3stalwarts (47 page)

Mrs. McKlennar often noticed Lana’s passionate preoccupation at feeding time. She did not, like many women, take it as a chore; her whole day seemed governed by the expectation that led up to the appointed time. She was a natural mother, Mrs. McKlennar thought, and knew that she herself, supposing she had had a child, would never have felt like that. From now on, Gil would have to walk behind the family cart. He would no longer be the girl’s husband, but the father of her family. It was the patriarchal instinct from her Palatine blood. Some of those girls were wonderful things to see before they married; then they became great mothers. “She’ll shut him out of both their lives until she wants him.” It seemed queer to an Irishwoman.

And yet it was not altogether so. Lana always greeted Gil with happiness and anxiety for his comfort. He was to be pleased, to have just what he wanted. But there it was again; he was the father. Mrs. McKlennar wondered how Gil would stand up under this attitude.

Three mornings later, Joe Boleo appeared at the house for breakfast. He had reached the valley late the night before, sleeping in Demooth’s barn. Now he said he wanted a good meal, a wash and shave, and a bed with feathers in it. Nothing was up in the south that he had seen. There was no news. He must admit that he preferred Daisy’s cornbread to Adam Helmer’s idea of nocake.

After feeding he dropped down to the hay meadow to pass a few minutes with Gil.

“The boy’s a dinger,” Joe said gravely. “He’s growed since I was here before.”

Gil grinned.

“He gets lots of nourishment.”

“By God,” said Joe heartily.

“Who’s down in the lodge?” Gil asked.

“Hain’t nobody,” said Joe. “I got sick of being by myself, but Adam’s due back there tomorrow.”

“Where’s Adam?”

“He’s picking up John Butler’s trail back to Niagara. There weren’t no point in staying down. They’ve all gone from Unadilla.”

“Listen, Joe. Did you see any of the Andrustown people?”

“No, I didn’t. I didn’t come through Andrustown. I took a swing west of there. Why?”

“There’s a party gone there to cut hay.”

Joe swore. “Why didn’t they tell me?”

“They supposed you were down south.”

“Well, I can’t stay there all the time. I hain’t been out of the woods for two weeks. Everybody’s so busy cutting hay they don’t think of a poor timber beast like me. Dingman wasn’t at the second lodge, either.” He leaned against the fence. “Hell, nothing’s going to happen.”

“Dingman’s haying for Mrs. Ritter. They spent last night there.”

“No,” said Joe.

“They’ve took their women with them.”

Joe gawped. “What do they think they’re doing?” he demanded.

“Cutting hay. Like me. Like anybody else. They thought the Rangers were out.”

“Now listen,” said Joe. “Everybody’s cutting hay and nobody spells me and Adam. We got to get some time off, ain’t we? Look here.”

Gil said, “We better see Demooth. I think you and me had better go after them.” He hooked his arm through his scythe snathe and picked up his rifle.

Joe stared.

“By God, you are an earnest man, Gil.”

Gil did not answer.

They reported to Demooth and set out before seven o’clock. They kept to the road. The tracks of the two wagons were plain in the road. Joe pointed to them scornfully. “What do they think it is, a frolic?”

“What do you mean?”

“All of them riding in the wagons. Probably singing songs. I hope they took along some cider for the girls.”

Gil thought grimly that they probably weren’t singing, anyway. But it was true that they hadn’t sent a man ahead. There wasn’t a sign of a human foot anywhere. But there wasn’t a hostile sign along the road, either. The woods were still and close with the July heat. Only the locusts made a sound. Nothing moved but the two men trotting along the road.

It was eight miles south to Andrustown by the road. They had left the Mohawk Valley and were cutting through the hills when Joe pulled up sharp. “Listen.” Gil stopped beside him. He himself had thought it sounded like a shot. Now, after a short interval, they knew. Half a dozen shots were made in quick succession.

“God,” said Joe. “I wonder if they got him.”

“Got him?” Gil’s brain was dazed.

“Yes.” Joe was irascible. “That was firing after somebody running. Probably trying to reach the woods. They must have been lined up.” He started running. “Run,” he said.

