3stalwarts (65 page)

“Yes.”

“Don’t you want to come with me? I’ll take you to Niagara.”

“No, I don’t want to come.”

Her eyes had dropped and she spoke hesitantly.

He said, “But you don’t want to stay in a place like this. It’s not right. It’s not decent, Nancy.”

“I don’t want to go,” she said, after a moment.

“You needn’t be scared of him. I’ll look out for you. Hon will be along.”

As she did not answer, his speech went on, more quickly, almost desperately. “But I’ll take you to Niagara. Don’t you remember how it was? You said you’d— you said you loved me. I loved you. I never forgot you, Nancy. Honest. I said I’d marry you, don’t you remember? You can’t stay here. I’ll marry you when we get to Niagara.”

She raised her eyes then to his.

“I am married,” she said. “I don’t want to go. Thank you,” she added softly, and turned back to the cabin.

He stood where he was for a long minute, half minded to overtake her; then he noticed Gahota a little way off, leaning against a tree and idly swinging his casse-tete by its thong. From the waterside Casselman and Hon were yelling to him to hurry up.

Days were to come in which Lana would find herself wondering if she were herself, or some fear-deadened creature existing in human flesh. The mounting tide of dread gained impetus with each express that came through German Flats from the east. In April and May they heard successively of smaller settlements cut off, their few inhabitants killed and scalped. The Sacandaga bush, Harperfield, Fox’s Creek, in Schoharie, Getman’s, Stam-ford, Cherry Valley for the second time, and isolated homesteads, one by one, to which families had returned in their eagerness once more to work their farms. The Indian parties did their work and vanished before rescuers could so much as start from the nearest fort. A puff of smoke against the warm May sky; the faint sounds of firing; another name crossed off the militia list; and who knew who was with him at the place. His wife? His children? Sometimes later it was learned that he was there alone.

The Indians were not taking many prisoners, for they were not returning all the way to Niagara after every raid. They burrowed off into the woods like dogs, circling, lying hidden till all threat of a pursuit was by, and then entering a new district. Five times that month of May the men at McKlennar’s had been called for the militia. Five times they had marched into the woods. And five times they had found only the burning ruins of the homestead cabin and stayed only long enough to bury such dead as they found.

The militia were positive that white men led the raids. Twice, following up the tracks of the destructives, Adam and Joe had found women at the site of their first camp. In each case it was obvious how they had been treated before being scalped.

Whenever the militia were called, Lana and Mrs. McKlennar had moved down to one of the forts. Once Adam had been sent to fetch them in when Joe and Gil were both on duty. He had taken them to Eldridge Blockhouse, where thirty people were crowded inside a stockade fifty feet by forty. They had spent seven days there, with no news of what was happening.

Jacob Small or Dingman or Robhold Ough was always on watch in the spy loft and from time to time he called down what he saw. Once it was an express riding along the Kingsroad, full gallop into the west. Another time it was a wagon train, presumably for Fort Stanwix, since it was escorted by sixty soldiers. Again, in the middle of one night, the watcher saw fire to the south and west, far up the valley, beyond Shoemaker hill.

It was so still in the darkness that even at that distance a brief session of firing could be heard. Lana and Mrs. McKlennar, sharing a shed with Betsey Small and her four-year-old boy, talked together in low voices, try-ing to imagine what was happening to keep the militia out so long. As soon as he had brought them safe inside, Adam Helmer had departed to run a single-handed scout, he said, to the northward. But he had been gone six days.

Betsey spoke tenderly of him as she lay on her back and stared at the square roof of the blockhouse against the stars. There in the spy loft Jacob was keeping the second watch.

“I’d miss Adam,” she said. “I’d hate to have anything happen to him. He’s such a crazy fool.”

“He’s crazy about you,” said Mrs. McKlennar.

“I know he is.” She added, after a minute, “I’m fond of Jake.”

One of the children turned on his straw bed with the noise a mouse might make in a barn. In the pitch-dark across the stockade another child began to cry. Instantly Jake’s voice came down from the spy loft. “Stop that noise.” The mother’s fierce whispering could be heard. Then again the silence.

