3stalwarts (57 page)

Lana suddenly got to her feet.

“I’m going to see if Gilly likes it,” she said. She brought him to the table and sat him on her lap while he stupidly nodded his big head and rubbed his sleepy eyes. They all held their breaths when she put the spoon to his mouth, carefully cooled by her own blowing. He made a face, feebly, then stiffened and was very still. Then he started to cry. Their disappointment was intense.

Lana said defensively, “He’s never tasted any sugar.”

“Don’t be silly,” cried Mrs. McKlennar. “All he wants is more.”

When Lana lifted the spoon again the child opened his mouth eagerly. “See!” cried Mrs. McKlennar. “I told you.”

Everybody felt jubilantly happy.

“Did you find out where they were going?”

“Stanwix,” said Joe and Adam together.

“Just there? There’s two hundred men there already.”

“That’s what they said,” said Adam.

“It’s my idea they’re going to make some kind of pass against Oswego,” said Joe.

“What would they send Rangers for against a fort?” Adam was scornful.

Gil said, “Do you suppose they’re going to go against the Onondagas?”

“By God!” said Joe.

They all remembered what Ellis had said. The Iroquois.

“They’ll need scouts, I’ll bet,” said Adam. Joe met his eye.

“It would be fun going with an army like that and wiping out some Indians,” said Joe quietly. “I always wanted to do some destruction against them.”

He turned to Gil. “If they do, will you come along with us?”

Gil shook his head. Adam said, “You got your planting done, ain’t you? Come on.”

“The womenfolks will be safe enough with an army that size flogging around the woods. You ought to see them. They ain’t like those Massachusetts boys.”

“We ain’t been asked,” said Gil.

“Shucks,” said Joe, blushing, because he had thought of something else to say and barely saved it before women. “You come along. I fixed something for the women in case they should get cut off. It’s a hide-hole. I been working on it for three days.”

“Really?” Mrs. McKlennar was interested. “What is it?”

“Come out,” said Joe. “No, damn it, it’s dark. I’ll show you tomorrow.”

“What’s that, Gil?” Lana had risen.

Adam said soothingly, “That’s just the taptoo, Lana.”

They all went out on the porch with the tattoo of the drums thudding faintly across the valley towards them. It was pitch-dark, but the regularly spaced fires seemed very near.

They stood a long time watching them, in the damp coolness of the night. They saw the sentry figures small and silhouetted. They could even see the stacked rifles.

“They been a long time coming,” said Joe.

Back in the house there was a scraping of silver against china as black Daisy scraped the cups for her own taste of sugar. She was humming softly.

Half an hour after sunrise, young John Weaver galloped into the McKlennar yard, waving a letter for Gil. It was a hasty scrawl from Colonel Bellinger asking Gil, Adam, and Joe to report to him immediately at Fort Dayton. While Gil was reading it, the calling of the robins was hushed by a long roll from the drums across the river. Gil ran round the house. He found Adam and Joe watching the camp. They could see the men breaking away from the fires and rolling their blankets.

“It’s the general,” said Joe. “I’ve heard it before.” He answered Adam’s question scornfully. “Not General Washington, you dumbhead. It just means the army’s going to march.”

Gil gave them Demooth’s orders and the men went into the house together to get their rifles.

Lana confronted them in the doorway.

“Gil!”

“Don’t get worried,” he said.

“Where are you going?”

“Bellinger wants to see us. That’s all.”

“You’re going with the army,” she said accusingly.

Adam interposed awkwardly, “Aw, now, Lana. Nothing can happen to Gil with me and Joe along.”

She looked white and stiff and her arms hung straight at her sides. Gil said to Mrs. McKlennar, “If we do have to go I’ll send John Weaver back. He’ll let you know if you ought to move to the fort.”

Mrs. McKlennar nodded her gray head.

Joe slapped himself. “Lord, ma’am, I’d forgotten clean about it.”

“What, Joe?”

“That hide-hole I made. It’ll only take a minute to show it to you. Come along.”

He led them quickly out into the sunlight and up through the sumac scrub. “You want to come this way, so you won’t leave tracks.”

He stopped a hundred yards up the slope.

“There it is,” he said modestly.

