3stalwarts (44 page)

Suddenly she blenched. She put her hand to her belly and pressed against herself. Her face was contorted with the effort to rise soundlessly. Her long legs moved with infinite care. She took off her shoes and tiptoed to her room. There the horror overwhelmed her completely. No longer try-ing to be quiet, she gathered her belongings in a panic,— her dress, her comb, her nightgown, and her cloth shoes,— and twisted them into her shawl. She came back through the kitchen, bent slightly forward, keeping her eyes from the door, and went out into the darkness. She ran heavily.

On Captain Demooth’s return he found his wife rigid on her bed, with a slight froth drying at the corners of her mouth. He could not waken her and called for Nancy. When she did not answer, he went into the kitchen and rang the bell. Then he went to her room and found that she had gone.

He took the lamp into the yard, shouting for Clem, and with the old Dutchman searched the yard. By the fence they found Nancy’s fresh tracks. She had climbed the rails and crossed the meadow towards the south. They managed to follow her tracks as far as the woods. But there they had to stop.

“There’s no use in looking any more.”

Clem shook his head: “Only an Indian could foller her through that brush.”

“Didn’t you hear anything at all?”

“I was sleeping pretty hard. I was tired.”

“I’ll have to get back to my wife.”

“Anything wrong with her?”

“She’s had a fit, I think. Her mother told me she used to have them when she was little. Will you go fetch Doc, Clem?”

Clem said, “Tschk, tschk,” in his best manner.

“Hurry up, Clem. I feel as if I was going crazy myself. We just had an express from Albany. Walter Butler’s escaped.”

“God help us,” exclaimed Clem; but he was thinking about fording the river. The water was high, now.

When, a few hours later, Nancy broke free of the woods, she found herself on one of the bare, hillside pastures. Looking back, she saw the mist lying below her in the valley. She had come a long way.

Her shawl was a sodden bundle hanging from her clinched fingers. Her short gown was torn over one shoulder. Her petticoat clung wetly to her legs. She felt like a flogged person; she was reeking with sweat and wet from the whipping branches. Her hair hung round her face. A little stream of blood trickled from a cut cheek.

She fought hard to gain her breath, turning her back on the valley and fixing her eyes on the stars. Gradually against their distant patterns she made out the dark shoulder of the hill. When she saw it, she started once more at her heavy walk. Her body was like a dead weight precariously balanced on the arch that joined her legs.

Somewhere under the mist behind her, a dog rushed out of an invisible house. She could hear his furious barks traveling back and forth. All at once the dog’s voice deepened, fixed, and she realized that it had picked up her scent.

But at the same moment a long whistle pierced the mist. It was followed by a man’s incensed shouting. “Prince! Come back here, Prince!” Nancy heard the name quite plainly. The dog stopped barking and then, a mo-ment later, yelped; and the night became still. A long shuddering breath went out of Nancy. She set herself with a desperate deliberation against the hill.

A half hour later she stopped on top of the hill in a scattered grove of maples to draw deep breaths. Though she knew that she was out of reach of pursuit, she did not dare stop for long. She was convinced that what Mrs. Demooth had told her would surely take place. The pain she had carried out of the house had died, but she was sure that it would come to life again. Even now she could feel its premonitory stirrings.

She tramped nearly all night. The general slope of the ground was downward, but at times she was brought up against sharp rises that took interminable climbing. A little before dawn she lost her sense of direction. She could no longer see the stars; the sky had turned to a dull gray with neither light nor shadow. The ravine in which she floundered was gray, like the sky, and the wet touch of branches on her cheeks or breast was cold.

She stumbled into a small stream without seeing it and came at last to a halt in water that pushed icily against her knees. She put her hand down and lifted a little water to her mouth. Her lips felt swollen to her hand’s touch. She could not drink.

After a minute she gave up and wearily forced her way out of the water. Her knees would not lift her feet the height necessary to climb out on the bank, and she struggled futilely, feeling the cold earth against her thighs. She splashed heavily, though she did not hear it, and fell face down on the thick dead sodden grass, and lay there.

