3stalwarts Read online

  Jacob Small or Dingman or Robhold Ough was always on watch in the spy loft and from time to time he called down what he saw. Once it was an express riding along the Kingsroad, full gallop into the west. Another time it was a wagon train, presumably for Fort Stanwix, since it was escorted by sixty soldiers. Again, in the middle of one night, the watcher saw fire to the south and west, far up the valley, beyond Shoemaker hill.

  It was so still in the darkness that even at that distance a brief session of firing could be heard. Lana and Mrs. McKlennar, sharing a shed with Betsey Small and her four-year-old boy, talked together in low voices, try-ing to imagine what was happening to keep the militia out so long. As soon as he had brought them safe inside, Adam Helmer had departed to run a single-handed scout, he said, to the northward. But he had been gone six days.

  Betsey spoke tenderly of him as she lay on her back and stared at the square roof of the blockhouse against the stars. There in the spy loft Jacob was keeping the second watch.

  “I’d miss Adam,” she said. “I’d hate to have anything happen to him. He’s such a crazy fool.”

  “He’s crazy about you,” said Mrs. McKlennar.

  “I know he is.” She added, after a minute, “I’m fond of Jake.”

  One of the children turned on his straw bed with the noise a mouse might make in a barn. In the pitch-dark across the stockade another child began to cry. Instantly Jake’s voice came down from the spy loft. “Stop that noise.” The mother’s fierce whispering could be heard. Then again the silence.

  The small stockade cut a segment out of the sky through which stars traced the passage of the night.

  “The last express said they expected Sir John Johnson would be down; do you think that’s it?”

  “It might be.”

  One of the four cows kept in the stockade began to moo; and Jake’s instinctive call for silence brought a smothered laugh from a boy. You couldn’t tell a cow to hush its mouth. Then, as the cow continued its bawling, the ridiculousness changed to terror. They could see Jake leaning over the sill of the spy-loft window. His voice was thick with passion.

  “Take a club to her! My God, are you all idiots down there?”

  Betsey whispered, “Jake feels mad. We’d better quit talking.”

  There were only five grown men in the stockade, to protect the twenty-odd women and children. Both the Snells who had survived Oriskany— seven of that family had been killed there— and the Forbush men and the two younger Borsts had been called up to Dayton. A solider man than Jacob Small would have been frightened by the responsibility. Eldridge’s was too far away from any other fort to expect any reenforcement if they should be attacked.

  Their only hope lay in keeping a strict silence during the night, and hoping during the day that any marauding party coming their way would be small enough for five men to handle. He thought he could frighten off any bunch of Indians with the swivel. But supposing the Indians were brought by some Tory renegade— like Casselman, for instance; he would know that a swivel mounted that high was next to useless.

  The alarm guns at Herkimer and Dayton both sounded three times. That meant that there was a large party of Indians. Jacob wished he knew how large. They must have burned the Moyer place during the night— that would be the fire he had seen. The Moyers, three families of them, had set out to build that spring, he had heard.

  The worst time of watching was in the hour before dawn, when light was just beginning and there were no stars. The valley, then, became like a gray blanket, without shape or distance. It was harder for a man to see than during the darker hours, and no sound was reliable.

  It was at this hour that Adam Helmer returned. He was crossing the highland on a dead run. Jacob heard him come over the edge and down the slope to the lesser incline on which the stockade was situated.

  “Eldridge,” he was calling. “Helmer.”

  “That you, Adam?”

  “Let me in, Jake.”

  Small bawled down the word to open the gate and Helmer came in, his wide shoulders filling the narrow gap. He stood in the yard, breathing deep, while Small leaned out of the spy-loft window to hear his news.

  “The Indians are out again, Jake.”

  “Where?”

  “I almost ran into them. They were coming from West Canada Crick. They’d crossed below Schell’s and they’re headed this way.”

  “How many?”

  “About sixty, I guess. I ran around them, after they’d gone by. I had to climb a tree and they went right under me. Mostly Senecas, and about ten white men. Casselman. Empie. McDonald. I heard their names.”

