The sky was an ugly gray, the November air sharp and cold. Of the many smells carried on it, some were a regular part of Ezra Rumstick’s life, a life lived out mostly on salt water, and some less so.
Rolling down from the Pine Barrens, they could detect the tang of the sea, or at least the salt marshes that bordered them. There was wood smoke in the air as well, and Rumstick caught of whiff of it now and again. It was not so prevalent as it might be in a town or village. They were moving through sparsely populated country now, with struggling farms scattered at odd and distant intervals and random woodcutters’ huts and other rude shelters. The smell of nearby woods and the fresh-cut stumps and limbs of the massive logs they were hauling was stronger than the wood smoke. Strongest of all were the oxen and the deposits they left on the hard, frozen road.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, there!”
It was Tommy Sullivan who yelled, Tommy who was handling the reins on the lead team. He was one of Faircloth’s marines, and getting Faircloth to agree to let him go on the hunt for masts had been a job of work. It would have been easier, Rumstick imagined, to separate Faircloth from his own right hand than to take one of his men. But Sullivan, unlike most of the men under Biddlecomb’s command, had spent more time on a farm than a ship, and he was adept at driving teams of any sort. That was something that Rumstick decidedly was not.
“What is it?” Rumstick called. “Problem?”
“No, no problem,” Sullivan called back. He was at the head of the lead train, while Rumstick was a dozen paces back, nearer the middle, where he had a better view of the whole. “The big fellow, he likes to get ahead of the rest, and I need to keep him back, is all.”
If that dumb cow is eager to get back to the ship, well, I’m with him, Rumstick thought. He lifted his musket a little higher and rested his thumb on the top of the hammer and looked around. The country was low, sandy, and bleak. They had left the more wooded area a few miles back and now were rolling through open fields dotted with stumps and dry, brown stalks, past the occasional farmhouse, which were mostly sorry-looking affairs. The few hardwood trees still standing had lost their leaves and looked skeletal now, and the evergreens looked dark and colorless under the overcast sky.
They saw people on occasion, men out in the fields who would stop for a moment to watch them pass, or women in the dooryards of the farmhouses. They would see small knots of men on the road, usually far off, who seemed to purposely avoid meeting up with Rumstick and his men. Banditti. Pine robbers, Rumstick guessed.
He was not too terribly concerned about them. He had a dozen men with him, well-armed and tolerably well disciplined. They were clearly not men who would be easily robbed, nor they did they appear to have much worth stealing. These pine robbers, he imagined, were like pirates, or vultures. They would not want to put themselves at risk or work terribly hard for their prey.
He had seen that already. Shadrach Barnett, Colonel Shadrach Barnett, had arrived with a gang of men, an unusually large gang for pine robbers, or so Richard Somers of the Gloucester County Militia had informed them. The Falmouth frigate was a tempting target, apparently, and Barnett seemed to envision considerable wealth stowed down in her hold.
But one show of strength—the marines parading on the dock, the men armed and lining the rails, Isaac Biddlecomb refusing to flinch—had been enough to make the man give up. He and most of his banditti had headed out the following day, and Isaac had felt secure enough that he was willing to send the woodcutting party, a quarter of the men aboard Falmouth, away.
Rumstick swept the countryside to his left, then looked over the top of the massive tree trunk and swept the countryside to his right. Nothing that he could see gave him cause for concern. He looked ahead, down the dark, frozen, dirt road. He had sent two of his men out ahead, a couple of foretop sailors named Manning and Ewald, to serve as pickets of sort, to make sure there were no surprises. He realized that he had not heard from them or seen them in some time.
That fact did not worry him, however. The road ran over a series of low hills as it meandered down to the sea, and the two men were likely hidden behind one of them. It would be easy enough to get well ahead of the lumbering train of oxen.
The boys are fine, doing just what you told them to do, Rumstick thought. And he believed that. To a degree. But, truth be told, the two were not particularly well suited for that job. They were not soldiers, after all, not light infantry. They were sailors, more accustom to moving nimbly through the rigging than stealthily down a road. That was true of all the men under Rumstick’s command.
There was nothing stealthy about the rest of the party from Falmouth. Eight armed men, a dozen oxen, and three massive trees rolling along on six pairs of loggers’ wheels. Falmouth had been launched with an admirable amount of gear stowed down in her hold. Most of the standing rigging, much of the running rigging, and all plain sail had been built while the hull was being raised on the ways. All of it had been put onboard before the ship had gone into the water. The ship’s builder, Malachi Foote, had had the good sense to realize that sending it off with the ship was the only way to keep it out of British hands.
