and John Weaver mounted. Lana came, still as death, behind Mrs. McKlennar. The men went down to the road and turned and waved. The widow waved back. Then Lana lifted her hand. Her arm looked frail and white in the morning sunlight.
“He might have said good-bye to the baby,” she sobbed.
Mrs. McKlennar put her arm over Lana’s shoulders.
“Don’t say that. He didn’t want to go any more than you wanted him to. That’s why he acted like that.”
Over the river the drums beat out the assembly and the troops began to mass along the fence. A moment later the “march” sounded, and the two women saw the lines gather themselves like a single organism and start moving out on the road. They saw what they had not seen last night, that there was a flag in the middle of the line. They had never seen the flag before. The sight of it, clean and bright, with its stripes and circle of stars, for some reason made them feel like crying.
It appeared that Colonel Van Schaick had requested three guides from Bellinger.
“I don’t know why he won’t take Indians with the Oneidas so close and willing to go. He wanted three white men, he said. I thought of you. He says it will be only three weeks at most.”
“Where does he want us to take him?” Joe asked.
“I don’t know,” said Bellinger. “You’d better start right away. Martin, did you plan for your women to come down here?”
“I think it would be better.”
“It may not be necessary. I’ll have young Weaver stay out there. But I’ll keep an eye on them.” He paused. “Van Schaick’s got the woods covered to the west and I’ll cover the south. And the Oneidas are out. I don’t think there’s any danger with the size army that’s coming.” He shook hands with the three in turn. “You’d better go.”
The three men reached Fort Stanwix the same day, coming out on the bend of the river just before sunset. While they were yet approaching the fort, a small swivel was discharged and the flag fluttered down from the pole over the gate. It was a beautiful flag, silky and shining against the setting sun; but Gil felt that no matter how often he saw this American flag, he would only see the one that had flown from that same pole two years ago, with its botched stripes of uneven thickness, and its peculiarly shaped stars. Then it had stood for something besides the Continental army.
They trotted up to the sally port and announced themselves to the guard as three scouts from Colonel Bellinger. They were at once admitted and taken directly to the officers’ mess. There they found Colonel Goose Van Schaick and his second in command, Major Cochran. The major was well, almost meticulously uniformed; but the colonel was a heavy man with coarse hair turning gray and small calculating eyes, and his collar rode high on his thick neck. He accepted Bellinger’s letter and eyed the three Rangers.
“I don’t want to be asked questions,” he said belligerently. “You’ll stay here, you’ll live with the noncommissioned officers. Now, does any one of you know the woods west of Oneida Lake?” His eyes had unerringly picked Joe, who was leaning his tail against the table and gazing into the fireplace as if it were a wonder of the world. Now he nodded his head.
“Sure,” he said. “I do.”
“How about you two?”
Joe answered: “Gil ain’t a timber beast, but the young lad’s not going to get lost as long as I tell him where to go.”
Adam opened his mouth to roar, but he met the colonel’s eye in time. There was something about the colonel’s eye which quelled him.
The colonel said, “You big ox, if you start fighting around here I’ll have you flogged before the fort. I don’t want to be bothered with yelling louts like you. And just so you’ll know what it would be like, you can go out on the parade to-morrow morning and see what happens when a man gets flogged.”
He turned back to Joe. “Listen you, what’s your name? Boleo. You’re to stay ready to march. You’re to report to me an hour before the first troops start. I’ll tell you where we’re going. Then you’ll pick the route, though I imagine there’s just one way to get there.”
“Sure.” Joe was looking out of the window. “Down Wood Crick and across the lake. You land on the southwest shore, march over to Onondaga Lake, cross the arm—you can wade it. It’s not over four feet deep. Then hit Onondaga Crick and go up. That will bring you to the first town. Jesus, Colonel, I used to play around there as a young lad. You ought to have been out there then.”
The major’s Irish face was a study, but the colonel wasn’t taking the same pleasure in Joe.
“How did you figure that out?” he asked in a steady hard voice.
“Why,” said Joe, innocently, “I ain’t a complete fool or I wouldn’t have been sent here, mister.”
“Did you get that from somebody else?”
“No, we figured it out coming up.”
The colonel grunted. “Keep your mouths shut. You’re sure you can wade over the arm of the lake?”
“If you don’t mind getting wet.”
The colonel stared very hard at Joe. Then he said in cold, level tones, “That’s all. If you want to eat you’d better hurry.”
As they came out onto the parade, the garrison were filing into the mess, and the three men followed them dubiously. These soldiers didn’t look quite natural somehow. They seemed to keep step with a kind of instinct. A corporal came out of the shadow of the officers’ mess and touched Gil’s arm. “You the three scouts?”
“My name’s Zach Harris. You’re to eat with us.” He led them into the mess to a table at which sergeants and corporals ate together. They were greeted friendlily enough and sat down to heaped wooden bowls of beef stew cooked with turnips, tea and sugar, a slab of white bread, and a piece of cheese. The way they ate made the soldiers regard them with curiosity.
“What’s the matter, ain’t you fed all day?”
Adam replied, “We ain’t had a feed like this since last September, Bubby. Does the old man always feed you like this?”
“He’s a dinger to get provisions. But he bears down pretty hard on the discipline. Ever since that Dutchman Steuben came around last year, old Goose has been cock-eyed over discipline. But he can act real nice sometimes.”
“He looks to me as if he could act just about as nice as a wolverine with the bilious complaint,” remarked Adam.
The table roared and the word, going clean round the mess hall, set all the men to laughing. But Corporal Harris’s was a dry grin. “I guess I see why the old man wanted you to watch a flogging, mister.”
The flogging took place an hour after sunrise and just before breakfast. It was one of the colonel’s theories that it made more impression on an empty stomach.
The three Rangers were routed out of bed by Corporal Harris and told to appear on the parade in five minutes. Before they were dressed they heard the drums beating a muster, and as they stepped out into the soft April morning the tap of a single drum came from the guardhouse.
Corporal Harris led them to a position in front of his own company. The entire garrison had been lined up in a hollow square. Set up on the bare beaten earth in the middle of the square was a single post about a foot thick. It made a long shadow towards the guardhouse, and now the tapping of the single drum marked the approach of the culprit along this shadow. He came between two sergeants. He was naked to the waist. He looked neither right nor left, but kept his eyes on the post.
Joe Boleo looked on with an abstracted kind of interest. Adam stood straight. The faces of the soldiers were expressionless as the culprit was taken by the arms, his hands lifted, and two nooses of fine rope passed over the wrists. The rope was then hauled up over a groove in the top of the post until the arms were stretched over the man’s head, and his shoulder blades stood out sharp and his toes barely touched the ground.
The two sergeants then stepped back. The sergeant major of the garrison stepped out from the ranks and the drums beat a short roll. The sergeant general read from a paper:—
“Private Hugh Deyo, Captain Varick’s Company, tried before court-martial and found guilty of stealing a shirt. Sentenced to fifty lashes with the hide whip. April 9th, 1779. To be administered before the entire garrison on parade, by order of Colonel Goose Van Schaick.”
He shifted the paper to read the back. “Captain Wandle’s company.”
“All present or accounted for.”
“Captain Gregg’s company.”
In turn each company was called and answered.
The sergeant major of Varick’s company then stepped forward to the left of the post. He unwrapped the six-foot hide whip from his arm, on which it had been coiled like an inanimate snake, and tossed out the folds in the dust so that they lay flat behind him.
The drums rolled.
“Sergeant, do your duty.”
Adam looked up to see the colonel standing grimly with the officers in the opening through which the prisoner had come.
The whip sang forward and snapped with a preliminary report to one side of the culprit. It snapped a second time and cracked solidly across his back. It made a small puff of dust as it snapped. The man’s body seemed to leap inside itself. A diagonal welt was marked on the skin, with a break between the shoulder blades, but the man made no sound.
The whip cracked again, and the sergeant said aloud, “Two.”
