Drums Along the Mohawk (9 page)

“You do that and there won’t be any bother,” said Weaver.

Wolff stared at his wife, but said nothing. She gave them the keys to open the chests. They found some blankets for the Indian trade. Some cheap knives. Some flour. Some salt beef. There were two bales of skins in the last. When they opened the lid a rank smell came out. “Shut it,” said Weaver. Kast started to obey, but MacNod, who was a curious man, pulled up the bales. “Look here,” he said.

Two twenty-pound bags of powder lay in the bottom of the chest.

“That’s my powder,” said Wolff. “I’ve had it a long while.”

“We’ll have to take it. I’ll give you a paper. It’s more powder than we’ve got for the company.”

“You leave me a couple of pounds, anyway.”

“What do you need it for?”

“It’ll save you wasting it on your damn muster days, anyways.”

“All storekeepers been asked to turn their powder in and make a statement of it.”

“That’s my business.”

“You set down,” said Kast. He leaned towards Wolff.

“Set down, John. Please.” Mrs. Wolff touched him timidly. He threw her hand off his sleeve. After a minute he sat down, though.

Mrs. Wolff turned to Gil.

“You can’t take it all. We hain’t got fresh meat. We need some.” She looked frightened. “Make them leave us a little.”

“I’m sorry,” said Gil, flushing. “George is in charge. He’s sergeant.”

A little breath went out of the woman. She sat down beside her husband.

Weaver listened to MacNod. He nodded his head.

“You stay here, Wolff. We’ve got to look over Thompson’s house.”

“That’s illegal entry,” said Wolff.

“You mind your business and we’ll mind ours.”

Probably Gil and Weaver were the only two among the company who had ever been inside of Thompson’s house, and neither of them had been beyond the little office to the right of the door. They had found Mr. Thompson a decent neighbor, but the big house had overawed them with its black slaves who seemed to feel contempt for any white man who didn’t own people like themselves, its sounds of voices from the parlor doors, and the tinkle of a spinet coming down from upstairs. To them it had been the expression of all the possessions they vaguely hoped to have come to them in their time. Weaver had been there twice to see about the loan of a yoke of oxen in the early days. Gil had come to sell a large buck he had shot once when some gentlemen had been stopping there.

Standing on the wide verandah that fronted the river, they now felt the same awe in the face of the closed shutters. Most of the men with them caught the feeling. Only Jeams MacNod, who had some education and a fanatical contempt for all success other than his own, was ready to break down the door. He threw his weight against it, but the heavy pine panels had no thought of yielding to a Scottish scholar.

His gesture, however, had been enough to renew their appetite. There had been nothing exciting at Wolff’s; they had come a long way, and the wearing off of the effect of beer had left them spoiling for action. When Jeams pointed out a heavy pole lying on the dock by the river shore, half a dozen of them ran down for it. They swung it against the door together. But the bars held
solid. The sound of the blow was like the tap on a gigantic drum, sounding hollowly throughout the house.

It stopped them for an instant; then they shouted. They swung the pole again; and again they got no more than the hollow crash, as if the whole house joined in one derisive shout.

To Gil, however, the empty sound was upsetting.

“It’ll take too long to break it down,” he said. “Why don’t we open a window?”

The others let the pole drop.

“That’s right,” said Weaver. “There ain’t no sense in spoiling a good door.”

They swarmed against a window together, hacking round the shutter bolts with their hatchets. In a few minutes they had the bolts cut out, the boards pried off, and Reall had thrown his hatchet through a pane. The glass tinkled chillingly into the dark room. They lifted the sash and climbed in, one after the other.

The room was the office, with Mr. Thompson’s desk and chairs, and little else beyond the ashes of paper on the hearth where wind in the chimney had stirred them from the grate.

“Hell,” said Kast. “There ain’t anything in here. Let’s look around.”

There was a short commotion at the door, before one man at last stepped into the hall. As soon as he had crossed the threshold, the others trooped after him.

The size and darkness of the hall were impressive. The wide boards under their boots creaked a little to their shifting feet, but for the instant it sounded more as if some ghostly person were descending the staircase. While they stood still to listen, chipmunks behind one of the walls took sudden fright.

