Arundel (79 page)

“Marie!” he called. “Marie!” As I closed the door behind him, he added in French
some
words I could not understand, following them with what he may have considered an imitation of our own nasal New England speech. “Couldn’t do nawthin’!” he shouted gaily. “Captured or killed every mother’s son of ’em, the damned dirty rabble!”

He stopped and listened. “Marie!” he shouted again. He turned, his coat in his hand, seemingly with the intention of tossing it to the person who had opened to him, and saw Natanis standing there, not two feet distant.

He sprang away, clawing for his sword, and put himself squarely in my grasp. As I closed my hands around his arm Natanis took the other. He strained against us for a moment; then went slack.

“This is unexpected,” he said, in the dry, delicate, displeasing tones I well remembered from my one meeting with him. “My eyes are dulled by the snow. To whom am I indebted for this greeting?”

“Old friends of yours,” I said. “Old friends. You have a slit ear to help you remember my father, who gave it to you; and you may recall giving me the scar on my own forehead. There’s another old friend of yours with us: one who hasn’t seen you since he kicked you into the mud, where you belonged.”

The door at the end of the corridor flew open on the candle-lit kitchen and Cap Huff peered out to see what we were about. I tightened my hold on Guerlac, thinking he might try to break from us at the sight that met our eyes—Mary bound hand and foot in a chair and gagged with a towel, done by the forethought of Cap Huff to keep her from trying to warn Guerlac of what awaited him; Hobomok leaning against the door with his musket between his knees, glowering at us; and Cap towering over both of them, a gaudy figure in his British officer’s garb.

We took Guerlac to the kitchen, where Cap lashed his feet together; and we made him fast to a chair with his hands tied behind him. Then we took the gag from Mary’s mouth, an easement that in a way seemed useless, since she sat silent.

“So!” Guerlac said, staring at us coolly. “Four deserters who ran from comrades in peril!”

This was no time to lose our tempers, I knew, and I could see Cap knew it too. I studied Guerlac. He had changed little since his visit to our inn at Arundel. His hair was gray over his ears, and there was a scar across his right cheek and ear where my father’s arrow had clipped him. Beneath his chin there was a little fullness; but otherwise he was as slender and haughty as the picture of him that had clung in my mind.

Cap sliced pork into the saucepan. “Gosh! What with tending this wench, and waiting for this damned light-fingered murderer you just brought in, I’m starving!” He slammed the saucepan on the fire, where it sizzled bravely, sending out a cloud of fragrant smoke.

“Yet,” said Guerlac, “it should be nourishment enough to know that when your comrades are rotting in gaol, you’ll be hanged for spies. That will happen, I take it, as soon as my friends come here and find you.”

“Get some cups, Stevie,” Cap said. “We want to make a kind of holiday out of this. ’Tain’t every day you catch a murderer in his own house, and it’s New Year’s Day and all! We wouldn’t want to drink this man’s wine out of a bottle, not even if we
are
filthy Bostonnais.”

He fished the pork from the saucepan and broke a dozen eggs into the sizzling grease. We found bread in a box beneath the table and made a fair breakfast, with two dozen eggs and the pork, and cups a third full of the coffee the cook had left on the stove and two thirds full of wine, a fine satisfying wine called Mersault. God knows I needed something to hearten me, what with the hours we had kept and our fight in the Lower Town and the manner in which Mary had spoken to me, and now this news of Guerlac’s that our men had been killed or captured. Whether to believe it or not, I didn’t know; but I knew that if I showed him I wanted to know he would lie to me fit to tangle my brain like a wet anchor rope.

Cap tilted back in his chair when he had finished and looked with a cold eye at Guerlac. “I’m surprised, I vow I am, that you haven’t got Mallinson’s scalp hanging up as a decoration.”

Guerlac sat silent, his eyelids drooping.

“I thought of you often,” I told him, “after you took Mary and did your best to split my skull in doing it. Lately I’ve wondered why you, a captain in the regiment of Béarn—you, an English-hater—should now be fighting with the English against Americans. All other Frenchmen are with America, to be revenged on the English.”

“Why,” he said, “you’re as ignorant as all Bostonnais! Some of us in Quebec recognize the justice of the British cause. Colonel Voyer and Captain Dambourges and Captain Maroux and Captain Alexandre Dumas fought with the English in the Sault-au-Matelot, this very day, against your rabble.”

“That may be,” I said, disregarding his attempts to enrage me and watching his face carefully, “but you gave Colonel Arnold to believe you sympathized with him.”

He laughed lightly. “To be sure! I had sympathy for him until I learned he seriously intended to be such a fool as to attack Quebec. Then I withdrew my sympathy.”

“And his letters,” I said, “I suppose you gave to the government.”

“Why,” he said, “you’re as good as a lawyer! I’ve had no letter from Colonel Arnold in three or four months.”

I saw I could get nothing from him, nor was I sure he had anything for me to get.

We were silent, a strange, uncomfortable company; and the stillness lasted until there was a movement from Hobomok. He hissed a warning and got up from his chair, bringing his musket to his hip.

“No shooting!” I whispered.

Cap picked up the poker from beside the stove and wagged it lightly between Guerlac and Mary. “A little noise from anybody now,” he whispered, “even from a lady, would be awful dislikable!”

There was a fumbling at the latch of the bolted door, and then a sharp rap.

“How many?” I asked Hobomok softly.

“Two! Eneas and Hook!”

I shot the bolt and tore open the door. It was Hook who had rapped, and Eneas stood behind him. I had already made up my mind what to do, and instantly I leaped out at Hook; but he was quicker than I: my reaching hands did not touch him. I stumbled and fell flat in the snow, the leap carrying me clear of the doorstep.

