Drums Along the Mohawk (24 page)

After supper Gil got down the Merritt rifle. And seeing him clean it, Mrs. McKlennar, who had dropped by in the dark, nodded her head from the door.

“Don’t look so scared, though, Magdelana. They haven’t got here yet.”

A canoe came down the river in the dark, cutting an arrow through the moon. In the bow a big-shouldered man stroked steadily. In the stern, Joe Boleo was paddling with his usual appearance of exhaustion.

They ran the bow aground above the falls and took the path down the hill by Warner Dygert’s. They found Nicholas Herkimer sitting on his porch.

“Who’s that?”

“It’s Spencer, Honnikol.”

Herkimer got up. The big man shook hands.

“Where you from, Tom?”

Spencer said, “Onondaga.”

“What’s up?”

“The Indians are at Oswego. Both the Butlers. Sir John Johnson.”

“How many all together?”

“They’ve got four hundred regular soldiers. The Eighth Regiment and the Thirty-fourth. There’s about six hundred Tories. They’re wearing green uniforms. All the Senecas are there. Brant and his Mohawks. The Cayugas and some Onondagas. A thousand, maybe.”

Herkimer grunted.

“Who’s in command?”

“A man named Sillinger.” (Spencer gave the local contraction of Colonel Barry St. Leger’s name.) “He has a big tent and five servants.”

“I never heard of him,” said Herkimer. “Is he an army man, Tom?”

The Indian blacksmith said, “I don’t know. He wears a red coat with gold strings.”

“Thank God for that,” said Herkimer. He yelled for a negro.

“Go get Mr. Eisenlord. He’s at Frank’s. Go quick.” He turned to Joe. “I can’t write this myself. It’s too damned hot to-night.”

Eisenlord’s neat hand made English of the general’s dictation:—

Spencer had already started back to the woods to watch Wood Creek for the first arrival of St. Leger’s advance guard.

Eisenlord had been ferried over the river with copies of his proclamation to be distributed through the county. There was nobody left but Joe Boleo. As he said to himself, he was dry enough to make a hen quack; but old Honnikol sat so grim and still in the darkness that he couldn’t bring himself to make any suggestion. He tried to think of a funny story, but the only one he remembered was the one about Lobelia Jackson and the hired man, and Honnikol had never taken much to dirty stories.

So in the kindness of his heart Joe Boleo set himself to thinking about a draft of beer. He thought about it in steins, and in a blue glass, and a pewter mug; and by and by he got so thirsty with his thoughts that he thought of beer in a keg, with the bung open and his mouth the same and the beer establishing a connection.

Herkimer shook himself. “Yah,” he said. “You’re thirsty, Joe.”

“How’d you guess that, Honnikol? I didn’t say nothing.”

For a moment the little German’s voice was deep with amusement.

“Yah,” he said. “That’s how.”

“Well,” Joe admitted, “if you come to mention it.”

“Maria,” called the general.

His wife came out on the stoop. She was a young, plump,
serene woman, who might have been the general’s daughter. She came to the steps and he reached out and put his arm round her knees.

“Maria, Joe Boleo’s thirsty. And I think I am. Bring us both beer. In the two big mugs.”

“All right, Nicholas.”

He said apologetically, “I don’t want the niggers round just now.”

“I know,” she said.

It seemed to Joe she was a long time coming back. But she came. Her husband made her sit down beside him and held her in his arm.

“Well, Joe”—holding up his mug.

Joe almost made his usual reply about a catamount’s biological necessities; he restrained himself in time.

“Here’s to you both, Mister and Missis.”

The beer was cool from the cellar. The night was dark. The moon was low upon the falls and the rapids were a living shine. The sound of broken water reached dimly towards the house.

“I’m getting to be old,” Herkimer said quietly. “Maria’s young.” His arm tightened. “When my wife died I never thought I’d marry her niece.”

“All in the family.” Joe was trying to ease the general’s voice.

“Yes,” said the general gravely. “That’s how it is here—too. Schuyler won’t send help. He writes I ought to be ashamed to ask it. He says I had no right to agree to anything with Joseph Brant. And now Cox and Fisscher and some others are blaming me because I did not shoot Brant, because I don’t get troops from Albany. They will send some Massachusetts people up to Dayton, that’s all. But everything else I do is wrong.”

“Hell, Honnikol, all the people are back of you. The dirt farmers and timber beasts like me.”

“That’s good. We’ll have one damn fight anyway. All in the
family, Joe. Our side and Johnson’s. There won’t be any soldiers at all. You could say it’s got nothing to do with a war at all.”

When General Herkimer received this he blew through his lips and put on his best coat. He rode right up to Fort Dayton and walked in to speak to Colonel Weston.

Colonel Weston was a man of sense—the first Massachusetts soldier that had managed to grasp just what the German settlers faced. He didn’t like Germans, particularly, but he liked still less anything that smacked of British aristocracy; and he agreed at once to send up provisions from his commissariat and two hundred men under Colonel Mellon, as soon as he could get them ready.

On the twenty-ninth, Tom Spencer sent down a message to Herkimer. It was the first definite assurance of the friendly stand of the Oneida nation in the face of war.

There was one thing left to do. Before night, Herkimer sent men down the valley as far as Johnstown to muster the militia on the third of August at Fort Dayton.

