3stalwarts

by Unknown

  “All of them, I said. We can’t have the yard cluttered up. We haven’t room for horses. If they get scared and get kicking they’ll damage somebody. Get them out. All the women …“he raised his voice so that it carried throughout the fort … “I want all the women to stay in the sheds or the church until we get the yard clear. If any shooting starts, all the women and children must get into the church. Keep the north pews for a hospital. All men with guns, who haven’t been assigned posts on the stockade, report to Captain Demooth on the east blockhouse.” As the subdued movement of disentanglement commenced, Bellinger moved over to the central fire, watching them. There was disorder, but it was quiet disorder, as if the people were accustoming themselves to a dark room; and Bellinger was patient. The horses and carts were being quickly taken out into the blackness beyond the gates, unharnessed, and the horses loosed. The banging of dropped shafts was a loud sound. In fifteen minutes Gil returned to report all horses outside the stockade. Bellinger raised his voice again. “One more thing.” He waited till everyone’s attention was fixed on him as he stood in the firelight. “We don’t know where the Indians are. It’s a black night and a fog is rising off the river. We can only listen for them. So as soon as you’re settled you’ll have to be quiet. No talking anywhere. If a baby cries, and you can’t hush him, take him into the church and cover him up.”

  He turned to meet Demooth. He seemed quite calm. His long dark face and broad shoulders made a comforting bulk in the firelight. Gil remembered him at Oriskany, lugging Herkimer up the slope.

  He said to Demooth : “Martin here has cleared out all the horses. Have you got all your men up, Mark?”

  Demooth’s voice was tightly strained, though the strain did not show in his face.

  “Yes, I have.”

  “How much longer do you think we ought to let the fire burn?”

  “It ought to be put out now. Nobody’s come in for the past ten minutes. We can’t check everybody. Some of the people may go to Fort Dayton. We don’t expect anybody from Eldridge.”

  Bellinger said, “I’ll put out all lights in ten minutes. I’ll have to give the people warning.”

  He was shouting the warning as Gil climbed up on the west sentry walk. Gil passed young John Weaver, looking white and set in the face. “Hello, John,” he said. “Hello, Mr. Martin,” said John.

  Down in the yard, Bellinger and Demooth had moved to the gates. They were closing them now, with two men helping. The gates squealed and ground on their straps. The three bars fell heavily into place. The shutting off of light from inside the enclosure also shut off the eyes of the horses outside. The animals had gathered in a small herd to look in at the gate. Now they whinnied in the darkness. The familiar sound, for some reason, was fearful.

  Gil found that his position was next to Adam Helmer. They shook hands. Helmer laughed softly. “Did you hear about me running away from those Mohawks?” he wanted to know.

  He was bursting with pride. He was wearing a shirt too small for him— there wasn’t a shirt in German Flats that would have made a decent fit for him. He leaned easily against the picket points, with a borrowed rifle propped handy to his hand. He talked softly about the run, becoming dramatic as he told about outdistancing each Indian. He made quite a story about the heavy-set fellow who had just sat down and banged the ground with his tomahawk. “He looked like he was crying,” said Helmer. “I don’t blame him. I’ve got quite a scalp, by God.” He shook his head, tossing his yellow hair, and laughed.

  “When the fire’s put out, nobody’s to talk,” shouted Bellinger. “I mean that. Anybody that can’t keep their mouth shut had better plan to get outside.”

  A couple of men had lugged a great kettle to the fire. They emptied it over the flames. The light seemed to burst and spread with the steam. At the hissing, and the steam smell, and the added darkness, the horses whinnied again. Then they stampeded.

  In the fort the darkness was black and voiceless. Lana felt as if the people she had been watching were all dead. She felt alone in the world with Gilly, until Mrs. McKlennar put her hand out. The two women held hands.

  Cobus whispered to his mother, “I don’t see why they won’t let me have a musket up there.”

  “Hush. Hush your mouth.” His mother’s voice was savage. Then almost inaudibly she began to pray for George. George had taken a trip up to Schuyler on that fatal day to see about some work he had heard of. He had wanted to get the job as a surprise for John.

