3stalwarts (23 page)

“I’m getting to be old,” Herkimer said quietly. “Maria’s young.” His arm tightened. “When my wife died I never thought I’d marry her niece.”

“All in the family.” Joe was trying to ease the general’s voice.

“Yes,” said the general gravely. “That’s how it is here— too. Schuyler won’t send help. He writes I ought to be ashamed to ask it. He says I had no right to agree to anything with Joseph Brant. And now Cox and Fisscher and some others are blaming me because I did not shoot Brant, because I don’t get troops from Albany. They will send some Massachusetts people up to Dayton, that’s all. But everything else I do is wrong.”

“Hell, Honnikol, all the people are back of you. The dirt farmers and timber beasts like me.”

“That’s good. We’ll have one damn fight anyway. All in the family, Joe. Our side and Johnson’s. There won’t be any soldiers at all. You could say it’s got nothing to do with a war at all.”

Fort Stanwix July 28, 1777

Sir:

We have received accounts which may be relied on that Sir John Johnson has sent orders to Colonel Butler to send a number of Indians to cut off the communications between this place and German Flats who are to set out from Oswego in five days from this, perhaps sooner, and that Sir John is to follow them with 1000 troops consist-ing of regular Tories and Vagabone Canadians with all the Indians they can muster. I hope this will not discourage you, but that your people will rise up unanimously to chastize these miscreants and de-pend upon it we will not fail to do our part. I am, Sir, etc.,

Marinus Willett

When General Herkimer received this he blew through his lips and put on his best coat. He rode right up to Fort Dayton and walked in to speak to Colonel Weston.

Colonel Weston was a man of sense— the first Massachusetts soldier that had managed to grasp just what the German settlers faced. He didn’t like Germans, particularly, but he liked still less anything that smacked of British aristocracy; and he agreed at once to send up provisions from his com-missariat and two hundred men under Colonel Mellon, as soon as he could get them ready.

On the twenty-ninth, Tom Spencer sent down a message to Herkimer. It was the first definite assurance of the friendly stand of the Oneida nation in the face of war.

At a meeting of the chiefs, they tell me that there is but four days remaining of the time set for the King’s troops to come to Fort Stanwix and they think it likely they will be here sooner.

The chiefs desire the commanding officers at Fort Stanwix not to make a Ticonderoga of it; but they hope they will be courageous.

They desire General Schuyler may have this with speed and send a good army here, there is nothing to do at New York, we think there is men to be spared, we expect the road is stopped to the inhabitants by a party through the woods, we shall be surrounded as soon as they come. This may be our last advice… .

There was one thing left to do. Before night, Herkimer sent men down the valley as far as Johnstown to muster the militia on the third of August at Fort Dayton.

It gave Gil a strange feeling, on that Sunday morning, to hear the church bell ringing across the river at Herkimer; to look out from his doorway and see the farm peaceful in the still hot August air, the blue river, and the wooded hills beyond. Children, playing outside the ramparts of the fort, were stilled by the ringing bell and began their reluctant straggling into church.

The sight brought back the bitterness he had felt when his own place was burnt; it made him think of the winter and of the happiness he and Lana had had together before that time. It had seemed to him, lately, that she was slowly regaining her old ways. But since Adam Helmer, now be-come a ranger, had brought the muster word, she had grown quiet again.

She was so quiet now, working in the kitchen, that he wondered what she was doing. When at last he turned back, he found that she was sewing a new cockade on his hat, while the tears dropped slowly down her cheeks. Her bowed shoulders and her silent crying made him tender.

“You mustn’t be like that, Lana.”

“I know,” she said. “I hadn’t ought.” She did not look up in replying. “But the last two days, Gil, I’ve been remembering. I’ve been feeling different. And now I wonder if it isn’t going to be too late.”

“Too late?” He tried to understand. “Oh. You mean I might get killed. … I won’t get killed, Lana.”

“No, no, no. Not that. I wondered if it was too late for you to love me again.”

“I do,” he said.

“I know. No girl ever had a better man, Gil. I want you to know that.” She got up swiftly, her hand like a head under the hat. She smiled and wiped the tears away with the back of her hand. “Put it on.”

He obeyed, standing in front of her the way he had before that first muster down in Schuyler. But it was different now. They both felt it.

