Drums Along the Mohawk (59 page)

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 that 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 to-morrow 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:—

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 been 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.

The whip sang forward and snapped with a preliminary report to one side of the culprit. It snapped a second time and cracked solidly across his back. It made a small puff of dust as it snapped. The man’s body seemed to leap inside itself. A diagonal welt was marked on the skin, with a break between the shoulder blades, but the man made no sound.

The whip cracked again, and the sergeant said aloud, “Two.”

It was beautiful whipping, the second welt appearing a half inch below the first. The welts went down the man’s back in parallels. The man still made no sound. At the count of ten the stripes began to climb again and the first overlay occurred. A little spurt of blood was drawn and trickled slowly into the hollow of his back, which looked tight and cupped, to receive it. It went down inside his pants.

Gil could not take his eyes off the man. He saw him duck his head against his arm and bite it. He still made no sound. But at the fifteenth stripe he gave way and yelled for the first time. Then with a pathetic stiffening of the back he kept silent for three more strokes, and then he broke down, and at last Gil managed to tear his eyes away.

He could hear only the whip stroke, the yell, and the stolid counting of the sergeant’s voice. When finally it was over the man hung against the post, quite still, but with a palpable throbbing all along his back, which now had puffed and dripped slowly all along the line of his belt.

The flies, which had been buzzing round and round the post throughout the punishment, darted in several times, and then lit delicately. The drums beat. It was over. The companies filed in to breakfast.

As they went the sentry hailed from the gate, and it was
opened to admit four Indians. But Gil did not look at them. If he had, he would have recognized two—the sachem, Skenandoa, the old man who had been Herkimer’s friend and who had come to the American camp before Oriskany, and Blue Back.

Blue Back was feeling pretty big these days, for he had succeeded to a sachemship with the title Kahnyadaghshayen, which, in English, meant “Easy Throat.” But he still continued his enlightened habits of thought, for he did not wear a blanket like the other three Indians. Instead, he wore a British campaign coat. If the gold braid was somewhat tarnished, the scarlet was redeemingly bright. It was much too tight across the back, which made it uncomfortable to wear, because it bound under the arms and made the lice go down into his leggings. But it did look well with the peacock’s feather, which he wore over his right eye. His wife had made a tricorn of his old hat, and as far as Blue Back could see, he was just as handsome as a major general. As he entered the fort, he was convinced that Colonel Van Schaick would hire him to guide the expedition, wherever it might be going, for forty cents a day, though he had made up his mind to accept twenty, so long as he was offered a full rum ration.

It gave him a genuine shock to see Gil Martin. For one frenzied instant he planned to run back through the gate; but as soon as he observed that Gil had not seen him, he took the feather surreptitiously out of his hat and hid it inside his coat. He didn’t feel quite so important, but he felt a lot safer. With the other three Indians, he stopped for a moment to stare at the flogged soldier, wondering inwardly why they had not burned him also.

A sergeant came up to lead them into the colonel’s office, where they all sat down on benches and accepted tobacco, while Skenandoa announced their names; and none of them looked at the colonel. None of them knew what to make of the colonel; he
wasn’t like Gansevoort or Willett, and they were a little afraid of him. He had a patience like their own; but it was cold patience in which they felt no courtesy.

Finally Skenandoa remarked that his young men had seen a big army coming west through Dayton. Was it so? Or had their eyes been deceived?

It was so, said Colonel Van Schaick.

So many men must be going on an expedition.

As to that, the colonel did not know. There were no orders. It would probably mean no more than a change of garrison.

Skenandoa looked crafty. That was too bad, because his young men had all come to the fort to offer themselves as guides and scouts. He had sixty young men and three sachems to keep them in order.

The colonel allowed that it was too bad. There was nothing for them to do unless they made an expedition of their own. He wished he had someone to send to Oswegatchie. He would pay five kegs of rum for the destruction of that place. But he had no men of his own to send.