Drums Along the Mohawk (35 page)

“He was particular. Said something about you being too good to lose. Said it must have been a great piece of fighting.”

Herkimer’s voice deepened.

“
Ja
. He should have been there.”

Another silence. The doctor, saying in his fresh young voice, “I see. I see.”

“You think it should come off? Petry said I should keep it. But he iss hurt und can’t come down.”

“Off? By gad, sir, it ought to have been off a week ago! With all respect. But these back-country surgeons sometimes …”

“Petry’s a stubborn cuss. Don’t get sick, Maria. It’s no good to me anyway. I want some rum und my pipe. The one with the big bowl on it.
Ja
.”

Gil realized that Trip was standing beside him. The negro’s eyes rolled round to his.

“Yassah.”

Without a word, Gil went down to the ferry.

It was all over in the northwest room. The surgeon, hat in hand, was saying good-bye. “I have to report to-night at Dayton.”

Herkimer looked at him calmly with his black eyes. The room was full of smoke. The negress Frailty was gingerly carrying out the bloody sheet they had used to cover the table. Mrs. Herkimer, pale face swollen, swayed a little as she waited.

“Goot luck, Doctor. Thank General Arnold for me.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Tell me something. Did you ever cut off a leg before?”

The surgeon blushed.

“No, sir.”

“Don’t pe ashamed. A man has to start somewhere. I remember the first deer I shot.” His face brightened suddenly. “Maria, have one of the poys find out if Boleo’s at Warner’s.” He set down his pipe in the candlestick. His eye fell on the bundle in the corner.

“Give it to Johnny Roof to bury. It should please a poy to do that.”

He sank back and closed his eyes. Nobody had heard him make a sound beyond the grinding of his teeth. Now his breathing was like a blow repeated and repeated against the walls of the room.

While he slept, two boys took the severed leg and walked with it in the orchard. They did not know where a good place would be until one thought of the ox-heart cherry tree the general was so fond of. They dug the hole and filled it.

While he slept, one of the negro lads went up to Warner Dygert’s tavern and gave the news of the amputation. Joe Boleo started getting sober then. “My Jesus, what did they do that for?” He picked his rifle from the corner and ambled unsteadily in the negro’s wake. Already it was getting dark.

There was no light in the northwest room while Herkimer slept, for Maria, from exhaustion, had fallen asleep herself in the chair by the hearth. She was awakened by Joe Boleo’s hand on hers. “It’s Joe.”

“Oh, Joe,” she whispered back.

“They took his leg off?”

“Yes.”

“I thought the nigger was lying.”

She stirred softly under his hand and left the chair and went into the dim light of the hall. She fetched a candle back. Together she and the gangling trapper leaned over the bed.

“Poor old Honnikol. He never could get round very fast, anyways.”

She gasped. She wasn’t pointing at the white face in which the nose seemed to have grown overlarge. Her finger pointed at the blanket.

Joe looked at the drench of blood and swore. He went right out himself and woke the entire lot of negroes.

“Get up to Fort Dayton,” he ordered. “Get Petry. Doc Petry. Bring him down in a canoe if he can’t ride. Tell him a fool army man cut off Honnikol’s leg and it’s still bleeding.”

He returned to the house.

“Hello, Honnikol.”

“Joe?”

“Shut up,” said Joe. He helped Maria Herkimer twist a tourniquet on above the bloody stump. “We’d better leave the bandage on. It might clot yet.”

“I don’t think so.” Herkimer spoke quietly. “Get me my pipe, Maria, and one for Joe, and beer for both of us. We both need beer. Me, I’m thirsty. How about you, Joe?”

“Oh, my Jesus, Honnikol. I ain’t drank in two weeks.”

They smoked and drank through long hours, while Herkimer talked fitfully about old hunting trips. They didn’t mention war. “Remember the trout above Schell’s riff?”

“Sure,” said Joe. “Sure, Honnikol.”

“I don’t know what’s become of all the fishing, Joe.”

When Herkimer finally went to sleep, Joe left the room, wandering hopelessly to the river side. There was nothing to see. They couldn’t bring Petry down before morning. And the bleeding did not stop.

Making a restless circuit of the house, he met Johnny Roof and the other lad standing in the orchard with two spades. “What you doing?” Joe asked sourly. They said they’d heard the general was dying. They were wondering about digging up his leg. “What for?” They said to bury with him. He merely cursed them. He walked around for an hour in the dark, leaving Honnikol to his wife. It was what a woman expected.

In the morning, Herkimer was not talking. Even when Colonel Willett came over the river and reported that General Arnold was passing on the north shore, Herkimer did no more than stare.

About nine, however, he rallied and asked for his pipe. When he had been smoking a little while he asked for his Bible, opened at the Thirty-eighth Psalm. He started to read aloud in a strong voice, but as he went on the voice started to fail. He did not appear to be aware of it, but read on, moving his lips slowly, and only now and then achieving utterance, so that his wife and the lank, uneasy woodsman, who leaned against the sunny window frame, heard only snatches:—

“ ‘O Lord, rebuke me not in thy wrath.…’ ”

The death of Herkimer shook the people. He had been the squire, the man with the money who had built a great house that
rivaled Sir William Johnson’s Hall. Now they remembered that he had been one of themselves, a quiet man, who came to dinner in his shirt, likely as not. They missed his steadfastness. The men who had been with him at Oriskany battle recalled how he had lit his pipe. Now that he was gone they had no one to depend on.

For three days. On the morning of the twentieth, officers on good mounts, wearing the blue coats of the regular army, rode the length of German Flats reading a proclamation.

