Drums Along the Mohawk (33 page)

Then a voice said, “You come now.”

She was led quickly towards the house, but not to the front door. They turned the corner to the left towards the kitchen porch. Nancy stumbled a little on the steps.

She was not afraid now, only surprised, and bitterly ashamed that she should have been discovered and have been brought to Hon’s attention in so humiliating a fashion after she had tried to be so careful. She could not understand how the men had got so close to her. She had not seen them even when the door was open. And now on the porch boards their feet made hardly a sound.

One spoke to the other, and she felt him taking hold of her with both hands, and as the other moved towards the door her nostrils were filled with a strong sweet greasy odor and she knew that the two men must be Indians. As the door opened she looked up at the man who held her.

He was a powerful thickset man. He wore a red cloth headdress, with a single eagle feather hanging down over his left ear. From the waist up he was naked, his hairless chest beaded through the grease with tiny drops of sweat, so that the light shimmered on his skin with a bronze sheen. He was looking curiously down at her, the eyes a strange parody of intelligence behind the red and yellow painting of his face.

“You be good,” he said, and relaxed the pressure of his hands slightly; but he did not let go of her.

The door opened again, showing her the second Indian and a soldier in a scarlet coat.

“You can let her go,” the soldier said to the second Indian.

He looked down at her. His coat was unbuttoned. Between the flaps Nancy saw that his shirt was wringing wet. He blew out his breath. “God, it’s good to get some fresh air. It smells like a Dutch funeral in there. Well, Missy, what do you want here?”

Nancy flushed within the protection of her shawl. She tried to find words.

“All right, Missy,” the soldier said. “Nobody’s going to hurt you.”

“I know,” Nancy replied. At the sound of her fresh young voice the soldier looked at her more closely. “I didn’t mean to make a bother,” Nancy went on. “I just heard my brother Hon was here and I haven’t seen him for two years and I wanted to say something to him.”

The soldier said kindly, “You’ve got a brother with us?”

Nancy nodded.

“What did you say his name was?”

“Hon Yost.”

“We ain’t got anybody named that with us. What’s your name?”

“Nancy Schuyler.”

“Nancy is a nice name.” He hesitated, still looking at her. Then, as if he couldn’t help himself, he took his hands from his belt and put the shawl back from her face. She stood in the light, hesitant and flushed, looking up at him with large eyes. Her full lips trembled a little.

He seemed to miss the simpleness in her eyes. He kept looking at her face, her lovely mouth, her heavy yellow hair, and the long soft curves of her body showing through the thin dress.

“Is your brother Jack Schuyler? He looks a little like you. Not really, you know. Jesus!” He drew his breath. “I haven’t seen a pretty girl since I left Montreal, last April.” He seemed to recollect himself with an effort. “Jack’s got yellow hair like you. Do you think he’d be your brother?”

Nancy was staring in a trance. But her eyes were on the glittering sergeant’s stripes, on the red coat, and the white breeches, now stained from his passage through the woods. She did not see at all the eagerness of his face, the almost feverish brilliance of his eyes.

“I don’t know,” she said timidly. “He had yellow hair. But I always called him Hon.”

“That’s Dutch for John. The Eighth is supposed to be all
English. I’ll fetch him out, anyway. I’d do a lot for you, Missy.” He smiled deliberately at her. “You just stay here.” He put his hand on her shoulder, letting it slide down her arm as he turned away to the open door.

“Where’s that half-wit Schuyler?” she heard him ask another red-coated man.

“What do you want him for?”

“His sister’s outside. She wants to see him.”

“His sister?” The man laughed out loud.

He disappeared in the throng and one of the Indians closed the door, leaving Nancy and themselves in darkness. She heard their catlike tread moving past her along the porch, and presently she made out their heads, shadowy silhouettes, staring east together from the steps.

She had to wait quite a while before the door opened again. But it was not Hon Yost; it was the soldier who had gone to look for him.

