From Sea to Shining Sea (20 page)

Heads were turning. Hoofbeats were coming lickety-cut down the road from Massanutten Mountain, and a voice was crying to herald some great news. Jonathan couldn’t make out the words at first; half the voices in the shed were still discussing the outcome of the cockfight, and the other half were demanding quiet to hear what news the rider was bringing.

And then he heard it:

“They’ve burnt Norfolk! The Redcoats burnt Norfolk!”

The courier was halted by the crowd outside Wright’s and he blurted what he knew of it. In retaliation for Great Bridge, Dunmore’s Redcoats had raided Norfolk from the sea and set the town afire. Hundreds of people were homeless and seeking refuge farther inland. The drunks from Wright’s shed were roaring in anger.

“By God in Heaven!” Jonathan Clark bellowed, shaking a huge fist toward the East. “That does it for me!” He turned to Abraham Bowman and yanked him up by his lapel. “You’re a Son o’ Liberty,” he yelled into his pale blue eyes, “are you with
me? I’m goin’ soldierin’, by God! Devil Dunmore will pay for Norfolk!”

“I’m with you!” Abe Bowman shouted. “And I’ll bet a hundred quid we’ll run the last Redcoat off this land before a year is out!”

G
EORGE LAY AS LOW AND STILL AS A SNAKE UNDER THE HIDDEN
ledge of limestone and peered out through a sun-dappled screen of maple leaves at the Shawnee’s dark, unblinking eye and the circle of vermillion war paint around it, and he thought:

He sees me.

George tightened his hand on the walnut handle of his knife, and his heart beat fast against the ground. The warrior was so close, kneeling down out there and looking in, that George could have put the knife right in his eye if his arm were ten inches longer.

But if he sees me why doesn’t he do something?

Come on, Shawnee, he thought. If you’re going to do something, do it and let’s get this over with. You people have slowed me up enough today. Come a little closer and let’s get it done. I’ve got a meeting to go to.

The eye did not look away, but it blinked once. The maple leaves were aglow with sunlight, brilliant green. They stirred a little, but it was a movement caused by a breeze; the Indian had not touched them. George could smell wet limestone and humus right under his nose. His clothes were soaked with sweat and creek water. He and his friend Jones had spent half the day running, hiding, swimming, and backtracking to elude these five or six Shawnees, but they were tenacious as bloodhounds. Now they were out there in the green woods combing this bluff, and if George and Jones were to get to Harrod’s Town today, or ever, it looked as if they would have to kill a Shawnee, this one outside their cranny. At least one they’d have to kill; maybe they would
have to kill all of them. But first there was this one to deal with, and this one would not move.

George hoped he would move this way. If he moved away, that probably would mean he was going to get some help to look into this cranny. If he came this way, George was pretty sure he could get a hand on him and a knife in him before he could make too much noise.

Come
, George thought hard, as if he could will the Shawnee to come closer.

It would have to be with the knife. George’s rifle was under his body where he could not extract it without moving noticeably. And he could not use the long gun in this tight place anyway, and besides that, its priming powder would be wet from his clothes. George lay willing the Indian to come closer.

It would be hard to do even with the knife. George could not move his lower body because John Gabriel Jones was lying across his legs. And Jones could not move off George’s legs because he was wedged in under the limestone so tight that George could feel the pressure every time Jones inhaled. He didn’t know whether Jones could see the Shawnee or whether he knew one was here. But Jones had not moved or whispered, even as cramped as he was, so probably he knew. George hoped he knew, because he did not want him to move or whisper just now.

Come
, George thought to the Indian, who had just blinked again.
Move, damn ye!

The painted face moved slightly down and to the side, so now George could see both eyes. A ruddy brown hand now came up stealthily beside the face, to push some maple leaves aside. It was the Indian’s left hand, and there was no weapon in it, which would mean that he probably had his musket in his right hand, one of those nice new British muskets they were all carrying these days. George hoped that if the Shawnee did have a weapon in his other hand, it would be his musket instead of a knife or tomahawk.