The small stockade cut a segment out of the sky through which stars traced the passage of the night.

“The last express said they expected Sir John Johnson would be down; do you think that’s it?”

“It might be.”

One of the four cows kept in the stockade began to moo; and Jake’s instinctive call for silence brought a smothered laugh from a boy. You couldn’t tell a cow to hush its mouth. Then, as the cow continued its bawling, the ridiculousness changed to terror. They could see Jake leaning over the sill of the spy-loft window. His voice was thick with passion.

“Take a club to her! My God, are you all idiots down there?”

Betsey whispered, “Jake feels mad. We’d better quit talking.”

There were only five grown men in the stockade, to protect the twenty-odd women and children. Both the Snells who had survived Oriskany— seven of that family had been killed there— and the Forbush men and the two younger Borsts had been called up to Dayton. A solider man than Jacob Small would have been frightened by the responsibility. Eldridge’s was too far away from any other fort to expect any reenforcement if they should be attacked.

Their only hope lay in keeping a strict silence during the night, and hoping during the day that any marauding party coming their way would be small enough for five men to handle. He thought he could frighten off any bunch of Indians with the swivel. But supposing the Indians were brought by some Tory renegade— like Casselman, for instance; he would know that a swivel mounted that high was next to useless.

The alarm guns at Herkimer and Dayton both sounded three times. That meant that there was a large party of Indians. Jacob wished he knew how large. They must have burned the Moyer place during the night— that would be the fire he had seen. The Moyers, three families of them, had set out to build that spring, he had heard.

The worst time of watching was in the hour before dawn, when light was just beginning and there were no stars. The valley, then, became like a gray blanket, without shape or distance. It was harder for a man to see than during the darker hours, and no sound was reliable.

It was at this hour that Adam Helmer returned. He was crossing the highland on a dead run. Jacob heard him come over the edge and down the slope to the lesser incline on which the stockade was situated.

“Eldridge,” he was calling. “Helmer.”

“That you, Adam?”

“Let me in, Jake.”

Small bawled down the word to open the gate and Helmer came in, his wide shoulders filling the narrow gap. He stood in the yard, breathing deep, while Small leaned out of the spy-loft window to hear his news.

“The Indians are out again, Jake.”

“Where?”

“I almost ran into them. They were coming from West Canada Crick. They’d crossed below Schell’s and they’re headed this way.”

“How many?”

“About sixty, I guess. I ran around them, after they’d gone by. I had to climb a tree and they went right under me. Mostly Senecas, and about ten white men. Casselman. Empie. McDonald. I heard their names.”

“How far back of you?”

“They’ll be here in about two hours.”

Small swore.

“That’s after sunrise. They’ll see us plain.”

“They’ve got the militia after them. But they figured the militia would chase up the crick, I guess. They’ll find out pretty quick what happened if Joe’s with them.”

“We only got five men here, Adam. Six, with you.”

There was a silence. All the women and the older children had come out of their sheds. Now they looked up at the spy loft, making a pond of white, strained, frightened faces. They were all depending on him, and he had no more idea than any of them what to do.

In the midst of that silence Mrs. McKlennar’s snort was a challenging blast.

“There’s fifteen grown women here,” she said. “We’ll rig up to look like men. If we show up along the rifle platforms, they can’t see we’re women. They’ll go by.”

They found a few extra hats and some old shirts. The five men passed their hats out. Betsey put on her husband’s; Lana borrowed Adam’s. They stuffed their hair inside. Three of the women, having no hats, hacked off each other’s hair with a razor. They put on shirts and coats and armed themselves with broomsticks and pitchfork handles. For a moment they stared at each other in the yard, then, hiking their skirts up, they climbed the ladders to the rifle platform.

“Don’t hold those sticks so plain,” admonished Small from the spy loft. “Just hold onto them as if they was guns, but don’t try to show them. If they come while it’s still misty you’ll look all right. And if any shooting commences, duck.”

He pulled his head out of sight, then stuck it forth again for a last word.

“And don’t talk. A woman’s got no idea how far a woman’s voice will carry.”