He pointed to a fallen tree whose roots had lifted a great slab of earth.

“I don’t see anything,” said the widow.

Joe beamed. “That’s it. You don’t see nothing. Come here.”

He led the two women to the roots of the tree, round to the trunk, and pointed. There was a small hole in the ground. “Don’t walk out there,” he cautioned them. “That’s just poles laid over with dirt. There’s room inside for the bunch of you. You can drop right down. I made it soft.”

Mrs. McKlennar said, “Thank you, Joe.”

Joe said, “You want to remember the way up here. Go over it in your heads so you could do it at night. I don’t reckon you’ll have to use it, though.”

“I don’t think so.”

“It’s a good thing to have handy, though.”

He went back down the hillside and found Adam and Gil ready and John Weaver mounted. Lana came, still as death, behind Mrs. McKlennar. The men went down to the road and turned and waved. The widow waved back. Then Lana lifted her hand. Her arm looked frail and white in the morning sunlight.

She began to cry.

“He might have said good-bye to the baby,” she sobbed.

Mrs. McKlennar put her arm over Lana’s shoulders.

“Don’t say that. He didn’t want to go any more than you wanted him to. That’s why he acted like that.”

Over the river the drums beat out the assembly and the troops began to mass along the fence. A moment later the “march” sounded, and the two women saw the lines gather themselves like a single organism and start moving out on the road. They saw what they had not seen last night, that there was a flag in the middle of the line. They had never seen the flag before. The sight of it, clean and bright, with its stripes and circle of stars, for some reason made them feel like crying.

It appeared that Colonel Van Schaick had requested three guides from Bellinger.

“I don’t know why he won’t take Indians with the Oneidas so close and willing to go. He wanted three white men, he said. I thought of you. He says it will be only three weeks at most.”

“Where does he want us to take him?” Joe asked.

“I don’t know,” said Bellinger. “You’d better start right away. Martin, did you plan for your women to come down here?”

“I think it would be better.”

“It may not be necessary. I’ll have young Weaver stay out there. But I’ll keep an eye on them.” He paused. “Van Schaick’s got the woods covered to the west and I’ll cover the south. And the Oneidas are out. I don’t think there’s any danger with the size army that’s coming.” He shook hands with the three in turn. “You’d better go.”

The three men reached Fort Stanwix the same day, coming out on the bend of the river just before sunset. While they were yet approaching the fort, a small swivel was discharged and the flag fluttered down from the pole over the gate. It was a beautiful flag, silky and shining against the setting sun; but Gil felt that no matter how often he saw this American flag, he would only see the one that had flown from the same pole two years ago, with its botched stripes of uneven thickness, and its peculiarly shaped stars. Then it had stood for something besides the Continental army.

They trotted up to the sally port and announced themselves to the guard as three scouts from Colonel Bellinger. They were at once admitted and taken directly to the officers’ mess. There they found Colonel Goose Van Schaick and his second in command, Major Cochran. The major was well, almost meticulously uniformed; but the colonel was a heavy man with coarse hair turning gray and small calculating eyes, and his collar rode high on his thick neck. He accepted Bellinger’s letter and eyed the three Rangers.

“I don’t want to be asked questions,” he said belligerently. “You’ll stay here, you’ll live with the noncommissioned officers. Now, does any one of you know the woods west of Oneida Lake?” His eyes had unerringly picked Joe, who was leaning his tail against the table and gazing into the fireplace as if it were a wonder of the world. Now he nodded his head.

“Sure,” he said. “I do.”

“How about you two?”

Joe answered: “Gil ain’t a timber beast, but the young lad’s not going to get lost as long as I tell him where to go.”

Adam opened his mouth to roar, but he met the colonel’s eye in time. There was something about the colonel’s eye which quelled him.

The colonel said, “You big ox, if you start fighting around here I’ll have you flogged before the fort. I don’t want to be bothered with yelling louts like you. And just so you’ll know what it would be like, you can go out on the parade tomorrow morning and see what happens when a man gets flogged.”

He turned back to Joe. “Listen you, what’s your name? Boleo. You’re to stay ready to march. You’re to report to me an hour before the first troops start. I’ll tell you where we’re going. Then you’ll pick the route, though I imagine there’s just one way to get there.”