Now this was a mischance that proved a grave one; for we had to deal with men not only powerful in muscle, but nimble and quickwitted in fighting; and within a trice they were near to our undoing.

Eneas jumped upon me before I could move. He had his knee into my back so that the breath left me, and he jerked upward with his hands beneath my chin, to break my neck. His act was so quick and so violent that I seemed to be in a paralysis and had no power to throw him off, but only to stiffen the muscles of my throat as much as I could. I seemed to feel them breaking, and the spine that braced them cracking.

With eyes starting out of my head, I saw Hobomok a little before me, and it seemed to me he was running away, as if stricken with panic. Then I heard a dreadful groaning kind of grunt, which I knew to be in the voice of Cap Huff; and a great scarlet body seemed to hurtle through the air as if heaved by some mighty power, and it flopped down beside me and lay inert, a crimson splotch in the white snow. It was Cap Huff, apparently dead.

From behind me I heard the report of a musket and saw Hobomok stagger, so I knew he was shot.

Thus, in a trice, we seemed undone, so sudden, sometimes, are the overturnings that may befall men just when they are most cocksure.

We four, Natanis, Hobomok, Cap and I, had no thought that misfortune could overwhelm us in any such manner. Opposed to us were only two men, attacked by surprise, and a man tied to a chair, and a girl; and in less than half a minute they had turned the tables against us and we were on the point of ruin. Nay, for myself, I was worse than that: I was at the point of death, and I knew it: my sight wavered, and such spouts of pain burst through all my upper parts and zigzagged in lightnings of anguish through my brain that never had I felt the like before, and was all too sure no one could thus suffer long and yet be alive.

It is wonderful that a man can be in so desperate a posture and still think; yet I did have thoughts, and wonderings, even then. It seemed to me there was something in what men call the ironical: to have dreamed of Mary Mallinson so long; to have come, after all my dreaming, to rescue her—to rescue her who would not be rescued, but despised me; and then, to top this off, to perish ignobly in such a pass, with my neck broke by an Indian spy. And what I wondered was how the devil it could be happening.

That helpless question is one that Cap Huff will, to his last hour, resent my putting to him. When Eneas leaped upon me Natanis ran to help me, Hobomok being engaged with Hook; and Cap made the blunder of going to the door to see how we fared. Rightfully I should not reproach him for this. It was his solicitude for me that caused the error; but he had two alert and quick-moving enemies behind him in the room, and they were not likely to miss their chance. Mary got a knife from the table and cut Guerlac’s ropes. Hobomok had left his musket in the room, and Guerlac used the stock of it upon the back of Cap Huff’s skull, then fired at Hobomok to save Hook.

The blow with the stock must have been delivered with a mighty swing, for it carried the whole weighty person of Cap as far as my leap from the door carried me, and laid him beside me, out of action. He was no worse than out of action—a fact for which credit must be given to his ancestors, who left him, as that very blow demonstrated, the thickest head-bone structure, undoubtedly, on the North American continent. But the fight was over; for he sat up and joined me in a great mutual puzzlement as to whether we were alive or no.

It was Natanis who saved us. His hatchet finished Eneas abruptly; my head, almost unseated, resumed its proper posture upon an aching neck; the intolerable weight upon my back was removed; and with eyes still wavering I saw Hobomok halt. He was not running away: it was Hook who was running away, with Hobomok after him—Hobomok with a bleeding left shoulder, as we saw from the red stain on his white blanket coat. He poised his tomahawk and threw, using the overhand swing with which the Abenakis hurl this weapon. The hatchet struck Hook in the middle of the back, near the waist; and he bent backward as if his body had been hinged, falling into the snow and lying there with no movement save a groping of his right hand, as if to catch hold of something and drag himself up.

I did not know until later that day how well and quickly Natanis thought and acted in these, our moments of overthrow. The blow fell upon Cap Huff at the very instant of the hatcheting of Eneas; and if Natanis had not sprung instantly back to the door, that door would have been closed: Guerlac and Mary would have run through to the front of the house and raised the town upon us.

But Natanis was too quick, and he was at the door before the latch could fall; Hobomok returned, running, and together they forced their way back into the house; so that even before I got Cap, groaning, to his feet, Guerlac was fast to his chair again, and Mary sat white and staring in hers.

Natanis and Hobomok ran out to Hook, took him by the arms, dragged him into the kitchen, and laid him on the floor. Cap and I staggered in. We shut the door and bolted it. Cap found a rag, soaked it in water, applied it to the back of his head, and stood looking at Guerlac with profound respect.

“Don’t you ever do that again!” he said. “You might have hurt me! And besides, if this happened to be any other day, shooting off a gun like that right in town might have made a whole lot of folks come around to see what was going on. Of course, after all the bim-banging and everything last night and this morning, I expect no body’s going to notice it; but don’t you do it again! You know yourself we don’t want the neighbors in here.”

Natanis took the white coat from Hobomok and dressed the latter’s wound, Hobomok sitting impassive, which was more than I could have done; for the ball had lacerated the shoulder muscles, and Natanis’s methods of bandaging were heroic. Not a moan escaped from the Indian’s lips; he was silent as the dying Hook upon the floor near by.

While I hated Hook more than any man in the world—more, even, than Guerlac—my hatred seemed to go from me when I saw his eyes rolling from me to Cap and from Cap to Hobomok and Natanis with the same fierceness I had seen in them when he went away from our inn with a broken jaw, leaving my father dying upstairs.

It was the look, I thought, of a wounded fish-hawk; and it flashed into my mind that there was more joy in having an enemy to pursue than in catching and destroying him.