But rigging and sails were useless without masts to hang them on. While anchored in the Delaware River, they had managed to get a fore lower mast and a foreyard in place, but that was it, that was all the sticks they had available. Falmouth could make a little headway with that rig if the wind was strong and abaft the beam, but they would need more if they hoped to sail her to someplace of safety.
There was little timber to be had near Great Egg Harbor, but just inland a ways was a stretch of country known as the Pine Barrens, and the name seemed to offer possibilities. There was, of course, only so much they could do when it came to securing masts and yards: serious mast-cutting required dozens of men and many dozens of oxen, snow-cover ground to drag the trees from the woods, iced-over roads on which to haul the timbers by sled, and mast landings where the great trees could be launched into the ocean and towed to where they needed to be.
The men of Falmouth had none of those things. But after much cajoling and distribution of hard money, they were able to coax the oxen and loggers’ wheels and axes from the farms around Great Egg Harbor. Rumstick had led his band of ad hoc loggers up into the Pine Barrens to see what they could find.
They went looking for white pine, that most admirable of trees, but they found none. What they did find was mostly cedar, which was useless for their purposes. They found spruce as well: not their first or even second choice, but it was serviceable. A few decent spruce trees could double their sail area, enough to hopefully drive them past the Royal Navy-infested waters off New York and clear to the more amenable seas around Boston.
On the first ridge, they located a few spruce trees large enough that they might have served as lower masts. But they were too big for Rumstick’s small crew, with their handful of oxen and dubious gear, to haul back to the ship. They moved on, and finally located three trees big enough to serve as topmasts, certainly, and perhaps as somewhat stunted lowers, but were still small enough for them to manage.
Those trees they felled and limbed, and with considerable effort and ingenuity positioned the loggers’ wheels under them and hitched up the teams. Sullivan took the lead and they headed back down the road, a road that would have been impossible to traverse if it had not been frozen solid.
“Ten miles, you reckon, Mr. Rumstick?” Woodbury asked. Woodbury, like Rumstick, had been bred to the sea, and like Rumstick had no great love for this sort of thing.
“About,” Rumstick said. He looked back over his shoulder, toward the hills to the west. There was no sun to be seen, but from the light in the sky, he guessed that sunset was a few hours away. Under the thick cover of clouds, the day was growing dark already.
“We won’t make it tonight,” Rumstick added. He turned back and looked out over the country ahead of them. “Maybe find a barn or some such to bed down in.”
They continued on in their ponderous way along the road to Great Egg Harbor, the oxen occasionally bellowing their displeasure, the men under Rumstick’s command muttering theirs, quiet enough that their growling was not so obvious, which allowed Rumstick to ignore it. They rolled down one of the several hills and the oxen strained to pull the logs up the far side and Rumstick continued to scan the country ahead of them.
“There, Woodbury, that look like a farm to you?” He pointed off to the south. There was a light, it seemed to be a window against a darker shape. The evening was coming on quick, the low areas already lost in shadow.
“Yeah, I think so,” Woodbury said, squinting in the direction that Rumstick was pointing. “Farm has to mean a barn.”
And food and maybe ale, Rumstick thought. He knew that was what Woodbury was thinking because he was thinking it himself. They had been living on cold meat and bread. What ale they had carried with them was long gone and they were reduced to water for the duration.
“Manning and Ewald, they’re probably there already,” Woodbury said. “Sons of bitches, probably having a smoke by the hearth as we speak.”
Rumstick nodded. He considered making some quip about the possibility of a farmer’s daughter, but he was too cold and weary to think of anything particularly clever, so instead he said, “Wish those two would show themselves, let us know what’s ahead.”
They crested the next hill and started to roll down the other side and Rumstick was certain now that it was a farm they were looking at, and not some miserable woodcutter’s hovel. He could see light in a few windows, and behind the house another building that seemed to be a barn of some sort. A barn would mean straw and some degree of shelter from the cold. If they drove the oxen inside, it would warm the place up some. Rumstick could comfort himself in the knowledge that he had slept in worse company.
The voice came from his left and from somewhere ahead. It came sharp and loud and unequivocal. “Hold!”
Rumstick frowned and looked in that direction and his first thought was that it was Sullivan calling out, that there was some problem with the team.
Not Sullivan…Rumstick realized. The voice was not Sullivan’s. Then there was another shout from the right and a cry of surprise, a loud curse, and that last one was most certainly Sullivan. The curse was followed with a dull thud and the sound of something dropping to the road.
Rumstick tried to see what was happening but they were in a dip between two hills and it was hard to make things out in the deep shadow. He raised his musket to chest height and cocked the firelock.