It was beautiful whipping, the second welt appearing a half inch below the first. The welts went down the man’s back in parallels. The man still made no sound. At the count of ten the stripes began to climb again and the first overlay occurred. A little spurt of blood was drawn and trickled slowly into the hollow of his back, which looked tight and cupped, to receive it. It went down inside his pants.
Gil could not take his eyes off the man. He saw him duck his head against his arm and bite it. He still made no sound. But at the fifteenth stripe he gave way and yelled for the first time. Then with a pathetic stiffening of the back he kept silent for three more strokes, and then he broke down, and at last Gil managed to tear his eyes away.
He could hear only the whip stroke, the yell, and the stolid counting of the sergeant’s voice. When finally it was over the man hung against the post, quite still, but with a palpable throbbing all along his back, which now had puffed and dripped slowly all along the line of his belt.
The flies, which had been buzzing round and round the post throughout the punishment, darted in several times, and then lit delicately. The drums beat. It was over. The companies filed in to breakfast.
As they went the sentry hailed from the gate, and it was opened to admit four Indians. But Gil did not look at them. If he had, he would have recognized two—the sachem, Skenandoa, the old man who had been Herkimer’s friend and who had come to the American camp before Oriskany, and Blue Back.
Blue Back was feeling pretty big these days, for he had succeeded to a sachemship with the title Kahnyadaghshayen, which, in English, meant “Easy Throat.” But he still continued his enlightened habits of thought, for he did not wear a blanket like the other three Indians. Instead, he wore a British campaign coat. If the gold braid was somewhat tarnished, the scarlet was redeemingly bright. It was much too tight across the back, which made it uncomfortable to wear, because it bound under the arms and made the lice go down into his leggings. But it did look well with the peacock’s feather, which he wore over his right eye. His wife had made a tricorn of his old hat, and as far as Blue Back could see, he was just as handsome as a major general. As he entered the fort, he was convinced that Colonel Van Schaick would hire him to guide the expedition, wherever it might be going, for forty cents a day, though he had made up his mind to accept twenty, so long as he was offered a full rum ration.
It gave him a genuine shock to see Gil Martin. For one frenzied instant he planned to run back through the gate; but as soon as he observed that Gil had not seen him, he took the feather surreptitiously out of his hat and hid it inside his coat. He didn’t feel quite so important, but he felt a lot safer. With the other three Indians, he stopped for a moment to stare at the flogged soldier, wondering inwardly why they had not burned him also.
A sergeant came up to lead them into the colonel’s office, where they all sat down on benches and accepted tobacco, while Skenandoa announced their names; and none of them looked at the colonel. None of them knew what to make of the colonel; he wasn’t like Gansevoort or Willett, and they were a little afraid of him. He had a patience like their own; but it was cold patience in which they felt no courtesy.
Finally Skenandoa remarked that his young men had seen a big army coming west through Dayton. Was it so? Or had their eyes been deceived?
It was so, said Colonel Van Schaick.
So many men must be going on an expedition.
As to that, the colonel did not know. There were no orders. It would probably mean no more than a change of garrison.
Skenandoa looked crafty. That was too bad, because his young men had all come to the fort to offer themselves as guides and scouts. He had sixty young men and three sachems to keep them in order.
The colonel allowed that it was too bad. There was nothing for them to do unless they made an expedition of their own. He wished he had someone to send to Oswegatchie. He would pay five kegs of rum for the destruction of that place. But he had no men of his own to send.
Skenandoa still looked crafty. His men were very young. Maybe the colonel could send two officers to show them how to act.
Colonel Van Schaick thought for a moment. Very well, he had two. When would the Oneidas want to start?
In a week.
Very well, it would be seen to. The great Lieutenant McClellan and the Ensign Hardenberg would go. He called in the two young officers and introduced them and ordered them to report to Skenandoa in the Oneida camp on the seventeenth, equipped for a three weeks’ march. The Indians grunted and ceremoniously departed.
“Sorry,” said the colonel to the two young officers. “We’ve got to get them out of here before they get the wind up about the expedition. I’m telling you in confidence, we’re to wipe out the Onondagas. If they knew it, the Oneidas might give it away.”
Blue Back, passing through the parade, saw his three white acquaintances emerge from the mess. “How?” he said to Martin, and “How?” to each of the others.
Joe said, “You’re looking fine, Blue Back.”
“I fine,” said Blue Back, grinning. “How?” He beamed.
“We’re fine.”
“Fine,” said Blue Back.
“Come and have a drink.”
Blue Back hesitated. His fat face was sorrowful.
“Neah,” he said. “No drink. Go home. Go make expedition.” That was a new word. Sadly he went out through the gate after his companions.
When Blue Back got home to his new house in Oneida Castle, he lay down on his skins on the floor. His wife found him there when she came in bearing a heavy faggot of firewood. His wife was still pretty and young-looking, though she was big with an expected addition to the family, which now, to old Blue Back’s continuing amazement, already amounted to two children. The eldest he had driven out to play with the other neighboring children. The youngest, still on her board, he had hung on the peg beside the door. So when his wife returned, she knew at once that Blue Back was engrossed either in sorrow or in deep thought.
She immediately brought up the fire and put on a dish of stew. And then she did what he always adored—stripped him and began picking him over for bugs.
Old Blue Back liked to feel her hard cool fingers going over his stout body. He liked the way her braids fell over her shoulders and tickled along the temple of his upstanding belly. She was infinitely proud of him and proud too of the way he was proving fertile. She even boasted about him to the women. Where was another man of her husband’s age that could get two children like that? And now another coming ten months after the second! She knew young warriors from their first successful warpath that didn’t produce as masterfully as that. It must be his belly, they said. Other old men lost their bellies, or they became round and hard like a walnut with shriveled meat, and rattled continually; but Blue Back had a stomach like Ganadadele, the steep hill. Truly, thought his wife, it was a wonderful thing, and her pride and duty to keep it so. She left him for the moment to fetch the meat, wishing that it might be autumn so that she could fill him with new beans.
When the two officers appeared in the Indian town, they brought a keg of rum, which restored some of Blue Back’s confidence and made the other sachems feel quite sure that what the officers said was true. Apparently, the new troops under Colonel Willett were to take over the fort, but for the time being both armies were remaining in garrison. The weather had turned cold, said the officers, and there was no point in marching back down the valley in cold weather. One could even see snowflakes falling beyond the door of the house. It was so.
However, being active men, they themselves were eager to join their Oneida brothers on a warpath. And the next morning, since the sun shone again, the sachems called up the young men. There were sixty of them, painted for war. Dressed in their best beadings, they made an imposing array among the small houses and lodges, and they set up a great yelling as they marched off into the woods, with the Indian wives following at the proper distance.
Inside the first woods, the men all took off their best clothes, leaving them in bundles for the women to take back. They painted a couple of trees, and set out. Blue Back left his red coat and put on his greasy old hunting shirt. He did not feel much like marching through the dripping April countryside; he felt vaguely uneasy. As he sobered, it occurred to him that Colonel Van Schaick was an artful man. Suddenly he did not believe anything of all the things that had been said. He decided that he would drop off by himself and see whether the troops were actually remaining in garrison.
He came out on the vale in which Fort Stanwix stood on the evening of the eighteenth, and beheld a sight that confirmed his suspicions.
Large squashy flakes of snow, falling steadily, made it hard for him to see what the soldiers were hauling west from the fort into the woods. Blue Back scouted round through the tamaracks and lay down beside the road St. Leger had constructed two years ago. One of the wagons came groaning by close enough for him to see that it carried two bateaux. After it had passed, he followed it all the way to the shore of Wood Creek.
There he found thirty soldiers encamped as guards for a great number of boats tied up to trees. He listened to the men’s conversation, but they made so much noise that he could understand little of it. Mostly it seemed to have to do with women and the new rum, which they did not think highly of.
