The Pioneers (64 page)

Several stout young men were selected, and taken apart with an appearance of secrecy, where they received some important charge from the Sheriff, immediately under the eyes, but far removed from the ears, of all in the village. Possessed of a knowledge of their duty, these youths hurried into the hills, with a bustling manner, as if the fate of the world depended on their diligence, and, at the same time, with an air of mystery, as great as if they were engaged on secret matters of the state.

At twelve precisely, a drum beat the “long roll” before the “Bold Dragoon,” and Richard appeared, accompanied by Captain Hollister, who was clad in his vestments as commander of the “Templeton Light Infantry,” when the former demanded of the latter the aid of the
posse comitatus,
in enforcing the laws of the country. We have not room to record the speeches of the two gentlemen on this occasion, but they are preserved in the columns of the little blue newspaper, which is yet to be found on the file, and are said to be highly creditable to the legal formula of one of the parties, and to the military precision of the other. Everything had been previously arranged, and as the red-coated drummer continued to roll out his clattering notes, some five-and-twenty privates appeared in the ranks, and arranged themselves in order of battle.

As this corps was composed of volunteers, and was commanded by a man who had passed the first five-and-thirty years of his life in camps and garrisons, it was the nonpareil of military science in that country, and was confidently pronounced by the judicious part of the Templeton community to be equal in skill and appearance to any troops in the known world; in physical endowments they were, certainly, much superior! To this assertion there were but three dissenting voices, and one dissenting opinion. The opinion belonged to Marmaduke, who, however, saw no necessity for its promulgation. Of the voices, one, and that a pretty loud one, came from the spouse of the commander himself, who frequently reproached her husband for condescending to lead such an irregular band of warriors after he had filled the honorable station of sergeant major to a dashing corps of Virginian cavalry through much of the recent war.

Another of these skeptical sentiments was invariably expressed by Mr. Pump whenever the company paraded, generally in some such terms as these, which were uttered with that sort of meekness that a native of the island of our forefathers is apt to assume when he condescends to praise the customs or character of her truant progeny:

“It's mayhap that they knows sum'mat about loading and firing, d'ye see; but as for working ship! Why a corporal's guard of the Boadishey's marines would back and fill on their quarters in such a manner as to surround and captivate them all in half a glass.” As there was no one to deny this assertion, the marines of the Boadicea were held in a corresponding degree of estimation.

The third unbeliever was Monsieur Le Quoi, who merely whispered to the Sheriff that the corps was one of the finest he had ever seen, second only to the Mousquetaires of Le Bon Louis! However, as Mrs. Hollister thought there was something like actual service in the present appearances, and was, in consequence, too busily engaged with certain preparations of her own to make her comments; as Benjamin was absent, and Monsieur Le Quoi too happy to find fault with anything, the corps escaped criticism and comparison altogether on this momentous day, when they certainly had greater need of self-confidence than on any other previous occasion. Marmaduke was said to be again closeted with Mr. Van der School, and no interruption was offered to the movements of the troops. At two o'clock precisely the corps shouldered arms, beginning on the right wing, next to the veteran, and carrying the motion through to the left with great regularity. When each musket was quietly fixed in its proper situation, the order was given to wheel to the left, and march. As this was bringing raw troops, at once, to face their enemy, it is not to be supposed that the maneuver was executed with their usual accuracy; but as the music struck up the inspiring air of Yankee-Doodle, and Richard, accompanied by Mr. Doolittle, preceded the troops boldly down the street, Captain Hollister led on, with his head elevated to forty-five degrees, with a little, low-cocked hat perched on his crown, carrying a tremendous dragoon saber at a poise, and trailing at his heels a huge steel scabbard that had war in its very clattering. There was a good deal of difficulty in getting all the platoons (there were six) to look the same way; but, by the time they reached the defile of the bridge, the troops were in sufficiently compact order. In this manner they marched up the hill to the summit of the mountain, no other alteration taking place in the disposition of the forces, excepting that a mutual complaint was made by the Sheriff and the magistrate, of a failure in wind, which gradually brought these gentlemen to the rear. It will be unnecessary to detail the minute movements that succeeded. We shall briefly say that the scouts came in and reported that, so far from retreating, as had been anticipated, the fugitives had-evidently gained a knowledge of the attack and were fortifying for a desperate resistance. This intelligence certainly made a material change not only in the plans of the leaders but in the countenances of the soldiery also. The men looked at one another with serious faces, and Hiram and Richard began to consult together, apart.