The sound of panic reassured them. The men broke apart, going from room to room. Gil and Weaver, remaining in the hall, listened to the stamp of boots overhead and back in the
kitchen. When men walked overhead a thin dust sifted from the cornices.

“I can’t find the cellar stairs,” shouted Kast.

“Where are you?”

“In the pantry.”

“Try the closet off the dining room,” said Reall.

Weaver turned to Gil.

“I don’t rightly know what we’re doing here, Gil.”

“I don’t either,” Gil said.

“Maybe we’d better go around and see they don’t get too rough with things.”

“All right, I’ll go upstairs.”

Gil wanted to get away from the big downstairs rooms. The fine black-cherry dining room table and the delicate chairs worried him; for they were things he would have liked Lana to have. But seeing them against the papered wall, dark though the room was, made him realize that a person could not merely own them.

The holland cupboard in the hall, with its wax figures, half like persons in spite of their small size, the soft feeling of the green carpet under his boots, gave him the same uneasiness. It was not until he stepped onto the bare wood of the stair treads that he felt remotely like himself.

But even on the stairs, the voices of the militia had an alien sound, as if by their entry they had done more than violate a house. They had put an end to a life. The house, shut up, could have fallen to ruin in dignity.

On the second floor, however, seeing the bedrooms opening from the hall, with the big beds unmade, as they had been left by the Thompsons, Gil felt a kind of unreasoning anger. By abandoning it, the people, apparently, had thought no more of the house than the militia had in forcing an entrance. And those that were abovestairs felt no compunctions.

One was holding up a flimsy dressing gown.

“Would a man or woman wear this?” he was asking.

The lace that edged the sleeves hung limply, and his calloused fingertips rasped on the silk.

“You can’t tell what they wear,” said a muffled voice. Christian Reall came backing from under the bed dragging a piece of crockery. “Look at this, Van Slyck. It’s got gilt on it.”

Van Slyck glanced down with lukewarm interest. “Yes, it’s a nice article,” he said politely. He dropped the dressing gown. “I wish I could get me one of these good and warm.”

Reall crouched over the chamber pot. “It would be a handy thing. My wife gets chilblains horrible in winter.”

They were as conscienceless as men inspecting a line of goods in a store. Gil wandered into the next room. There was less in it to interest one, perhaps, for there was only a narrow bed and a great closet of dark wood standing in the corner. He was curious to see what might be inside the closet.

He found it empty of everything except, lying in a corner, a piece of silk that might have been used as a head wrapping. It was bright green with little white birds printed on it. He picked it up almost mechanically, thinking suddenly how well it would look on Lana’s dark hair. Glancing round, he saw that he was alone. It made him feel like a thief, but he comforted himself with thinking that it had no real value. And he had meant to bring Lana something. He had not been so long away from her since they were married. Inevitably it went into his pocket.

Then he looked round him. He felt that he ought to do something, to show his zealous sense of duty.

In the corner of the room behind the door a ladder leaned against the wall. He had not noticed it at first. He would not have noticed it now except that in the pale light creeping through the shutters the dust on the rungs looked disturbed.

At first Gil thought that there might be rats in the house; but he did not see why rats should be climbing to the attic. He decided to have a look.

He had to lift a trapdoor.

The attic seemed no darker than the rest of the house, and he could see quite plainly. The two central chimneys came up side by side out of the floor and continued at a slight outward angle like the trunks of a double tree. Between them was a bed.

There was nothing else in the attic. Gil stared a long time to make sure before he hoisted himself through.

He kept well away from the chimneys until he had circled both of them. On their outside edges the dust lay thick and unmarked, but sometime recently a man had come through the trap and gone to bed. Even if it had not been for the tracks, Gil would have noticed the faint tobacco smell.

He sniffed at the blankets. It hadn’t been an Indian. The bed would have had the sickish sweet smell, a little greasy, that Indians had. It had been a white man. Gil sat down on the bed.

Whoever it was, the man must have cooked downstairs, or have got food from Wolff’s, for the bed had the appearance of being used often. But the man could not have used the fireplaces except at night or the smoke would have given him away.

