by Gary Paulsen
“He loves chess.”
“I heard the officer say to another soldier that the only reason he brought your father was that he saw a chessboard when they raided the cabin and he wanted somebody to play with.”
Thank God, Samuel thought. Thank God for such a little thing to mean so much. His father’s life spared for a chessboard. His mother’s life, too. He stood. “Thank you for the food. I have to be going. If I’m only three days behind and they keep taking it slow, I could catch them.”
Caleb said, “They’re headed for New York. The city. The British hold it and they keep a lot of prisoners there in old warehouses and out in the harbor on old ships. If you don’t catch them along the trail you might just go there. Good luck to you, son. We’ll keep you in our prayers.”
Ma pressed more food on him—venison, potatoes and corn, wrapped in a piece of linen. Annie and Ma hugged him and Caleb shook his hand. Then he trotted slowly, his stomach still heavy, out of the yard to the edge of the woods, where he entered thick forest.
He stayed well off to the side of the trail. Once again, this small act saved his life.
He heard one clink—metal on metal—and dropped to his stomach, out of sight, though he could see through gaps in the brush.
He watched them pass: an organized body of troops with tall hats moving at a quickstep in a tight formation. They followed an officer on a large bay horse. They did not look like British soldiers—they had brownish instead of red uniforms and were more disciplined than the redcoats. Hessians, he thought, Germans.
They were quickly past Samuel. Their march would take them directly to Caleb’s farm. Curious, and with some fear, Samuel turned and followed them, off to the side, fifty yards to the rear.
He’d relive that decision for many sleepless nights.
The attack was over in minutes.
The Hessians quick-marched into the yard, broke formation and spread out into the farmyard, grabbing chickens as they moved.
Caleb and Ma came out onto the porch. Caleb wasn’t armed, though he raised his arm and pointed at the soldiers.
He and Ma were immediately gunned down. Then four soldiers jumped to the porch and bayoneted them. Annie exploded out of the house and ran toward the barn. Three or four of the soldiers shot at her but missed, and once she was around the barn she ran for the trees. More men tried to hit her but missed. Samuel was amazed at how fast she ran. She stumbled once and it looked as if she might be hit, but she jumped to her feet and kept running.
They took the bodies of Caleb and Ma and dragged them back into the house. Eight or ten men went in the house then and looted it, taking anything shiny and all the food they could find.
Then they set fire to the house and barn and when those were roaring with flames, the soldiers fell into formation and quick-marched out of the yard, disappearing down the trail.
It had taken less than ten minutes.
Samuel was sickened by the cruelty, the absolute viciousness, of the attack, and he hunched over and retched. He felt that he should have run to Caleb and his wife, to help in some way, but knew there was nothing he could have done. He would have been dead long before he’d got at them.
He was helpless. He sat crying, watching the house and barn burn, the Hessians gone like a plague. Caleb and Ma. The food, eating together, how open and gentle and pleasant and good it had been to sit with them and talk.
Destroyed. Gone.
Gone in this ugly war with these evil men. Gone and never coming back and there was nothing, nothing, he could do or could have done to save them, help them.
Except find Annie.
Take her with him to New York.
He made certain nobody was coming down the trail, then set off at a trot around the clearing, staying well in the undergrowth, looking for Annie and trying to erase from his mind what he had seen.
He had to find Annie. Then find his parents.
That was all that mattered.
PART 3
GREEN
New York—1776
War Orphans
Children orphaned by war, as countless were during the Revolutionary War, suffer from nightmares and sleeping problems, headaches, stomachaches, anger, irritability and anxiety. Severely traumatized children may become withdrawn, appearing numb and unresponsive and sometimes becoming mute. When the danger and devastation end, children can show remarkable resilience and recovery if they are in a safe and stable environment where they are cared for and nurtured.
After the Revolutionary War, however, many orphans, if they were not taken in by other family members, grew up in institutions. Formal adoptions were very rare.
CHAPTER
12
He found Annie huddled in some hazel bushes, crying. When she saw him, she ran and threw herself at him, grabbing the edge of his shirt, silent except for the soft sobbing.
For three days.
Unless she was asleep or tending to herself, she would not get more than four feet away from him for three solid days. She held on to his clothing and did not say a word in all that time. At night he would wrap her in his blanket and sit away from the glow of the fire and doze, and she would cry in her sleep, almost all night.
It bothered him that she had no shoes or moccasins, and he had no leather to make a pair for her, but her bare feet were amazingly tough and she kept up with his rapid pace much better than he would have expected.
They drank from creeks, which were common, and shared the small amount of food Ma had given him. Annie did not eat for the first three days and he worried at that—although she drank—but in the evening of the third day she took some food and seemed to come out of the cloud she was in, little by little.
He was having a very difficult time. With almost everything. The jolt from what his life had been just short weeks ago to what it was now had been so sudden, the gulf so vast, that he felt he was in a completely different world, one dominated by violence and insanity.