“What’s acting? Sullivan?” he shouted. There were more cries of alarm behind him and then a dozen men came swarming up from the ditch beside the road, a ditch that Rumstick had not even realized was there. He could see muskets in the men’s hands and he swung his own musket around level, finger on the trigger.
“Son of a bitch!” Rumstick shouted and he pulled the trigger. The priming hissed and the charge lit and the musket jerked back in his hands as it fired. In the muzzle flash, he could see the men coming at him, some with muskets leveled, some with pistols. He could see that his one shot had struck no one.
He flipped his musket around, grabbed the warm barrel and swung the gun like a club, because that was the only sort of weapon it could be now. A broad, wild swing, but if he connected he might be able to take out one of two of them.
“Hold!” the voice shouted again. “Don’t fire, none of you, don’t fire!” The command was loud and emphatic. It cut through the confusion created by the bold attack, the frantic defense. Rumstick could see the men from the ditch stepping back, lifting muskets to shoulders, aiming at him and the others, but not firing. Up and down his column he could hear the struggling and the shouting give way to quiet.
“Put your muskets down, the lot of you!” the voice, calling again. “Rumstick, you son of a whore, where the devil are you! Tell them to put their muskets down.”
Rumstick frowned and looked in the direction from which the voice had come. He did not lower his musket. He did not reply.
“Rumstick, damn your eyes,” the man called again, then said, “Abbot, bring that damned lantern over here.” For a moment there was a shuffling, a clanging of metal on metal, and then a spill of light where someone unshuttered a lantern. He held it high, walking down the length of the log that was mounted on the loggers’ wheels.
“There you are, Rumstick, you bastard,” the man said. He stopped five feet away, holding the lantern up so its light fell on his face and Rumstick’s as well. It was a face Rumstick recognized. Not a face he knew well, but one he recognized.
“You’re that poxed bastard Wilcox, styles himself a sergeant or some such,” Rumstick said, remembering at last where he had seen that unpleasant face before. Only once, and standing beside the other whore’s son Barnett, the one who styled himself a colonel, from headquarters, of all things.
“Sergeant…that’s right,” Wilcox said. “Don’t make no never mind, in any event. I might as well be the pope, for all the difference it’ll make to you.”
Rumstick’s first impulse was to demand an explanation, to ask what Wilcox thought he was doing, but he kept his mouth shut. It was pointless. He knew what Wilcox was doing: he was eliminating a dozen of the men defending Falmouth, a quarter of the ship’s company, and when he was done, he would doubtless rob their corpses for good measure. Maybe he was acting on Barnett’s orders, maybe acting on his own, but that was what he was doing.
“Where are my men? The ones I sent ahead?” Rumstick demanded instead.
Wilcox actually smiled at that. “Them two idiots, come strolling along like they was going to a Sunday picnic? That the best you got? Lord above, if that’s true I’d be doing you a favor by killing you now.”
“If you killed them, then you are one dead son of a bitch,” Rumstick said. “With my own hands, I’ll kill you.”
“Uh huh,” Wilcox said. “That would be quite the trick, seeing as you’ll likely be dead yourself soon enough. But don’t fear. They ain’t hurt. For now, the lot of you are worth more to me alive. For now.”
Wilcox looked up and down the length of the train, at the men on both sides with muskets raised, then looked back at Rumstick. “Seems like we have a bit of a stand-off here,” he said. “But I got two dozen men to your…ten, maybe? Which means if every one of us kills his man, I still got more than a dozen standing.”
“You got a hell of a head for figuring, I’ll give you that,” Rumstick said.
“Thank’ee,” Wilcox said. “So…why don’t you tell your men to put their damned firelocks down before I tell my boys to blow all your damned heads off?”
Rumstick nodded slightly as he considered the demand. At this range, it was likely that every shot on either side would tell, and the Falmouths would certainly come out on the losing side of that exchange. He could not dispute Wilcox’s arithmetic. Loathe as he was to surrender, he knew there was a better chance of escape if they were not dead.
“Very well,” Rumstick said, then in a loud voice called, “You men of the Falmouth, lay down your arms! Lay them down, I say!”
He could hear grumbling and cursing in the dark, and the thud of heavy muskets tossed to the frozen road. He hoped none of the weapons would misfire: one accidental discharge and he and his men could be on the receiving end of a firing squad.
The last of the muskets hit the ground with nothing louder than a thump and Wilcox ordered his men to bind the hands of Rumstick’s crew. This they did with admirable efficiency because, Rumstick saw to his annoyance, they had the lengths of cordage in their coat pockets, ready to go.
