Drums Along the Mohawk (26 page)

Herkimer said nothing. After a minute more, Skenandoa nodded his head. “They say Butler and Brant have moved the Indians down the road from the camp. They are doing it now. The white men are coming along soon.”

Herkimer thanked him quietly.

“That’s all?”

“Yes.”

“Have you Oneidas made up your minds?”

The chief seemed to have withdrawn inside his own old thoughts.

When he replied, his voice was low. “The Mohawks and the Senecas have sent threats. Mr. Kirkland is my good friend. Some of us will go.”

“Thanks.”

The two Indians departed, almost as quietly as they had come.

“You see,” said Herkimer. “It’s what we would expect. But these military gentlemen, they want to ride right through, banging on drums. Cox says it is disgraceful we ain’t got trumpets!”

“What do you want us to do, Honnikol?”

“I’ve been thinking, all day. I think if we could get Gansevoort to send out men against their camp, eh?”

Demooth nodded.

“You, Joe, and you, Adam, you know these woods. Do you think you could get into the fort? With the Indians coming this way, you could go round and get inside?”

Helmer laughed.

“Sure,” he said offhand.

“I can’t let Bellinger or Klock go. Mark, will you? You’re the only other officer that knows these woods and Indians.”

“What’ll we tell him?” Demooth asked.

“Send out men if he can, and fire three cannon to let us know.” He got up and walked to the door. “It’s misty. You’ll have good cover.” The pipe smoke mingled with the mist. “You better get going now.”

In the morning, Herkimer sent out a call for all commanding officers to come to his tent. While the men were cooking breakfast they arrived. They made a knot of uniforms, bright, light-hearted, against the dark hemlock boughs. Cox with his bellicose flushed face and staring eyes; Bellinger, raw-boned, simple, honest, looking worried; Klock, stodgy, chewing snuff and still smelling faintly of manure and already sweating; Campbell’s gray face freshly shaved; Fisscher, dapper and dandy in his tailor-made coat and new cocked hat; and the black-coated, clerkly, calculating Mr. Paris. Behind them assorted captains and majors waited, watching.

Cox had the first word, as he always did.

“Well, Herkimer. Going to give us marching orders?”

“Pretty soon.”

“Why not now? The sooner we get going, the sooner we’ll have Sillinger making tracks for home.”

“Listen, the Oneidas told me last night that Brant and Butler have got the Indians somewhere up the road. They moved down after dark. Johnson’s troops ought to be there by now.”

“Fine,” Cox said boisterously. “We can lick the Tories and then we can tend to the regulars. Like eggs and bacon for breakfast.”

Herkimer looked thoughtfully from face to face, looking for support, perhaps, or perhaps just looking for what was there. Only Bellinger was attentive—and maybe Klock.

“We won’t break camp for a while,” Herkimer said. “I’ve sent Demooth and two men up to the fort. They’ll send a party out and shoot off three cannon when they do. We’ll move when we hear the guns.”

For a moment no one said a word. But they all looked at Herkimer in the sunshine, while the morning birds cheeped in the surrounding trees.

“You mean we’ve got to sit here on our arses?” demanded Cox.

“If you like to wait like that,” said Herkimer. “I do not mind.”

“Personally,” said Fisscher, “I’m getting sick of waiting.”

Herkimer said nothing.

“It’s a good idea,” Bellinger said loyally.

“You getting scared too?” said Paris.

Herkimer held up his hand with the pipe in it.

“There’s no sense fighting among ourselves.”

“What’s the matter? We’ll outnumber them. The whites. We can handle the Indians on the side.”

“You’ve never seen an Indian ambush,” said Herkimer.

“Oh, my God,” cried Cox, “this isn’t 1757! Can’t you get that through your thick German head?”

Rumor had gone down the road that the gentry were having words. The men abandoned their fires to hear the fun. Many of them left their guns behind. They pushed off the road, surrounding the clearing, till the little German seated before his tent was the focal point of over a hundred pairs of eyes.

Gil Martin, coming with the rest, listened among strangers. For over an hour the silly fatuous remarks went on. Some said you could not hear a cannon that far; some said that the three men would surely get captured; some said that probably they’d never gone to the fort at all. That was Paris’s voice.

