3stalwarts (54 page)

He turned to the room, “Hello, Ma.”

Emma Weaver said, “We saved you some supper.”

“I’ve had it,” said John. He closed the door behind him and swallowed hard.

“Ma, I’ve brought Mary home.”

Emma turned her head. Her homely face, grown more gaunt, became animate. Anger, doubt, conviction, and fear passed over it.

“John,” she said softly, “you mean?”

John managed to nod.

“Mary’s staying. We got married this afternoon. Reverend Kirkland married us at Mrs. McKlennar’s.”

Cobus, who was whittling an ash stick for snowshoes, became all eyes. He turned from Mary to stare apprehensively at his mother. Emma said, “Do you want me and your brother to move out?”

“No, Ma. You know that we wouldn’t want that.”

Emma said, “I heard Captain Demooth would not take Mary to Schenectady. I didn’t know you’d do this.” All at once tears, big helpless ones, poured out of her eyes, and trickled unevenly down her lined face.

Mary’s breath caught.

“Don’t, Mrs. Weaver. Please don’t cry. I want to help you, John and me both do. And we can, please, if you’ll let us.”

She had stepped forward and bent slightly down towards Emma. Now, to her astonishment, and to the two boys’, Mrs. Weaver lifted her wet face.

“I’m so tired,” she said. “You don’t know how tired I have got since George got took.” The sobs rose in her breast. She hid her face, and, as Mary touched her, leaned against the girl’s knees. John thought that he was going to cry himself. He had never seen his mother licked before; she seemed physically beaten, as if he himself had laid a stick across her shoulders.

They got her to bed on the floor before the fire, where she lay sobbing quietly. John ordered Cobus to bed and then he and Mary moved the chest as he had planned and hung the deerskin up. They blew the tallow dip out and crept under the blankets, dressed as they were, for warmth. They could see the soft glow of the firelight pulsing over the bark on the log walls. The fire burned without sound.

Over in the other corner, in John’s old bed, fat Cobus lay like a hare, unmoving, holding breath, soundless, and all ears. Emma’s sobbing continued softly. The deerskin, not completely cured, had a faint tangy rankness that seemed to grow as the fire sank to coals… .

In one of the cellar cells, in the very wall of the old fortress at Chamblee, George Weaver was wondering whether German Flats had managed to get through the summer and autumn without suffering the raid everyone had been afraid was coming. He did not know. There were nine other men distributed around the walls of the small cell. They had no window to see each other by. Their faces must be remembered from the brief flashes that the jailer’s torch made when he came to bring them their food. Since they had entered the cell they had not been allowed out of their irons; and their irons were fastened to heavy rings in the stone walls.

It had taken George two months to get there. First three weeks of following his Indian captor through the wilderness to a Seneca town, where they had made him run the gantlet. It was his plodding patient strength that had brought him through that, though George would have said it was the fact that they could not beat him off his feet. His captor had become a celebrity on the strength of George’s performance and told George in broken English that he had never seen a man take so slow a pace and survive.

George had stayed two weeks in the Indian town before being led on to Niagara, where he was traded for the customary eight dollars to a beefy British major. They had kept him at the fort for eight days before shipping him with some other prisoners on a small sloop to Montreal. All the prisoners hoped they would be kept in Montreal, and most of them were. But George, with two other men who had been captured near Cobleskill, was shipped on to Chamblee.

When he saw the immense square walls of the old fortress, he had thought that it would be a hard place to get out of; but he had had no idea that men treated prisoners the way he was treated. A man could stand up, and he could sit down, and he could lie down if he got in a particular position parallel to the wall. That was bad, but worse was the fact that since the ten men had entered the cell they had not been allowed loose for even long enough to clean the filth out. The place had an unbelievable stench. Some of the men had periods of raving, and others never said anything. George was managing to get used to the stench. It was becoming part of him, like an integral function of his own skin. The only thing that bothered him was his belief that the man in the corner behind the door had been dead for four days. He had not touched food for that period nor said anything nor rattled his chains, and the jailer’s light never reached into that corner, except to touch the unused food, which was left lying there. There was quite a heap of it now on the board the man used to use as a plate. But no one else could reach it.