  “How far back of you?”

  “They’ll be here in about two hours.”

  Small swore.

  “That’s after sunrise. They’ll see us plain.”

  “They’ve got the militia after them. But they figured the militia would chase up the crick, I guess. They’ll find out pretty quick what happened if Joe’s with them.”

  “We only got five men here, Adam. Six, with you.”

  There was a silence. All the women and the older children had come out of their sheds. Now they looked up at the spy loft, making a pond of white, strained, frightened faces. They were all depending on him, and he had no more idea than any of them what to do.

  In the midst of that silence Mrs. McKlennar’s snort was a challenging blast.

  “There’s fifteen grown women here,” she said. “We’ll rig up to look like men. If we show up along the rifle platforms, they can’t see we’re women. They’ll go by.”

  They found a few extra hats and some old shirts. The five men passed their hats out. Betsey put on her husband’s; Lana borrowed Adam’s. They stuffed their hair inside. Three of the women, having no hats, hacked off each other’s hair with a razor. They put on shirts and coats and armed themselves with broomsticks and pitchfork handles. For a moment they stared at each other in the yard, then, hiking their skirts up, they climbed the ladders to the rifle platform.

  “Don’t hold those sticks so plain,” admonished Small from the spy loft. “Just hold onto them as if they was guns, but don’t try to show them. If they come while it’s still misty you’ll look all right. And if any shooting commences, duck.”

  He pulled his head out of sight, then stuck it forth again for a last word.

  “And don’t talk. A woman’s got no idea how far a woman’s voice will carry.”

  It was so still now, in the misty pre-dawn, that they heard the splashing of Small’s brook under the alders a hundred yards away. It was cooler than it had been during the night. Even Jacob Small, twenty feet above them, saw nothing; and he did not hear the padding feet as soon as they did.

  The footfalls came along the way that Adam had taken, over the crest of the highland and down the slope, at a run. But before they reached the wheatfield they slowed down and faded out of hearing. For a long time Lana tried to hear them again. She kept staring toward where they had last been audible, away on her left.

  She never knew what sound had caused her to turn her eyes straight out from the stockade, but when she did she nearly screamed. An Indian was standing there, vaguely defined in the pale light. She knew it was an Indian. She could see the feather over his ear and the scarlet on his face and chest and the blanket hanging from his shoulder. Her courage seemed to drain out at her feet. She could only stare as a bird would at a snake. She felt her heart beating so hard that she could scarcely fetch her breath; the blood pounded in her ears, stopped suddenly, and the painted figure of the Indian began to sway in her eyes. She thought she was going to faint.

  Then Mrs. McKlennar caught sight of her and reached out and poked Adam. He glanced at Lana, slipped over to her, and followed the direction of her gaze. His rifle crept out noiselessly between the points of the sticks.

  The smell of his sweat beside her brought Lana to her senses. “Don’t move,” he muttered. She did not dare move. Out of the tail of her eye, she saw his thick finger bending on the trigger. She
could not help herself from looking back to the Indian. As she did so the rifle roared in her ears and the smoke flushed up in her face, choking her. But before it did, she saw the Indian spin on his heels and fall, head towards her, on his back.

  “Hell,” said Adam. “I must have got him to one side.”

  The tear of his teeth on the cartridge paper, the cold slither of the ramrod whanging home the bullet, and he was gone back to his post. She found that she was panting.

  “Get him?” Jacob called down.

  “Got him,” Adam answered.

  The shot brought on the main body of the destructives. They could be heard on the highland, then coming down the hill. Then their progress faded out. But the mist was thinning, and here and there the vague shapes of them were visible.

  A musket flashed from the spot at which the Indian had been killed. The ball whipped over the women’s heads with a sharp tearing sound. “Down, you,” shouted Jacob.

  For a minute there was no other shot. Then a yelling broke out. They loosed a volley at the palisade and the bullets broke splinters off along the points. And then a shrill whistle called out of the mist.

  Jacob called down, “They’re pulling off. It did the trick. They seen you.” He waited a moment. “I think the militia’s coming. I heard a conk-shell horn.”