“Jack can’t get out right now,” he said.

She asked timidly, “Did you tell him I was here, Mister?”

“Yes. He said for you to wait. I told him I’d look after you.” He leaned himself against the wall of the house and stared at her. He had left the door open a crack, so that the light shone on her, but when she moved he put his hand out.

“Don’t move. Please. You don’t know how it is, in the woods. So long. You get half crazy with the heat, and the flies, and there’s nothing to see but men like yourself. You don’t know what it is for a man just to look at a pretty girl.”

Nancy stood still. She couldn’t see his face now—only his brown hair over his ear in the edge of the light; but she could see where his eyes were.

He said, “I used to live down here. Down beyond Fort Dayton. On the other side of the Canada Creek. I worked for an old woman named McKlennar. It’s funny I never heard of you.”

Nancy could not think of anything to say. She was listening and looking for Hon. But the soldier’s voice sounded so unhappy that she turned her face a little towards him and smiled her slow smile, with its meaningless warmth.

He said, “My name’s Jurry McLonis.”

“Yes, Mr. McLonis.”

She smiled again and he was silent for a time. Through the door the same decisive voice she had heard before came with the stilted precision of a man reading:—

“It’s signed by John Johnson, D. W. Claus, and my father John Butler. It’s plain honest sense, and the last chance you people will have to save your necks. I’m going back day after to-morrow. Every man who goes with me gets a uniform coat, a musket if he needs it, pay in good English money, and a land bounty when this war’s over.”

Again the silence, and again the low mumbling of voices.

“God, I’m sick of hearing all that, Nancy. The same thing over and over for two days.” Jurry McLonis touched her arm. “Jack can’t come out a while. Let’s go out where it’s quiet and dark.” Her eyes turned to him, large and questioning and hesitant and foolish. “He told me to look out for you, you know.”

“Yes, Mister. I don’t mind. While Hon’s busy.”

The steady sound of Butler’s voice had muddled her head. McLonis’s arm round her waist was comfortable to lean against. The Indians moved over on the steps and glanced at them, and moved back.

McLonis led her out, his arm tightening round her as she found the footing uncertain in the darkness. He took her behind Shoemaker’s barn. There he let her go and leaned against the log wall. But Nancy did not move away. She stood where he had left her, within reach of his arm, quite still, thinking that it was a long time to have to wait for Hon, but glad to be away from the house and the Indians. She could hear his steady breathing just beside her.

Suddenly she was caught again in his arm and swung in front of him. His free hand came behind her back, forcing her against him so hard she thought she could almost feel the logs through his body. She felt his face feeling for hers, his chin scraped across her shoulder in the opening of her dress, moved over her cheek, and his mouth fastened upon hers. For an instant, startled and dizzy, she was inert against his chest. Then under the pressure of his arms her strength came to life. She put her arms around him, pulling herself even closer to him, and lifted her face.

She was silent as an animal. When suddenly he let her go, she stood before him trembling and still; but when he put his hands out again, she moved hard into his embrace. Her hands pressing into the small part of his back became clumsy. Her breath came out with a little moan at the end and her breast arched. She had
no recollection of Hon left, only of herself and the man in her arms. He kept saying, “You …” without finding any other word to add to it.

Nancy lay in the long grass. The soldier was standing up, like a tower in the darkness rising from her feet. For an instant he was motionless. Then without as much as saying good-bye, he broke into a run away from the barn. Not towards the house, but back up the hill from the river. For an instant her disordered senses followed his crashing progress through the underbrush. Abruptly, the sound ceased, and Nancy, coming to herself at last, knew that something had gone wrong at Shoemaker’s.

She heard men shouting, and feet stamping on the other side of the barn as men ran past. She sat up in the grass, fumbling for her shawl. Her hair was snarled and full of grass. Panic swept over her, and without thinking of Hon, only of the instinct to get hidden at home, she found the shawl and started running towards the road.

