Drums Along the Mohawk (31 page)

Then, three hours later, the first bateaux had arrived with
General Herkimer. The fort had been hailed. The gate opened, and the general was carried in past the waiting silent people, holding torches here and there, to the church. After the gates were closed the people moved up to the church windows and talked softly to those who had their beds inside, and learned that the general was wounded in the leg. The men who had brought him lay down in the western blockhouse and would not answer any question. They slept like animals.

In the next few hours other boats arrived. One of the first brought George Weaver home, and John was one of the garrison sent to help him to the fort. As he entered with his father, he saw Mary standing beside the gate, her eyes searching the faces of the new arrivals, and it came to him that alone of all her family she had the interest to look for her father.

He helped put his father down on the hemlock bed and stood back while his mother unwrapped the bandage from his chest.

His father said, “Hello, John.”

“Hello,” said John.

Emma said, “I’ll tend to Pa. You’d better get back where you belong. Cobus can fetch me things.”

“I will,” said John. He looked down on his father’s big body hesitantly.

“Where’d you get the gun, son?”

Emma said, not without pride, “He’s one of the watch.”

“You’d better get along.” His father lay back and groaned as Emma ruthlessly pulled away the cotton. Then he opened his eyes and met John’s. “What’s on your mind, son?”

“Did Christian Reall …?”

He saw his mother’s back stiffen.

“I don’t know. I didn’t see him. But Jeams MacNod’s outside. He’ll know.” George closed his eyes. Without opening them he said almost apologetically, “I got this at the first beginning, son.”

John left them with a sudden realization that they might like
to be alone. He returned to the gate where the schoolmaster sat in his tattered black coat, hatless and unshaven, a venomous kind of terror still printed on his face.

He looked up at John’s question.

“Kitty Reall?” he said. “You want to know where Kitty Reall is? Well, I can tell you. He’s laying with his face over a log. He’s scalped. But he ain’t half of what there is to see.…”

John said savagely, “You know he’s dead?”

“I’m telling you.… What do you think? They ain’t satisfied with just killing. I never saw Indians before. It ain’t war. My God!”

Turning away, John saw Mary Reall standing by the corner of the church. She was watching him still, her thin pale face a little lowered, looking out from her brows.

A wave of sick pity went over John and he walked up to her, taking her arm without a word. She didn’t protest, but went with him quietly. As he walked her forward he kept searching for a place they could be private in. But there was no unoccupied corner within the stockade, till it occurred to him to look up at the sentry walk.

All the men were round by the gate, looking down over the points of the palisades at the river.

“Come up with me,” said John, and climbed the ladder. They could stand in the angle of the walk made by the palisade and the blockhouse wall. No one could see them from below.

John waited for her, with his eyes on the faceless night beyond the stockade. She came up quietly beside him on her bare feet and leaned with him against the pointed upright logs.

It was the nearest to him she had been since he had first become aware of who she really was. Her dress touched his side, and through the dress he could feel the slim round hardness of her body. Her hair had a faint smell of its own, like spice over the body scent.

She waited for him to speak. She had not yet said a word on her own part. But she leaned beside him against the stockade, taking one point between her breasts like a spear, and when he turned his head she did not turn hers.

“Mary,” he said.

“Yes.” She waited again; but when he could not go on she asked quietly, “Did you hear anything about Father, from that man?”

“Yes.”

It seemed an awful thing to say. As if he were killing Christian Reall with his own words.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?”

She was making it easy for him.

“Yes, Mary.”

She did not cry or do anything that he might have expected. But she turned suddenly to him, so that he saw her face oval against the peeled logs of the blockhouse.

“It was kind of you, John, to find out. I wouldn’t have known how to ask.”

“It’s nothing. I wanted to help.”

“I’m grateful to you.”

He felt himself grow stiff and his voice tightened.

“It’s awful. But, Mary, I’ll always be willing to help you. Whatever there is you need, you’ll let me know. I think you’re the finest girl in German Flats.”

It wasn’t what he had set out to say, but he meant it. And she was standing just as stiff as he. “You’ve been so good,” she was saying. “I’ll always remember how good you’ve been, John.”

“I wanted to tell you myself,” he said. Then suddenly he leaned forward over his musket. She bent a little towards him and they kissed each other, briefly.

He pulled back quickly, and then, as she looked at him, held out his hand. She put her own in it and they held hands for a moment. Then he said, “I ought to get back to the gate.”

“Yes, John.”

“You’d better go down here, and I’ll go down the walk.” They stood silent for a moment and he added, “It would look better.”

“Yes, John.”

She went down under his eyes, shy and swift, and he turned round the sentry walk, marching openly with his musket on his arm.

It was a wonderful thing to have a girl like Mary Reall. It made him feel protective, as if the musket really meant something. As if Sergeant had picked him out for the very purpose. And it was a wonderful thing to have someone accept your opinions the way Mary did. It was a wonderful thing to be betrothed, he thought.

As the wounded were brought into the stockades, and the last of the Palatine and Canajoharie companies departed for their own precincts, a pall of terror settled on German Flats. Even the garrisons in the two forts became irascible and bitterly sarcastic about the German race. Everyone thought it was only a matter of days before the Tories and Indians would be among them.

Word got round that among the wounded at Dr. Petry’s house was a man who had been scalped, and many people were moved by a morbid curiosity to see him. He turned out to be George Walter, a stout German farmer living below Fall Hill, well known for his good humor. It had not deserted him now. He was entirely willing that people should come and look at him and offer him drinks behind the doctor’s back.

“
Ja, ja
,” he would say. “I was lying behind a tree, und the Indian
comes und shoots me, und then he comes with his liddle axe und hits me und takes the top off mine head, und he goes away mit it. He thought I was dead.” He would pause to grin, and say, “I thought I was dead too,” as if that were a peculiarly funny coincidence.