The woods were the one thing he knew and still believed in. He was thankful for the haven of the forest as they traveled.
Still, his rage would not go away. He stifled it, but he seethed with anger every time he thought of the Hessians and how they had killed the Clarks, of how they had tried to kill Annie, of how the raiders had slaughtered the peaceful settlers for no reason.
He wanted to punish them, make them pay for what they’d done, and could think of nothing to do except act as insane and violent as they had.
Kill someone.
Find someone in a red coat and shoot him.
He knew it was not something he could do, even though he thought of it. And so he drove himself—and, unfortunately, Annie—in a forced march that covered over fifteen miles a day. It would not have been so hard except that the trail had become a proper road. There was still forest on either side, but settlements, then small towns, appeared regularly. They often saw local people or detachments of redcoats marching on the road.
They avoided everybody. Samuel trusted no one, not even people who might have been friendly. Annie complained only once.
“We jump into the woods every time we see somebody,” she said. “They can’t all be bad.”
“Yes,” Samuel said, thinking of the Hessians, “they can. Every single one of them can be bad. So we hide. And that’s it.” His voice had an edge that kept her from arguing.
They worked around settlements and small towns, sticking to the trees, and on day five—they’d been out of food for a day and a half—Samuel shot a deer and took an afternoon, well back in the woods, to make a small fire with flint and steel and a little powder. He cooked the two back legs of the deer with stakes holding them over the fire and, when the meat was still rare, cut pieces from one of the legs, and they ate it squatting by the fire. He also cut off the strips of meat alongside the lower backbone—the tenderloin. Although it was quite small, he cooked that as well, to save for later.
They ate a whole back leg sitting there, until Annie’s face was coated
with grease. They wrapped the excess in the cloth Ma had given him and were up and moving again, Samuel not wanting to waste daylight.
He could think of little but finding his parents and getting them away from their captors. But he also realized that the odds were not good. He knew nothing of cities, or even towns, but New York City must be large, and filled with people who would not be helpful since the British were there. Try as he might, he couldn’t think of a way to get into the city safely to find his mother and father.
With meat in his belly he fairly loped along, so fast that at last Annie gasped, “You got to slow down. I can’t run like a deer.”
He slowed but kept the pace steady, so that when it was dark, hard dark, and he stopped, Annie fell asleep almost the instant he wrapped the bedroll blanket around her.
He decided to make a cold camp and didn’t start a fire. Since there was no smoke, the bugs, mostly mosquitoes, found him at once. They weren’t as bad as they’d been on his hunting trips on the frontier, but then he’d always had a fire with the smoke to keep them away.
He was tired, although not like Annie, and he had some thinking to do. It took him a while to get his mind off the mosquitoes, and by that time there was a new sliver of a moon. In the pale silver light he saw Annie’s face, wrapped in the blanket, just showing enough to let her breathe, and his heart went out to her.
She was only eight, he thought, maybe nine, and her whole world had been absolutely destroyed.
Were there many like her? Everything gone because of this war? The innocent ones were the worst part of it all. His mother and father making a life on the frontier, just wanting to be left alone, his mother trying to get the garden to grow, his father learning how to use tools, how to make his own house, wanting only to work and read and think and live a quiet, simple life with his family.
All gone. His own life gutted, not as much as Annie’s, but enough.
He had to get his parents back.
How? What to do? There were so many unknown factors that the questions seemed impossible.
He was one person with a rifle.
Oh yes, he thought, smiling grimly, and a knife.
And he felt that the entire world he was heading into was against him. He would have to get around them, the people in that world, some way, somehow….
How?
His eyes closed, opened, closed again, his questions spiraling down as he leaned back against a tree and slept.
Civilian Deaths
Civilian mortalities have always been underreported in wars, and are nearly impossible to verify. Most historians and governments are forced to guess at the numbers because not only are birth and death certificates, church records, tax rolls and emigration documentation frequently destroyed during combat, but the true numbers are, in many cases, never counted, in order to hide them from a country’s own people as well as the enemy.
Once mass weapons such as cannons and guns were developed and used by the military, far more civilians were killed simply by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
CHAPTER
13
The signs were on the side of a tree, two boards hacked into the shape of an arrow and nailed up with large, handmade cut nails.
One pointed to a trail that went straight south. Crude letters: “Philadelphia—41 m.”
The other arrow pointed straight east: “New York—38 m.”
“What do they say?” Annie asked. “I can get the letters but I can’t put them together so good. Yet.”
Samuel told her. “About the same to either place. A three-day walk…. Let’s get off the trail. I’ve got to think on it.”
They moved back into the undergrowth and settled out of sight.
“What’s to think about?” Annie said. “We go to New York to get our ma and pa.”
She did not realize what she said, but Samuel heard the our. Something had happened in her mind, she’d found a way to stand it all, to keep going.
Samuel nodded.
What had Caleb said? Oh yes, New York was British.