It was so still now, in the misty pre-dawn, that they heard the splashing of Small’s brook under the alders a hundred yards away. It was cooler than it had been during the night. Even Jacob Small, twenty feet above them, saw nothing; and he did not hear the padding feet as soon as they did.

The footfalls came along the way that Adam had taken, over the crest of the highland and down the slope, at a run. But before they reached the wheatfield they slowed down and faded out of hearing. For a long time Lana tried to hear them again. She kept staring toward where they had last been audible, away on her left.

She never knew what sound had caused her to turn her eyes straight out from the stockade, but when she did she nearly screamed. An Indian was standing there, vaguely defined in the pale light. She knew it was an Indian. She could see the feather over his ear and the scarlet on his face and chest and the blanket hanging from his shoulder. Her courage seemed to drain out at her feet. She could only stare as a bird would at a snake. She felt her heart beating so hard that she could scarcely fetch her breath; the blood pounded in her ears, stopped suddenly, and the painted figure of the Indian began to sway in her eyes. She thought she was going to faint.

Then Mrs. McKlennar caught sight of her and reached out and poked Adam. He glanced at Lana, slipped over to her, and followed the direction of her gaze. His rifle crept out noiselessly between the points of the sticks.

The smell of his sweat beside her brought Lana to her senses. “Don’t move,” he muttered. She did not dare move. Out of the tail of her eye, she saw his thick finger bending on the trigger. She could not help herself from looking back to the Indian. As she did so the rifle roared in her ears and the smoke flushed up in her face, choking her. But before it did, she saw the Indian spin on his heels and fall, head towards her, on his back.

“Hell,” said Adam. “I must have got him to one side.”

The tear of his teeth on the cartridge paper, the cold slither of the ramrod whanging home the bullet, and he was gone back to his post. She found that she was panting.

“Get him?” Jacob called down.

“Got him,” Adam answered.

The shot brought on the main body of the destructives. They could be heard on the highland, then coming down the hill. Then their progress faded out. But the mist was thinning, and here and there the vague shapes of them were visible.

A musket flashed from the spot at which the Indian had been killed. The ball whipped over the women’s heads with a sharp tearing sound. “Down, you,” shouted Jacob.

For a minute there was no other shot. Then a yelling broke out. They loosed a volley at the palisade and the bullets broke splinters off along the points. And then a shrill whistle called out of the mist.

Jacob called down, “They’re pulling off. It did the trick. They seen you.” He waited a moment. “I think the militia’s coming. I heard a conk-shell horn.”

Lana turned her back to the palisade and sat down. She also had heard the deep dismal wailing of the conch shell.

“Hey,” bawled Jacob. “They’re a-going! They’re going down the road.”

They were trotting down the road in Indian file. Lana, getting to her feet, watched them with the others. About sixty of them, Adam counted, perhaps a dozen white men. They plodded along at a steady pace, not looking back. They carried blankets on their shoulders, and rifles and muskets trailing from their hands. They all looked brown in the thinning mist, dark and dirty and implacable. There were enough of them to have stormed the stockade in five minutes if they had not mistaken the women for men… .

An hour later the militia came over the edge of the highland behind Joe Boleo. They came at a trot, also, but the gait was not like the smooth In-dian tread. The militia plodded like farmers, stubbornly setting down their feet, forty weary men.

Joe Boleo drew a little ahead of them.

“You all right?” he yelled.

“Yes.”

“How long ago did they go by here?”

“An hour.”

Joe gave a groan. “All night long I been kicking these twerps to make them run and all we do is get farther behind.”

“You’re lucky at that. There was sixty.”

“They burnt out the Moyers. We got Dolly Moyer, scelpt but not kilt. They’d started to carry her off, but we come up too quick. We was right on them there.”

The militiamen fell out of rank any which way and lay down on the grass bank before the stockade. Joe eyed them disgustedly. “Say, is Adam in there?”

Adam was already pushing the gate open.

“Hello, you bug-tit,” he said to Joe. “Want to go after them?”

“Yeah. I want to see them out of the valley. Come on.”

Lana issued from the fort with the other women, looking for Gil. He was sitting on the bank with his back against the stockade. He looked back at her without smiling.