It was surprising how his shambling stride covered the ground. He ran like a dog, with his head up, as if he took scent out of the wind. Now that he was started he seemed perfectly calm. He even jerked some talk over his shoulder to Gil.

“So long as they’re shooting they’ll all be watching the houses,” he said. “Must have got them inside the houses.”

Twenty minutes later, Joe slowed down. There had been two more shots, but since then there had been not a sound. He and Gil had covered a little over three miles.

“No sense in running right into their laps,” he said. “Your wind is licked anyway. You couldn’t hit a standing barn.” He himself was breathing deep but easily. The only sign of his running was the sweat on his forehead, which stood out in big drops. “We’ll kind of edge up and see what they’re doing.”

He circled to the west in order to get up on the slope of the hill. If you were going to be spotted and chased, it was good to begin running halfway up a hill. That meant that the man chasing you would put on his first spurt, nine times out of ten, the full length of the hill, so you had him licked be-fore he could ever get in shooting distance.

He and Gil circled round till they could look through a slash in the trees down onto the little settlement. It was a small place— just the seven cabins and five small log barns, and the barracks under which the crops were stored. It was familiar enough to them both, except that about four acres of hay had been mowed and half of it cocked. But the two men were not looking at the hay.

What they were looking at was the group of people on the road. There were about sixty Indians, painted for the most part. The hot sunlight glistened on their greased hides and the feathered tufts of hair on their heads. They were standing around a cabin which they had just set on fire. The flames ran along the bark on the logs. The flames were dull red and yellow and tipped with thick smoke. The smoke went up against the trees and rolled into the sky. The bark roof caught with a gush of sound, and suddenly the whole cabin seemed to be enfolded with fire. It was unbelievable that a house could burn so fast.

Joe said suddenly under his breath, “There’s somebody in that house.”

“How do you know?”

“They wouldn’t be bothered to watch it otherwise. Look, they’ve got everything they could out of the other houses.”

It was an effort for Gil to take his eyes from the burning cabin. Now he looked carefully at the crowd of Indians. He saw the three women standing among them. They were not making any demonstration. They stood perfectly still, watching the cabin with a dull kind of fascination. The way sheep will look at something dreadful. They stood like that until the roof fell in. If there were a man inside he made no sound. “Killed himself if he had sense,” Joe said. “Look, they got somebody there.”

Gil saw for the first time the body hanging on the fence. It was old Bell. He was caught with one leg through the rails up to the crotch and both arms hanging over the top rail; his head tilted to one side, against his shoulder. He had been scalped. The top of his head was like a red gape against the sunlight, with a little halo of flies.

Joe started moving from tree to tree, to get a fresh view, while Gil followed him. When they had moved far enough to look past the other side of the burning cabin, they saw two men lying on their faces in the road. One was young Bell, in front of his own door; the other they thought must be Staring’s son, but they could not be sure from that distance. Joe began to swear.

Gil had a crazy impulse to take a shot at one of the Indians, any one, to put a shot into the midst of the whole bunch; but Joe, who seemed aware of it, whispered, “Don’t shoot. We can’t do anything. I don’t see Leppard or Hawyer or young Weaver anywhere. Maybe they got away.”

His rifle muzzle twitched up in his hands. ‘They ain’t all Indians either, Gil. Look there.”

A man in a green coat with a black skullcap on his head had come out of the Leppard cabin. He seemed unconcerned. He went over to the Indians and watched the burning cabin with them. Then he said something that started them picking up burning sticks.

“That’s one of Butler’s Rangers,” said Joe. “Do you suppose Leppard or Weaver would have the sense to get back to the fort?”

Gil did not know. He was too fascinated by what was happening to think of anything except that this was how his own place must have looked with the Indians burning it.

Butler’s man turned round to the women and his face was towards Gil.

“Joe!”

“Don’t talk so loud,” said Joe.

“That’s Caldwell!”

He remembered him as plain as if his wedding night had happened only a week ago. Even without the patch over the eye the man’s face looked the same.

