“So,” William said, feeling a strange, cool resignation, “we do without Gen’l Harmar, eh?”
“Colonel’s sent him a rider,” Wyllys said. “Might be we’ll get reinforced later. All right, Mr. Clark. Sunrise. And do y’r name credit, eh?” He squeezed William’s wrist and went whispering away through the grass to the next officer. William looked over his shoulder. The edge of the sky was pearly. The sun would be peeping over in five or ten minutes. Maybe the last sunrise I’ll see, he thought. He was twenty. Short career, he thought.
He crawled back to instruct his company. Stubbly jaws, white faces, burning eyes, sorrowful eyes, silent nods, final attention to their priming powder. Then he crawled up to the place where he had been lying in front of them and lay watching the hazel thicket for Colonel Hardin’s signal, and he remembered and recited to himself the litany of advice George had given him:
Head a-swivel. Dread nothing; see everything. Keep comrades in the corners of your eyes. Don’t hesitate ever. If you’re hit don’t stop; run on ’im before he can reload or raise an arm. Half a second can make the difference. Yell and be happy; there’ll be time later for crying and puking. Let the wolf in ye come out, but by Heaven no Clark better ever stoop to take a scalp.
William thought of the express rider being sent after Harmar. No hope in that, he thought. Take three or four hours at least for
him to get there and bring back cavalry. This kind o’ scrap won’t last that long.
Somehow he had it set in his mind that combat could only last ten or fifteen minutes. He had never known anyone capable of doing
anything
at full tilt more than ten or fifteen minutes at a stretch, and surely killing must be a full-tilt kind of thing.
He looked at the grassy, brushy ground sloping down to the shallow river and then up to the smoke among the sun-gilded sycamores on the other side and foresaw his route across that distance, his heart beating on the ground and his limbs feeling all twitchy with dreadful eagerness, and then he looked back at the horizon where the top of the rising sun was shining like a spark through distant tree tops, and then he heard something like a sigh all around and looked toward the hazel thicket where Colonel Hardin had just ridden out and was sitting on his war horse, looking lean and hard as an ax, glancing to his right, then to his left, then drawing his saber.
William remembered then to pray, but there was time to say only
Our God help us all
before Colonel Hardin slashed down with the saber and dug in his spurs, and Fountain’s cavalry streamed out of the thicket. And then the morning was full of the swishing and thumping of men running downhill through dry grass.
Of course they would have been naive to suppose that the Indians were unaware of their presence. The cavalry were out of the far side of the river and the infantry were splashing thigh-deep through the cold water when William felt something whiff past his temple. At the same instant he saw a cavalryman jerk in his saddle and drop his sword to clutch at an arrow in his throat. Musket fire roared then, and muzzle flashes and smoke erupted from the sycamores just ahead. A soldier fell in the water on either side of William. An arrow cracked against his rifle stock and fell in the water. It had all started.
Now
, he thought, lifting his knees high to run in the water,
now. Yell and be happy!
His yodel poured throbbing out of his throat and his heart felt as big as a barrel. Hundreds of throats opened up with his, and now he was splashing out of the river among sycamore roots and could see painted faces and brown bodies moving among the tree trunks, and there had been no time for the savages to reload their muskets. Some of them were sprinting back toward their camp, others were standing fast, drawing bowstrings or rushing forth with raised tomahawks. A brave with a very boyish, round face with a stripe of vermillion painted across his nose and under his eyes had just notched an arrow and was pulling his bow ten feet
away with William as his target. He was only a boy and except for the painted face looked terribly much like just anybody in a schoolroom, and William didn’t want to kill him, but had to, and put his rifle to his shoulder and squeezed the trigger and saw the stripe-painted young face jerk back, one eye blown in through its socket and spouting blood. The arrow went whirling sideways.
And so now William had done one of the big things in life: he had killed a man—a boy, at least. But there was no time to think about it: a warrior was in his path with his tomahawk cocked behind his shoulder and his black eyes on William’s and his teeth bared. William raised his empty rifle in front of his chest to parry the blow. The tomahawk whacked so hard his hands stung.
Don’t hesitate ever.