To keep himself from thinking about it, George used to try to think about his family. It came easier tonight because the jailer had said it was snowing outside. George thought what a nice thing it would be for his family if he could write them a letter saying that he was not dead.

The same snow that the jailer at Chamblee told George Weaver was falling over the valley of the Richelieu River, in the woods south and west of Cherry Valley took the form of sleet. The scout of twelve men and a sergeant ten miles out on the Beaver Dam road decided that there was no sense in running a scout at all on such a night. The sergeant was sure that he was getting up the beginnings of a chill. He had never been able to stand being in the woods anyhow; and when darkness began to filter through the sleet, he gave orders to halt on the next dry spot, or drier spot, or spot less wet was what he meant, and light one hell of a big fire.

Only one man asked if it was wise to light a fire near the road; the rest laughed or cursed, according to how wet they felt, and began breaking off dead spruce limbs. But the sergeant thought that he ought to take cognizance of such a remark. He set about explaining to the private that they had had rumors all fall of a raid on Cherry Valley, and it hadn’t come, had it? What if Colonel Ichabod Alden had sent them out; he had to do something, hadn’t he? But he wasn’t worried, was he? He was sleeping in the Wells house, four hundred yards from the fort, wasn’t he? Him and Colonel Stacia and Major Whiting— and if the private thought that that looked as if the officers expected a raid, he was entitled to think so or to drain himself in the creek, or to kiss the sergeant’s great-aunt if he liked. The private responded that to him it didn’t matter a damn if the whole General Continental Staff slept in the Wells house so long as Mr. Wells raised no objections; the officers always slept in the houses where there were pretty girls, didn’t they? Well, said the sergeant, he wasn’t himself going to stand under an eternal and universal piddle while Colonel Ike lay in a feather bed, and not build a fire anyway, and to hell. He sneezed.

In ten minutes they had a great fire going, shooting the sparks up through the drizzle-soaked boughs, and they stood around it, dripping and steaming and feeling sorry for themselves, with the light red on their faces, and their guns stacked under a near-by hemlock tree.

All the Indians under the advance scout of Ranger Captain Adam Crysler had to do was to give a couple of yelps and step in and pick the guns up. The Continental scout of Massachusetts men never offered to leave the fire. They stared and gawped. These were the first Indians many of them had ever seen, painted Senecas with their heads bare to the wet and their blankets sopping dismally about their sides. They looked bulky and stuffed out under their deerskin shirts, but for all that they looked damned ugly, too. The ugliest thing they did was to herd the prisoners away from their own fire and take their places.

The first the Continental scout knew of a hostile British army was when a distant whooping answered the Indians who had captured them. Then for a long time there was not a sound except the crackle of spruce on the fire, the muttering of the Indians, and the everlasting drip and piddle from the branches. Then more Indians came through the woods, more Indians than these Massachusetts men believed existed. They seemed like a thousand. There were five hundred of them. They gathered round and started building new fires. Soon the little valley glowed with light, like a hillside in a dripping sort of hell. Into this infernal glow penetrated the steady beat of shod men marching.

The marching soldiers followed a slender man, swarthy as an Indian, without paint, whose lank hair clung to the back of his neck in wisps. He looked drawn and cold and tired. Behind him came one hundred and fifty men in green campaign coats and black leather skullcaps. Behind them marched fifty British regulars in red. Some of the regulars were even keeping step. All at once the woods had overflowed with living men. It seemed a miracle that they were there.

It was almost a miracle. On the Chemung River the Rangers had been watching the movements of the Eleventh Pennsylvania Regiment. The Continentals had penetrated nearly to Tioga before turning back to garrison Wyoming. Then Walter Butler, young, headstrong, and consumed with his ambition, decided to make a late fall march on Cherry Valley, All year the Canadian command had been making useless plans for taking Cherry Valley, one of the military depots for the Continental army, a frontier fort, and a menace to their own base at Unadilla. It was late in the year to make a start. He had insufficient supplies for his troops, and he had only two hundred men. But he put it up to them and they answered by offering to start next day.