  Mrs. Demooth was quite docile. She lay on her back on the blankets with her hands folded on her breast. She had a queer notion that her husband had tied her hands after she had kicked Nancy. She thought they were still tied. She would not even dress, or feed herself. Mary had to take complete care of her; but she was nice to Mary. She wasn’t afraid any more. She lay there singing under her breath. She sang snatches of a hymn, of which only now and then, by leaning close, could Mary hear a phrase. “A mighty fortress is our God …” Mary remembered how her father liked to sing it; he sang it always in German, rolling it out with his surprising deep voice. Her tears came close to her eyes as the woman’s colorless voice went on with the hymn. And then, after a silence, the voice sang thinly— it was like the voice of an insect, it was so small— a little light sad tune.

  “Twixt the water and the willow tree, There stood I, When I spied my gallant gentleman Riding by …”

  It went on, so plaintively that Mary hugged her knees tight and tried to see John up on the sentry walk. But since the fire had gone out, she could see nothing. Her heart was sad, thinking of him and herself. It was impossible for him to find work anywhere that paid money. He had worked through most of the harvest for nothing but food and keep. He always seemed to be cheerful when he came to see her, and he was happy that she should be doing so well. It made her feel very humble that she should be earning money while he wasn’t.

  “Oh, my Lord, why did you pass me

  In the time gone by, That only now you speak of love

  When death rides nigh? For I’ll never love another

  Though the stream run dry, Though the willow leaf be withered

  And my heart doth die.”

  Listening to the thin voice, Mary felt her love for John well up in her. She said a prayer for him, addressing God as a literal person who could, if He would, take care of John.

  She put out her thin hand to the woman’s forehead, in the dark, and began to stroke her face, very gently. The singing stopped after a while, and a little later Mary’s hand felt wet.

  In the darkness by the eastern blockhouse Bellinger and Demooth talked in low voices. They tried to feel confident that the fort could hold off Brant and the Indians. They had eighty-seven armed men. Fort Dayton should have sixty-odd. The most dangerous place was Little Stone Arabia Stockade with only twenty, but they believed that the raid would be confined to the flats. Altogether there were one hundred and forty families in the flats— that figure included the Eldridge Settlement, which contained eight families and fourteen men. Men were any male persons over fifteen. They did not know how big Brant’s force was. They had no way of telling. All their scouts but Joe Boleo were inside the fort; and the scouts were the nucleus of any real defense. They could not afford to send one out. Boleo, they decided, must have been cut off and have gone over to Dayton.

  They had a fair supply of powder, enough for a week, though the often demanded supply had not been sent up from Albany. There was plenty of shot. They knew that an express had been sent down to Cherry Valley, where the Massachusetts Regiment of Colonel Alden had gone into garrison; but they did not expect any succor from him for two days— if indeed any ever came at all. They had to rely on themselves. Their greatest hope lay in the fact that Indians never cared to face fire from behind a stockade.

  When they stopped speaking, the fort was still and black about them. Not a light showed anywhere. There were not even any stars to give an outline to the palisade. Nothing moved but the mist eddying damply against their fac
es in a vagrant draft.

  Demooth climbed the nearest ladder to make a round of the sentry walk. All the men were wakeful. Each one whispered as Demooth passed that he had heard no hostile sound. Demooth paused from time to time to listen for himself.

  The only sound he heard was the slow tread of a grazing horse. It seemed to be quite near, but the horse was totally invisible.

  The faceless night dragged on interminably. As near as Gil could figure, it was getting on to dawn when his ears were first attracted by the soft blowing of a horse’s breath. He nudged Helmer. But Helmer had already heard it.

  He whispered, “If that was an Indian the horse would have run.”

  They waited for several minutes. Then they heard a man whistle.

  Adam stiffened. He whistled back on the same note. The answer returned.

  “It’s Joe,” he murmured. “He’s edging up to the sally port.”