He brought his knee up into the Indian’s groin and ran over him as he doubled over.
Head a-swivel.
They were through the sycamores now, howling murder, the line still moving forward even though every step forward was a mortal fight for every man. This bank was a narrow level bottom of tall horseweeds and willows on silty ground. It was a chaos now of running and wrestling bodies, powder smoke, gunshots, grunts, shrieks, thuds, curses, neighing horses, cracking of wood on wood, crunch of steel into bone, men sitting or lying dazed and dying, dark blood pouring onto the gray soil. Some yards off to the right Colonel Hardin rode hatless, maneuvering his great wild-eyed stallion with one hand full of reins and the other slashing with a crimson-bladed saber as if he were mowing wheat. Major Wyllys fired a pistol point-blank into the face of a huge Indian, but then dropped to his knees with an arrow in his side. William clubbed a warrior with his rifle butt and then whipped out his sword and slashed his throat as he fell, and his hand was bathed with spurting hot blood. Two yards ahead of him an Indian was pounding in the skull of a fallen militiaman. William ran up and kicked him; when the Indian yelled and spun about, William slashed across with all his might and the Indian’s body jerked and flopped, headless, jets of blood pumping from the ghastly stump of meat and gristle while the head rolled the other way like a ball in the dust. This shook William, this that he had done so often to chickens and turkeys for the family table and had now done in a reckless fury to a human being.
The slaughter continued all around him and he stumbled ahead now like a man hacking his way through a thicket. A bullet passed through his clothes with a yank and he felt warm blood from a grazed flank running to his waist. Most of the Indians he saw now were in flight. He stubbed his foot on an iron
kettle and realized that they had advanced into the camp. He sheathed his bloody sword and knelt to reload his rifle, head still a-swivel. His hands were sticky with blood, which smeared his powder horn and ramrod as he touched them, and he reloaded, still looking right and left. He remembered the feel of pig blood on his hand, that first slaughter so long ago.
The banging and howling continued around him, and men were falling and powder smoke burned his eyes and nostrils. His heart was thudding fast in his ribs and he had lost count of the men he had killed, and suddenly he was struck with the realization that he had no idea of the
shape
of the battle; he had been too involved in rushing and personal bloodletting to notice how the battle was going—the very
purpose
of all this frenzy had gotten lost somewhere; he had been a wolf, an animal for which there is no design, no future. Men to his right and left were hacking and shooting and stabbing and howling with the same sort of blind impetus, no different from his. But he was supposed to be an officer, responsible for a larger part of this battle than just the radius of his sword’s swing. He began looking beyond that distance, standing with his rifle in his left hand and drawing his saber with his right. At his feet a dead Indian lay face down in a still smoldering campfire, his flesh cooking with a smell like venison. A few feet away a saddled gray horse, its neck red with blood, lay on its side twitching, trying to raise its head. The battle roared everywhere, a whirlwind of mortal struggle, but it was impossible to determine what was happening in the large view. Everywhere in sight lay the blue-coated bodies of regular soldiers; they seemed to have been chosen as special targets by the warriors, and William could not see a one alive anywhere. Sunbeams slanted in through dust and the dense smoke of campfires and gunpowder. A horse galloped through the melee a few feet in front of William, its rider, foot in stirrup, being dragged, flopping and bouncing, under it, and William saw that it was Major Fountain, commander of the cavalry detachment.
And now through the acrid curtain of smoke and dust in front of him came a dire howling, war cries from countless throats, and then a wall of dusky bodies materialized through the haze, coming toward him. It was a counterattack, a great wave of savages coming from somewhere, scores of them abreast, brave and disciplined, moving as if with a single will, driving back the militiamen who were still on foot. Arrows and bullets hummed and whispered thick as hail across the battleground and Kentuckians were crumpling to earth everywhere. William began backing up, yelling over the din:
“FALL BACK TO THE RIVER AND FORM A LINE!” He tried to repeat it but his throat was clogged with dust and he could only croak.
But they had heard him, and when their retreat carried them back to the sycamores, they did not plunge back into the river but turned to reload and fight. A brown figure sprinted straight at William, waving a war club. He parried with his sword and the blow of the club wrenched the sword from his blood-slippery hand. As the savage whipped his arm back to deliver the death blow, William punched him between the eyes with his big fist and the Indian caved in.
