3stalwarts (74 page)

“Jesus, they’re getting bold,” thought Joe.

Ten minutes more of cautious feeling forward showed them the first campfires.

No one was standing sentry in the storm. The fires made a long line through the woods, and the men lay close to them, sprawled out; many of them had lain still so long that their blankets were whitened by the snow. In the largest part of the camp, three or four horses huddled together, lifting their heads and snorting at the scent of wolves. But the men paid no attention to them.

The whole place, but for the horses, seemed to sleep. It was a sleep like death, as if the snow that fell on them were a drug they had had too much of.

But while the three Indians and Joe watched, they saw a man stir in one of the shelters, shake off the snow from his blanket, and rise. His face was haggard. His green and black, stained uniform and his leather skullcap on his unclubbed black hair identified him to Joe. He could have picked him off then, and got safe away without trouble, but Willett wanted to hit the army, not Butler.

The man’s eyes passed over where the four scouts stood, swept the camp. They saw his lips move. He walked to the edge of the firelight and bent down and prodded a snow-covered shape with his sword. The man lurched over, rose, and lifted his hand, and Butler struck him with the flat of the sword and drove him out to his sentry post.

The man was a Highlander. The knees under the kilt were black as chilled beef. He looked pathetic and wild, shivering, with the icy musket in his hand, confronting the woods, the wind, and the wild voices of the wolves.

He was within a hundred yards of Joe, but he saw neither Joe nor the Indians. What he saw, no one could tell. His eyes were opened inward on his own thoughts.

For a few moments more the four watched Butler go down the camp, beating out the delinquent sentries, indomitably, patiently, wearily, forcing them to posts. Then the scout backed slowly off. The two younger Indians followed reluctantly. There was easy scalping material around that camp. They knew it— as the wolves knew it.

Blue Back took a straight overland course directly to Willett’s camp, where Joe roused the colonel.

“Come in here,” said Willett. “It’s warmer.”

Joe sat down beside the colonel and made his report. “They’re only three miles north and they look played out. I couldn’t see that they carried much food, General.”

“Eating their horses as they go along,” commented Willett. “We’ll go for them before sunrise tomorrow. You’ve done fine, Major.”

Joe grinned.

“I seen Butler,” he said. “He was the only man with gimp to put the sentries out.”

Willett nodded.

“I told him once he was going to be hung,” he said. “After Oriskany. We’ve been far apart since then.”

“I could of killed him easy.”

The militia camp began to come to life at the dusk hour before dawn. The low fires were replenished. The men moved stiffly, semi-animate, with the cold in their bones. It was still dark in the spruce woods. They ate briefly of boiled beef thickened with cornmeal. Then Willett called them together.

“The enemy’s three miles in the northwest. We’ll follow our same formation till we hit them. The levies will follow me to the centre. The rear guard break along their south flank. They’ll probably try for the West Canada. We want to turn them into the woods.”

Helmer, Boleo, Blue Back, Gil, and John Weaver found themselves again in the advance. When they came outside the spruces, they found that the snow for the time being had stopped falling. But the heavy leaden clouds were still in labor over the shadowless land. The cold felt damper with the snow withheld. The breaths of the advancing brown militia crossing the white upland clung to their faces white as cotton. Behind them the beaten path of their feet stretched to the edge of the valley from which they had risen.

It took them an hour to reach the camp site of the enemy; but the enemy had moved as early as themselves. The trail they had broken was like a wide road through the woods. Ahead along the hills the wolves still howled, marking their place.

Willett jogged up to the front.

He formed parties. The Indians split again and went ahead wide on either flank, two horns to the main body of the militia. Like eyes before the head, the same scouts were advanced for contact.

“We’ve got a beaten path,” said Willett. “I want you boys to take their rear guard as quick as you can. We’ll be right after you.”

The march was now a steady run in the beaten track of the army. Even so it was an hour before the scouts first came up with the enemy’s rear.

John Weaver found himself on the right, with old Blue Back half a dozen yards beyond him. In spite of the hard going and the fast pace, he did not feel quite warm. He could not get his mind on the business properly. The white woods seemed to blur before his eyes, trees swimming together, and his mind kept turning to home.