But the Americans still held Philadelphia, the center of the new government. Had his mother and father come by here and seen this sign? Did they know that safety and refuge were just forty miles away, and then did they have to go on to New York?
He shook his head.
“I should … I ought to take you into Philadelphia, where it’s safe, and find a place for you.”
“No.”
“But—”
“No. I ain’t going to leave you. You’re the only family I have. It won’t help to leave me someplace because I’ll just run and follow you. No matter what you say. We’re going to find our folks. That’s all there is to it. We’re going to New York.”
“What I was going to say—”
“Together.”
“—was that it would take too long to go down there and come back—six or seven days—so I guess we’ll stick together.”
“Good. That’s settled.”
Samuel almost smiled. She looked so ragged—her dress was indescribably dirty and so was her face. Her hair stuck out at odd angles. The dirt was caked on her legs, and her feet looked like shoe leather—and yet she was ready to do what had to be done. I’m proud, he thought, to have you as a sister.
“All right then,” he said. “Let’s go.”
They had a stroke of luck after they turned toward New York. Later that day they saw a farm with fresh corn in the field. They crept into the edge of the field and took enough ears for dinner.
Just after leaving the field, back in the woods alongside the trail, they heard an awful racket coming up the road from the rear. Something on wheels was clanging and clanking and rattling along. They were far enough back in the thickest part of the undergrowth so they couldn’t see what it was. It stopped nearby.
All was quiet, and then Samuel heard dogs panting. Before he and Annie could move, two black-and-white mostly collie dogs came up to them in the brush, looked at them each for a moment—directly into their eyes—and gently tried to push them out toward the road, using their shoulders against Samuel’s and Annie’s legs.
“Hey!” Samuel whispered. “Leave off!”
He heard a laugh.
“You might as well come out of there,” a coarse, deep voice shouted. “I know right where you are and I’ve got a two-gauge swivel gun aimed at you.”
“You stay here,” Samuel whispered to Annie. “I’ll see what’s going on.”
But no, she was not going to stay, and they both stood and walked out of the brush, the collies nudging them along.
A huge freight wagon stood on the road, so stacked up with all sorts of everything—from bundles of rags to loops of tin pots tied up like garlands, to two saddles, to barrels and buckets and a rocking chair—that it looked enormous: a junk pile on wheels being pulled by two scruffy mules.
“How’s your day?” the man on the wagon asked, spitting, and in such a thick Scottish brogue that it was difficult to understand him. “I’m Abner McDougal, tinker at large. The two dogs are William and Wallace—named after a Scottish hero.” He saw Samuel’s rifle and he held up his hands. “Don’t shoot, I was making a jest about the swivel gun. I’m not armed, as you can see—don’t believe in shooting things.”
He seemed to be dressed in sewn-together rags and looked as untidy as the junk he was carrying. His voice had a horrible rasping sound, like a steel shovel edge hitting rocks in gravel, and he was absolutely covered in unkempt gray hair. It was almost impossible to see his face for the hair, and the lower part of his beard was soaked with tobacco stains from dribbled spit.
“I’m Samuel,” Samuel said, “and this is Annie.”
Abner nodded and then looked at the dogs, which had moved in front of the mules and were peering down the trail in the direction of New York.
“Get in the back of the wagon,” Abner said.
“What?”
“Get in the back of the wagon. Hide the rifle. Now. Quick. Someone
wrong is coming.”
“Wrong?”
“Move! Hide the gun!”
Abner’s firm voice left no room for argument. Samuel took Annie’s hand and they climbed up in the back of the wagon. There was just room for them to sit with their legs out on the opened wagon bed. Samuel hid his rifle and powder horn beneath a pile of cloth.
He had no sooner done this than there was the sound of hooves. A troop of British cavalry dragoons came around the bend in front of the wagon and stopped. Samuel could see through the side of the wagon. There were about twenty riders in red uniforms and high fur hats and knee-high boots. They were carrying short muskets and sabers. The horses were well lathered, snorting and breathing hard, and the group broke formation and spread around the wagon. Two men pulled their sabers and started poking in the load from the sides until Abner said, “Careful there! There’s my bairn’s bairns inside.”
“Your what?” The commanding officer pulled up next to Abner.
“My grandchildren. Don’t go poking them with your stickers.”
“The purpose of your trip?”
“We’re headed for New York. I buy things and sell things. Would you be looking for anything in particular yourself?”
“You could have any kind of illegal goods in there”—the officer nodded at the wagon—“any kind of contraband.”
“I could, but I don’t. And besides, I have a merchant’s pass from the commanding general’s staff, handwrit and signed and sealed. All official.”
“Let me see it.”
Samuel heard the rustle of paper being passed back and forth—he could not see the front of the wagon—and then the officer’s brusque voice: “All right then, pass on. But watch for anything suspicious. We’ve just taken New York and a lot of the rebel runners and deserters are trying to make their way to Philadelphia.”