Herkimer sat in their midst with the voices flinging back and forth above his head; his shirt was still unbuttoned, showing his stained woolen undershirt. Now and then he took his pipe from his lips to answer some remark that had a rudiment of sense behind it; but the rest of the time he kept his head turned to the west, listening. Apparently he was unheeding; but the men close to him could see his cheeks flexing from time to time and the slow even reddening of his skin.

It was Cox who finally touched the match.

“By Jesus Christ,” he shouted in his roaring voice, “it’s plain enough. Either he’s scared, or else he’s got interest with the British. I didn’t bring my regiment this far to set and knit like girls.” He looked round with his staring eyes. “Who’s coming along?”

Fisscher cried, “I am.”

Suddenly all the officers were shouting; and the men, following their voices, filled the woods with shouts.

It seemed to Gil that nobody was looking at Herkimer but himself. He saw the old man sitting there, his face pained, his eyes worried. He saw him knock the pipe out on his hand, blow out his breath, and lift his head.

“Listen to me, you damned fools.” He used German. He was getting on his feet and yanking his coat over his arms. But his voice was enough to stop them. “Listen,” he went on in English. “You don’t know what you’re doing, you Fisscher, Cox, the bunch of you. But if you want to fight so bad, by God Almighty, I’ll take you to it.”

He climbed aboard the old white horse and sat there, looking down on them for a change.

“God knows what’s going to happen. But I’ll tell you one thing,” he said bitterly. “The ones that have been yelling so much here will be the first to pull foot if we get jumped.”

For a moment they gaped up at him.

“Vorwaerts!”
he shouted, and put the horse toward the creek. Some of them were still standing there when he splashed through and waited on the other side. Then the officers were running to their companies, yelling, “Fall in. Fall in.”

The men went scrambling through the brush to find their guns and blankets.

“March! March!” The word was in all the woods where the abandoned breakfast fires still sent up their stems of smoke among the tree trunks. Up ahead at the ford, a drummer gave the double tap or the flam. It was like the first nervous beating of a drummer partridge. It was too early for such a sound, but there it was.

Then the whips began their rapid fire along the wagon train. The cartwheels screeched in starting. The still heat in the woods was overflowed with shouts, stamping hoofs, the rattle and slam of carts along the corduroy, the treading feet. The dust rose over the column. All at once it was jerking, getting started, moving.

At the head of the army, Cox moved his big horse beside Herkimer’s. His face was triumphant, almost good-humored once more, because he had planted his will on the column. He felt half sorry for the little German farmer. But he would help the little bugger out.

The rough road went nearly straight along the level ground of the Mohawk Valley’s edge, following the course of the low hill. Now and then it dipped down sharply to get over a brook. But the bottom was solidly corduroyed. The wagons didn’t get stuck. They had even moved up a little on the marching men.

Blue jays squawked and fluttered off, cool spots of angry blue against the leaves. Squirrels, chattering, raced from limb to limb. A porcupine took hold of a tree and climbed it halfway, and
turned his head to see the thronging, jumbled mass that heaved and started, checked, and went again along the narrow road.

The men marched in two lines, one for either rut, their rifles on their shoulders, their hats in their hands. When they came to a brook, the thirsty fell out and drank. Nobody stopped them. When they were through they wiped their mouths and looked up, startled, to see their company replaced by another. They got out of the way of other thirsty men and floundered in the bushes to catch up. There was no room left on the road to pass.

Even George Herkimer’s company of rangers, who were supposed to act as scouts, would stop at a spring. And when they went ahead they crashed in the undergrowth like wild cattle. There was nobody to stop them. There were no tracks. The woods were dusty. Branches, whipping on hot faces, stung like salt. The heat grew. Not a breath of air in the branches anywhere, not a cloud in the bits of sky high overhead, nothing but leaves, nothing in all the woods but their own uproarious, bursting, unstemmable progress on the narrow road.