His first awareness of the enemy was a loud yell from Blue Back. He lifted his head dully to see the Indian flop on his belly in the snow, and, looking over him, he saw half a dozen men in red plaid kilts trot out of a clump of trees. He could not realize what it meant for a moment. His head was full of wonder. He had just thought how it would be if George Weaver were not dead after all, if he were to come home and find a grand-son named after him. It was the last thought John ever had. One of the Highlanders had heard the old Indian’s warning yell. He turned, sighted the standing boy, lifted his rifle, and fired. The ball struck John square in the chest. He jumped straight up, like a deer, clear of the ground.

As he heard the rifle shot, Gil whirled towards it and broke out of the underbrush to see John pitch upon his face. Blue Back fired at the same instant. The belly-filling roar of the brown musket brought a snow load down from the nearest tree. Two clouds of black smoke wavered a little way apart. But the Highlander was not dead. He lay on a doubled leg. His comrades were like a pack boring into the woods.

As Gil stopped beside John, Blue Back humped forward through the snow. The scalp yell broke from his old throat with an unaccustomed quaver. Gil knelt down beside John. But John was dead as he lay, full pitch in the snow, covering his own blood. At the same instant the cry of the Highlander was drowned by a deep roar behind them all. The militia came through the woods in a brown wave. They passed on the dead run, without much order. And after that first yell they were silent. The battle had begun. Gil was picked up by the mass of men and carried forward, leaving John where he was. He had a glimpse of Blue Back beside the dead Highlander, sticking the wet scalp in his belt and lurching into his fat waddle. Then they were in the woods and taking running shots at the army ahead.

The hostile army never stopped. When a man fell he was pushed aside. Feet trod him into the snow. The rear guard of Highlanders was picked up by the militia and surrounded and disarmed, but the main force continued as if they had heard nothing.

They trotted in two files, making for the creek. A little before the valley was reached, the snow began again. And on the near side of the West Canada, Walter Butler rallied the Rangers. They made a stand. It held long enough to let the army get across. The Rangers plunged in, swimming and being carried down where the two units of Oneidas waited hanging over both banks with their hatchets ready.

But the militia were not to be stopped. They surged down the bank and into the water just as Butler lifted his exhausted horse on the far bank. In a volley of shots he was seen to pitch. The horse flung out on the shore, shook him off, and went galloping after the army, raising wet clots of snow. A couple of Indians coming up the bank found Butler, scalped him where he lay, and passed after the horse.

The snow came thicker. The militia, who had crossed, broke into the woods. All morning they followed the fleeing army, picking them off like driven hares. None of them stopped except to fling their blankets off, then their guns. Finally it seemed as if half the British were running unarmed, west and north, on their blind trail towards the Black River Valley.

It was a little after noon that Willett finally worked to the head of the militia and stopped them fifteen miles beyond the Canada Creek. They stopped from exhaustion as much as from obedience, leaning on their guns in the falling snow and staring westward past the colonel over the wintry wilderness where the disrupted path of the beaten army still bore witness to their panic. Slowly a grin passed from Willett to the men.

The job was done at last. They had not captured the army, but everyone seemed to know that Butler was killed; and everyone knew what would happen to a foodless army in full rout, half armed, in eighty miles of path-less woods.

They turned slowly back, not talking, not keeping ranks, trudging for home. Along the way they saw the Oneidas reaping a harvest of scalps that was beyond the dreams and legends of all Indian history. They left them to their bloody work.

The militia reached West Canada Creek again a little before dark and pushed forward for four miles more on the back track. During the evening, Gil tried to find John Weaver’s body. But it was not until Blue Back joined him that they found it. It had not been touched, for the wolves had passed on ahead at the first shooting and were now waiting the completion of the Oneidas’ work. Gil found stones and brush to build around the body before it became dark.