After a while, Blue Back withdrew into the woods and built himself a bark shed and lit a small fire. He stayed there all that night. In the morning he went back to the fort and saw the troops marshaling outside the glacis, and a couple of wagons hauling food towards Wood Creek.
Blue Back’s round face grew rounder with thought. If the army were really going to travel, they would normally have been glad of Indian guides. If they had elaborately sent off the Indians towards Oswegatchie and paid rum in advance, it meant that they did not wish Indians. If they did not wish Indians, it was because they did not wish Indians to know what they were going to do. Even Blue Back knew enough to realize that there was just one objective against which such an army would move—the Onondaga towns.
Though the Onondagas had claimed to be neutrals, Blue Back was aware that the Americans thought the Onondagas had done some raiding of their own. He knew himself that they had taken Caldwell down against Little Stone Arabia. Skenandoa had remonstrated with them about it. They had refused to take warning. They were having all the fun of raiding with little risk of retaliation. Now they were going to be raided by the Continentals.
Blue Back didn’t care about that; but what he did care about was the indubitable fact that the Onondagas would claim that the Oneidas had told on them, and would therefore still more indubitably bring the hostile western nations down on the Oneidas. He decided that there was just one thing for him to do, and without wasting another minute he started jogging west towards Wood Creek.
His belly bounced a little at first, but gradually he got the wind out of himself and by the time he reached the shore of the creek he was making good time.
He circled the landing, taking note that no bateaux had yet started, and set off along the bank. He was relieved to see how full of drift the creek was. Bateaux drew so much water that the men would take a full day getting them down to the lake. By that time he himself should have found a canoe and got far across the lake.
He found a small canoe well hidden in a growth of young balsam, turned it over, and found two paddles in it. He picked it up easily and carried it to the water. He sighed with satisfaction when he got in and picked up a paddle and shot off with the roily current.
He looked enormous in the canoe, like some kind of brown frog, corpulent with May flies. But his arms were strong and the canoe handled like a leaf under his earnest paddling. The sweat came out on his brown face, and he took his hat off, showing his braided lock held in shape with a red, lady’s shoelace. Before midafternoon he came out into Oneida Lake to meet a rising west wind, and he skirted the southern shore. He paddled all afternoon and evening, making heavy weather of it, and having to land every hour or so to drain the canoe.
Along towards midnight, however, having been compelled to go ashore for the second time in an hour, he decided that he had enough of a lead on the army, and he lay down under his canoe and slept. The snow formed a white backbone on his canoe and dripped off on either side of him as he lay, but neither the cold nor the wet disturbed him.
He was awakened at dawn by the screaming of gulls. The wind was still in the west, but lighter; and the waves had a brittle slap along the sand. It was a clear day with a mild sun that only intermittently could be felt through the wind. The lake was a cool dark blue, and the sky, still shadowed in the west, had a rim of brightness all round the horizon. It looked to Blue Back like a regular rain-making day. He turned his attention to the gulls, which were streaming past him in groups of two and three, great white birds, with the sunlight golden on their underwings. Off to the east a flock of them had collected and were wheeling and rising and swooping like enormous snowflakes.
For some time Blue Back studied them. He stood on the beach, the wind flapping the edges of his hunting shirt, his hat tilted back on his head and his belly feeling as empty as the windy sky. Slowly an expression of the purest surprise came over his brown face. He put his hand to his mouth, then took it away and plodded back up the shore for his canoe. It was sodden and heavy with snow, but he swung it over his head in his haste as if it were a brand-new one. His bowlegs trotted under it; he gave a grunt and heaved it off his shoulders and tossed it into the water, sprang in, and made two strokes standing—still looking back towards the east. Then he sat down and paddled, striking out across the bay called Prosser’s, and heading straight into the wind for the Onondaga landing.
He could scarcely believe what he had seen, though he knew his eyes were good. They were unmistakably bateaux, about thirty of them, he thought. They would be carrying about five hundred men. Even at that distance he had been able to make out the blue coats in some of them. And the boats were all close together, though they must have rowed all night to have come so far. Who had ever heard of an army of that size traveling so quickly?
Blue Back felt a little quiver far under his fat at the root of his backbone. Those soldiers weren’t going to do anything to the Oneidas, but it made him uneasy to think that they could move about the country with that speed. He kept the bow of his canoe straight in the wind and paddled hard, hoping that he had not been seen. He knew that he could paddle away from them. But he had figured on having a day or two to break the news.
A couple of gulls started following him and squalling, but luckily the main flock were too interested in the flotilla to be attracted to him, and little by little the canoe drew ahead until it was safely out of sight.
Blue Back did not land at the landing, but a half mile to the east of it. He hid his canoe a good hundred yards up the shore, before starting his stout trot for the Onondaga Castle.
He reached it, fairly tired out, before dark, and helped himself to a good meal before he delivered his news. The largest part of the Onondaga fighting force was in the west, supposedly to meet Colonel John Butler somewhere beyond the Genesee. There were only a few men left in any of the villages, he was informed, and they were mostly older men, or boys. When he told the men that there were five hundred soldiers coming against them, they decided that they must move at once, and started sending out runners to the surrounding villages. They planned to move in the morning. They appeared to feel perfectly friendly towards Blue Back and offered him a bed in one of the best houses.
He was glad to accept, and slept heavily all night; but next day his uneasiness recurred to him. The approaching invasion had nothing directly to do with him; it was rather the sight of all these people starting out into the west that troubled his mind. They were very quiet. Even the multitudinous dogs did not bark. The main town, in which he was, boasted fourteen horses, and these were all loaded to the limit of their capacity until their half-starved, beaten bodies were almost lost to view. The women carried their babies, their seeds, and bundles of their finery, as much as they could manage. Even the little girls were given each a bundle or basket. And nobody said good-bye to Blue Back. They moved off in single file into the southwest to strike the Iroquois trail, a hundred souls of them, without a house to go to.
When he started looking into the empty houses, it made him sad to see how much they had been forced to leave. Green pelts, the larger household dishes—unexpectedly his probing finger found a pouch of wampum beads. His face looked singularly thoughtful as he transferred the pouch from its hiding place to his belt. But there were so many things left. In the council houses were a lot of oldish muskets which Blue Back carefully went over to see whether there was one better than his.
It was well on in the morning before he gave up his investigation of the deserted town and wandered off into the woods. He stopped for an instant to look back on the empty silent houses, most of them with bark roofs, some beautifully rounded in the old Iroquois fashion that the fathers used to know, all scattered any which way in the woods, with the long council house standing alone.
In that council house had burned once the council fire that made the Six Nations a great and undivided race. “Onenh wakalighwakayonne. Now it has become old; now there is nothing but wilderness. You are in your graves; you who established it.” The words entered Blue Back’s mind, the beginning of the great hymn. He had not thought of them for a long time. They went through his brain like a lost bird crossing the sky. He lifted his eyes and beheld rain clouds driving down from the northwest.
The old Indian, in his dirty shirt and his dirty moccasins and his limp, leaf-stained hat, shuffled indolently into the underbrush. A patch of bloodroot bloomed like the whitest snow, and among them his feet made no sound.
So, suddenly, he heard to the southeast the report of several rifles, irregular, distinct, but tiny thuds of sound.
It had been Blue Back’s plan to return to his home before the troops arrived; but now he realized that they must have marched overland from Oneida Lake with far greater rapidity than he had counted on. They were already cutting into the outlying villages, between him and the home trail.
He drifted uneasily up on a low hill from which he could see out over the forest tops. The drizzle had already begun, driving through the stems of the trees and striking him in waves of wet. Four miles south and east a vast cloud of dark smoke was tumbling skyward. Blue Back wondered whether the people had moved away in time. A great curiosity laid hold of him to find out how the army would act. There had been shooting.
He hesitated for only a few minutes; then, like a fat brown shadow in the gray spring woods, he began to move towards the smoke. And in half an hour he had picked up the bluecoat company, led by a detachment of Rangers, coming towards him among the trees.