It was not what the proclamation said that roused the people. There were too few Tories left in German Flats to make the promised amnesty applicable to themselves. It was rather the choice of words. Here was a man who put down what he said as if he meant it, who wasn’t afraid of calling scoundrels by their proper names.

Militiamen who hadn’t thought of heading west again began to talk of going along with Arnold’s army. He was the man who had taken troops overland through Maine and would have conquered Quebec and all Canada but for one unlucky bullet that got him in the knee. In the knee, like Herkimer; the coincidence was striking. They listened to his invitation to all able-bodied men, militia or exempts, to join him in a victorious march
against St. Leger’s camp. But they waited awhile to see what he would do.

He did a lot. He made an inspection of the forts round German Flats. In each he made another speech about his expedition. He also urged the people out to take care of the wheat.

“This valley’s not only got to feed you; it’s got to feed General Washington’s army. And the army will pay you high. Right now it’s buying unmilled wheat at seven shilling.” They listened to him, watching him—a black-visaged, hawk-like man, with arrogant round eyes and an opulent mouth. “You’ve got more than your families to look out for here. You’ve got the bread of the army in your care. That’s what St. Leger’s after. And that’s what Gansevoort’s saving by hanging out in Stanwix, and that’s what we’re going to save Gansevoort for.” His face was flushed high; his voice had a queer habit of sliding up the scale; but they liked the way he walked up and down, light on his feet, like a man who knew the woods.

“Listen to me. Over in Bennington, Vermont, Colonel Stark and a bunch of minutemen captured and licked and manhandled five hundred Hessian cavalry. Do you know why the Hessians went over there? Because Burgoyne’s getting pinched for food. General Schuyler has him bottled up. His murdering Indians have gone home, they can’t find any more girls to kill, like Jenny McRae. He’s just sitting still and praying for St. Leger, and that’s what we’re here to stop. Lick St. Leger and you lick Burgoyne. You people can do it. You damn near did. I’m here to help you take another whack at it, and both of us together can win this war, right here.”

He had Learned’s artillery manœuvre in Petry’s field, and the men went from all the forts and stockades to look at cannon dragged on wheels. The soldiers lined one up and fired it down the river, and the awed people saw the heavy ball send up a tower of spray three hundred yards downstream. They thought
of what that would have done to the Indians at Oriskany, and Arnold had a battery.

“By Jesus,” said Joe Boleo, making his first emergence from his gloom, “I calculate I’ll go along and see one of them balls let loose after Sillinger myself.”

Arnold’s next step was to court-martial Walter Butler. He appointed Willett Judge Advocate, which made men shake their heads and say conviction would be pretty near conclusive, with that arrangement. When they found that the trial was open to any and all spectators, they so crowded Dr. Petry’s store that a guard had to be thrown round it to keep out late comers.

It gave them a strange thrill to see one of the men who had run the valley standing up before an officer. Butler was self-contained but scornful. He argued in his clear attorney’s voice that he had come with a flag to parley with the inhabitants of German Flats. He did not know anything of this new law, he only knew the King’s law. He did not consider it necessary to report to Colonel Weston, for he did not know of any Colonel Weston or of any Fort Dayton. The natural pallor of his face was not accentuated when he was brought back into court and sentenced to the pain and penalty of death. The new law he had scorned, as administered by Willett and Arnold, had ground him down. It gave all men pause for thought.

By contrast the succeeding trial of Hon Yost Schuyler as a deserter from the Tryon County militia was an anticlimax. But it showed that General Arnold was not missing any tricks at all; and some of the spectators were reminded how nearly they might have found themselves in Schuyler’s shoes, guilty, and sentenced to a hundred lashes.

Arnold had no authority for court-martialing Butler. Both Gates and Schuyler had sent definite orders that the captured
men be removed to Albany. But he and Willett had been putting on a show to divert attention from their unavoidable delay. The militia were not coming in as they had expected, and the commissary train as usual was lagging no one knew quite where.

That night while he and Willett sat together in headquarters tent trying to think up some new game and wondering whether they dared disobey instructions and execute Butler anyway, the guard announced two women to see the general. The women were Mrs. Schuyler and her daughter, Nancy.

Both officers were men to whom directness invariably appealed. Mrs. Schuyler wasted no time in pleading her own shame, she only mentioned that she was Herkimer’s sister, they could see her position for themselves. She had brought a proposition from her son. If Arnold let him off, he guaranteed to go to Sillinger’s camp and, pretending he had escaped from the American army, to put the fear of death into the Indians. He volunteered the information that when he left with Ensign Butler, the Indians were already getting restless. He believed that if the Indians left, the Tories, and maybe Sillinger himself, would lose their nerve.

It was the kind of notion to appeal to men like Arnold and Willett. They admitted it. But Arnold said, “What guarantee can you give us of your son’s good faith?”

“I’ve brought my daughter with me,” said Mrs. Schuyler. “You can keep her for a hostage.”

Arnold studied Mrs. Schuyler and then glanced at Nancy’s face. Nancy was pale and her eyes were wide with emotion. As she met the general’s eye her lips parted. She had made the suggestion herself to her mother, and she was ready, if anything happened to Hon, to take his punishment.

Arnold smiled grimly.

“Mrs. Schuyler, you’re too intelligent to think I could accept a girl for a hostage. What would people think of me if I ordered my sergeant to give a girl a hundred lashes on her bare back?”

Mrs. Schuyler sighed.

“I thought so. Very well, my son Nicholas has agreed to put himself in your hands till Hon returns.”

Nancy’s face flushed darkly, then it went pale again. And she stood there shivering. The two officers smiled sympathetically. It seemed quite natural; they admired her heroism. Her mother said, “Be still.”