The Shawnee’s hand was pushing leaves aside and now George could see the green light from the sunny maple leaves gleaming on the Indian’s oiled brown forearm and he could see the black dirt under the Indian’s fingernails. The Indian was on his hands and knees, and George now could see part of his right shoulder with sun on it, as well as the face and the hand. It was bright out there and it well could be that the Shawnee really had not seen George’s eyes in the shadows. The painted face was young, with square jaws. The face was no more than five feet from George’s face and the eyes were probing.

Now
, George thought, and, quick as a copperhead, he grabbed the Shawnee’s wrist with his own left hand and pulled.

J
IM
H
ARROD LOOKED OUT THROUGH WHAT HE WAS SURE
was the only glass windowpane in Kentuck. It was good to see so many people milling around in the compound; it gave Harrod’s Town an air of special importance he thought it deserved. He and his thirty workmen undeniably had built the best and stoutest fortified town in all of Kentuck. The place still smelled of raw new wood, and the entire compound had been paved with sawdust and shavings and hewing chips and tanbark, which was far nicer to walk on than dust or mud, especially when you had a crowd in.

Harrod turned from the window and looked across the crowded room at what he was sure was the only Swiss mantel clock in all of Kentuck. It was four o’clock. He scowled and growled.

“I swear to God, that Clark boy’s got this whole country bumfuzzled! He calls everybody here to my town, for some mysterious God-damned callathump. Then ’e gives us all th’ bubble by not showin’ up for his own meeting! I swear it makes less sense than tits on a boar hog!”

“Don’t get your internals all in an uproar, Jim,” said a soft, merry voice nearby. “He said he’d be here, and he will be. Meanwhile, let us poor folk wallow in the luxury of your great city.” It was Daniel Boone, who so loved to play off against Harrod’s beetle-browed bluster. Boone had brought most of his men down from Boonesboro for the meeting.

Harrod scowled at Boone’s strong, serene face, then grumbled, “Well, there’s not a whole lot o’ day left, so I say we’d better start the meeting without him. We all got a good idea what it’s about, now, don’t we?”

They did know. That Clark redhead had talked to every soul in Kentuck, it seemed, in the last three months. He had talked to them and asked their views on the future of the territory. Even when most of them had been preoccupied with digging up the next stump, hewing the next log, shooting the next meal, or fighting the next Indian war party, he had forced them to look further ahead: You’re making your house in Kentuck, he’d say. This is a sacred land to the Indians, and they sure don’t mean to let you stay here. How do you intend to protect yourselves? By the Virginia militia? Do you intend, then, to be represented in the Virginia Assembly as a new county of Virginia? Or do you mean to establish an independent state and have your own militia? Or do you expect to be under the proprietorship of Henderson’s Transylvania Colony? Or are you going to be British
subjects and appeal to the Crown for your safety? How much gunpowder have you? Not much, is it? Where do you propose to get more? He had made them all think on these questions and had told them they would not survive long without some sort of law and some sort of military protection. Since the start of the rebellion in the East, Indians had been coming down across the Ohio in larger and more frequent raiding bands, equipped with good British guns and plentiful English gunpowder, and with sharp new red-handled scalping knives of British steel, often even led by British army officers from the forts at Detroit and Vincennes and Kaskaskia. The British intend to drive us all back across the mountains, he had said, and it will be easy for them to do unless we have a means of defense. What will it be?

He had showed up everywhere, that intense and likable Clark lad from Virginia, full of news and interesting talk, and his disturbing questions. With him usually was his friend John Gabriel Jones from the Holston Valley, a tough, bespectacled young man with that same agreeable gift of gab and good sense. Sometimes they arrived in time to help raise a log cabin or budge out a stump; sometimes they showed up with a fresh-killed deer when there wasn’t anything else to eat but flour and berries; sometimes they arrived in time to foil a theft of horses by some Indian band, or to escort some decimated family to the safety of one of the walled towns. The fact was, those two were as well known around the country as Boone or Harrod, and they had helped people and made them think; and so now that they had sent word of a public meeting at Harrod’s Town, the people had come from miles all around. They all knew now what the needs and the problems were. And so, though Clark and Jones had not arrived, the settlers proceeded with their meeting.

And when the pair trotted in at twilight, blood-spattered and thorn-tattered and loaded down with shiny British muskets and scalping knives, they were greeted at the gate by Jim Harrod in a surprising manner. Tipping his hat and bowing slightly with all the grace of a trained bear, Harrod said, “Welcome to Virginia’s spankin’-new county of Kentuck, Mister Assemblyman Clark and Mister Assemblyman Jones. Sorry you didn’t get here in time to vote for yourselves, but it doesn’t matter, as most everybody else did.”

F
OUR DAYS LATER, IN THE GREEN GLOOM OF THE FOREST
, John Gabriel Jones sucked in a breath between clenched teeth, and stopped. He was trembling with pain. He took off his spectacles and wiped sweat off of them with the end of his neckerchief.
His narrow face was yellow-gray under his woodsman’s tan. George turned in his saddle and looked back to where Jones stood in the path, leaning on his rifle. Jones tried to take a step forward; again he squinted and gasped.

Damnation, George thought. “Come, Mister Assemblyman Jones,” he said, swinging his leg over to dismount. “You ride.” George’s own feet were hot and throbbing almost beyond endurance. When they touched the ground he groaned aloud. They felt as if he were standing in boiling water.

“No,” Jones said, “you been letting me ride all morning. And ’e’s your horse, anyways.” Jones’s horse had foundered two days earlier, and since then the two “assemblymen,” as they jokingly called each other, had been sharing George’s mount.

They were a hundred miles east of Harrod’s Town, on their way to Williamsburg, carrying petitions from the Kentuck settlers. It had rained every day, but there had been so much fresh Indian sign that they had not dared light fires to dry their moccasins, and so now they were suffering the torment that hunters called scald feet, and had been limping along the steep trails, taking turns riding George’s horse.

Even riding did not relieve the pain much. They could not bear to put their feet in the stirrups. And when their feet dangled, they felt as if they were engorged with boiling blood and might burst.

George helped Jones onto the horse, then hobbled on in advance, trying to concentrate on the woods ahead. The misery dulled his senses, and this was far too dangerous a trail to stumble along half-alert. The Indians knew all the trodden paths between the settlements, and watched them like buzzards.

After a few hundred excruciating steps, George stopped and stood listening to the dripping woods. Since morning he had been hearing distant gunshots, faint
thuds
on the eardrums, filtered through wet air and dripping water. Hunters from Martin’s Station, he would think, more hoping than believing.

He heard nothing now. “Let’s go,” he ordered his feet in a whisper, then gritted his teeth and winced and limped. This matter of his feet was somehow disgraceful. They were not bonebroken, not cut; it was only pain, and he did not believe that mere pain should cripple a body.

“Godalmighty, man,” Jones said after a few hundred more yards. He had ridden alongside to find George hitching along, face contorted in a gray and sweat-slick grimace. “George Clark, I prayee, let’s hole up someplace and doctor these bedeviled
trailbeaters of our’n. I can’t go any more, nor can you, if you’d admit it.”

“All right, Mister Assemblyman Jones,” George grinned and groaned. “Yonder’s the Licking, and down it a league is Martin’s. We’ll put in there if we can make it, eh?”

“Thankee, Mister Assemblyman Clark.
Thankee!
”

The assemblyman thing was a joke between them. They could not really be assemblymen until Kentuck was a county, and Kentuck could not be a county until the Virginia Assembly voted to admit it. The people voting at Harrod’s Town had not known of that technicality, or had simply ignored it. “But look at it thisaway,” Jones had said. “If it does get to be a county, we’ve got a head start.”

M
ARTIN’S
S
TATION WAS DESERTED
. I
TS FOUR CABINS STOOD
empty and locked. A few pigs wandered grunting among the buildings. There were no boot or shoe prints in the damp earth. But there were tracks of many Indian moccasins. “The folks must’ve packed out in the rain,” George said. “Those Indian tracks are real fresh. Likely they followed out looking for the people. Be back any time, I’d wager, to burn the place down.”

“What now for us, then?” Jones groaned. “We’re not fit to go dodgin’ Indians, like we had such fun at t’other day. We need a fire. We need to make some foot salve.”

“We’d better fort up, I reckon, or we’ll be smellin’ brimstone through a nail hole before we’re a day older. Let’s use Mr. Martin’s big cabin yonder.” It stood on a rise in the middle of a clearing, up from the river, away from the other structures. Anyone approaching it from any direction would have to cross fifty yards of open ground.