It was Blue Back’s first sight of the Morgan Rangers. He did not like their looks. He could tell by their faces that they would pot an Indian as quick as a rabbit. They would not be troubled to find out what nation he belonged to. He sank down into the scrub, watching them pass with beady eyes.…
For two days, Blue Back dogged the army in the rain, watching everything they did. He saw them burn the old towns, loot the houses, taking very little. He saw them casting muskets into the hottest fire. He saw the store of Indian gunpowder exploded in the main town and the council house curl apart, hissing under the raindrops, and fall in a mass of sparks. He saw a lone returning dog, a white dog, looking for food, shot in the head and swung into the fire by its tail. He saw squads of men sticking pigs with their bayonets and roasting them in the ashes of the burning houses.
The troops did everything systematically and quietly. It was not like an Indian raid. It was done with a cold-blooded calculation that overlooked no ear of corn.
On the morning of the second day, Blue Back picked up a small detachment that had surprised the one village in which Indians yet remained. They had rounded up fifteen women and brought them as prisoners, a silent, sullen, hopeless group, wet, shivering, mishandled. Later he found the remains of the village; and here he came upon signs that the discipline had not been observed. There were a few men lying about the open ground, unscalped for the most part. And there were women, some of them half naked. He was not much interested in the dead women until he happened to notice one in the bushes beyond the town. She was lying under a low-growing hemlock, on the soft needles, where it was yet quite dry. She had been hit on the head and was dying. She was quite naked. She was a young woman. Her tangled hair was long and black. She made no sound at all and did not move except for the very slow and painful heaving of her breast.
The old Indian did not let her see him; but he waited near by, dog-like, until she was dead. Then he beat around the town looking at the other dead women. Almost all of them were young.
The army camped that night on the site of the old town with great roaring fires. The officers had a long lean-to set up on a rise of ground. Blue Back, who hung on the outside of the pickets, could see everything they did. He recognized Colonel Van Schaick entering notes in a small book with the feather of a bird and receiving reports from the other officers. He also recognized Colonel Marinus Willett by his huge nose and slab-sided ruddy cheeks. He saw Joe Boleo and Adam Helmer come into the light of the officers’ fire to be questioned. He understood enough of what they said to realize that all the towns had been burned and that the army would start its return march on the next morning.
One by one, captains and lieutenants made their reports. When the last one had spoken, Colonel Van Schaick turned to Colonel Willett.
“We’ve not lost a man,” he said with satisfaction. “How’s that for a record? Ninety-odd miles into the Indian country, a nation destroyed, no casualties. By the Lord, I’m proud of you all!”
Everyone seemed pleased. Only Willett spoke through his great nose.
“I’d like to know where all the Indians went to, Goose. I’d like to know who warned them. Somebody did, you know.”
“I’m just as glad,” said Van Schaick. “We’ve given them a lesson and we’ve committed no atrocities. I’m proud of you all. It ought to have the effect we hoped for.”
“What effect, Goose?”
“Why, it practically guarantees safety to the western settlements.”
Next morning Blue Back stayed only long enough to make sure that the army had started back towards their bateaux on Oneida Lake before cutting off on his own path to find his canoe. He was well ahead of the army when he reached the lake, and he launched his canoe without being noticed by the boat guard.
Two days later he was back in his own house, talking to Skenandoa and eating a hot meal. The ancient sachem was as upset as Blue Back himself. He said he would have liked to protest to Van Schaick at once over the expedition, but to do that would be to acknowledge that the Onondagas had been warned by one of the Oneidas. When they considered everything that Blue Back had seen, they decided it would be dangerous to let the colonel know. They felt singularly helpless. They decided to wait until the news became general and then to demand army protection against the western nations and the British.
After Skenandoa had left, Blue Back’s wife combed out his hair and pampered him in his favorite ways. She was immensely proud of him; but at the same time she was disturbed by his persistent staring at her. She did not know that he was wondering whether a white man would consider her young enough, or pretty enough. He felt that he no longer comprehended white men.
Colonel Van Schaick was doing the talking. He stood up before the three men, now that he had shaken their hands in turn—Joe Boleo, Adam Helmer, and Gil. On one side Major Cochran looked on with obvious pleasure. On the other Colonel Willett was preternaturally solemn. But when Adam’s restless eye met his, the yellow-haired giant felt like laughing out loud. Willett’s right eyelid was perceptibly fluttering.
“I am obliged to you three men,” said Colonel Van Schaick. “You have done a splendid job for me. For the whole army. I flatter myself the whole army has done a splendid job, but it would have been impossible without such sure guides. You will now return to your homes, and you will kindly convey to Colonel Bellinger my gratitude for having sent me three such excellent men. Tell him I shall write him personally as soon as pressure of duty permits. Here’s your pay. I thank you.”
To each man he handed a slip of white paper neatly inscribed, except where his own pigeon-track writing wandered through the letters of his name. The two woodsmen, neither of whom could read, were too dumbfounded to speak. They held the papers in their big hands gingerly and merely stared. Gil tugged them by the sleeves. They followed him out, heads bare.
Joe muttered, “It’s like church.”
“Shut up,” said Gil. Adam burst out laughing. Then they heard a chuckle behind them and found that Marinus Willett had come after them. “You did a good job, boys,” he said. “I want to remember you.” He shook hands, the way Van Schaick had, but he seemed like somebody a man could talk back to. His big erect shoulders had none of this new drill-masterish stiffness. “I don’t know how much good the expedition did, but we did all there was to do.”
Joe looked sober. “Those Onondagas will holler like cats with their tails in traps.”
Willett nodded.
“I hope they’ll only howl.”
He nodded his head to them and went away to his own quarters. The three men walked out through the gate. As soon as they were out of hearing, Adam demanded, “What’s this paper anyway? It ain’t money.”
“I’ll read you mine,” said Gil. “They’re all the same.”
By Goose Van Schaick, Esquire, Colonel,
the First Regiment, the New York Line.
TO GILBERT MARTIN & GREETING—
You are hereby authorized to impress for your own use as a return for your services in this regiment in the service of the United States, 3 bushels of wheat from any Person whom Col. Peter Bellinger, Esquire, shall deem can conveniently spare the same & whose name shall by him be endorsed on this warrant.
Given under my hand at Fort Stanwix
this twenty-fifth day of April 1779
GOOSE VAN SCHAICK, COL.
“Well, for God’s sake!” said Adam. “Who’s got three bushel of wheat in German Flats anyway?”
“Shut up, can’t you? Always yelling. Look, Gil, does mine say, ‘Joe Boleo and Greeting’ on it?”
“Yes, it does.”
“Show me where.”
Gil showed him.
“Well, I’ll be God damned. Boleo and Greeting.”
“Yes, but what good’s this thing to me?” demanded Adam. “It ain’t money, it ain’t likker, and there isn’t any wheat.”
“Oh, give it to your girl for dinner,” growled Joe, lengthening his stride to pull ahead of them.
“Listen, Gil. Maybe you’d like to buy my paper, hey?”
“I haven’t any money,” Gil said, with a laugh.
“Well, how am I going to get paid, then?”
“I don’t know. You can ask Bellinger.”
The road wound out of the grass into the woods. Joe Boleo shambled along in the lead. He didn’t act anxious for company. He was bent way over, his lean shoulders hanging and his wrinkled face absorbed. When the other two got in hearing of him, he was muttering, “Joe Boleo and Greeting. By God! Joe Boleo and Greeting.…”
The three reported to Bellinger at Fort Dayton and were given supper there. Men crowded round Bellinger’s cabin to hear the news of the expedition, and to many of them it seemed—now that Congress had decided to act—that the end of the war could not be far away. They started discussing the feasibility of rebuilding on the sites of their old farms. Some regretted that they had sown their spring seed in borrowed land.
