Arundel (51 page)

What hell may be like, I don’t know; but if it’s like the Height of Land I hope I may be spared from it. I have seen evil forests in my life, but never so much evil compressed into such small compass as here.

The trees were dwarfed and starved, without a first-growth tree among them; and all of them grew from the rotting bones of other forests which had been beaten to the earth, Natanis said, by the terrible windstorms that rage across them. There were blow-downs everywhere, tangles of dead pines, with new growth binding them together, so that there was no getting through them. Nor, as one climbed higher on this terrible wall, did the moisture drain from the earth, as might be expected. Everywhere there were mire holes: wet gullies through thickets whose dead twigs snapped into our faces: devilish bogs at the bottom of ravines, and sheer precipices rising out of dark bogs with other bogs at their tops.

Along our narrow deer track, twisting around mire holes and skirting blow-downs, Natanis moved without hesitation, though it was a path I could never have followed by myself. When I said so, he showed me the Abenaki trail marks, faint ones so that they might not be used by the Montagnais or any other Northern Indians: triple slashes, little more than scratches, inclined to the left or to the right, or straight up and down, depending on the direction followed by the trail ahead. There were, he said, three main Abenaki trails across the Height of Land from the Chain of Ponds: one zigzagging across from the pond we had just left and coming out on Seven Mile Stream, which is the stream flowing from the northerly side of the Height of Land into Lake Megantic; one going to the right of this and coming out on the easterly shore of Lake Megantic; and the third going to the left and coming out on the westerly shore of the lake. These, he said, were necessary for hunting parties, and had existed for years, with cross trails connecting them. It was the first of these, he said, that we were traveling. The trail opened for the army was straighter and shorter than any of the Abenaki trails.

After we had topped the Height and commenced our descent we came to a mountain meadow, one that seemed to me a lovely sight because of its resemblance to a fragment of New England dropped into all this hellishness. It was dotted with clumps of elms, large and stately, and over it lay a thick mat of grass, so that it had a familiar look, like Ipswich common, or the green at Newburyport. Natanis warned me not to be misled by this unexpected sight into thinking all our troubles lay behind us. The meadow, he said, was without a mate anywhere in that country; and from its beauty the Abenakis believed it to be the spot where the great lord Glooskap was born. Its lower end, he said, gave rise to the Seven Mile Stream, which, after seven miles of winding, fell into Lake Megantic; but the country through which it flowed was worse than the Height of Land, thick with trackless bogs lying deep in water, so that even the Abenakis shunned it, skirting around it on the high land to the east and west.

Through this meadow ran a new-made trail, so we knew Church and Steele and his men, as well as Arnold himself, had passed this way into Seven Mile Stream and so to Lake Megantic. We went beyond the meadow, watching carefully for Treeworgy, dropped our canoe into the twisted channel of Seven Mile Stream, and slipped silently down it through the worst swamps that ever I saw, there being no banks at all to the stream on its lower portions, only trees and shrubs standing in water, with here and there an islet choked with brush.

The trees and bushes ceased toward dusk, and we knew we had come to the lake. In the distance was a plume of smoke, rising straight in the cold air from the right-hand shore. We saw bateaux in the water, and made out five or six campfires, so we were certain we had caught up with Colonel Arnold, which indeed we had.

We skirted around the camp so that Natanis might land beyond it and be safe until we had need of him. Then we came back to the camp, Hobomok running me inshore quickly; so that if Treeworgy was there I might face him unexpectedly.

Captain Oswald stood on the point talking with Lieutenant Church and Lieutenant Steele when the canoe shot in. They fell silent as I jumped ashore and went up to them. “Is Treeworgy here?” I asked, trying to look into the gloom beyond them.

Steele stared silently across the lake. Church, scratching his lugubrious face with his forefinger, said sadly: “What you want of him?”

Both had failed to give me any greeting at all.

“What’s the matter?” I asked. At once I thought I had the answer. “Treeworgy told you about Enos, of course! Where is he?”

Steele walked away. Church looked mournfully at the ground.

Oswald said: “You’d best hold your tongue until you’ve seen the colonel.” His voice was hostile.

“Why, what do you mean?” I said. “What the hell ails you, treating me like a criminal!”

“Over there,” Oswald said, pointing to an Indian cabin made of bark, sheltered from the north by a heavy clump of spruces. Light gleamed through its cracks. He and Church turned away, leaving me alone.

I walked over to the bark house with a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach. It never occurred to me to wonder how the cabin had come there. I pushed aside the blanket that hung at the door and found Colonel Arnold inside, his field desk balanced on his knee. When he looked up and saw me, he snapped down the cover of the inkwell and threw the desk together with a bang.

“By God!” he said, “you’re either a brave man or the damnedest fool alive to come into this room with me!”

“What in God’s name is the matter?” I asked, near sick with apprehension.

Arnold’s eyeballs gleamed white in his dark, puffy face, which had lost all its pleasing contours and become nubbly, like the green squashes we grow in Arundel. He made a hissing sound, and picked up a heap of papers from beside the stump on which he sat.

“Here,” he said, slapping one of the papers and glaring at me until I thought his eyes would pop. from his head. “You advised Colonel Enos that it was his duty to return to Cambridge with all his troops and provisions! What have you got to say to that, damn you!”

“It’s a damned dirty lie!” I said, cold and shaking all over, and feeling as though I had no stomach inside my hunting shirt.

“Do you dare to stand there and deny—”

“Deny! Deny! I say it’s a lie! I fought him, for God’s sake! What are you talking about?”