Gil, pushed on from behind, pushing on George Weaver just ahead of him, heard the birds singing in the dark swamp ahead. The ground fell steeply to a quiet flowing brook with a cool moss bottom. He felt his own step quicken with the instinct to drink and cool himself. Looking over George Weaver’s thick round shoulders, he had a glimpse of the road turning into a causeway of logs across the stream; of George Herkimer’s rangers crowding down on the crossing to make it dry-shod; of the Canajoharie regiment floundering in the swamp and drinking face down by the brook; of Cox turning his red sweaty face to Herkimer and bawling, “Where did you say Butler was?”; of the two banks, precipitous and thickly clothed with a young stand of hemlocks, so soft and cool and damp and dark that it made one wish to lie down there and rest. Now he felt the ground falling under his feet, and the resistless push at his back thrusting him out on the
causeway. They had passed half of Cox’s regiment and were plugging up the other side. The stamp of Klock’s regiment came down the bank at their backs. Behind in the woods the jangle and rattle of the carts, the steady cracking of whips, and little futile
rattle-tats
of Fisscher’s drummers. All in the moment: “I meant to get a drink of water,” Reall’s voice was saying at his shoulder. “So did I,” said Gil. “My God,” said Weaver, “what was that?”

At the top of the hemlocks a little stab of orange was mushroomed out by a black coil of smoke. They heard the crack. Cox’s voice, caught short in another remark, lifted beyond reason. His big body swayed suddenly against his horse’s neck. The horse reared, screamed, and, as Cox slid sack-like off his back, crashed completely over.

A shrill silver whistle sounded. Three short blasts. The young hemlocks disgorged a solid mass of fire that made a single impact on the ear. Gil felt George Weaver slam against his chest, knocking him sidewise on top of Reall. A horse screamed again and went leaping into the scrub. As he got up, Gil saw the beast fall over on his head. It was Herkimer’s old white horse, galvanized into senseless vigor. He felt his arm caught and Bellinger was shouting, “Give me a hand with the old man.” The old man was sitting on the causeway, holding on to his knee with both hands. His face was gray and shining and his lips moved in it.

But the voice was lost.

Gil stood before him with his back to the slope and stared down into the ravine. The militia were milling along the brook, flung down along the bank, like sticks thrown up by a freshet, kneeling, lying on their bellies, resting their rifles on the bellies of dead men. They were oddly silent. But the air around them was swept by the dull endless crash of muskets and a weird high swell of yelling from the woods.

Then beyond them he saw the Indians in the trees, adder-like, streaked with vermilion, and black, and white. From the head of
the rise the first orderly discharge went over his head with a compelling, even shearing of the air, as if a hand had swung an enormous scythe. He saw the green coats on men firing at him; but he bent down and grasped the general by the knees and heaved him on up the bank while Bellinger lugged him by the armpits.

The colonel was swearing in a strange way. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and said, “By God, Fisscher has pulled foot!”

East of the causeway, where the rear guard had been, a dwindling tide of yells and firing fled backward into the woods. They dumped the general down behind a log and fell beside him. Gil put his rifle over the log and pulled the trigger on the first green coat that filled the sights. The butt bucked against his cheek. He yanked the rifle back and tilted his powder flask to the muzzle. He saw the man he had fired at lean forward slowly in the bushes, buckle at the hips, and thump face down. He felt his insides retract, and suddenly had a queer realization that they had just returned to their proper places; and he thought with wonder at himself, “That’s the first shot I’ve fired.”

“Peter.”

“Yes, Honnikol.”

“It looks as if the Indians was mostly chasing after Fisscher.

You’d better try and fetch the boys up here.”

The little German’s voice was calm.

There was no sense at first in any of it. The opening volley had been fired at ten o’clock. For the next half hour the militia lay
where they had dropped, shooting up against the bank whenever they saw a flash. Their line extended roughly along the road, beginning with the disrupted welter of the wagon train, and ending at the west, just over the rise of ground, where a mixed group of Canajoharie men, and Demooth’s company of the German Flats regiment, and what was left of Herkimer’s rangers, made a spearhead by hugging the dirt with their bellies and doing nothing to draw attention to themselves. If the Indians had stayed put or if Fisscher had not run away, the entire army would have been destroyed.

But the Indians could not resist the temptation of chasing the terrified Fisscher. More than half of them had followed his men as far as Oriskany Creek before they gave over the attempt. And a large proportion of the rest, seeing easy scalps ready for the taking, started sneaking down out of the timber. When, at last, Bellinger began to rally the men and get them up the slope, the Indians made no attempt to follow them, for they had discovered that killing horses was an intoxicating business.