He acted perfectly quiet, as if he knew just what he was doing. He motioned the women to walk north along the road. He kept saying something to them. The women looked back at him almost stupidly, and he jabbed the air with his hand. The women turned and started walking along the road. Every now and then they turned their heads to see the Indians setting fire to another cabin or barn. The Indians were swarming all round the settlement now. A couple of them were even going through the hayfield touching off the cocks.

One of the women began to run and the other two brokenly took their pace from hers. As if the Indians had heard their quickened footfalls, half a dozen of them broke away from the burning and yelled. The women started to run hard. They looked ineffectual scurrying up the road. They ran with their heads back, stiff above the hips, their legs working furiously and twice too hard under the heavy petticoats. The rest of the Indians, hearing the yell, threw down their sticks and yelled themselves and poured out on the road.

Gil was trembling like a dog. He felt sick and cold. Even his hands seemed to feel nausea. He started shouting at Joe. “We got to do something.”

Joe whirled on him and struck his face with his open hand.

“Shut up. God damn you, shut up.” He turned back to watch. His eyes had a glittering kind of interest in the proceeding. The women did not bother him. There were plenty of women. He wanted to see. But he kept saying over and over to quiet Gil, “We can’t stop them. Not even if we shot.”

Gil saw that he was right. The Indians were overtaking the women easily. They weren’t even hurried about it, but the women were too terrified to realize that. They still ran along the road, erect and desperate, with the funny skittering motion that a woman has when she tries to run. The Indians let them get almost to the beginning of the woods, then they yelled again with the piercing high note that an Indian can make and surrounded the three women.

Six or seven bucks caught the women by the shoulders and threw them down on the road and fell on top of them. The rest of the Indians crowded round. They were still yelling, but some of them were laughing.

Joe said suddenly, “I guess they ain’t going to kill them.”

Gil saw that the white officer was standing in the road looking after the Indians. He was making no motion to stop the proceedings. Even from that distance he looked almost amused by it. Then he turned his back and started systematically to feed the fires where they were not doing their job.

Gil looked back at the women and Indians. The crowd had given back a little. Now there was a shrill whoop and one of the Indians bent down and straightened up waving a petticoat. All the Indians whooped. Then another bent down and came up with a short gown. In a moment a couple of dozen of them were waving pieces of the women’s clothing. Then they all backed away so that the two men on the hill were able to see the three naked bodies of the women lying in the road.

The Indians looked down at them for a while, shaking their clothes at them, until the man in the green coat put a whistle to his mouth and blew a shrill blast. The Indians answered it stragglingly. They left the women.

The women lay where they were, beaten and stupefied, until the Indians were quite a way off, when one by one they got up slowly. They stood naked looking back at their burning homes, at the Indians, and the three dead men. Then they stampeded for the woods. The Indians sent a few whoops after them, and at each yell the women seemed to buck up in the air and come down running harder. They weren’t like women any more without their clothes. They were like some kind of animal, and they went a great deal faster than they had before.

Joe whispered to Gil, “Come on, we got to head them off.”

He led Gil at a rapid rate back through the woods until they got to the road. The women heard them coming and ran like fury, but Gil and Joe did not dare call to them. The women were too scared to look back. They had to run them down. It was only when two of them fell that the white men were able to overtake them.

The women were Mrs. Leppard and Mrs. Hawyer and young Bell’s wife. The oldest woman, Mrs. Leppard, was the first one to recover her wits. She said the Indians had come up just before the men went out to hay it. They had got Bell and had shot old Bell when he was going to get a horse. Young Crim, who had decided to join their party at the last minute, got into his house and would not come out, so the Indians burned his house with him in it. The three men in the hayfield had made the woods. John Weaver had been down by the spring and had got away too.

Joe helped up Mrs. Staring, who was a pretty girl, quite young, and urged all three off the road. While they were still talking, young Weaver, unarmed, came down the hill to them. His face was white and he looked terribly scared. But he had stuck around. He said he thought something might turn up for him to do.

Joe grinned at him.

“Did you see Leppard and the others?”

“They went for the fort.”