Drums Along the Mohawk (49 page)

Joe said suddenly under his breath, “There’s somebody in that house.”

“How do you know?”

“They wouldn’t be bothered to watch it otherwise. Look, they’ve got everything they could out of the other houses.”

It was an effort for Gil to take his eyes from the burning cabin. Now he looked carefully at the crowd of Indians. He saw the three women standing among them. They were not making any demonstration. They stood perfectly still, watching the cabin with a dull kind of fascination. The way sheep will look at something dreadful. They stood like that until the roof fell in. If there were a man inside he made no sound. “Killed himself if he had sense,” Joe said. “Look, they got somebody there.”

Gil saw for the first time the body hanging on the fence. It
was old Bell. He was caught with one leg through the rails up to the crotch and both arms hanging over the top rail; his head tilted to one side, against his shoulder. He had been scalped. The top of his head was like a red gape against the sunlight, with a little halo of flies.

Joe started moving from tree to tree, to get a fresh view, while Gil followed him. When they had moved far enough to look past the other side of the burning cabin, they saw two men lying on their faces in the road. One was young Bell, in front of his own door; the other they thought must be Staring’s son, but they could not be sure from that distance. Joe began to swear.

Gil had a crazy impulse to take a shot at one of the Indians, any one, to put a shot into the midst of the whole bunch; but Joe, who seemed aware of it, whispered, “Don’t shoot. We can’t do anything. I don’t see Leppard or Hawyer or young Weaver anywhere. Maybe they got away.” His rifle muzzle twitched up in his hands. “They ain’t all Indians either, Gil. Look there.”

A man in a green coat with a black skullcap on his head had come out of the Leppard cabin. He seemed unconcerned. He went over to the Indians and watched the burning cabin with them. Then he said something that started them picking up burning sticks.

“That’s one of Butler’s Rangers,” said Joe. “Do you suppose Leppard or Weaver would have the sense to get back to the fort?”

Gil did not know. He was too fascinated by what was happening to think of anything except that this was how his own place must have looked with the Indians burning it.

Butler’s man turned round to the women and his face was towards Gil.

“Joe!”

“Don’t talk so loud,” said Joe.

“That’s Caldwell!”

He remembered him as plain as if his wedding night had
happened only a week ago. Even without the patch over the eye the man’s face looked the same.

He acted perfectly quiet, as if he knew just what he was doing. He motioned the women to walk north along the road. He kept saying something to them. The women looked back at him almost stupidly, and he jabbed the air with his hand. The women turned and started walking along the road. Every now and then they turned their heads to see the Indians setting fire to another cabin or barn. The Indians were swarming all round the settlement now. A couple of them were even going through the hayfield touching off the cocks.

One of the women began to run and the other two brokenly took their pace from hers. As if the Indians had heard their quickened footfalls, half a dozen of them broke away from the burning and yelled. The women started to run hard. They looked ineffectual scurrying up the road. They ran with their heads back, stiff above the hips, their legs working furiously and twice too hard under the heavy petticoats. The rest of the Indians, hearing the yell, threw down their sticks and yelled themselves and poured out on the road.

Gil was trembling like a dog. He felt sick and cold. Even his hands seemed to feel nausea. He started shouting at Joe. “We got to do something.”

Joe whirled on him and struck his face with his open hand.

“Shut up. God damn you, shut up.” He turned back to watch. His eyes had a glittering kind of interest in the proceeding. The women did not bother him. There were plenty of women. He wanted to see. But he kept saying over and over to quiet Gil, “We can’t stop them. Not even if we shot.”

Gil saw that he was right. The Indians were overtaking the women easily. They weren’t even hurried about it, but the women were too terrified to realize that. They still ran along the road, erect and desperate, with the funny skittering motion
that a woman has when she tries to run. The Indians let them get almost to the beginning of the woods, then they yelled again with the piercing high note that an Indian can make and surrounded the three women.

Six or seven bucks caught the women by the shoulders and threw them down on the road and fell on top of them. The rest of the Indians crowded round. They were still yelling, but some of them were laughing.

Joe said suddenly, “I guess they ain’t going to kill them.”

Gil saw that the white officer was standing in the road looking after the Indians. He was making no motion to stop the proceedings. Even from that distance he looked almost amused by it. Then he turned his back and started systematically to feed the fires where they were not doing their job.

Gil looked back at the women and Indians. The crowd had given back a little. Now there was a shrill whoop and one of the Indians bent down and straightened up waving a petticoat. All the Indians whooped. Then another bent down and came up with a short gown. In a moment a couple of dozen of them were waving pieces of the women’s clothing. Then they all backed away so that the two men on the hill were able to see the three naked bodies of the women lying in the road.

The Indians looked down at them for a while, shaking their clothes at them, until the man in the green coat put a whistle to his mouth and blew a shrill blast. The Indians answered it stragglingly. They left the women.

The women lay where they were, beaten and stupefied, until the Indians were quite a way off, when one by one they got up slowly. They stood naked looking back at their burning homes, at the Indians, and the three dead men. Then they stampeded for the woods. The Indians sent a few whoops after them, and at each yell the women seemed to buck up in the air and come down running harder. They weren’t like women any more
without their clothes. They were like some kind of animal, and they went a great deal faster than they had before.