It was that grin that was described around the settlements. They said his face had lost all its fatness and the features seemed on the point of running out of his chin, and that when he grinned all his features seemed to get together there, down below his face. He did it so much that the stitches tore out and the doctor had to work on him all over and lock him up on the top floor. But even so, small boys climbed the maple tree across the road to look at him through the window.

Other sufferers, less picturesque than Walter, had circumstantial stories of Tories recognized in the opposing side. People began to repeat from them how Ritter had been dragged off by two Indians and how the Indians had been driven off by Ritter’s former neighbor, Casselman, who had then cut Ritter’s throat with his own hand. There were stories of some Scotch Highlanders in Sir John Johnson’s regiment scalping the militia just as if they were Indians themselves.

A few people made feeble efforts to the effect of combating these horrors. Domine Rozencrantz read in church from the Ninety-first Psalm:—

“He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust: his truth shall be thy shield and buckler.

“Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day.”

But the Lord’s presence was not an active thing like John Butler’s before Fort Stanwix. People in the stockades began to talk about how he used to be Sir William Johnson’s right-hand man when the Indians were taken care of, bribed and pampered, so that
any man might take up land in safety, and Joseph Brant was just a neighbor. More than one man began to shake his head and think that he had been a fool, and wish for the old safe days back again.

The members of the Committee of Safety in German Flats were well aware of the swing of popular feeling. On the ninth of August, Peter Tygert wrote the Albany Committee as spokesman for his district by virtue of his own survival.

Demooth and Helmer and Joe Boleo had left Fort Stanwix on the night of the sixth, and it had taken them three days of circuitous traveling to elude the Indian scouting parties. They brought news to German Flats of the increasing shortage of provisions and ammunition. Colonel Gansevoort had put the garrison on a single daily ration. The one bright spot was the account of a sortie led by Lieutenant Colonel Willett against the Tory camp on the day of the battle. It was a daring raid and it resulted in the removal to the fort of all the munitions and food the enemy’s camp contained, together with Butler’s and Johnson’s papers and half a dozen flags. They spoke with admiration of Willett’s conduct. They said he was a cool, unhurried man. But they also said that the fort could not hold out indefinitely, that the Indians and the regulars were keeping a tight network of lines round the fort. They said that in Butler’s papers they had found endorsements for scalps taken, at eight dollars per scalp. When they got through, the sortie seemed a drop of victory that was ironical.

Tygert, writing these things down, continued with the battle itself:—

But two days after this letter had been dispatched by Helmer, a scout escorted two men into Fort Dayton. One of these was a young lieutenant named Stockwell; the other was Lieutenant Colonel Marinus Willett. As soon as they arrived they were taken to Colonel Weston’s quarters, and he in turn immediately sent for Tygert, Demooth, and Dr. Petry.

These three took comfort from the very look of Colonel Willett. He was standing before the fireplace, and at their entrance withdrew his hooked nose from the glass in his hand, a drop hanging from the tip of it, and eyed them with unwavering hard blue eyes. As he was being introduced to the three Committee members, the drop fell to his waistcoat. He said to them bluntly, “Gentlemen, I’ve had you sent for to know what you’ve written to Schuyler.”

He nodded again when Tygert had repeated the gist of his letter to the Albany Committee.

“You put it to them pretty strong. But they’ll send the letter on to General Schuyler. I’m going to see him myself.” He smiled at them. “Somebody needs to raise a stink, and Gansevoort seemed to think I could do it.”

His big nose seemed to arch.

“Just how bad are things up at Stanwix?” asked Dr. Petry.

“Bad enough. We’ve got food enough for a while, but we’re low on shot. Right now St. Leger’s busy writing letters about what he’s going to do to us and to you people if we don’t surrender. But the troops are taking them right. We made a flag on the new Continental pattern and flew it over the flags we took in the sortie, and that tickled them. And then I thought to read them the passage in the Book of Joel.” His blue eyes twinkled close on either side of his high nose as he solemnly quoted:—

“ ‘But I will remove far off from you the northern army, and will drive him into a land barren and desolate, with his face toward the east sea, and his hinder part toward the utmost sea; and his stink shall come up.’ ”

There was a commotion in the parade yard, and an orderly looked in to announce a dispatch rider. He entered with his papers in his hand.

“Colonel Weston?”

“Yes.”

“Papers from General Schuyler.”

Weston did not ask to be excused. He immediately opened his letter. Then he looked up.

“Schuyler’s sending up General Arnold and Learned. He hopes to add the First New York Line.”

There was a silence in the room through which the panting of the dispatch rider’s horse came heavily. They all looked at one another. Then Willett wiped his mouth. “Maybe you ought to give this lad a drink,” he suggested.

“Yes, yes,” said Weston, and filled his own glass. He turned to Willett. “Do you think you’ll have to go down to headquarters, now?”

“By God, yes. I want to be damned sure they don’t waste any time. Is that decent horse you spoke of ready yet?”

“He’s outside.”

They all went to the door, then walked to the gate after he mounted. He paused there, gathering up the reins.

“Who do I have to pay if I spoil this horse?”

He grinned and kicked the horse into a canter before he was answered. They watched him down the road towards the creek ford. He sat straight in the saddle, like an electrified ploughman; but as they saw his square shoulders disappearing under the low maple branches they remembered the hardness of the blue eyes, and the big nose in the long face. He wasn’t the kind of man who would return without what he was after.

“They’ll hear him even if they hold their fingers in their ears,” the doctor said. “What was that flag he was talking about, Mark? Did you see it?”