Bellinger told Gil that the women had remained at McKlennar’s, for there had not been a single alarm throughout the valley. It was now generally admitted that a powerful campaign was going to be carried on against the Iroquois that summer. Quartermasters were scouring the valley for supplies. In Schenectady they were constructing numberless bateaux. It was believed that one wing of the army would muster at Canajoharie within six weeks. James Clinton was the brigadier appointed to command it—fifteen hundred men. But that was only the wing. The main army would muster in Pennsylvania and come up the Susquehanna. The expedition Gil had just returned from was no more than a preliminary demonstration.
As he walked down the road from the fort after dark, Gil felt a strange sense of peace. The air had turned warm on a southerly wind. It was damp, and it felt like more rain; but a rain from the south would be a growing rain. He was walking alone, for Joe had accepted an invitation to drink, and Adam, having caught sight of Polly Bowers at the corner of the fort, had been overwhelmed with the desire to describe the Indian country to her. Gil was glad to be alone, just then.
The house was quite dark. Either they had gone to bed or they had closed the blinds. He thought that perhaps in a few months it would be safe for people to burn candles in their houses once more, without darkening the windows.
He was startled when a dog rushed barking down the slope. Then he realized that John Weaver must be staying at the farm and he whistled to the dog. The dog recognized him and jumped about his legs, and the next moment the door opened and Lana was pushing her way past John. “It’s Gil. I know it’s Gil. Let me out,” she was saying.
He jumped up the porch steps and put his arms round her. She was whispering, “I was sure you were coming home to-night. I knew it, Gil, but they wouldn’t believe me.”
He pulled her through the door and they walked together into the kitchen, where Daisy was holding a splinter to the coals and blowing through her thick lips at it. It took only a moment to get the light. It was good to be home, to see women’s faces, people he loved. He shook John’s hand. John said, “We heard you’d gone against the Indians.”
“Yes,” said Gil, “we burned the towns. We took some prisoners, but the men were mostly away. It wasn’t much but marching.”
John’s face colored.
“Now you’re back,” he said, “maybe it would be all right for me to get on home.”
“Yes, yes, go ahead, John. And thank you for all you’ve done.” Mrs. McKlennar grinned at his retreating back. “I keep forgetting John’s a married man.”
They sat down together while John whistled to his dog and set out for Fort Dayton.
“You look healthy,” observed Mrs. McKlennar.
“I’m fine,” said Gil. He felt Lana pressing his hand under cover of her petticoat. “How have you all been? How’s Gilly?”
“Everything’s been fine.”
“How’s the cow?”
“She freshened day before yesterday. She’s in good shape,” said Mrs. McKlennar.
“What was it?”
Lana smiled.
“A heifer. A nice one. Brown and white.”
“That’s fine.” It was better than fine. It would have been tragic if the cow had dropped a bull calf. With the few remaining cows in German Flats one bull was enough for service for the entire district.
The next evening at sundown the army came from the west, a long line of bateaux rowing steadily down the river. They camped on Getman’s farm, and in the morning they continued for the east. Two days later their munition wagons hauled through with a company for escort. The commanding officer brought an order to Colonel Bellinger demanding levies to fill out one squad, and the militia was mustered and lots drawn.
Gil was miserable with the dread of having to leave the farm again; but he did not draw a long straw; and he was able then to feel sorry that young John Weaver was one of the unlucky ones. He could see Mary’s face, thin and tragic; and he thought of how Lana would have looked if John’s bad luck had happened to him. He tried to cheer John, telling him that he would draw pay for the three months and get a campaign coat, but John only nodded. He had almost an hour to see if he could buy himself off, but having no money to trade with, he was unable to interest anyone else.
He went to see Demooth about it. The captain said he would get Mary for his housekeeper, so that at least she should be taken care of. John marched at sunrise.
In May, having planted his corn and squash and pumpkins, Gil finished the barn roof. It was a great day on the farm. Mrs. McKlennar got out a bottle of Madeira, the last she had, and they drank it together.
Then in June the news came that the army was mustering at Canajoharie. They would have been slow to believe it had not Mary Weaver had a letter from John. She brought it up to McKlennar’s to have it read, and Mrs. McKlennar read it aloud to them all. John wrote badly, but his letter was confirmation of the report.
Dear wife Mary I am now at CONJHARY I am in Col Willets regiment Cap bleeckers comp. Hav a new blew cote am well Nothing remarkabel has happened we have 1500 men, & Pars rifle comp, They say we will merch for Springfeld nex Satday the 19 i think I think of you Mary & wonder if you have found out you are to have a baby yet I send my love with this and also beg you will give love to ma and Cobus
Your husband, recpectfully,
JOHN WEAVER
There was a silence in the kitchen after Mrs. McKlennar finished. They could hear outside a man far away whetting his scythe, and across the river Casler shouting to his team as he brought in logs for his cabin. Casler was rebuilding.
“It’s a good, manly letter, Mary,” said Mrs. McKlennar.
“Yes,” the girl gave a sort of gasp. She reached out for the letter and folded it over and over and stuck it inside her dress. She seemed to be ready to cry. Gil went outdoors. It was no place for a man. He drove down to the hayfield with the mare and cart.
When the bumping and creaking had died away, Mary looked up at Mrs. McKlennar and blushed painfully.
“Colonel Bellinger said he had to send an express down to-morrow and I could send a letter, but I can’t write.”
“Would you like me to write for you?”
“Yes. Please. John’s mother can’t write either, and I couldn’t ask anyone else.”
Mrs. McKlennar snorted softly as she fetched her desk and ink. She sat down again opposite Mary with the desk on her knees, and dipped the quill.
“Now what would you like to tell him? You just say it and I’ll write it down.”
“Dear husband John—” and then, appalled, she listened to the scratching of the quill and saw Mrs. McKlennar’s capable wrist arching along the paper, and she burst into a flood of tears.
“Now, now, child. You mustn’t act like that. Remember that he’s probably homesick and wants this letter more than anything in the world.”
“I can’t do it. I can’t. I don’t know how,” wailed Mary.
“Well, what do you want to tell him? He’s anxious, you know.”
“Yes, he was worried about it. About me having a baby. He didn’t know how we could buy flannel for it. His mother doesn’t think I could ever be a good breast feeder and we’ve got no cow.”
“Well, dear, are you going to have a baby?”
Mary shook her head. Her face crimsoned, and suddenly she covered it with her hands.
“Then tell him.” Mrs. McKlennar drew herself up, without being aware of it, and looked formidable. “Just imagine I’m John and say it to me.”
With an effort Mary governed herself. “I’ll try.”
DEAR HUSBAND JOHN,
I am well and I hope you are really well. I am not going to have the baby now but will surely some day. I am sure I could feed a baby even though your mother thinks not. She is well and so is Cobus. I am keeping house for Capt Demooth and he is nice to me but it is not nice to cook for him like cooking for you. I think of you every night and do you think of me? It is my hope to see you home safe soon. I pray for you, and that is my prayer.
Your loving wife …
“Would you say ‘Mary Weaver,’ or just ‘Mary’?”
Her breast was rising and falling as if she had run.
“I would say just ‘Mary,’ I think, myself, though the other is dignified.”
“I think John would like ‘Mary Weaver’ best.”
Mrs. McKlennar wrote “Mary Weaver.”
They did not hear from John again, except through general news of the movement of the army. On the twenty-third the word came by an express to Colonel Van Schaick at Fort Stanwix that the army was not to march west through the Mohawk Valley, as many people hoped, but to join Major General Sullivan’s huge corps at Tioga. Clinton had already started his first troops south from Canajoharie and was hauling bateaux overland to the head of Otsego Lake.
The same express coming east again the following day reported to Colonel Bellinger that Oneida Indians had brought news to Fort Stanwix that John Butler was taking an army up the Genesee, planning to cross above the Indian Lakes and mobilize the Indians at Tioga. That John Butler not only knew of the American rendezvous but knew the names of all regiments and the numbers of men contained in them. As proof, the Indian named what he could remember, and his figures were correct. That was how Peter Bellinger was first informed of the numbers and personnel of the southern army, and that was how the people of German Flats first heard of it—information supplied by their own spies from observations of the British.