The march home went quickly. They came over the ford at SchelFs a little before sunset and reached Fort Dayton just at dark. Willett let them fire a full round of shots; and then for the first time they cheered. They saw the women rushing out. They saw the torches waving. And then, with unexampled extravagance, Bellinger let off a salute of four cannon. It nearly graveled poor old Blue Back, until he remembered that he had taken scalps himself. He twisted the hair round the muzzle of the ancient musket and started a crazy screeching which his Indians imitated. But they were hardly heard.

They streamed together into the fort, past the women and children, who began sobbing and crying with them, and rushing into the marching men to join their husbands.

Bellinger stood beside the gates. He kept yelling something. Yelling and yelling. Nobody heard for a while. Then Willett entered and met him. They talked for an instant. Willett’s face blazed and went white. He jumped up on the blockhouse ladder and set off a swivel over their heads.

For an instant silence settled with the smoke. Through it his nasal voice came down.

“General Washington’s taken Cornwallis in Virginia!”

It came to them all slowly. So slowly that Gil, with Lana under his arm, for an instant forgot. Then he saw Mary Weaver passing from group to group, her eyes searching every face with a stilled panic. He said something to Lana, and both of them moved after Mary.

She lay on her bed without crying. It was Emma who cried. The night was still at last. And the snow fell over the Mohawk without wind. Gil, Lana, and Joe Boleo stayed with them, helpless and wordless.

At his table in Bellinger’s room in the fort, Willett was wearily writing his dispatch. He had got through with it. The invasion of Warrensbush, the fight at Johnstown, the loss of the enemy’s trail, the sally north from German Flats, the chase through the woods, the bloody crossing of the Creek, Butler’s death, only one American killed. He ought to say something to show why he did not capture the army.

He rested his long face on his left hand and finally wrote:—

In this situation, to the compassion of a starving wilderness, we left them… .

10

LANA (1784)

Lana brought the stool to the kitchen door for ten minutes’ rest. With Gil away she had so much work to do in caring for the farm that these few minutes before the boys brought the cows in for milking were like a gift from God. The baby was asleep in the cradle with a rag over her to keep the flies off. It was a bad season for flies. So much wet, and then the mid-summer heat that had brought the wheat on very fast. Too fast, Gil believed; he was afraid of rust. But the corn had thriven as they had never seen corn thrive before.

When they had returned to Deerfield a year ago, their hearts sank at the way berry vines and scrub brush had encroached on their cleared acres. Yet they had ploughed easily. In one season, Gil had restored all the land they had originally worked, and this summer it was under crops, with the corn in a brand-new lot.

The new cabin stood on the site of the old. It looked like the old cabin from the road, but the end that pointed towards the spring had an extra section in which Gil and Lana and the baby slept, while the two boys occupied the loft over the kitchen. The barn also was larger, for they had two cows and two calves; and instead of the old brown mare, which they had had to kill for food the year after the West Canada Creek battle, they now had a yoke of oxen. The oxen had seemed to them the first material evidence of their future prosperity— even to Lana, who longed for a boughten bed with cords and a feather mattress. She no longer slept as easily as she used to. Her back was apt to pain her after a full day’s work from four to nine, as when she had to help get in the hay before a rain and leave her household work till after dark. But the boys helped now, raking, and fetching down the baby at her feeding hours, and saving their mother the walk back to the cabin. The oxen had cost Gil seventy dollars and the big cart thirty dollars more. He had had to borrow from Mark Demooth to make up half the price, so that they had a mortgage on the place; but that would be taken care of partially by back militia pay and the indemnity for the first burning of their farm when Congress started meeting claims. It was hard for them to have to wait so long when down in Ulster and New York claims were already being settled; but Mr. Yates had explained to Gil that it was a question of votes and that when the new western county became politically important they would be paid surely. It was a matter of being patient.

It was hard for Gil to be patient. If he had had that pay, he could have bought the black girl Klock offered to sell him the week he went after the oxen. Klock’s asking price was only a hundred and fifty dollars. To-day, Lana was inclined to share Gil’s bitterness. With a girl to do the cooking and help with the cheese, she would have felt quite fresh for tonight’s milking.