It was then that the pains returned. Nancy lifted her swollen, pale, and tear-streaked face and cried out. Her voice was not loud, it was utterly forlorn. It made the Indian think of a rabbit in a faulty snare.

The Indian had been scouting down towards the flats when the dog scented him and barked. His first intention had been to sneak up beside the corner of the barn to see whether he could pick up an easy scalp. He wanted to save up for a new gun; his old French trade musket that he had inherited from his father shot very badly. For hunting he even had to carry his bow. He had picked up two scalps that month, one down at Ephratah, and one of a lone trapper between Edmeston and the little lakes. The one he had got at Ephratah had not come off well and he was not sure whether he would be able to get the eight-dollar bounty for it at Niagara. He ought to take another to be sure.

But the dog had so obviously spotted him that the Indian decided to give up that chance, and he legged it up the hill with the dog chasing him. The man had called in the dog; and the Indian had nothing to show. But then he had heard somebody floundering in the wet way above him. When he reached the pasture, whoever it was had disappeared, but the Indian found plain tracks and a tatter of cloth together beside a juniper. He could not understand it; it was too dark to see the tracks, but just on the chance he had started following. In the dark, that was slow and painful work. As soon as it got lighter, however, he made the surprising discovery that the footprints had been left by a woman. He fingered the pouch under his belt in which he carried his Oki, the skin of a red-headed woodpecker, and realized that at last it was bringing him a little luck. You got eight dollars for any scalp regardless of sex. This ought to be an easy eight dollars. The woman was alone.

He went at a trot, for the trail was easy to follow, and a little past dawn he broke out on the edge of a steep ravine and looked down on her. She had fallen forward on the bank of a small stream.

The Indian ran down the bank, jumped the stream in a single leap, and stood beside her, fingering his hatchet. He had several ideas. He might shoot her— he hadn’t shot anything with his musket this trip— or he could bang her on the head and save the powder. He was still considering when Nancy looked up at him and screamed again, and he realized that she had not seen him at all or heard him either until that instant. Then he saw that she no longer saw him. She was unconscious. He caught her by the arm and hauled her out of the water and looked at her. He found out that she was in the act of giving birth.

He was very much puzzled. To find a woman like her there alone in such a case was extraordinary. It made him uneasy. He decided that he had better think things over before he killed her, so he dragged her over the ground to a clump of hemlock and built a fire. He left her on a slight incline, with her legs downward, and sat down himself with his back to her.

The light increased gradually while he sat before the fire. Birds moved in the branches. He heard their voices all through the woods and the smooth musical sliding of the water over a sunk log. While he watched the birds he took out of a pouch a piece of pemmican and began sucking and gnawing at it. He considered that his wife had died that winter and that he had no children and that he might get eight dollars for the torn scalp anyway. But he was not sure.

He seemed oblivious of the event taking place behind him. But suddenly his dark eyes were attracted by the flashing passage of a woodpecker. Black and white, and the red head like a traveling spark. A great twittering and fluttering broke out in a tree, and a moment later the woodpecker returned in hot pursuit of a female. The Indian grunted, relaxed, and went ahead with his chewing. He decided that she was a strong girl, or she would not have journeyed so far. And her light long hair and her blue eyes interested him; he was different from most Indians in his own town. He liked to live solitary and had a small log house on the outskirts of Deodesote village. He had never been markedly successful on a warpath. Two scalps and this woman prisoner might make him some reputation. If, now, he decided to marry her, it wouldn’t be necessary to give presents, either.

He waited complacently for the woman to finish the business.

When some poor order emerged from the flux of Nancy’s consciousness and she opened her eyes to the world before her, she saw the Indian sitting in sunlight before his fire with his blanket drawn over his shoulders. The musket was leaning against the stub of a dead hemlock branch and the bow and quiver were hung beside it.