Five thousand men would move against the Iroquois, with cannon and Morgan’s rifle regiment, and four states supplying the infantry. It was an impressive thing to think of. To people like Demooth, and Gil Martin, and Bellinger, came the first realization that there was a power in their own country, the country that had been made theirs. A power beyond the unlimited muddleheadedness of Yankee politicians.
They felt that now they would be safe from the Indians as long as that army was campaigning in the wilderness. The whole settlement breathed easier. The women went out on the haying parties, and the last of the hay was brought in with a rush. Gil Martin abandoned his first plan of stacking his hay in small lots hidden in the near-by woodland and stacked it all against the barn. The sight of the new barn, and the high mound of hay which Lana had thatched, working in the cool of the late afternoon, was an emblem of their new security.
Towards the middle of July, Joe Boleo and Adam Helmer returned from a scout to the southeast and reported having been all the way to Otsego Lake to see the army.
“We got down beyond Butternuts and there was a lot of Indian signs heading east, and we figured they was watching the army, so we thought we might as well get a look at it ourselves.”
Adam bubbled over with descriptions of the tents, the boats. “They’ve dammed up the entire lake,” he said. “And when they start they’ll bust the dam and have four foot of water to float their boats downriver.” They had seen the execution of two Tory spies and listened to a sermon by the Reverend Mr. Kirkland and had a drink with Marinus Willett, who wanted them to serve with him as scouts. “Joe figured the rum wouldn’t hold out as far as Chinisee,” Adam explained, “so we didn’t go.”
“I wanted to see what fifteen hundred men looked like, all together,” Joe said. “I didn’t want to make it bigger than it was, though. Somebody would have had to go without his rations.”
Bellinger was thankful that they hadn’t gone. He gave them each a present of liquor and a little cash, and after Adam had spent one more fruitless day with Betsey Small, he and Joe went into the woods again.
Then people heard that the army had set off. They heard it in the prayer of Reverend Rozencrantz, who gave credit to Rimer Van Sickler, who had returned from Otsego. He was one of the levies taken at the same time as John Weaver. He turned up in church and listened to himself being quoted by the domine, and explained to his friends that he had come back to finish his barn. He figured that the army under Clinton could do just about as well with one less man, but that he himself couldn’t get along without a barn next winter. And all it needed was the roofing of one bent, if a log barn could be said to have a bent. It would take him only three days. He said the army had made him lame in the left foot. On Monday he got cheerfully to work. On Tuesday he had finished the roof. He told Bellinger that even if he was a deserter and got taken for it, it was worth more than the regular thirty-dollar fine to roof his barn.
On the night of the twenty-fourth, Lana was restless. She was suffering continually from pains in her legs, and therefore she heard the gallop along the road in time to wake Gil. They sat up side by side in the dark, hearing the furious thudding swell towards them through the night, pass, and die rapidly away.
They got up and went out onto the porch, searching the night instinctively for fires. Mrs. McKlennar woke and came out to join them with an old red coat drawn over her nightdress. They held their breath to listen, but heard nothing except the whimper of the whippoorwills in the wheatfield.
For a while they thought it must have been an ordinary express, though expresses seldom went by at night. But before they had decided to get back to bed, the sound of galloping again was born in the west and swept towards them.
As the horse came round the bend in the road, the rider began shouting, “McKlennar’s! McKlennar’s!”
“Hello!” shouted Gil.
“That you, Mr. Martin?”
“Yes, who’s that?”
They could see him now, the hoofbeats stilling as the horse pulled up, a shadow on the vague pale ribbon of the road.
“Fred Kast. Bellinger says for you to come to the fort. The Onondagas are out! They killed some soldiers up to Stanwix this afternoon.”
Lana gave a choked cry, but Mrs. McKlennar said, “Get the baby. I’ll close and bolt the shutters.”
The horse was stamping. “I’ve got to get to Eldridge’s,” yelled Kast. He was off again.
As he hitched the mare to the cart, Gil had a dull feeling that nothing was any use. The destructives would be there. They would burn his new barn. He couldn’t turn the cow out either, because of the calf. Better to leave them in the barn than chance a bear’s getting the calf. He set down a pail of water for the cow and dragged in some forkfuls of hay.
It was just like the start for Fort Herkimer almost a year ago, except that this time they would go all the way in a cart. Thank God the wheat wasn’t yet quite ripe enough to burn!
They were two-thirds of the way to the fort when Kast overtook them. Eldridge’s was warned. “They’ve only got powder for about twelve rounds,” he said. “Jake Small ain’t been able to get any anywhere.”
At Dayton the squad of regular soldiers with whom Van Schaick had garrisoned the fort assigned them to a space along the barrack wall and told them to keep out of the way. The night continued clear, warm, and uneventful, except for an outraged screech owl, and the myriad mosquitoes.
But late the next afternoon they were informed that reënforcements would be with them in twenty-four hours. The army had not yet left Otsego. About three hundred men were marching under Gansevoort.
Everyone breathed easier, except Van Sickler.
Towards sunset of the following day the drums were heard approaching, and within the hour the little army was encamped outside the fort. Gansevoort rode in with his pink Dutch face delighted at having made the swiftest march the valley had ever seen—two days from the foot of Otsego Lake to German Flats. He promised to wait until the Rangers came in, and in the meantime he arrested and court-martialed Van Sickler for desertion.
But Gansevoort was so pleased with himself that he let Van Sickler off with a fine of thirty-one dollars, and, since the man could not possibly pay it, announced that he would have to be on fatigue for the rest of the campaign.
Van Sickler himself was dubious about it all. At first he figured he had lost sixty-one dollars; but later he decided that he had got his barn roofed for a dollar, and that was a bargain.
As soon as the information was brought in that the Onondagas had passed to the south of Springfield, Gansevoort departed. His troops moved fast, their three light wagons keeping close up, their drums banging a quickstep.
The people watched them go and, long after they had disappeared, listened for the last faint mutter of the drums. That sound, hauntingly faint, was the last sound of war in the valley until the same detachment appeared, surprisingly, from the west in September.
In the meantime, it seemed as if the great army had disappeared from the face of the earth. They heard no news at all of it, but what it might be doing, whether it had met the army under John Butler,—Rangers, Greens, British, Tories, Senecas, and Mohawks,—whether it would reach Niagara, or even the Seneca towns, was the one thing men talked about in the settlement.
Gil thought little of it. During the last week in August Lana’s labor started, and they lived for three days with Dr. Petry in the house. Mrs. McKlennar, and Daisy, and Betsey Small, who had come down to help from Eldridge’s, were all worn-out and haggard.
To Gil it seemed as if the thing would never finish. Now and then, even in the wheatfield, he thought he heard her crying. Dr. Petry seemed helpless. He blamed it on the lack of food, on the drain that nursing the first baby had put on her. “Last winter took about everything out of her. And this is a big baby. I don’t see how she got to have such a big one.”
“Can’t you help her some way?” demanded Mrs. McKlennar.
“How can I help her? It’s part of a woman’s job—that’s all. We can’t do anything but wait.”
“But it’s unnatural!” Mrs. McKlennar’s voice grew harsh. “It’s terrible.”
Betsey Small remembered her own painful childbed, but that had been full of violence, and quickly over. Once when Petry was alone with her, he said, “Do you still want another one?” He tilted his head towards the room in which Lana lay.
Though Betsey’s eyes were shadowed, her mouth shaped itself impudently. “It’s part of a woman’s job—that’s all. I wonder whether a man or a woman said that first.”
“Don’t talk to me like that,” he growled. “I hear tales about you and the fool Adam Helmer.”
“Well, you needn’t believe them! I’m fond of Jakey.” Her eyes brightened. “But I would like some more, if you want to know. Plenty of them. Poor Jake.” She turned her eyes away.