  Helmer dropped off the sentry walk, lighting on his feet as gently as a cat. He went quickly towards the gate where he found Bellinger and told him that Joe Boleo was coming in. Together they opened the sally port, and Joe Boleo stepped through like an embodiment of the darkness itself.

  “What have you been up to?” Adam asked.

  “That you, Adam? I been sleeping with your grandma’s aunt. Where’s Bellinger?”

  “He’s right alongside of me.” Adam grinned in the darkness. “Did you hear about me running off from the Mohawks?”

  “No,” said Joe. He turned to Bellinger as the latter demanded what news he had.

  “Brant’s up at Shoemaker’s. He’s got a big army. Mostly whites, too, that’s the funny part. I couldn’t figure out how many— about five hundred all together. They camped there the first part of the night, but two hours ago they commenced moving out over the valley. I thought maybe I’d better come back and get some sleep.”

  Bellinger asked, “Are they moving all in one bunch?”

  “Naw. They’ve broke up in parties.”

  “Then I guess they won’t attack the fort.”

  “I ain’t guessing,” said Joe.

  “Well, Helmer. You get back on the walk.”

  “Come with me, Joe,” said Helmer. “I want to tell you …”

  “Go to hell,” said Joe. “Where can I get a drink of water?”

  Joe’s news was passed from man to man. The whisper traveled the circumference of the stockade like the flitting of an owl through the dark. The women and children could hear the shuffle of feet passing over their heads, as each man moved to his neighbor, whispered, and moved back. But no one bothered to tell the women. They had to stay in their dark and airless sheds, listening and waiting and unwarned.

  Lana felt Gilly wake up in her lap. First the slight stiffening of his hard little back, then the bump as he slung his head down against her thigh. He would begin to cry for his feed. He was an early feeder— voracious and demanding, a regular rooster. She whispered to Mrs. McKlennar, as she dandled Gilly, and Mrs. McKlennar leaned away from Lana’s shoulder. When Gilly opened his mouth for his first bawl, he found the breast popped in. The smack of his mouth as it closed in surprise was almost like the clap of two hands. He gave a little grunt and, applying himself directly, sucked with noisy gusto. Mrs. McKlennar gave a positive snort of delight.

  “The little warrior!”

  Lana eased her back, which ached from the long hours of sitting in the darkness, and let him feed. She was glad of the distraction. It was the first thing that had happened all night, and her brain was worn out with her unceasing effort to listen.

  A cock crowed.

  The bird’s voice was so familiar in its accents that more than one person imagined it at his own farm. But as the bird crowed again, the voice became isolated and infinitely distant in the mist. Presently another bird answered, and then a third took it up.

  Listening to the birds crowing here and there throughout the valley, Demooth felt that something was out of place. He drew out his watch and read the face by the light of the gunner’s match kept going in the church. The watch told him that it was 4.25, almost an hour and a half before dawn.

  He climbed up into the belfry to get a higher view. As he went up the ladder into inky darkness, he heard a dog start barking far up the valley.

  Standing beside the swivel, under the beam that used to carry the bell, Demooth looked out. He could not hear a human sound. Only the frantic furious barking of the dog persisted. But suddenly the dog yelped and went away yelping through the fog.

  At that instant, Demooth lost his illusion. Red glows of light swelled in the fog to the west, and, refracted in the moist air, they took spherical shape. Even as he located their position, new globes of light swelled be-hind them; then with the unexpectedness of a blow they started springing up on the right and left, north and south, of the fort, and finally to the east, so that the fort was surrounded as if by a phantasmal manifestation.

  He was so absorbed in the sight that for the moment he was not aware of the stirring on the sentry walks below him. But as the voices of men reached upwards, he was brought sharply to his senses.

  “That’s Ritter’s barn, see.”

  “Which one?”

  “That one, the little one, just to the right of the other and a little back of it.”