Joe whispered to Gil, “Come on, we got to head them off.”

He led Gil at a rapid rate back through the woods until they got to the road. The women heard them coming and ran like fury, but Gil and Joe did not dare call to them. The women were too scared to look back. They had to run them down. It was only when two of them fell that the white men were able to overtake them.

The women were Mrs. Leppard and Mrs. Hawyer and young Bell’s wife. The oldest woman, Mrs. Leppard, was the first one to recover her wits. She said the Indians had come up just before the men went out to hay it. They had got Bell and had shot old Bell when he was going to get a horse. Young Crim, who had decided to join their party at the last minute, got into his house and would not come out, so the Indians burned his house with him in it. The three men in the hayfield had made the woods. John Weaver had been down by the spring and had got away too.

Joe helped up Mrs. Staring, who was a pretty girl, quite young, and urged all three off the road. While they were still talking, young Weaver, unarmed, came down the hill to them. His face was white and he looked terribly scared. But he had stuck around. He said he thought something might turn up for him to do.

Joe grinned at him.

“Did you see Leppard and the others?”

“They went for the fort.”

“You take the women back and tell them I and Gil are going to camp on their trail for a while.”

The men gave the women their hunting shirts and started them off for Fort Herkimer with John. Then Joe and Gil returned to the edge of the clearing and watched the Indians burning the rest of the settlement. It took them about an hour more before
the white officer was satisfied. Then they picked up their loot and made packs of it. They had a queer collection of odds and ends, which Indians were apt to value, like small mirrors and a china bowl; but the men with the women’s clothes were the ones that seemed the most envied. Some of them tied the clothes round their heads. They rounded up the two horses that had brought in the carts, which had already been burnt, and took off south down the road, a compact mass of men, moving, now that they had finally got started, quite fast. They made Gil think of wild dogs which had been running sheep. They kept no order in their march, but stuck together with the instinct for killing.

The destruction of Andrustown was something that Adam Helmer had missed: he had made a long swing to the west with old Blue Back, following John Butler and his thousand men on their trip back from Wyoming. He had gone all the way to Chemung behind the army. Butler had left off some of the men at Tioga, but he himself was indubitably headed for Niagara. Helmer and the Oneida had struck back cross-country with the news that Brant had met Butler at Chemung and had gone back to Tioga to pick up the Rangers left there, and his own Indians at Unadilla. There was some talk of attacking Cherry Valley, apparently; but Helmer believed, and so did Blue Back, that Brant would strike at German Flats.

At the news of Andrustown the first impulse had been to chase the raiders down to Unadilla. Conrad Franck had
immediately set out with twenty volunteers on the understanding that Colonel Klock, whom Congress had appointed chief of the militia battalions, should bring up the Palatine companies to join Bellinger and back them up. But Jacob Klock got no farther than the sight of Andrustown; while he was still apprehensively eyeing that smoking ruin, a runner came from Little Stone Arabia Stockade to report a new irruption by the enemy. They had burned houses in Schuyler and taken two men prisoners, one of them George Weaver, and killed four. That was enough for Jacob Klock. He would not listen to Bellinger’s protests. He gave orders for Bellinger to return to Fort Herkimer while he himself took his companies overland to the falls, and as soon as he was home he sat right down and wrote a letter to Governor Clinton.

The puffy old colonel was so disturbed that he got his sequence of events completely muddled; he even dated his letter June 22, instead of July 22. He wrote:—

While Jacob Klock was busying himself with this effort and Colonel Peter Bellinger was crossing the hills north again as fast as his men could set down their feet, Conrad Franck and his thirty volunteers were sitting on their tails round Joe Boleo’s lodge on the hill above the Edmeston settlement. They were waiting there for Bellinger and Klock. Gil and Joe had intercepted them
on the road barely in time to keep them from being run over by Brant’s main gang, which was returning from the little lakes. Brant and Caldwell had joined just above Edmeston, making an army of three hundred men, and the thirty farmers from German Flats lay up in the witch hobble and sumac, a quarter of a mile off, and looked down on the fringe of the army. It was apparent to them that Caldwell was but an offshoot of Brant’s main army, and it might well have been that the whole three hundred would have turned that afternoon. Instead, however, they bore off south into the woods, passing Edmeston. They made a motley army: Indians for the most part, Cayugas, Senecas, and Mohawks in their paint and feathers, Eries with strange headdresses made of the dried heads of animals, greencoat soldiers, with their black caps and leather gaiters, a few scattered remains of the old Highland guard of Fort Johnson, dark limber men, wearing tartan kilts and knee-length leggings of deerskin and carrying long-barreled, smooth-bore rifles and Indian war clubs. They came down the trail with the long loose stride of woodsmen, their tread light on the ground, but their voices were upraised in talk as if there were no other living thing in all the woods. They shouted back and forth, calling each other’s names, lifting the fresh scalps from their belts,—those that had them,—roaring to know whether the bounty still held at eight dollars in Niagara.