The doctor grunted.
“Will she die?” asked Betsey.
“I don’t think so. But you might.”
“Not with you looking after me, Bill.”
“Oh hell,” he said.
Mrs. McKlennar was beckoning him to the door.
The baby was born at noon on the fourth day, a huge and handsome boy. It looked so big to Gil that Lana’s body seemed to him completely caved in after the birth. She did not speak to him, but lay inert, eyes closed.
“She’s all right,” said Dr. Petry. “You needn’t whisper. She wouldn’t hear the trump right now. She won’t be good for much for quite a spell, though. No, don’t thank me. I didn’t do anything. I just sat here to earn some money.”
He growled, and wearily mounted his old horse, and rode away.
“Bill’s aging lately,” Mrs. McKlennar said.
Betsey Small was dandling the child and calling it her lusty man.
“I’m just as glad Adam’s not around,” thought Mrs. McKlennar, watching her.
Throughout the summer and fall their feeling of security was strengthened. After each scout Joe and Adam reported the same emptiness of the woods. Maybe a lone Indian: if they followed his tracks up, they found he was an Oneida or Tuscarora going fishing. Or sometimes they saw the tracks of several Indians; but these parties always included squaws. They weren’t war parties. They were Indians looking for the blueberries. “They say it’s going to be a hard winter. They’re doing a lot of berrying.”
It got so that the two men hated to go out. Especially Joe; for Adam generally dropped off a scout and came back to spend a while with Betsey Small, and, when he got sick of getting nothing from that red-haired woman, to make a night excursion somewhere with Polly Bowers. But with the latter he went out just enough to keep his own inside track with her. Betsey Small had infatuated him. It got so that he would pick her a bunch of flowers, maybe, besides bringing her in a good fish or two, or some venison, or a couple of prime partridge. Once he asked her whether she would think any more of him if he brought her a couple of scalps.
“Senecas?” she asked.
“Sure,” he said. “Senecas, or a couple of them Tories. If you ever want anybody’s scalp, you let me know.”
She smiled, veiling her eyes and looking insolent and badgering, studying all his magnificent body as he sprawled on the bench with his back against the table and his chest bare to the fire.
“You like me an awful lot, don’t you, Adam?”
He tossed his yellow hair back and grinned.
“Don’t you ever get tired waiting around here?”
He kept on grinning.
“If it wasn’t for Jake, I’d have had you a long while ago. But I like Jake.”
He looked puzzled, as she repeated, “Yes, if it wasn’t for Jake.”
Jake Small came in. He was getting bald and looked fatter.
“Hello, Adam,” he said. “You back for a while?”
“Yes, I’m back. I just stopped by on my way home. How are you, Jake?”
“Fine, boy, fine.”
He reached for an apple off the shelf.
“Have one, Adam?”
“No, thanks,” said Adam.
“Well, I will,” Jake said, biting into it. “I’ve always had the awfulest hankering for apples, Adam.”
He put his arm round Betsey when she came up to kiss him. It was the damnedest thing Adam ever had to look at—the happy way she looked when she kissed him back. He got himself lazily onto his feet and picked up his rifle and went out of the house.
Though Lana was getting about again, she had not much strength. She worked because there was a great deal to be done. Gil was threshing in between days of picking the ripened corn, and he needed help in sifting the chaff. He wanted to get his oats all threshed and safely stored before the fall was over. The steady thump of the flail on the barn boards was like the drumming of a partridge, hour after hour.
The air was cold and very clear, as if frost were in the offing. Lana sniffed it in the yard and looked up the valley. The sky to the west had a greenish glassy tinge. One could almost think that the sky was reflecting the shine from the river. The tips of balsams seemed more sharply pointed, needlelike, and made of iron. The low sun looked like a thin coin. In its light, Lana seemed pale and full of stillness; her black hair was heavy and without lustre. As she stood beside the shed door, the evening found in her the same hushed intentness it found in the darkening woods. Only the front of her short gown moved with her light breathing, showing her full and heavy breasts.
Joe Boleo, stepping quietly in the shed for an extra log of wood, watched her for a moment. He thought she had not heard him, any more than she seemed to have heard the thudding of Gil’s flail. But she said suddenly, “Joe, what’s that bird?”
“Which bird?”
“There on the bottom branch of the maple. I never saw one like it.”
She seemed to have a sixth sense for spotting anything alive. The bird had neither moved nor made a sound.
He said, “That’s a Canada Jack. It’s early to see one of them—and so close to a house, too. Most generally it means a hard winter.”
They both stayed still, and the bird on its limb was still, staring back at them. Then the calf bawled flatly in the barn, and they heard the blatant answer of the cow homing through the woods.
In the kitchen, Daisy rattled her pans.
At sunset the two companies of soldiers swung down the road from Fort Stanwix. They were lean and tired. Their ragged uniforms gave them at first sight a kind of ghostliness. Their long strides brought them swiftly and with an odd effect of silence, for half of them wore moccasins, to replace the shoes they had used up. And the drums of the two drummers were headless.
John Weaver returned with them. He did not look at all like the boy who had started out. He was like a stranger to Mary. She felt even younger than on her bridal night; and when they went to bed in the Herter house, she was shy and half frightened. He seemed so much stronger—even in his happiness with her she was aware that he had been with men and become a man. Though she had never thought of him otherwise, she knew that the John she had married was a boy; and proud as she was of him, now, his touch conveyed to her a strange sense of warning that she would never be as close to him again in all their lives.
Gansevoort had given him his discharge, and paid him in a wheat warrant, so that he felt quite comfortable about feeding his mother and Cobus during the winter. For themselves, he and Mary would stay on with Demooth.
He was glad to get home. The next morning, when the conch horns sent their dim invading wail over the valley, they lay under the blankets close together and heard the cannon fired from the fort as a salute to the departing soldiers. The rising sun, entering the low window, touched the shoulders of his campaign coat, stained, frayed, and faded.…
“John, was it awful out there?”
“It was the finest farming country I ever saw. But we got so we were sick of it. Every time we saw a cornfield we were sick. They made us cut it down—all of it. We cut down the apple trees. They had peaches, even. We cut them down. We did at first; but there was so many we just girdled the last orchards. We burned every house. Some of them had nice houses, framed ones, with glass windows. Nicer than this house, Mary.”
“It must have been hard work.”
“I don’t know how much we burned. Captain Bleecker figured it out that the army had destroyed one hundred and sixty thousand bushel of corn. The Indians all went west to Niagara.”
“Was there any battles?”
“Only one. It was short. There was five thousand of us and only fifteen hundred of them, more than half Indians. Afterwards they cornered a scouting party. Twenty men. They caught two of them and burned them in Little Beard’s town. Chinisee Castle.”
He stopped suddenly.
“Poor John,” she whispered.
“It was mostly just walking,” he said. “Walking every day and sometimes at night. Or burning. Or cutting corn with your bayonet. We got short of food and had to eat our horses. We wished we hadn’t burned everything, coming home.”
“The Indians will never come again,” she said.
“No. They’ve gone to Niagara. I don’t know.”
“Were the burned men anyone we knew?”
“No, a Lieutenant Boyd. And a sergeant. His name was Parker. I didn’t know either of them. I don’t want to talk about them. I been dreaming of the way they looked. It makes me afraid sometimes. I don’t want to go to war again, Mary.”
She tried to hush him.
“You won’t need to.”
“I never was scared of the Indians before. But they did things to those men.”
“Don’t talk.” She lifted up her lips. But he didn’t kiss her. He lay close beside her, with his face hidden in the hollow of her shoulder. He didn’t move.