It gave Gil a strange feeling, on that Sunday morning, to hear the church bell ringing across the river at Herkimer; to look out from his doorway and see the farm peaceful in the still hot August air, the blue river, and the wooded hills beyond.
Children, playing outside the ramparts of the fort, were stilled by the ringing bell and began their reluctant straggling into church.

The sight brought back the bitterness he had felt when his own place was burnt; it made him think of the winter and of the happiness he and Lana had had together before that time. It had seemed to him, lately, that she was slowly regaining her old ways. But since Adam Helmer, now become a ranger, had brought the muster word, she had grown quiet again.

She was so quiet now, working in the kitchen, that he wondered what she was doing. When at last he turned back, he found that she was sewing a new cockade on his hat, while the tears dropped slowly down her cheeks. Her bowed shoulders and her silent crying made him tender.

“You mustn’t be like that, Lana.”

“I know,” she said. “I hadn’t ought.” She did not look up in replying. “But the last two days, Gil, I’ve been remembering. I’ve been feeling different. And now I wonder if it isn’t going to be too late.”

“Too late?” He tried to understand. “Oh. You mean I might get killed.… I won’t get killed, Lana.”

“No, no, no. Not that. I wondered if it was too late for you to love me again.”

“I do,” he said.

“I know. No girl ever had a better man, Gil. I want you to know that.” She got up swiftly, her hand like a head under the hat. She smiled and wiped the tears away with the back of her hand. “Put it on.”

He obeyed, standing in front of her the way he had before that first muster down in Schuyler. But it was different now. They both felt it.

“Lana. You’ll be all right. You stick to Mrs. McKlennar.” He paused. “If anything goes wrong …”

“Yes, Gil.”

Mrs. McKlennar strode down the path from her house.

“Still here?” she asked. “I’m glad. I wanted Gil to have this.”

She held out a small flask fastened to a loop of rawhide.

“It’s brandy,” she said. “Brandy’s the next best thing to powder in a fight.”

Lana said politely, “Isn’t it a pretty flask?”

“It used to be Barney’s.” There seemed to be some kind of stoppage in the widow’s long nose. “It’s no good to me, now,” she said briskly. “I thought it might come handy to you.”

Gil thanked her.

They stood a moment awkwardly. Then Mrs. McKlennar’s head lifted.

“Drums,” she said.

The steady rattle of the drums came up the Kingsroad. Gil stepped to the door. His voice lifted a little.

“That’s Klock and the Palatine regiment,” he said. “I’ve got to go.”

He turned to kiss Lana, but Mrs. McKlennar stepped between.

“I’m going to kiss you, Gilbert Martin. I’d better do it now. You don’t want to go off tasting a widow on your mouth.”

She took his face and kissed him firmly.

“Good-bye, lad.”

She stepped through the door with a snap of skirts.

Bright crimson, Gil stooped down to his wife.

“Good-bye, dear.”

Lana lifted her lips. Her eyes closed suddenly. He saw the tears welling at the roots of her dark lashes.

“Good-bye,” he said again. “We’ll make out all right. The both of us.”

He caught the rifle up and tossed the blanket roll across his shoulder. He tramped down to the fence. He turned there, waved his arm, and stepped over into the road, not a hundred yards beyond the oncoming Palatines.

Lana could only stand and watch. He was walking along the
road behind the railings, rifle on his shoulder, the long barrel like a finger pointing back towards home. Then for a moment the ragged rattle of the drums submerged her senses.

She felt an arm round her waist, and Mrs. McKlennar was breathing harshly beside her ear.

“It’s hard on a woman,” said the widow. “Many a time I’ve seen Barney go off just the same way. Good-bye. And he’s off. Maybe he waves, but he ain’t seeing you. He’s thinking about the men, you see. All the men together.”

The arm tightened.

“It’s bad enough when he’s your son, or even your father.” Her stoppage seemed to trouble her again. “A man can’t help it if he’s your son—and almost any man can be a father. But there are so damn few good husbands in a woman’s life.”

Gil was by the turn of the road now; he hadn’t looked backward again. In his place the uneven files of Palatine farmers trudged along the road, bent over in their walk, as if they followed a plough. Men and officers were indistinguishable—except the colonel, who sat like a sack of meal on the thumping black mare he used to draw manure with.

The men made an uneasy, sprawling mass throughout the little settlement. On the edge of the knoll the fort had been built on,
Nicholas Herkimer straddled his old white horse, leaning his hands heavily on the somnolent withers.

He was using his deep voice to good effect, now giving orders in English to an officer, locating the muster ground of each company, now checking the list of supplies that trundled past in carts drawn either by oxen or by horses, now hailing in Low German some neighbor or acquaintance.

When Gil preceded the Palatine company into the village, he saw the general in the same position, in his worn blue campaign coat, warm enough in the stifling heat to keep the sweat steadily rolling down his cheeks. He was listening to the bombastic voice of Colonel Cox.

“All right, Colonel,” he said finally. “If you want to push ahead to-night, you can. But don’t go beyond Staring’s Brook. And don’t go until your whole regiment’s here, either. Leyp’s and Dievendorf’s companies haven’t showed up yet.”

Cox, flushed with heat and drink, said loudly that they were wasting time, he’d undertake to lick the Tories with his own company, and he could look out for his company, too, without being told.

“Those are orders,” Herkimer said, tartly, for once. “I make Colonel Weston witness, if you don’t like them.”

The commandant of the Dayton garrison nodded brusquely, met the embattled colonel’s eye with a Yankee gleam in his own, and said, “I’ve noticed them already.”