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  He plodded along, hunched forward, as if he had a plough in front of him. By nature he was an abstemious man and the beer had gone to his head, what with the heat, and the responsibilities of running the muster; and nearly all the way he kept trying to think what he ought to do when they got to Cosby’s. As it turned out, it was Jeams MacNod, the school-teacher, who had the great idea.

  He said, “If them Indians ain’t there, what are we going to do?”

  Nobody had thought of that. Jeams said, “Suppose Thompson has some men around, he might get nasty.”

  “Thompson cleared out a month ago,” Reall said.

  A kind of deliberate sunrise of intelligence dawned in the school-teacher’s narrow, befuddled face. He was a poor man, and he led a hard and thankless life. He wiped the sweat out of his eyes with the cuff of his coat sleeve and said, “Why don’t we take a look around the manor then?”

  “Ain’t that thieving?” asked Gil.

  MacNod shook his head. “No, it ain’t. Not when there’s war. That’s what they’re a-doing down the valley. They done it in Johnson Hall when Sir John cleared out. There was some of the Flats people in Colonel Day-ton’s regiment. They went right over the place. They didn’t steal nothing. Captain Ross, he said it was confiscated property and he went around with them showing what he wanted retained for himself. Retaining ain’t like robbery.”

  The suggestion gave them the feeling of being on military service. They were doing what regular army troops had done in command of a regular army officer, and they were doing it of their own initiative. By the time they came to Cosby’s they were, as Kast said afterwards, looking sober enough to eat hay. They wouldn’t have seen the British army, perhaps, if it had been drawn up in squares round the big house, but they saw Mrs. Wolff all right. She was just coming in from the corn patch with a squash in her arms, like a baby.

  When her eyes first fell on them, entering the clearing, she started instinctively to run. A woman of forty-five or fifty, her bleached hair half fallen to her shoulders, the bone pins clinging here and there, loosely, like oversized white lice.

  Then she caught hold of herself and stood still.

  “Mrs. Wolff,” said Weaver, when the company had drawn up behind him, “where’s your husband?”

  “What do you want with John?”

  Weaver said heavily, “We’re militia on duty. Where’s John?”

  “We hain’t done nothing,” she said in her dull voice. “John, he’s out in the lot.”

  “You call him in,” said Weaver.

  She stared at them for a moment more. When her eyes met his, Gil felt vaguely ashamed. But she didn’t say anything as she turned for the log store. She went onto the porch ahead of them and took a small hand bell and swung it slowly.

  They all waited for John Wolff.

  He came in a moment with a dead pipe in his hand. A little charred corn silk sticking over the bowl showed that he must be out of tobacco. He was a year or so older than his wife, but he had a healthier color, and a set stubborn jaw.

  “What do you want?” he demanded. He didn’t try being friendly. Everybody knew which way he stood. He thought they were damned fools.

  “Where’s them two Seneca Indians was around here this morning?”

  “There wasn’t any Senecas around here.”

  Reali’s voice piped up from the back of the line.

  “Yes there was. Me and Gil saw them. Setting in the woodshed.”

  “Oh, them. They wasn’t Senecas. I don’t know who they was.”

  “What were they doing here?”

  “They come in last night. Hungry. I let them bed in the barn and give them something to eat. I never saw them before.”

  “You admit they wasn’t Oneidas or Fort Hunter Mohawks.”

  “I don’t admit anything. I gave them something to eat. What the hell business is it of yours, Weaver?”

  “John.” His wife breathlessly touched his arm. “Don’t get angry, John.”

  “Shut up,” he said. “What right have these Dutch punks got coming onto my land?”

  “We’re on duty. We got to keep track of people without business in these parts.”

  “Why don’t you ask them what their business was, then? I don’t know.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Go and find out. They left here at nine o’clock.”

  Weaver stood uncertainly on the porch. Jeams MacNod went up to him and whispered. Weaver put his finger in his ear.

  “Yes,” he said. “You stay in the store. Both of you. We’ve got to in-vestigate the grounds.”

  Wolff said, “Suit yourself. But you can’t do anything to me.”

  “I’ll just go through your place first,” said Weaver. He called for Gil and MacNod and Kast to come with him. The rest were to surround the store and wait till he came out.

  The inside of the store was a long room with a fireplace at the end and a bed in the corner. There were rough shelves along one wall and storage chests along the other. There were two benches set end to end down the middle of the floor. The benches were made of split basswood logs with hickory legs let into them. Two windows allowed some sunlight to filter through the fly specks.

  There wasn’t anything an Indian could hide behind. Weaver went into the woodshed. He found about a month’s supply of wood stacked sloppily, two pairs of snowshoes, an axe, a wedge, and a maul. “No one out there,” he said, and helped the other three lift aside some axe helves, a keg of lamp oil, and a couple of rum kegs. The oil keg had four inches of oil. The other kegs were empty.

  They stood looking round. It was so still inside the store that they could hear the men outside talking softly through the buzzing of the flies.

  Jeams MacNod tried to lift the lid of a chest.

  “It’s locked,” he said.

  Weaver turned on Wolff.

  “Give us the keys, John.”

  “Like hell I will.”

  “Then we’ll have to take an axe to the chests and bust them in.”

  “All right,” Wolff grinned thinly. “You’ll find it’s a hot job.”

  “Get the axe, Kast. It’s in the woodshed.”

  Kast returned with the axe.

  Wolff said, “You spoil them chests and you’ll hear of it. I’ll make a complaint to Captain Demooth.” He drew his hand over his thin mouth. “I and Demooth had a talk. He said I could stay here as long as I didn’t do nothing. I ain’t been looking for trouble. He said he’d look out for me. You touch them chests and you look out.”

  Weaver had begun to get mad.

  “Go ahead, Kast. Bust the lock if you can.”

  Kast swung the axe like a hammer.

  “You stop that. There ain’t nothing in them,” said Mrs. Wolff. “Don’t you spoil them.”

  “Let them do it,” said Wolff.

  “No, I won’t. There ain’t anything in them. I’ll give them the keys.”

  “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 state-ment 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 per-son 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 finger-tips 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 ex-cept 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 thro
ugh.

  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 be-gan 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.”

  “You’re going to scold me, ain’t you?”

  “Come here.”

  She obeyed meekly.

  He fished the green silk out of his pocket and put it round her neck.