They started late in October, through the cold rainy days, following down the Chemung, then turning up the Susquehanna, on which they met Brant returning towards Canada.

John Wolff would never forget that meeting on the banks of the river, filled with floating sodden leaves and driftwood: Brant at the head of his five hundred Indians, Butler with his two hundred men, showing an order from Haldimand that gave him sole command of any expedition under-taken against Cherry Valley and requested aid from all and any British officers. Brant demanded the command as senior captain. Butler curtly refused. There was a long argument before Brant, bitter and silent, turned his Indians to the northeast ahead of the white troops, and the long march was continued.

A hundred and fifty miles through swamps and along riverbanks and over hills, up the Susquehanna to Otsego Lake, thence overland to strike this road. There was little talking in the company of Rangers. They marched with a dogged, damp, and dreary sullenness. But they never stopped, for always they had the indomitable nervous figure of Butler ahead of them.

The Indians were unfriendly as Brant himself. They did not know why they had to come. They hated the rain. They wanted to go home. Many of the Senecas had been out all summer. The Indian scouts all said it was impossible to take Cherry Valley. There were two hundred and fifty men in garrison; there were three hundred more at Schoharie and nearly five hundred at Johnstown. Better to make a raid in the upper, unprotected valley.

But Butler was stubbornly setting his heart on Cherry Valley; his winter in prison seemed to have given him a bitter power. He drove the Indians on; even Brant, wrapped in his blanket, his gold-lace hat a sodden scarecrow mockery of himself, no longer argued.

John Wolff, marching in the last squad of the Ranger company, had fits of nervous fear when he saw the Indians all around them. He and some of his company thought it likely that the Indians might turn on them. Once a scalp was taken off a head, you couldn’t tell whose head it had come off of. The white men were so much easy money for the Indians, if they chose; and stories went round that that had happened in a small way with St. Leger’s retreating army, and that Bolton in Niagara had paid eight dollars for more than one member of the Eighth King’s Regiment.

It was a nightmare march, with insufficient food. War had driven the deer far off the trails, and the wolves had begun running. They heard them at night in the hills above Unadilla as they came by.

November eighth and ninth and tenth they came through the Tryon country. It was on the tenth that they rounded up the twelve scouts with the sergeant and learned that the officers were at the Wells house. The scouts were willing to talk. Any man would have been willing with all those predatory Senecas squatting round him in the rain. They crowded close to Butler and answered questions.

Wolff heard the order to march as if it were part of a dream. Darkness no longer had any bearing on his thoughts. He shouldered his gun and took his place, and presently his feet began to take him forward through the rain. They had gone a mile when the rain gave up for a breath. The night seemed suddenly to clear and the marching feet left a dark track in the dark, and the mud felt cold and brittle. “It’s freezing,” said the man next to Wolff. “I hope to God my shoes hold out.” Then from the north a flake drifted down, and another flake. The ground whitened under the trees. A luminous imitation of light was counterfeited in the woods.

At twelve o’clock they halted, filed off the road, and entered a swamp. Through the trees on the edge of the swamp they saw white hills dimly rising against the sky, one a steep cone, like a sugarloaf. The word came down the line, “No fires tonight.” The men stood crowded close together for what warmth their clothes could give off. The sleeve of Wolff’s coat stiffened with frost.

“We’ll be lucky if half this army gets back to Niagara.”

The man beside Wolff was talking. Wolff did not hear him. He was so cold that even his brain was numb. He did not even think.

At daylight the snow unexpectedly turned to warm rain from the south. A mist that was more like steam rose over the snow and hid the valley. Low orders were given: Eighty men with Captain Crysler to cut off the Wells house and take the officers; the rest to charge the fort, Butler leading the main group; the Indians to circle the fort and rake the palisade from the far side. Brant appeared and disappeared. A whistle sounded and the army moved.