“Lana. You’ll be all right. You stick to Mrs. McKlennar.” He paused. “If anything goes wrong …”

“Yes, Gil.”

Mrs. McKlennar strode down the path from her house.

“Still here?” she asked. “I’m glad. I wanted Gil to have this.”

She held out a small flask fastened to a loop of rawhide.

“It’s brandy,” she said. “Brandy’s the next best thing to powder in a fight.”

Lana said politely, “Isn’t it a pretty flask?”

“It used to be Barney’s.” There seemed to be some kind of stoppage in the widow’s long nose. “It’s no good to me, now,” she said briskly. “I thought it might come handy to you.”

Gil thanked her.

They stood a moment awkwardly. Then Mrs. McKlennar’s head lifted.

“Drums,” she said.

The steady rattle of the drums came up the Kingsroad. Gil stepped to the door. His voice lifted a little.

“That’s Klock and the Palatine regiment,” he said. “I’ve got to go.”

He turned to kiss Lana, but Mrs. McKlennar stepped between.

“I’m going to kiss you, Gilbert Martin. I’d better do it now. You don’t want to go off tasting a widow on your mouth.”

She took his face and kissed him firmly.

“Good-bye, lad.”

She stepped through the door with a snap of skirts.

Bright crimson, Gil stooped down to his wife.

“Good-bye, dear.”

Lana lifted her lips. Her eyes closed suddenly. He saw the tears welling at the roots of her dark lashes.

“Good-bye,” he said again. “We’ll make out all right. The both of us.”

He caught the rifle up and tossed the blanket roll across his shoulder. He tramped down to the fence. He turned there, waved his arm, and stepped over into the road, not a hundred yards beyond the oncoming Palatines.

Lana could only stand and watch. He was walking along the road be-hind the railings, rifle on his shoulder, the long barrel like a finger pointing back towards home. Then for a moment the ragged rattle of the drums submerged her senses.

She felt an arm round her waist, and Mrs. McKlennar was breathing harshly beside her ear.

“It’s hard on a woman,” said the widow. “Many a time I’ve seen Barney go off just the same way. Good-bye. And he’s off. Maybe he waves, but he ain’t seeing you. He’s thinking about the men, you see. All the men together.”

The arm tightened.

“It’s bad enough when he’s your son, or even your father.” Her stoppage seemed to trouble her again. “A man can’t help it if he’s your son— and al-most any man can be a father. But there are so damn few good husbands in a woman’s life.”

Gil was by the turn of the road now; he hadn’t looked backward again. In his place the uneven files of Palatine farmers trudged along the road, bent over in their walk, as if they followed a plough. Men and officers were indistinguishable— except the colonel, who sat like a sack of meal on the thumping black mare he used to draw manure with.

The men made an uneasy, sprawling mass throughout the little settlement. On the edge of the knoll the fort had been built on, Nicholas Herkimer straddled his old white horse, leaning his hands heavily on the somnolent withers.

He was using his deep voice to good effect, now giving orders in English to an officer, locating the muster ground of each company, now checking the list of supplies that trundled past in carts drawn either by oxen or by horses, now hailing in Low German some neighbor or acquaintance.

When Gil preceded the Palatine company into the village, he saw the general in the same position, in his worn blue campaign coat, warm enough in the stifling heat to keep the sweat steadily rolling down his cheeks. He was listening to the bombastic voice of Colonel Cox.

“All right, colonel,” he said finally. “If you want to push ahead tonight, you can. But don’t go beyond Staring’s Brook. And don’t go until your whole regiment’s here, either. Leyp’s and Dievendorf s companies haven’t showed up yet.”

Cox, flushed with heat and drink, said loudly that they were wasting time, he’d undertake to lick the Tories with his own company, and he could look out for his company, too, without being told.

“Those are orders,” Herkimer said, tartly, for once. “I make Colonel Weston witness, if you don’t like them.”

The commandant of the Dayton garrison nodded brusquely, met the em-battled colonel’s eye with a Yankee gleam in his own, and said, “I’ve noticed them already.”

“Where’s Bellinger’s regiment?” asked Gil.

“Beyond Doc’s house,” replied a delighted farmer from Snydersbush. “Cox had to haul his tail down that time.” He grinned. “He used to hunt around and raise hell with young Johnson, and now he thinks he’s drawn title to being a gentleman.”