Some of the troops managed to load and fire here, and a score of Indians tumbled. The rest of the horde dropped into the weeds and behind cover, but kept crawling forward.
“Stand your ground and reload!” William bellowed now. He saw a face coming forward among the weeds, a face with a blue circle painted between the eyebrows. He threw his rifle to his shoulder and put a ball in the blue circle.
He glanced up and down along the river bank while reloading. A few hundred yards upstream, Hall’s men were already retreating across the river in a cloud of gunsmoke, and several of them at that moment were crumpling into the water. Downstream, Colonel Hardin suddenly appeared from the trees, and rode out into the middle of the stream. “Fall back!” he was roaring in a mighty voice. “Back ’cross the river and form up!”
In a moment the river was full of splashing, scrambling militiamen trying to get back to the east bank, desperate to put the river between them and the howling horde. William repeated the command to the men around him, and when they were in the river he stepped off into the water himself. He retreated, sidestepping on the mucky bottom, keeping his rifle on the sycamores. He could see motion among the trees as the savages moved to the bank, but could not get a clear shot at any. Then a fusillade of shots erupted.
Chewp! chewp! chewp!
Balls hit the water around him. One flicked the top of his hat; another pinged on the brass of his sword scabbard.
The watersoaked leather of his leggings weighted his legs as he scrambled out on the bank. Hats floated slowly on the current. Hands reached up out of crimson-stained water and then sank. His men—the few of them who remained—were milling or lying on the bank. “Load up!” he roared. “Here they come!” Now the savages were leaping in the water to come after their quarry, high-stepping through spray, a yodeling mass of painted skin, feathers, and quills, weapons in both hands, mad for victory.
Hardin was riding back and forth now, trying to rally his men and move them upriver toward Hall’s struggling force. “Fish in a barrel, boys!” William yelled, and aimed for an amulet on a brown chest. He squeezed the trigger and was reloading by the time that Indian had sunk. Now his men were doing their business well. Almost every shot found its mark and at least a dozen Indians were slumping or reeling in midriver. Smoke rolled yellow in the sunbeams; ramrods slid down and up; rifle fire roared continuously from the shore, and the river ran blood. The Indians were now stumbling over the floating bodies of their own dead and wounded. Some began to turn and wade back to the west bank. But now Hardin was close by, virtually driving his troops before him. And William could see through the smoke now that the Indians had crossed the river downstream; they were pouring across onto the ground Hardin had vacated. “Up! Up!” Hardin was barking. “Close up with Hall!” His face was strained white, hollow-cheeked as a death’s-head; he was frantic.
And now William could see why. The Indians who had crossed the river were fanning up the east bank, up the slope toward the hazel thickets, outflanking the retreating Kentuckians, trying to compress them into the low ground of the river bottom, encircle them, cut them off before they could reach Hall’s men. Hardin was right; there was nothing to do but retreat up the river, and they would have to fight every step of the way. An army sergeant trotting past William suddenly cried something that sounded like “HUNG!” and dropped his rifle and went knock-kneed. He fell face-down with an arrow through the X where his shoulder straps crossed his back. There were hardly any of the blue-coats to be seen now. There had been eighty of them on the assault; there were only a half-dozen or so still moving. William herded his own men along now, making them move as rapidly as they could while still loading and firing back.
He kept to the right, picking off any Indian he could see trying to get around their flank. Hardin up on his big stallion now seemed to be the main target for all the Indians, and though he appeared to have a charmed life, it was not good to be near him. Several men were nicked by bullets aimed at him. “Colonel!” William shouted at him as the wild-eyed, frothing stallion danced near. “Where’s Colonel McMullen?”
“Decoyed off someplace, the fool son-of-a-bitch!” Hardin snarled. “Left our right flank wide open. HEYAH! HEYAH!” He dug in his spurs, shouting: “HEYAH! Some o’ you idle jackasses
tote them wounded! HEYAH! Don’t leave a livin’ soul for those murderers! HEYAH!”