The sides of the Indian’s poll were shaved and the scalplock was braided like some queer kind of handle to his head. One battered feather hung from it. He looked comical to her lightheaded fancy, and she felt sorry for him, he was so dark and ugly. When she tried to speak, and he turned, she al-most laughed at the way his face looked with smeared paint, white and vermilion, in stripes. She even remembered how it had terrified her when she saw it on the bank of the stream; then it had appeared like the arrival of the abomination itself. But now Nancy knew that she was alive.

To her awakening senses came the sound of the water in the stream, the birds’ voices, and the smell of smoke from the Indian’s fire. Her body felt torn and sore and exhausted, but it was alive. She met the Indian’s expressionless eyes with a slight smile; then struggled to sit up.

As she did so he rose to his feet and moved away from her. He went down the ravine to a piece of dry raised ground and started peeling sheaths of bark from a big hemlock. He used his hatchet and scalping knife together.

For a while Nancy watched him erecting a tiny bark shanty. Then she made her eyes look down at herself and at the small, soiled, male shape to which she had given birth. For a moment she was chilled by the old fear; but her movement upset the child so that it rolled over and bumped against her knee; and suddenly it opened its infinitely small mouth and gave a flat bawling wail.

It was alive. Nancy laughed. Then she picked up the baby and moved it into the sun and went down to the stream with unsteady steps and washed herself as well as she was able. While she was there she found her bundle, and, bringing it back, unwrapped it and took out the nightgown, which was of worn flannel. In the dryest piece of this she could tear out, she wrapped the baby, after first wiping its body with the other portions.

When she was done, the Indian came back to her and said something she could not understand. He was a squat, slightly bowlegged man who did not quite come to her shoulder. He pointed to the shed he had made.

“Oh yes. Thank you very much.”

Nancy smiled wanly and managed to follow him. He did not offer to help her with the child or her belongings, but he put down his blanket for her.

He tapped himself on the chest.

“Gahota,” he said. “Gahota.”

Then he poked Nancy’s breast with his forefinger and stared at her. She giggled slightly. He poked again. Finally she understood.

“Oh, my name’s Nancy.”

He repeated it. Then he said, “Gahota.”

“Gahota,” said Nancy. The Indian smiled. Some of the paint cracked on his cheek. He watched her sit down on his blanket, put some more wood on the fire, took his bow, quiver, and musket, and disappeared into the woods.

Nancy sat still for a long time, holding the baby in her lap. Finally she lay down with it and slept.

It was nearly dusk when she smelled cookery and woke again. The In-dian was squatting before the fire. He had fashioned a bark dish in which he was boiling some meat. Every now and then with a small ladle of birch bark he would skim off a wet mass of feathers. But as soon as he saw that Nancy was awake, he moved over and gave her the ladle, signing to her that it was time she assumed the woman’s job.

The two partridges boiling away in the soup smelled strong, for they had been immersed, feathers, entrails, and all; but Nancy was hungry. She skimmed with good will. When the two carcasses fell apart she took the bark dish off the stones it rested on and set it between herself and Gahota. As she started to dip her ladle, the Indian took it from her hand.

He ate slowly and steadily until the soup was half gone. Then he shoved the vessel towards her and tossed the ladle in. Nancy was ravenous. While she was eating the baby began to cry. But she did not heed it until she had finished the soup. Twice she saw the Indian stare at the child, and the third time she reached for it and set it on her lap.

A little later in the evening she felt the milk filling her breasts. Clumsily she lifted the child. She caught Gahota’s eye. He looked contented now, indifferent. He had removed his shirt and was slowly rubbing his belly.

Nancy felt a great friendliness for this kind man.

“Will you help me find my brother?” she asked.

He did not turn his head, nor answer.

“My brother, Hon? Hon Yost Schuyler.”

He did not answer.

“I must find him,” said Nancy, with a slight panic. But the Indian continued to ignore her. She dropped the subject, for she thought obviously the poor heathen did not understand the English language. Besides she felt warm and soothed and preoccupied with the tugging at her breast. Al-most as an afterthought she said companionably, “He lives at Niagara, you know.”

Gahota, whose name meant Log-in-the-Water, had been politely ignor-ing her bad manners in addressing him. But now he grunted.

“Deodesote,” he said flatly.