  The globes were dispelled and became bonfires. They seemed to have aroused a wind, for suddenly it began drawing from the west, slowly driving the mist past the fort and appearing to build a wall with it over Little Falls. Looking down again, Demooth found that he could see the sentry walk quite plainly, picked out by the firelight, and encircling the darker well of the yard. But even this darker place had come to life. Hearing the men’s voices, the women had stolen out of the sheds. They were standing now with their faces lifted skyward. To Demooth they looked pale and swimming with a queer pained realization of disaster, though as yet they had not been. Then they started moving for the ladders and began to climb up on the sentry walks. They kept shifting, as if they sorted themselves out, to stand with their menfolk, and all together, men and women, they stared out at the burning valley.

  The whole valley was alight. Trees stood out against the darkness, distinct and black and two-dimensional. Houses and barns assumed their accustomed shapes with suddenness in a bed of rising fire, then seemed to sink and vanish as the flames went up. The watchers in the fort had ceased talking. Their voices, however, continued; a guttural sort of punctuation of helplessness that swelled inarticulately as they got their first sight of the destructives.

  The Indians were plainly silhouetted, darting into the zones of firelight, with their crested heads and their naked shoulders shining. The white men were darker shapes, more governed in their motions. They ran before the fires, or stopped momentarily to watch, before running on. There was as yet no sound of shooting.

  Now and then a band of destructives could be traced through the darkness by the burning sticks they carried. They followed the roads as though they were illuminating a map.

  On the sentry walk a man shouted, “My God, they’ve set fire to my wheat!”— he strained out over the picket points, his eyes were incredulous. Beside him a woman stood stiff as a spear, with her face turned outward and her eyes closed, as if she could see the roaring burst of flame against the back of her eyelids. The man stopped muttering to himself, and gradually the entire fort became so still that the noise of the nearer fires became distinctly audible. The Indians were too preoccupied to pay attention to the fort, but the first attempt at a sally, the first shooting, would have drawn the entire mob of them. There was nothing that men could do but stand and watch the swift destruction of their homes.

  Gil had been keeping watch on the opposite side of the river. Fires already had broken out as far east as Eldridge Settlement, and the small squat tower of the blockhouse was sharply etched against them. But not until an hour had passed did he see the first small fire start at Mrs. McKlennar’s place.

  He watched for a moment, identified the barn, t
hen the log house, then the two wheat stacks. They burned so fiercely that after a minute or two they seemed to merge in one tremendous conflagration. In ten minutes half a dozen men had managed to destroy the entire results of his year’s work— the best yield the farm had ever had. He felt that if he watched longer he might burst out crying like a baby.

  A volley of musket shots distracted him. The shots came from Fort Dayton, where already there had been considerable burning done in the cluster of the village. It was impossible to tell what had happened, whether the Indians had attacked the fort, or whether the garrison had made a sortie. Joe Boleo lifted his thin face like a fox into the wind and listened to the shots. “Look,” he said after three or four minutes. “That’s a runner. There’s some more coming after him. I reckon they chased some of them away from Dayton.”

  The men on the sentry walk saw the band coming through the ford. They made a dark blot on the water. The water was an almost pearly gray. “By Jesus Christ, it’s daylight!” said Helmer.

  None of them had noticed the rising sun. It poured a rosy light through the valley, tinting the stray remnants of the mist that hung on the brooks or the edges of the river. The last line of the bank of rainless clouds that all night long had passed from west to east caught fire along its lower edge, burned crimson for a while, and slowly sank away. A flight of plover, riding high against the sunrise, came down West Canada Creek with their soft intermittent calling back and forth.

  The runner was passing due south in the direction of the Herter place. As the men followed him with their eyes, they saw that a large group of the destructives stood in the yard. One man kept slightly aloof, in his In-dian blanket, with the sunrise catching a faint shine in the gold lace covering his cocked hat. A whisper went the rounds again. “That’s Brant.”

  The runner spoke to him, and the following group of men came up to merge with those that waited. Brant called out several men, who raised their rifles and fired a volley skyward. They loaded, fired again. Once more they repeated it. Then, round the smouldering coals of the Herter barn, they sat down, cooked, and ate their breakfast.