“Sure.” Joe was looking out of the window. “Down Wood Crick and across the lake. You land on the southwest shore, march over to Onondaga Lake, cross the arm— you can wade it. It’s not over four feet deep. Then hit Onondaga Crick and go up. That will bring you to the first town. Jesus, Colonel, I used to play around there as a young lad. You ought to have been out there then.”

The major’s Irish face was a study, but the colonel wasn’t taking the same pleasure in Joe.

“How did you figure that out?” he asked in a steady hard voice.

“Why,” said Joe, innocently, “I ain’t a complete fool or I wouldn’t have been sent here, mister.”

“Did you get that from somebody else?”

“No, we figured it out coming up.”

The colonel grunted. “Keep your mouths shut. You’re sure you can wade over the arm of the lake?”

“If you don’t mind getting wet.”

The colonel stared very hard at Joe. Then he said in cold, level tones, “That’s all. If you want to eat you’d better hurry.”

As they came out onto the parade, the garrison were filing into the mess, and the three men followed them dubiously. These soldiers didn’t look quite natural somehow. They seemed to keep step with a kind of instinct. A corporal came out of the shadow of the officers’ mess and touched Gil’s arm. “You the three scouts?”

They said they were.

“My name’s Zach Harris. You’re to eat with us.” He led them into the mess to a table at which sergeants and corporals ate together. They were greeted friendlily enough and sat down to heaped wooden bowls of beef stew cooked with turnips, tea and sugar, a slab of white bread, and a piece of cheese. The way they ate made the soldiers regard them with curiosity.

“What’s the matter, ain’t you fed all day?”

Adam replied, “We ain’t had a feed like this since last September, Bubby. Does the old man always feed you like this?”

“He’s a dinger to get provisions. But he bears down pretty hard on the discipline. Ever since that Dutchman Steuben came around last year, old Goose has been cock-eyed over discipline. But he can act real nice sometimes.”

“He looks to me as if he could act just about as nice as a wolverine with the bilious complaint,” remarked Adam.

The table roared and the word, going clean round the mess hall, set all the men to laughing. But Corporal Harris’s was a dry grin. “I guess I see why the old man wanted you to watch a flogging, mister.”

The flogging took place an hour after sunrise and just before breakfast. It was one of the colonel’s theories that it made more impression on an empty stomach.

The three Rangers were routed out of bed by Corporal Harris and told to appear on the parade in five minutes. Before they were dressed they heard the drums beating a muster, and as they stepped out into the soft April morning the tap of a single drum came from the guardhouse.

Corporal Harris led them to a position in front of his own company. The entire garrison had been lined up in a hollow square. Set up on the bare beaten earth in the middle of the square was a single post about a foot thick. It made a long shadow towards the guardhouse, and now the tapping of the single drum marked the approach of the culprit along this shadow. He came between two sergeants. He was naked to the waist. He looked neither right nor left, but kept his eyes on the post.

Joe Boleo looked on with an abstracted kind of interest. Adam stood straight. The faces of the soldiers were expressionless as the culprit was taken by the arms, his hands lifted, and two nooses of fine rope passed over the wrists. The rope was then hauled up over a groove in the top of the post until the arms were stretched over the man’s head, and his shoulder blades stood out sharp and his toes barely touched the ground.

The two sergeants then stepped back. The sergeant major of the garrison stepped out from the ranks and the drums beat a short roll. The sergeant general read from a paper: —

“Private Hugh Deyo, Captain Varick’s Company, tried before court-martial and found guilty of stealing a shirt. Sentenced to fifty lashes with the hide whip. April 9th, 1779. To be administered before the entire garrison on parade, by order of Colonel Goose Van Schaick.”

He shifted the paper to read the back. “Captain Wandle’s company.”

“All present or accounted for.”

“Captain Gregg’s company.”

In turn each company was called and answered.

The sergeant major of Varick’s company then stepped forward to the left of the post. He unwrapped the six-foot hide whip from his arm, on which it had beeen coiled like an inanimate snake, and tossed out the folds in the dust so that they lay flat behind him.

The drums rolled.

“Sergeant, do your duty.”

Adam looked up to see the colonel standing grimly with the officers in the opening through which the prisoner had come.