At this conjuncture, they were joined by Billy Kirby, who came along the highway, with his ax under his arm, as much in advance of his team as Captain Hollister had been of his troops in the ascent. The wood chopper was amazed at the military array, but the Sheriff eagerly availed himself of this powerful reinforcement and commanded his assistance in putting the laws in force. Billy held Mr. Jones in too much deference to object; and it was finally arranged that he should be the bearer of a summons to the garrison to surrender, before they proceeded to extremities. The troops now divided, one party being led by the captain, over the Vision, and were brought in on the left of the cave, while the remainder advanced upon its right, under the orders of the lieutenant. Mr. Jones and Dr. Todd—for the surgeon was in attendance also—appeared on the platform of rock, immediately over the heads of the garrison, though out of their sight. Hiram thought this approaching too near, and he therefore accompanied Kirby along the side of the hill to within a safe distance of the fortifications, where he took shelter behind a tree. Most of the men discovered great accuracy of eye in bringing some object in range between them and their enemy, and the only two of the besiegers who were left in plain sight of the besieged were Captain Hollister on one side, and the wood chopper on the other. The veteran stood up boldly to the front, supporting his heavy sword in one undeviating position, with his eye fixed firmly on his enemy, while the huge form of Billy was placed in that kind of quiet repose, with either hand thrust into his bosom, bearing his ax under his right arm, which permitted him, like his own oxen, to rest standing. So far, not a word had been exchanged between the belligerents. The besieged had drawn together a pile of black logs and branches of trees, which they had formed into a chevaux-de-frise, making a little circular abatis in front of the entrance to the cave. As the ground was steep and slippery in every direction around the place, and Benjamin appeared behind the works on one side, and Natty on the other, the arrangement was by no means contemptible, especially as the front was sufficiently guarded by the difficulty of the approach. By this time, Kirby had received his orders, and he advanced coolly along the mountain, picking his way with the same indifference as if he were pursuing his ordinary business. When he was within a hundred feet of the works, the long and much dreaded rifle of the Leatherstocking was seen issuing from the parapet, and his voice cried aloud:

“Keep off! Billy Kirby, keep off! I wish ye no harm; but if a man of ye all comes a step nigher, there'll be blood spilt atwixt us. God forgive the one that draws it first, but so it must be.”

“Come, old chap,” said Billy, good-naturedly, “don't be crabb'd, but hear what a man has got to say. I've no consarn in the business, only to see right 'twixt man and man; and I don't kear the valie of a beetle ring which gets the better; but there's Squire Doolittle, yonder behind the beech sapling, he has invited me to come in and ask you to give up to the law—that's all.”

“I see the varmint! I see his clothes!” cried the indignant Natty. “And if he'll only show so much flesh as will bury a rifle bullet, thirty to the pound, I'll make him feel me. Go away, Billy, I bid ye: you know my aim, and I bear you no malice.”

“You overcalculate your aim, Natty,” said the other, as he stepped behind a pine that stood near him; “if you think to shoot a man through a tree with a three-foot butt. I can lay this tree right across you in ten minutes, by any man's watch, and in less time, too; so be civil—I want no more than what's right.”

There was a simple seriousness in the countenance of Natty that showed he was much in earnest; but it was also evident that he was reluctant to shed human blood. He answered the vaunt of the wood chopper, by saying:

“I know you drop a tree where you will, Billy Kirby; but if you show a hand, or an arm, in doing it, there'll be bones to be set, and blood to stanch. If it's only to get into the cave that ye want, wait till a two hours' sun, and you may enter it in welcome; but come in now you shall not. There's one dead body already, lying on the cold rocks, and there's another in which the life can hardly be said to stay. If you will come in, there'll be dead without as well as within.”

The wood chopper stepped out fearlessly from his cover, and cried:

“That's fair; and what's fair is right. He wants you to stop till it's two hours to sundown; and I see reason in the thing. A man can give up when he's wrong, if you don't crowd him too hard; but you crowd a man, and he gets to be like a stubborn ox—the more you beat, the worse he kicks.”