Gil and Joe Boleo and Adam made a trip up to Fort Dayton to talk to Rimer Van Sickler. The squat, overmuscled Dutchman sat in his cabin among his fourteen children, with his second wife cooking him an apple pie. Her thin face, prematurely aged from bearing children and too much heavy work, was exalted with the social eminence her returned hero had brought the family. Why, only yesterday, Colonel Bellinger and Captain Demooth had spent the whole afternoon listening to her Rimer tell about his western expedition. Here in her own cabin. She had had to send the children over to Mrs. Wormwood’s out of politeness, seeing they were gentry, but she herself had stayed. And now here was Mr. Martin and Joe Boleo and that worthless Helmer, who had thought he was a hero himself when he outran the Indians.
Rimer yelled a “Come in” to the men. He was obviously tickled to have them come to see him. Timber beasts.
“Get out some rum for my vriendts,” he yelled. “You voman: Py Godt, I think I haf to put my belt across you und learn you again who is boss, hey!” He turned to the three. “I had to do it pefore, I can do it again, ja!” He had her almost in tears. The light went out of her face as in obedience she fetched the jug and set it down before him.
He was sitting in front of the fire on a deerskin, whittling calluses on the balls of his feet. “Efry time I cut a piece off I say to mineself, ‘Rimer, you old timber beast, dot is t’ree miles from Kandesago to Kanandaque.’ ”
Joe said dryly, “I always figured that fifteen miles, myself.”
“Ach, ja. You peen out dere. I haf forget it. You’re right, Joe. But, py Godt, dot big hunk over there, dot is twenty-seven und a half we marched Candaya to Appletown. In te afternoon. Py Godt! Efry shtep I feel dot punion grow, like a horn. Dot vas de day mine boots broke through, too.”
“Did you kill many Indians, Pa?”
“Don’t talk. No, de Indians vas alvays de trees behind, or de hill behind, or de shwamp across. Only once we haf a battle, dunder, shmoke de cannons, und de Indians run right off. Old Pa Rimer couldn’t run so fast as Indians. Ja.”
They had to listen to the full details of the campaign as witnessed, memorized, and amplified by the aggrandized imagination of Van Sickler; but finally he came to Boyd’s capture, telling how the army found the ambush and marched the next day to the Genesee, forded it, and entered the great town.
How, in the open space before the council house they saw the two stakes. Even Van Sickler forgot himself as he described it. Those Senecas, what they could think of! The two corpses half consumed from the waist down before the fires burned out, eviscerated; the nails removed from the toes and fingers, the fingers disjointed or cut off at various lengths. “Ve found two thumbs, so ve knew de nails vas pulled. Dere vas clam shells dey had cut de fingers off mit.” The eyes had been pushed out and the nostrils slit, the cheeks pierced, the lips skinned off, the tongues pulled out, and all over the chest slabs of hide removed.
The children listened with popping eyes and a dull apathetic horror came over the woman’s face as she stared at her husband, though whether at the torture or at the man, describing each detail with bestial accuracy, she hardly knew herself. “Dey cut de heads off. But de last thing vas de heart.” His small eyes glittered as he told it. “Cut out between de ribs, und stuck de mouth into. Only dere vasn’t any lips, joost de teeth. Ja! It vas a sunny day.”
The winter came early, and it turned piercing cold. By the first of October the hills were white in the north, and the leaves fell with the snow. The snow never went down. By November, before the blizzard, it was more than a foot deep on the ground. But after the sixth day of the snowstorm it was four feet deep. It mounted up against the sides of house and cabin and barn until the paths to the door were like inclined chutes, holes in the earth. No one had ever felt such cold or known such snow.
Few people went visiting. Lana, who had thought of trying to see her parents during the slack season in December, gave up the notion. Provisions coming up to Stanwix took two days even on the river ice. More than once horses broke down and froze where they had fallen.
At McKlennar’s, Gil was thankful that he had stacked his hay beside the barn. He could never have found it in the woods, once the big snow came.
All day he and Lana and Mrs. McKlennar and the babies hugged the fireside. The negress suffered a strange change in her complexion. It was as if her skin had turned gray with dark brown blotches underneath. She could hardly walk for her chilblains. Joe Boleo never left the place. The idea of raiding parties coming in that cold was simply preposterous. But he took great satisfaction in his idleness. “I can’t get them Senecas out of my mind,” he said. “They ain’t got any food. I bet they’re dying every which way.” It was a comforting thought to them all.
The only thing that troubled him was having to help Gil get wood. They cut great logs and skidded them in the front door and set the butt ends in the fire. Every hour or so they would pry the log forward into the coals. They kept it going all night, taking turns at watching.
Even so it was so cold in the kitchen that Lana’s fingers were too numb to spin, except occasionally when the sun shone at noon. They became silent for long periods. And Mrs. McKlennar seemed to age during the winter, and sat more and more, close to the fire. Finally she succumbed to Lana’s suggestion of having her bed moved into the kitchen.
Only Adam went about at all, visiting occasionally at Eldridge’s or paying a dutiful visit to Dayton. The cold did not affect him as it did the others. He did all the hunting alone. But hunting was poor, and the deer, when he got one, were terribly thin. The meat was tasteless as old leather.
The wind seemed never to stop blowing. It had a high note on the crust. At night, when it came from the north, they could hear the howling and threshing of the pines on the high ridges half a mile away. But on the few quiet nights, the cracking of frosted trees in the icy darkness was worse to listen to.
In the barn Gil had built a kind of wall around the cow and heifer and mare, banking it every day with the manure that was dropped overnight, but that was always frozen. The three animals kept close together. Their coats were shaggy as sheep’s wool. To milk the cow was an ordeal; his bare hands received no warmth from the teats; and the milk froze before he could get it to the house.
But the knowledge of their security was one comforting thing; and when the weather finally broke towards the end of February, they waited uneasily for a week, hoping for more snow. It came at last, heavy, without wind, a deep, protecting blanket between them and Niagara.
Though it came in time to save them, it did not come in time to save the Oneida Indians. On the last day of February, the entire fighting strength of the Onondaga nation, with a few white men and a party of Cayugas and Senecas, fell upon Oneida Castle. In German Flats they never learned the rights of it; all they knew was that a mass of half-frozen Indians,—men, women, and children,—and a few starved dogs, appeared at Fort Dayton and asked for food and shelter. They crowded the fort for two days, making dangerous inroads on the supplies, before Bellinger was able to get them started for Schenectady. The town had been utterly destroyed, but the raiders, they said, had gone back to Canada.
When Adam went down to see them, he found old Blue Back, his fat cheeks mottled with the cold, squatting in his blankets and watching his wife make a sort of hot mash of whole oats. The two larger children huddled against him, and the baby on the squaw’s back was wrinkled like a nut, with two enormous eyes. The old Indian accepted tobacco wordlessly.
“They’ll take care of you all in Schenectady,” Adam said in an attempt to cheer him up.
“Sure. Fine.” But the old man obviously did not think so. He smoked, looking past Adam along the soiled snow of the parade. “You watch’m woods close,” he said. “They come some more. They mad.”
“I wish you was going to be around, Blue Back. It’d be handy having you scouting with us.”
“Maybe.” He went on puffing. Then he said, “You going back to Martin?”
“Yes.”
Blue Back reached a dirty hand inside his shirt, and felt of something.
“You fetch’m this. No luck,” he was going to say; but as he touched the peacock’s feather it occurred to him that in a white man’s town it might be lucky after all.
His eyes grew blank. He shook his head.
“You watch’m woods,” he muttered dully.
Adam told Bellinger what Blue Back had said that afternoon, and Bellinger wrote letters to the governor, and to General Clinton, and to Schuyler. Three weeks passed before he got a reply. All three sounded upset and indignant. The army last fall had been organized to wipe out the Indian towns. It had done so. The Indians were bound to be crippled for years to come. The menace had been removed at a vast expense; no other single campaign of the war could compare to it in cost. Over a million of dollars had been expended, purely for the benefit of the frontier. There was some mention of common gratitude. And let him be reminded that such continual fears and apprehensions and baseless alarms would have deleterious effects upon the inhabitants. It was felt in Albany that the time had come for the frontier settlements to stand on their own defense.
In German Flats, the settlers began to look for spring.