  Lana turned her back to the palisade and sat down. She also had heard the deep dismal wailing of the conch shell.

  “Hey,” bawled Jacob. “They’re a-going! They’re going down the road.”

  They were trotting down the road in Indian file. Lana, getting to her feet, watched them with the others. About sixty of them, Adam counted, perhaps a dozen white men. They plodded along at a steady pace, not looking back. They carried blankets on their shoulders, and rifles and muskets trailing from their hands. They all looked brown in the thinning mist, dark and dirty and implacable. There were enough of them to have stormed the stockade in five minutes if they had not mistaken the women for men… .

  An hour later the militia came over the edge of the highland behind Joe Boleo. They came at a trot, also, but the gait was not like the smooth In-dian tread. The militia plodded like farmers, stubbornly setting down their feet, forty weary men.

  Joe Boleo drew a little ahead of them.

  “You all right?” he yelled.

  “Yes.”

  “How long ago did they go by here?”

  “An hour.”

  Joe gave a groan. “All night long I been kicking these twerps to make them run and all we do is get farther behind.”

  “You’re lucky at that. There was sixty.”

  “They burnt out the Moyers. We got Dolly Moyer, scelpt but not kilt. They’d started to carry her off, but we come up too quick. We was right on them there.”

  The militiamen fell out of rank any which way and lay down on the grass bank before the stockade. Joe eyed them disgustedly. “Say, is Adam in there?”

  Adam was already pushing the gate open.

  “Hello, you bug-tit,” he said to Joe. “Want to go after them?”

  “Yeah. I want to see them out of the valley. Come on.”

  Lana issued from the fort with the other women, looking for Gil. He was sitting on the bank with his back against the stockade. He looked back at her without smiling.

  “Have you got any food?” he asked. “I’m hungry. Young John here’s just about played out.”

  “I’ll cook up some wheat right away. There’s no flour.”

  In one corner of the fort was an old burned-out stump, an Indian mill, they called it, in which they crushed their wheat grains to a kind of rough meal. Lana threw some of this in water and borrowed a pinch of salt.

  While she was tending it, Gil brought John Weaver in with him and sat down in the shed.

  “Are we going home with you?” Lana asked with a nod towards the children.

  “Yes. It’s over, I guess. Sir John has headed north.”

  “Sir John? North?”

  “I forgot you wouldn’t know,” he muttered. “Sir John brought five hundred men across the Sacandaga flows. He’s struck the valley by Johnstown. They say he’s burned down every house in Caughnawaga. He’s killed fifty or sixty people. Old Fonda that used to be his neighbor, eighty years old, scalped on his front door. They crucified a man at Tribes hill, they say. There was three hundred Indians. Everything burnt. They say a hundred or more men went off with Sir John. They took their families with them. And the families of Tories that got left behind four years ago.” His voice became uncertain. “Bellinger got orders to muster us in case they came this way. But yesterday afternoon we heard they’d headed north. The soldiers hadn’t even started after him from Schenectady when the express left there. They’d been called back there until they knew that town and Albany was safe. We were just coming home when we got the word that there was burning up at Moyer’s. We started out after them. …”

  “Don’t talk,” said Lana. “Stop. Eat something. It’s all ready.”

  Outside the upright sticks at their backs a woman cried, “Tom! Tom! You come back here! You mind your Ma.”

  A surly voice answered back, “We was just playing Indian, Ma. We was trying to scalp him.”

  In the sunlit field two little boys with wooden knives were squatting be-side the dead Indian.

  4. Terror by Night

  No man, all summer long, had gone to his field alone. The haying had been done by armed parties, of thirty or more, sent out from the forts. The people in Fort Herkimer attended to the south side of the river, those in Dayton to the north. At the end of July twenty men were sent to help out with the Eldridge haying. The hay was all stored in small stacks within sight of the stockades, but out of shooting range, so that they could offer no cover to the enemy. At the same time, they could be watched and sallies made to protect them against any small force.