Pretty damned sure of yourself, weren’t you? Rumstick thought, but he had to admit, to himself at least, that Wilcox’s self-assurance had been well-placed.
“Here now, the lot of you, get a move on,” Wilcox called once Rumstick’s men were bound at the wrists. “Form up there and get a move on.”
“What, ho? You’re just leaving the oxen?” Rumstick asked. “And the logs?”
“Sod the oxen, and sod the logs,” Wilcox said. “We got no use for them, and neither do you.” With that, he and the others herded Rumstick and his men to the front of the train and gathered them together, surrounded on four sides by the musket-wielding banditti. With another shout and various curses, the rag and tag parade moved out, shambling along the dirt road, which was becoming increasingly hard to see in the gathering dark.
They marched up the next hill and down the other side and Rumstick called, “Hey, Wilcox, we marching clear to Great Egg Harbor? Kind of far to cover, and night coming on, ain’t it?”
“Shut your gob,” Wilcox said, and he offered no more enlightenment regarding his plans. But it was clear soon enough what he intended. Near the bottom of the next hill, he directed the men away from the road and down the beaten way that led to the farmhouse Rumstick had seen from a distance. They did not pause at the farmhouse at all, but marched on past toward the barn. A couple of men stood at the big, open door, lanterns head high.
“In you go,” Wilcox said, gesturing toward the door with an exaggerated sweep of the hands. “They got cows and swine in there, but I reckon they won’t be too offended by you lot.”
Rumstick led the way in, followed by his men and the men with the lanterns and Wilcox’s men. The barn was what Rumstick imagined it would be—not terribly large by the standard of barns, but large enough for the animals and the prisoners. A loft overhead, all but lost in the shadows, was spilling over with hay, and more hay and straw lay in a great heap on the floor. Manning and Ewald were sprawled side by side on the straw, hands bound, mouths gagged.
“You gentlemen make yourselves comfortable,” Wilcox called. “Too damned late to kill you lot tonight, we’ll take care of that little thing in the morning. Unless any of you want to try and get away. In that case, we’ll kill you where you stand.”
“Hey, Wilcox,” Rumstick said, “my men need food and drink. Since you’re being so hospitable, and all.”
“I told you, you dumb bastard, I’m going to kill you all in the morning,” Wilcox said. “Ain’t gonna waste food and drink on you now.”
With that, he and his men pushed Rumstick and the rest onto the pile of straw. Wilcox posted four guards at various places around the barn and issued sundry threats for them to stay vigilant, and described what would happen to them if they did not. The rest of his men he took with him as he headed back out to the farmyard, closing the big doors behind him.
“Lieutenant…” Tommy Sullivan whispered. He was lying on the straw beside Rumstick. In the initial fight, he had taken a blow from a musket butt to the side of the head and he had been pretty wobbly through most of the march to the barn, but he seemed to be doing better now.
“Yeah?” Rumstick said.
“Do you reckon they truly mean to kill us? In the morning?”
“They won’t kill us,” Rumstick said.
“That son of a bitch, he said he was going to kill us,” Sullivan insisted.
“He won’t kill us,” Rumstick said. “If he meant to kill us he’d have done it out on the road. Left us in the ditch. No reason to go to the trouble of marching us all the way here.”
Sullivan nodded and was quiet for a moment. “So…what then?” he asked.
As to that, Rumstick had a pretty good idea, and nothing he could think of suggested he was wrong. “They want the Falmouth,” he said. “This Wilcox bastard, or him and Barnett, doesn’t really matter. They want the ship but they sure as hell don’t want to fight their way onboard. That would be a slaughter if they tried it. But an exchange—hostages for the ship—that wouldn’t be too much trouble.”
“Huh,” Sullivan said. “But, you reckon Captain Biddlecomb…”
“Here, shut your damned mouths!” one of the guards called from across the barn. “We got to be stuck in here with you sorry sons of bitches, we don’t need to hear you yapping away, to boot.”
“Don’t need to stay here,” Rumstick called. “Wilcox and them others, they’re all getting a hot meal, a cup of ale. Rum. And they left you out here. Ain’t fair. Go join them. We can watch ourselves, it’s no problem.”
“I said shut your damned mouth!” the guard said in reply and so Rumstick shut his damned mouth, deciding he had pushed that far enough.
Very well, he thought. This son of a bitch Wilcox has his plans. So I guess it’s up to me to make a hash of them.
And that was just the thing Rumstick intended to do. There were, of course, a few obstacles he had to overcome first. He was unarmed. He and his men were vastly outmanned. He was laying on a pile of straw with his hands bound and a guard who was eager to blow his brains out standing not fifteen feet away. But beyond that, he was ready to go.