But Gil noticed what the Snyders man had not, that several of the other officers were looking after Cox with sympathetic eyes. Like him they rode good horses, with English-made saddles and polished riding boots. In their company, Herkimer’s faded outfit, horse and coat, looked like a shabby imitation. No doubt they thought him one.

George Weaver greeted him. “You’re only just in time, Gil. How’s Lana? We ain’t seen her in a month, now.”

“She’s fine,” said Gil. “How’s Emma?”

“Just the same. She’s been considering going down to visit Lana to get a quilting pattern off her. She said she might go down while I was away.”

“That’s fine,” said Gil.

Finding the company mustered took him back more clearly than ever to the time before his house was burnt. Reall, with his gun clean for once, was there; and Jeams MacNod, looking a little pallid at the thought of war; and Clem Coppernol.

Gil said, “I thought you were over sixty.”

The white-haired Dutchman said, “Too old? By Jesus, a Dutchman ain’t ever too old to take a pot at the British.”

Weaver said, “We’re to camp along the road tonight, right here. We’ve got to wait for Fisscher’s Mohawk company, and Campbell’s Minutemen.”

“I thought they’d have to stay, with Brant around there.”

“Brant’s cut back west again,” said Weaver. “He’s at Stanwix now.”

A man gaped. He said, “That Indian can move through the woods faster than you get the news of him.”

“He’d better look out where he shows his head,” said Reall in a boisterous voice, raising his gun and aiming at a cabbage in the doctor’s garden.

George Weaver smacked the barrel down, roaring:—

“Do you want to kill somebody?”

That evening it looked as if the drought might break. Slate-colored clouds with traveling veils of white lifted their heads over the southern hills. There was a distant rumble of thunder, but no rain came. Fires broke out beside the ox carts. Eatables were unloaded. Pork and bacon frying made an odor through the village. Men sat together, grumbling because they had been kept out of decent beds— men like Fred Kast who couldn’t see the sense of walking east seven miles one day to walk back seven miles the next, merely for the sake of sleeping in a blanket on the ground.

“I ain’t complaining of your company,” he explained. “It’s just the idea.”

“You ought to have brought your bed along,” a man said.

“Yes, with Katy in it,” said Christian Reall.

Kast laughed.

“I thought of that, and then I thought I couldn’t find no room in it, with all you ground pigs trying too.”

George Weaver looked down the slope of ground to the river, where Peter Tygert’s house was. Herkimer was staying there. Few noticed the late arrival of the Mohawk regiment until they saw Colonel Frederick Fisscher, dapper and dandy for all his gray hair, go cantering down to Tygert’s.

“Well, they got here,” Weaver said. “I’m going to* bed.”

He rolled over in his blanket. Reall said, “You’d better pull your feet out of the road, though.”

Demooth came round at breakfast time, wearing the homespun coat he used around the farm. The men were pleased to see him. They had got sick of the handsomely outfitted officers of the other regiments. It made them feel too much like the plain bush Germans the others claimed they were.

“All present?” he said to Weaver.

“Yes. There’s nobody missing.”

“That’s fine.” His dark face, lean, alert, quick-eyed, looked them over.

“Boys,” he said, “Herkimer was going to put us in front. But the way feeling is, he had to let Cox go up ahead. Bellinger’s regiment and Klock’s are going to be the main guard. Fisscher’s so tired he’ll just naturally have to come behind. You can fall in when you hear them cheering Herkimer off from the fort. When he goes by, you just drop in behind him. I’ve got to send Cox off now, but I’ll join you up the road.”

“Yes, captain,” said George.

They both grinned.

It took them all one day to get to Staring’s Brook. Ten miles. The companies straggled along the road, taking it easy in the heat. Up ahead, Cox led the Canajoharie men, festering all the time in his wounded vanity. Then, after a long gap, came Herkimer, musing on the old white horse who picked his footing with such caution. With Herkimer rode half a dozen officers, Colonels Fisscher, Veeder, Klock, and Campbell, and Paymaster Isaac Paris, talking volubly on how a campaign of this sort should be conducted, making a bright patch of blue coats, like out-of-season gentians in the woods; and then the German Flats regiment and the Palatine, perhaps five hundred men. Then another gap, and the long line of ox carts jolting on the road, making their painful crawl, beasts and drivers choking in their own dust, stung by horse and deer flies. And after another gap, the Mohawk regiment, taking its ease along the way.