  The destructives had hung in the woods through June and July. The scouts sent out left and entered the forts under cover of darkness. In July a mob of sixty Indians almost surprised three hay wagons, chasing them right under the Dayton stockade.

  Lana had heard the warning gun go off on the southeast rampart of the fort and gathered her children and run them through the gate. She did not know whether Gil was on that particular hay party, but she was not allowed on the rifle platform to see. She had to remain under it, out of the way, with the other women, listening— first to the shooting out across the valley; then to the rumble of the wheels and the squeaks of the racks as the heavy loads swayed in and out of ruts at their mad gallop. Then the thudding of the horses’ hoofs and the racket of harness; the screech of the gates swinging open; the yelling of the Indians close behind; and at last the thunder of the wagons rolling into the parade. As the gates screeched shut again a volley from the rifle platforms seemed to split the fort apart, and four swivels went off with sullen booms, and the yelling outside stopped.

  Holding the two children to her, she crowded out with the other women, to see the men sliding down off the loads and running to join the sortie forming at the gate. She saw Gil looking over his shoulder at the line of women’s faces. His eyes met hers. He did not raise his hand or smile, no more than she. In the next moment he had passed with the others through the opening gates to drive the Indians away from the cabins and haystacks outside the wall.

  That was the nearest any party of savages came to the forts that summer. Most of the time they lay in the woods, trying to pick up berrying parties, and burning all the new outlying cabins one by one. The valley now was as desolate as it had been after Brant’s raid. Most of the remaining cattle had been killed and eaten by the destructives. The scouts reported that the pigs, left to run loose in the woods, were getting to be as cute as the deer.

  Though the women still cooked in the cabins, most families slept inside the forts; for, towards the end of July, Brant had appeared below Stanwix with eight hundred Indians. They had actually seen his army from Fort Herkimer, crossing the valley to the south. He made no demonst
ration against the forts, however. Instead, two weeks later he turned up at Canajoharie at the site of his old place, and desolated six miles of the Mohawk. Men, women, and children were killed and taken prisoner, one hundred houses were burned, mills and churches. Wagons were destroyed, ploughs and harrows broken. They said that opposite Frey’s you could see human bodies in the water.

  After the second burning of the Herter house, Captain Demooth had moved into Fort Dayton. John Weaver, however, was sent across the river to Herkimer. Since he had served with the Continentals under Sullivan, he was now classed as an experienced soldier and was appointed by Bellinger a sergeant of the garrison.

  The promotion made Mary proud, and thankful, also, that his duties kept him entirely in the fort. They lived on the second story of the northwest blockhouse, sharing space with Sergeants Stale and Smith and their wives and Stale’s two children. They had no room for privacy between themselves, but they all felt that it was better, airier, and quieter than living in one of the sheds.

  It had been dry and very hot. The green had been slow in returning to the mown hayfields. The river ran very shallow. But since August there had been few alarms.

  On the north side of the river Mary and John could see through the loophole next their bunk the stone McKlennar house with its shuttered windows. The survival of that house, the last left standing but Shoemaker’s, was one of the mysteries they often talked about, together, for they liked to look at it and plan on having a house of their own some day resembling it.

  The other women, hearing them, would sometimes smile, half bitterly, that people could still be so young. But Mary ignored them. She understood how these two women felt, having lost everything that belonged to them. She did not try to answer when Mrs. Smith told her to wait until she had had a child and seen it sicken from lack of food and die from cold. Mrs. Smith had taken her child to bed with her during the past winter, but it had caught a malignant quinsy of the throat. “Doc Petry couldn’t do nothing. He said it needed milk.” Her toneless voice went on: “My own milk gave out. I ain’t like some people. I got to have food myself to breast feed a child. I’m the hearty-eating kind of woman. I’ve got another in me now. What’s going to become of it?” She glanced at Mary’s figure. “You’re lucky. You ain’t never had one. You talk about stone houses. Well, all I want to think about is a log house of my own again, and dried punkin and corn ears and hams on the rafters. Just to set down and look at them and know they’re all mine.”