“I’ve got it here!” Arnold shouted, banging the stump with his fist. “I tell you I’ve got it down in black and white! Here! Did you or did you not say this to Captain Williams before Colonel Enos, when asked for advice? Did you or did you not say that if you were in their place you’d pack up and go home, no matter how much food you had?”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” I said. “Yes! But in sarcasm! In sarcasm!” A hurly-burly of thoughts raced through my head, making me near speechless from desire to speak them all and inability to know where to start. “By God!” I said, “it was Treeworgy! Treeworgy heard me!” “Yes,”

Arnold said, his face furious, “Treeworgy heard you say it!”

“I tell you I didn’t say it! I said other words that changed the meaning!”

“But you used those words!”

“Yes, but not as you imply. Wait: I can’t remember what I said! I tell you I fought Enos and Williams! This Treeworgy—he’s responsible, damn his dirty lousy soul to hell—they never would have gone back but for Treeworgy!”

“Oh,” Arnold said, moving his thick shoulders under his coat and glaring at me cold and unwinking out of pale blue eyes. “Oh, so now you turn it all on Treeworgy! What was it Treeworgy did?”

“Damn him!” I said, half crying with desire to tear him to pieces. “He took my food and my musket and my canoe, and raced up here to lie about me!”

Arnold watched me with hard blue eyes. “Good reason, too! He heard you advise them to go back. He thought you intended to go back as well.”

“He thought no such thing! I did
not
advise them to go back. I’d see anyone in hell before I advised him to go back! If I advised them to go back, why have I come on myself? What would Treeworgy say to that? Where is he, the damned gray rat?”

“I’ll tell you what he’d say,” Arnold said. I tightened my muscles, thinking he meant to jump up and take me by the throat. “I’ll tell you what he
did
say. He said he took your canoe because he thought you were a coward and would go back with Enos, so that you’d have no use for a canoe. He said if you came on in spite of that, it would prove what he disliked to think: that you’re a spy!”

“No!” I exclaimed, groping and groping in my mind for words, but finding little there except what seemed to me like cold flakes of metal such as fall from red hot iron when pounded at the forge. “No! It’s not true! Why, you
know
me! You’ve been in Arundel and you’ve been in my home and you
know
me! You knew my father! You know my mother and my sisters! How in God’s name could
I
be a spy!”

“Why, for that matter,” Arnold said, glowering at me, “you’re nothing but an innkeeper and a trader—a man who’ll take money for almost anything he owns—”

“Damn you! You can’t say that!”

“Oh, can’t I? Why can’t I, when I’ve got a thousand men on my hands to bring safely through these forests? I say it, just as Treeworgy said it to me: somebody must have got to you with money! You’ve taken money! You must have taken money!”

“Now wait!” I said, feeling as though some terrible thing had happened in the pit of my stomach. “Wait! Now wait for a minute!”

“You’ve taken money!” Arnold repeated. “I’ll not run the risk of having my men endangered by such as you! I’ll have no more of you!”

“Wait!” I said, fumbling for words. “Endangered! Do you think I’d endanger Phoebe or Noah Cluff or you or any friend of mine? For God’s sake, wait a little! Why, here: you’ve known for years I’ve wanted to go to Quebec—to Quebec after Mary. Yes, and you’ve seen Mary! You went to see Mary and brought back word of her to me. Now wait a minute! You wouldn’t let me go to Quebec until you gave the word! There it is: you know the both of us! You can’t treat me this way! Why, Colonel, I swear to my God I’ve done no such thing—I’ve taken no man’s money! What do I want of money? What object would I have in taking money to turn against my own country and my own people?”

“Object?” Arnold asked thoughtfully. “Object? Why, the best of objects from the point of view of a lovesick idiot! If you were taking British money the gates of Quebec would be open to you always. You could walk in to see this milk-faced wench of yours with no trouble, where the rest of us might have to fight our way in.”

“No!” I shouted. “No! It’s a lie! I’d waited years! I’d have waited years more, and you know it damned well!”

“Now listen!” Arnold said. “I can remember when you’d have hit me with a stool—me, a guest in your own house—for being slow in telling you about your doll-faced wench. Don’t tell me what you’d do! There’s no telling what a man in love will do! He isn’t in his right mind! As soon as Treeworgy asked whether there was any woman in your case I knew he’d hit it!”

“No! For God’s sake, no!” I said, striving to speak calmly. “You can’t take Treeworgy’s word against mine! I’m your friend, and you never saw Treeworgy before this expedition. I tell you he’s a liar!” “So!”

Arnold said softly. “So! I never saw him before! And he lies about everything, does he?”

“Yes, damn him! About everything! He filled Enos’s men with lies, until they were ready to turn tail and run by the time they reached Skowhegan.”

Arnold went to laughing silently, his broad shoulders shaking under the deerskin shirt that covered his uniform. As he laughed he stared into my face with bulbous blue eyes in which there was no merriment at all. “I think,” he said, “he sometimes tells the truth.”

“No!” I protested. “Never! I tell you every word he says is a lie!”

“Ah!” said Arnold, “and is it also a lie that the Indian Natanis has visited our camps in your canoe?”

I stared back at him, speechless at the trap into which I had blundered.

“Speak up!” Arnold cried. “Treeworgy may be a liar, but you can’t deny Natanis has been with you, as Treeworgy said! Do you deny it?”

“No!”

He got to his feet, his face swarthy and nubbly. “I know this much! You were warned about Natanis! Washington warned you and I warned you! We threshed that out and settled it! He’s a spy; and you were told so. You knew we had no faith in him. Now you’ve taken him the length of our lines. You’ve shown him the last shred of pork and the last keg of powder we’ve got! You knew Steele had orders to shoot him, and yet you did these things! By God, I’ll lay odds you warned him, so he escaped us!”