Without being quite sure of what he looked for, Gil began poking round. He couldn’t find anything except the old dottles of pipes and some small bits of paper. They didn’t have writing on them. He got up and began a circuit of the attic. Coming back, he noticed that when the chimneys began to slope towards the roof the bricks were laid in tiers, making small shelves. He went back to the bed and stood on it. On one of the chimneys he found a piece of black cloth. He could just reach it.

For a minute he could not tell what it was. But as he held it in his fingers, his mind went back, for some strange reason, to his wedding day. He remembered how they had left Fox’s Mills
and how he had hardly been able to take his eyes off Lana, and how pretty and bashful she had seemed when they came to Billy Rose’s tavern. They had had the place to themselves except for the one-eyed man who had talked so brashly against the Continental Congress.

Gil caught his breath. It was the patch for a blind eye.

George Weaver’s voice came through the trap rather plaintively.

“You up there, Gil?”

“Come up here, George.”

George grunted and the ladder shook as he climbed. He took a slow look round him, and listened to what Gil had to tell.

“You’re right, Gil.”

“The man’s name was Caldwell.”

“Well, he ain’t here now.”

Jeams MacNod, the curious man, appeared on the ladder. Immediately he had ideas.

“No doubt he’s one of them spies that George Herkimer’s rangers keep chasing after all the while. There’s a great leakage of news.” He took the patch in his hand. “No doubt he ain’t blind at all.”

“What’s he wear this for?”

“So a person will know what he is without having to ask. There’s been men with bad eyes, and a man with a lame hand. Herkimer’s never been able to catch one of them.”

George Weaver said, “I don’t know about it. Where’s the rest of you?”

“Reall’s down in the cellar. They’ve broke it in. They’ve got some good gin and they’re bringing it up to the dining room. They had to use a chair or two breaking in the door.” He lifted the patch. “What are you going to do about this?”

“I don’t know. They hadn’t ought to be breaking things. I’ll get into trouble.”

“Listen,” said MacNod. “We’ll all get into trouble. There ain’t a man here hasn’t got something out of the house unless it’s you and me and Gil.” Gil had his own doubts about what MacNod had taken. The man looked too satisfied. “But,” continued the schoolmaster, “this here shows that there’ve been unlawful people using this house.”

Weaver said, “I got to get down before the boys do too much damage.”

Gil said, “He must have boarded with Wolff,” before he meant to. He didn’t want to get into trouble.

“How do you mean?” asked MacNod sharply.

“He couldn’t use the fireplaces here daytimes.”

“No,” said the schoolmaster. “He must have gone to Wolff. We can tell easy, looking at the fireplaces. Look here, George. You don’t have to worry what the boys do now. You’ve got proof of unlawful doings. If you find he ain’t used the house to cook in, you can arrest Wolff. That’ll get you out of trouble.”

Weaver said, “I don’t want to get John into trouble.”

“Man,” said MacNod, “ain’t he a traitor?”

“I don’t know about that.”

“Well, you better do it to keep yourself out of trouble.”

Downstairs they found that the fireplaces had not been used. In the dining room the men had started building a fire of the broken chairs. They were drinking gin out of blue china cups which they handled carefully.

Weaver broke in on them.

“You boys’ll have to step out smart. We’re going to arrest John Wolff.”

“What for?” they wanted to know.

“Hiding King’s people.”

“Oh hell, leave him alone.”

“Get up!” said Weaver. “You can bring the gin along.”

He got them out with arguments and cajolery and finally had them lined up on the porch. From where they stood they could see Wolff’s backhouse. Mr. and Mrs. Wolff were coming back quickly from the door.

“My God,” said Weaver. “I never thought to look there.”

He broke into a run, and the rest streamed after him, Reall at the end, carrying his chamber pot in both hands so as not to spill the gin.

Mrs. Wolff gave a little cry, but her husband only looked sullen and stood his ground.

“Who’d you have hiding there?” demanded Weaver.

“Nobody. My wife felt sick. I went out with her.”

“You swear to that?”