The sturdy notions of independence maintained by Billy neither suited the emergency nor the impatience of Mr. Jones, who was burning with a desire to examine the hidden mysteries of the cave. He therefore interrupted this amicable dialogue with his own voice.

“I command you, Nathaniel Bumppo, by my authority, to surrender your person to the law,” he cried. “And I command you, gentlemen, to aid me in performing my duty. Benjamin Penguillan, I arrest you, and order you to follow me to the jail of the county, by virtue of this warrant.”

“I'd follow ye, Squire Dickens,” said Benjamin, removing the pipe from his mouth (for during the whole scene the ex-major-domo had been very composedly smoking); “ay! I'd sail in your wake, to the end of the world, if so be that there was such a place, where there isn't seeing that it's round. Now, mayhap, Master Hollister, having lived all your life on shore, you isn't acquainted that the world, d'ye see——”

“Surrender!” interrupted the veteran, in a voice that startled his hearers, and which actually caused his own forces to recoil several paces. “Surrender, Benjamin Penguillan, or expect no quarter.”

“Damn your quarter!” said Benjamin, rising from the log on which he was seated, and taking a squint along the barrel of the swivel, which had been brought on the hill during the night and now formed the means of defense on his side of the works. “Look you, Master, or Captain, tho'f I questions if ye know the name of a rope, except the one that's to hang ye, there's no need of singing out, as if ye was hailing a deaf man on a topgallant yard. Mayhap you think you've got my true name in your sheepskin; but what British sailor finds it worth while to sail in these seas, without a sham on his stern, in case of need, d'ye see. If you call me Penguillan, you calls me by the name of the man on whose land, d'ye see, I hove into daylight; and he was a gentleman; and that's more than my worst enemy will say of any of the family of Benjamin Stubbs.”

“Send the warrant round to me, and I'll put in an alias,” cried Hiram, from behind his cover.

“Put in a jackass, and you'll put in yourself, Mister Doo-but-little,” shouted Benjamin, who kept squinting along his little iron tube, with great steadiness.

“I give you but one moment to yield,” cried Richard. “Benjamin! Benjamin! This is not the gratitude I expected from you.”

“I tell you, Richard Jones,” said Natty, who dreaded the Sheriff's influence over his comrade; “though the canister the gal brought be lost, there's powder enough in the cave to lift the rock you stand on. I'll take off my roof if you don't hold your peace.”

“I think it beneath the dignity of my office to parley further with the prisoners,” the Sheriff observed to his companion, while they both retired with a precipitancy that Captain Hollister mistook for the signal to advance.

“Charge baggonet!” shouted the veteran. “March!”

Although this signal was certainly expected, it took the assailed a little by surprise, and the veteran approached the works, crying, “Courage, my brave lads! Give them no quarter unless they surrender”; and struck a furious blow upwards with his saber that would have divided the steward into moieties, by subjecting him to the process of decapitation, but for the fortunate interference of the muzzle of the swivel. As it was, the gun was dismounted at the critical moment that Benjamin was applying his pipe to the priming, and, in consequence, some five or six dozen of rifle bullets were projected into the air, in nearly a perpendicular line. Philosophy teaches us that the atmosphere will not retain lead; and two pounds of the metal, molded into bullets of thirty to the pound, after describing an ellipsis in their journey, returned to the earth rattling among the branches of the trees directly over the heads of the troops stationed in the rear of their captain. Much of the success of an attack made by irregular soldiers depends on the direction in which they are first got in motion. In the present instance, it was retrograde, and in less than a minute after the bellowing report of the swivel among the rocks and caverns, the whole weight of the attack from the left rested on the prowess of the single arm of the veteran. Benjamin received a severe contusion from the recoil of his gun, which produced a short stupor, during which period the ex-steward was prostrate on the ground. Captain Hollister availed himself of this circumstance to scramble over the breastwork and obtain a footing in the bastion—for such was the nature of the fortress, as connected with the cave. The moment the veteran found himself within the works of his enemy, he rushed to the edge of the fortification, and waving his saber over his head, shouted: