From Sea to Shining Sea (47 page)

George spent a good portion of his time alone in his quarters in Rocheblave’s old house. He had set up a comfortable bed in a small downstairs room off the study which served as his headquarters. Madame Rocheblave and her servants had removed to the home of a friend in the town, and her upstairs rooms now housed the duty sergeant and guard detail. George’s solitude mystified several of Kaskaskia’s young ladies. He liked to dance with them and talk with them, drink tea with them, accept their kindnesses and let them tutor him in their tongue. But he let them know that his heart was already given. Two or three tried to test the strength of his vows and quickly found that he was faithful and could not be misled.

George had to keep negotiating for food and services, and calculated like a countinghouse clerk to keep his accountings straight. He had signed his name to a thousand vouchers by now;
he had expended more in Virginia’s name than all his lands and belongings were worth. He sensed that this bulging packet of records might yet be all that could save him from personal ruin, and though he hated it, he guarded it as he guarded his own life.

A few days into the new year, George was laid low by an onslaught of intestinal cramps, chills, and fevers, worse than anything that had ever hit him. Old Dr. Laffont of Kaskaskia bled him and gave him barks, and, when he worsened, called in a younger colleague, Dr. Conard, for consultation. Conard was more modern, a believer in chemical medicines, the more the better, and between the two physicians they very nearly killed George in the next fortnight, until he came out of a delirium one evening with a healthy appetite for beef, the image of Teresa in his mind, and a conviction that he was going to live after all.

And it was then that the first awful rumors came:

That the Hair-Buyer General, Governor Henry Hamilton, was in the Illinois Country with an army of eight hundred soldiers and Indians, coming to recapture the Mississippi Valley.

George was aghast. Could Hamilton somehow have stolen such a move on him without the least warning? The old notion of the chess game came back to George, and he castigated himself for having got so complacent and distracted that Hamilton might have jumped him in his moment of triumph.

The people of Kaskaskia were petrified. They had gladly given their oath of allegiance to the Americans, but had never dreamed that the British would return in such force. They knew it would go badly with them when the British came, and they were voting to capitulate. They wanted George and his Americans to take asylum on the Spanish side of the river so there would be no war fought over their town. George snorted, ordered their spokesmen out of his headquarters, and sent for his officers and scouts to track down the source of the rumor.

At last it was traced to a French hunter and some Negro woodcutters who had stumbled upon a hidden Indian encampment beside the road to Cahokia. The Indians had told them they were part of General Hamilton’s army of eight hundred, which was coming to attack the town. George’s scouts then went out and found the abandoned encampment, and said that apparently no more than thirty Indians had been there. They had fled eastward since, along the main trace between Kaskaskia and Vincennes. The scouts had ridden long and hard, but had found no sign of an enemy army within thirty or forty miles of Kaskaskia.

So it had been a false alarm. But to George and his officers, it was as ominous now that the alarm was past as it had been before.
It raised questions that he had to ponder long after the Kaskaskians had breathed their sighs of relief.

“They weren’t friendly Indians,” George told his officers. “They’d been hiding there for days. Any Indians I’ve treated with know they can come camp right in the shadow o’ this town.”

“If they really were enemy, though,” Johnny Rogers queried, “why would they spoil Hamilton’s surprise by explaining their presence all so handily like that?”

“A joke,” said Dick Brashears, a lieutenant. “Just a prank by some mongrel band. I’ll bet it is.”

“No,” George said. “We have to presume they’re hostile. Why would they say those numbers, eight hundred? Well, like as not, to keep the Long Knives from swarming out and catching ’em. That’s what I’d ha’ said if I was them, caught prowlin’ like them.” He stalked around and around his desk, frowning at the floor, stroking his chin. He stopped in front of the hearth and kicked a log in the fireplace. It sent up sparks and began burning brighter. He gazed at the strengthening flame. “Get me a brandy, Johnny, and pour one for anyone else thirsty.” He sipped and stared at the flames and thought. Then he turned to them. “Now let me tell ye what confounds me. When they skedaddled, they went toward Vincennes. Meseems they wouldn’t go thataway, between two forts flying our flag, now would they?”

He was concentrating like a chess player now, tapping himself on the temple. “Some little things been botherin’ me. Len Helm hasn’t sent a word since early last month. I just blamed that on th’ weather. But another thing. Mister Vigo started over there last month to trade. I gave him some news for Len, requiring replies. Vigo should ha’ been back long since.”

There followed a silence so complete that the officers could hear the soft flutter of the flames in the fireplace. Finally Johnny Rogers said, “What are y’ thinking, Cousin?”

His answer chilled them.

“It would surprise me, but then it
wouldn’t
surprise me, if the Hair-Buyer really
was
somewhere out there nearabouts, and has a ring around Vincennes. A net across the trail, maybe.”

Another dreadful silence held until Captain Dick McCarty coughed and said, “What might y’ mean by nearabouts, Colonel?”

“The upper Wabash, maybe. Ouiatanon, or Post Miami.” It was an awful thought. Ouiatanon was but a hundred miles or so up the Wabash from Vincennes. Ouiatanon was an Indian town where Hamilton’s agents had had a trading post before the Long
Knives came. George was calculating, counting weeks, trying to imagine whether Hamilton could possibly have raised and moved a large force from Detroit to there between late summer and December, when the rivers froze. It didn’t seem likely. George had presumed Hamilton to be a rational and orthodox English officer, not one who would try a bold stroke like that. A Strategy of the Absurd.

At last he turned to them from the fire. “I sent some scouts on toward Vincennes, to take a careful look-see. We should know ere long whether there’s a net out.”

“I’ll be eager t’ know,” said Brashears. “I can stand even bad news better’n my imagination.”

“My boys,” growled Lieutenant John Bailey, “came out here with’ee t’ fight Redcoats an’ Indians. I reckon they’d still like t’ get a chance to.”

O
N THE TWENTY-NINTH OF
J
ANUARY THE ANSWER CAME
. The portly trader Francisco Vigo from St. Louis brought it. He rode in splattered with mud to his shoulders. His heavy dark eyebrows were peaked with worry and his red tongue kept licking his chapped lips.

“My colonel,” he said, “is it known by you that the Governor General Hamilton occupies Vincennes since the last month?”

George swallowed. “Him in person? Good God! And what of Helm?”

“His prisoner, but well treated. Eh, then! Sit down, my colonel, and hear the news, for I’ve been there a long time and I have much that you must know. For weeks he would not let me to leave there, though I protest I am a Spanish citizen. He is afraid I would come tell you of his presence.”

George was rubbing his forehead and trying to grasp the whole consequence of that staggering news. “Thanks be to God he let ye loose! I’m surprised ’e did!”

“Only after he make me promise I would not come and tell you on my way to home. Such a perplexion I had, for my word is my honor! So, I do honorably: I hasten to my home first. I touch my door. Then I turn and hasten here to tell you!”

T
O
G
OVERNOR
P
ATRICK
H
ENRY
C
OMMONWEALTH OF
V
IRGINIA

The Illinois Regiment came along in an arrow-shaped file with its scouts forming the head of the arrow and the long drab
line of riflemen following, feet squishing in the cold mud, the drizzle hissing around them, the French militiamen following behind them and then the pack horses, and more flanking scouts bringing up the rear. Their panting breath condensed in clouds. The men were loaded with their long guns and ammunition pouches and their knapsacks and shoulder-hung pouches and their pistols and tomahawks, and their blanket rolls across their shoulders. Their deerskin outer clothes were rainsoaked and heavy. The land was flat as a tabletop, but walking was as strenuous as climbing because of the weight they carried and because every step brought up a foot clogged with mud like bread batter.

The ground had thawed on the surface but was still frozen under the sod, so the water from the drizzling rain and the melted snow did not seep down, and it was too flat to drain, and so some miles of the plain were like shallow ponds as far as they could be seen through the mist, water ankle deep and sometimes calf deep, and where the water lay like this the marching was not quite so fatiguing because the mud underfoot was more like soup than batter. On these stretches the feet were always soaked with cold water, but not weighted with anchors of mud, and it was a little less bad, in its way.

There were no horizons because of the mist. The men in the rear could see the men fading into the mist ahead of them. They could see now and then the vague shape of a brush thicket, and ghostly, pale patches of snow, and for fifty yards around they could see the matted gray and tan prairie grass and dark brown weed stalks, and the footprints ahead filling with muddy water, and the muddy channel they were churning across the unseen prairie in an easterly direction along the Kaskaskia-to-Vincennes trace.

They had been on the plain for ten days now, and it had been raining or sleeting or snowing all those days. They had at first covered twenty to thirty miles a day by slogging from daybreak to dusk. The officers had given up their horses to buffalo hunters, and now marched in the mud with the troops. Each evening they would seek a campground raised enough that they would not have to lie down in water. There were no tents, and so they slept in the rain, rolled into their blankets with hides over them. If they had not been so extremely fatigued by the marching, sleep would have been impossible in these conditions. As it was, the troops plummeted into sleep with their evening grog still warming their blood, and got up at half-light, sluggish as half-frozen reptiles but eager to march because it warmed them.