As she scrambled over the yard fence a man shouted, “There goes one!” A musket roared behind her head, but she was too close to hear the bullet. She ran frantically, sobbing, and yanking at her skirt. For a moment she heard men pursuing, then she was out down the road and going for her life.

She did not stop until she was nearly home, and she stopped then only because she could not run another step. She veered from the road like a hurt deer and fell full length. She kept drawing her breath in great sobbing gasps.

She was still there when she heard the men tramping towards her down the road. Her first instinct was for renewed flight, but immediately afterwards she drew down into the sheltering
brush like a hare in its form, to stare with horrified eyes at the approaching group.

Several of the men were carrying torches, and under the smoky light their bodies made a dark throng in the road, with the willow limbs like arms lifted above them.

They came without talking, in open files, their muskets on their shoulders, soldiers from the garrison at Fort Dayton, with the prisoners between them.

With them, at the head of the procession, Nancy’s appalled eyes recognized Captain Demooth, and Gilbert Martin, his arm still bandaged, and one of the officers from the fort, a Colonel Brooks, who had sometimes come to supper at the Herter house. But as the files passed her she took her eyes from them and stared into the prisoners’ faces. The first was the man who had been reading in Shoemaker’s house, the man she had heard addressed as Ensign Butler. It was her first sight of Walter Butler, with his whittled attorney’s face, black hair cut short, and black eyes. His mouth reminded her a little of McLonis’s, long and thin-lipped, but, unlike McLonis’s, tipped with a passion of contempt.

He was dressed in a scarlet coat with an ensign’s tabs on the shoulders, and the men who followed him between the tramping files of Massachusetts soldiers were of the same regiment. She kept looking for McLonis, but he was not with them. He must have escaped. Her heart rose, even in her fright, until, as the last of the white prisoners passed, she saw her brother.

Even in the uncertain light Hon Yost looked as she remembered him, his yellow hair reaching to his shoulders, his straight features and red cheeks, and the blue eyes, irresponsible. He walked jauntily, as if he hadn’t a fear in the world; but watching the faces of the garrison, Nancy sank down still lower in the brush, and bit her hand to keep from crying aloud. Before she could think what she should do, the tail of the procession was going by with the last torch shining on four captured Mohawk Indians.

The light flashed over their painted cheeks, picked out a wolf’s head on the chest of the first, a drooping eagle’s feather in his headdress. The light made a dark shine on their oiled skins.

It was not till long after they had gone, until she had seen the torchlights reflected in the water of the ford, that Nancy stumbled to her feet.

The Herter place was dark when she reached it, but, though she was still sobbing softly, she moved as quietly as she could round the corner of the barn. She had crossed halfway to the house when Clem Coppernol rose up in front of her, surrounding them both with his fog of rum.

“Who’s that?” he asked unsteadily. As she tried to elude him, he stumbled forward and caught her skirt. He used it to help himself off his knees. “ ’S a pullet anyways,” he mumbled. “ ’S you Nancy, ain’t it?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Been out. I seen you going. I seen you. You can’t lie.” He nodded against her shoulder. “Been to Shoemaker’s. See Hon?”

She shivered and the tears gathered under her lids.

“No. No. I want to go to bed.”

“Saw somebody. You tell me and I’ll let you go,” he said slyly.

“Yes. I saw a soldier.”

He chuckled.

“Nice girl. So awful nice with me, ain’t you? Bet a dollar you got laid.”

“No,” she said frantically.

“Did, though. Or you wouldn’t act this way. Where’s Hon?”

Her sobs started again.

“They caught him. They’ve taken him to the fort. What are they going to do, Clem?”

“That’s good. Good business.” He scratched his head with his free hand. “Probably they’ll hang him. Hang the bunch. Yes, sir.”

Nancy managed to whisper, “Please let me go.”

“Maybe I will, and maybe I won’t. You got to be nice to me now, or I’ll tell.”