Long Knife (15 page)

“Will,” he said, “d’you reckon you could fold up this camp by sunup tomorrow?”

“Humph. I could quit this mud hole in twenty minutes. Where to?”

George again emptied the cup, and banged it down on Smith’s field table.

“Corn Island!”

T
HE RAIN WAS GONE, THE SUN WAS HOT, THE RIVER WAS RUNNING
high and swift, when George Rogers Clark, bending over the gunwale to scoop up a hatful of drinking water, tensed suddenly and listened to verify the sound he thought he had heard.

It could have been just the wind in the trees. No one else seemed to have noticed anything yet; perhaps he thought he was hearing it only because he knew he should be hearing it soon. He sat up, drank, then listened and detected it again, he was certain: under the hushing of the wind, a deeper sound, like very distant thunder, now growing louder, sustained, uninflected. And the water did now seem to be running more swiftly. He
reached back and put a hand on Captain Bowman’s arm, awakening him from a hat-shaded snooze.

“The Falls!” George cried. “Pagan, get toward that left shore!”

“Larboard she goes, sor!” Pagan answered, and Jonas Manifee’s nasal laugh rang out, followed by: “Weigh th’ mainyard jivits! Blow me down! Blow me down!”

George drew from his packet a homemade map, and laid it out on the bow of the boat, weighted down with his pistol, to consult it one more time before the dangerous approach to the rapids. There was excitement in the boats now as the roar of the waters ahead grew audible and the boats bore in toward the south shore. Few of the men could swim, and perhaps in every man’s mind there was a vision of being swept in the laden boats over a great waterfall. George found his own heart beating fast and high.

The river, here running almost due west, curved northwestward ahead, and as the boats swung into the bend the broad stream took on a strange aspect; the left half of it seemed to run straight up against a forest; the right seemed to drop out of sight as if going over a great sill. On the map there showed, in the outer edge of the bend, an island shaped rather like a long mitten, nearly half as wide as the river itself; the northern half of the stream fell away in a long, complex chute of rapids, which a note on the map said was about three miles long. That forest wall, he thought, must be Corn Island. As the boats drew nearer, he could now see mist and white water beyond the lip of the Falls. To get into the water north of the island obviously would mean being carried helpless over the Falls and through a three-mile maelstrom of churning chutes and channels. The safe way obviously had to be a landing on the southeast corner of the island, about a hundred yards off the south bank of the river.

The boats now glided toward that point. The rapids roared between the bluffs on both sides of the river. The island lay low alongside the Kentucky shore, but obviously was high enough never to be inundated. All the officers and the men not engaged in rowing now crouched forward in tense and excited attitudes; it was an intimidating scene of grandeur and natural power.

The men laughed and shouted with relief when the boats swung at last into the lee of the island and the terrible Falls were obscured beyond its green woods. The boats reached shore in calm water and were tied up.

The island was not quite a mile long and about five hundred
yards wide at its greatest breadth, separated from the Kentucky shore by a few yards of swift but smooth water. George led his officers in a hurried exploration around the island on foot, stopping on the north shore to study the great rapids, which seemed to be formed by the river’s flow over a limestone escarpment some twenty feet high.

At a place where the forest gave way onto a heavy growth of cane, he stepped off the site of a stockade. Smoothing a patch of the rich black earth with his moccasin, he then bent and drew in the dirt with his knife point a plan similar to the fort at Boonesboro, but smaller. “Each of the long sides will comprise three barracks buildings,” he said. “At this end there will be two buildings for the families, with the stockade gate between them. The entire rectangle will be enclosed in palisades of upright logs, sharpened at the tops. We shall begin felling trees immediately and start building the cabins tomorrow. I suggest we draw up our guard details and work parties at once.”

He slipped his long knife into its sheath, stood up amid his officers, looked at the distant bluish bluffs which stood high beyond the waving heads of the cane stalks, and listened to the voices of the militiamen and the steady rush of the Falls. An excellent place someday for mills, he thought, with all this falling water. The ground was dappled with dancing sunlight which angled through the quivering foliage. Overhead, puffs of light-limned cloud sailed up the valley. George took a deep breath. “Well, gentlemen, we are here. We are on land after these leagues of floating, and I must ask, have you ever seen a more picturesque and benign place?”

They grinned and looked around. Leonard Helm scratched his sweaty chest through the open collar of his shirt. “Y’d have to take care not t’ git too contented here,” he said, casting a sly glance aside at George. “Not if we’re supposed t’ to be gittin’ on, as I suspects we are.”

He’s fishing for those secret orders, George thought. I cannot put off telling them any longer. “We’ve about five hours of daylight left,” he said. “We’ve less than a third the manpower we expected, so we shall need to work ’em three times as hard. We’ll want as many trees dropped and trimmed as we can get today. Tonight we’ll gather the men right here for a big feed and powwow, and it’s then I’ll tell them what you’ve all been beggin’ to know: I mean our mission.” The officers all tried to speak at once, but George raised a hand. “When we picked up Smith’s recruits, I sent runners up to Harrodsburg and Leesburg
and those places, asking their leaders to ride down and meet us here. I should like to have them here when I announce. If they aren’t here by tonight, I shall tell the men anyway. But I hope they’ll arrive.” He looked at Bill Harrod and Joseph Bowman, clasped his hands behind his back, and smiled. “It has been a long time since I saw your big brothers, boys. I tell you, I have the fondest hopes they’ll come down. Now, gents, I want to hear this place ring with the sounds of industry for the next few hours. Bill, there’s deer on this island, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those Nimrods o’ yours could bag tonight’s banquet without even going ashore. If you’d put a few on that, please.”

To George’s surprise, the men did not complain about having to work out the rest of the day. Relieved to be out of the confining boats and off the monotony of rowing, inspirited by the magnificent place where they now found themselves, they fell to in high spirits. Soon the island was resounding with the solid
chunk … chunk
of axes in hardwood, cheers, yells of warning, the great crackling rush and thump of falling trees, the
thud, thud, thud
, of mauls on splitting wedges, the sonorous and rhythmic ripping of two-man ripsaws. At the west end of the island, where the game animals had fled from this noisy invasion and were trying to swim or wade the narrow channel to shore, hunters’ rifles cracked periodically. George went among the working parties, watched the skillful broadax handlers straddle huge logs, squaring them into timbers as easily as whittlers; he saw sinewy men with razor-sharp axes lop the limbs off fallen poplars and ashes. He smelled the tang of fresh oak chips and the delicious aroma of sassafras sawdust. Here a ten-year-old boy swung a mallet, driving eight-inch lengths of split hickory through the sharp-edged hole in a small anvil to make the pegs which had to suffice here on the frontier where nails could not be had. “A good tune yo’re beating there, Dickie,” George smiled. The lad was Dick Lovell, an orphan he had found at Redstone and enlisted as the regimental drummer. The boy beamed, and pounded another peg through the hole.

A few feet away a one-legged old man, an elder in one of the families, sat on a log and deftly sharpened axes and saws and augers with a variety of files and stones, while a butterfly with iridescent blue-black wings stood on his hat folding and unfolding, as oblivious to the man’s labors as he was to its presence. Dust-motes swirled in the leaning afternoon sunbeams, and pungent
steam billowed near the shore where women had set up kettles to boil long-unwashed garments.

George summoned Private Butler, who had returned from hunting, and went with him to the north shore of the island.

“What is the channel, Si?”

Butler pointed his long arm straight upstream and cleared his throat elaborately. “Wal, suh, you have t’ paddle up th’ river ’bout a mile fust, an’ it’s a hard row. Then you ’proach t’ ’bout two hunnerd yards o’ th’ north bank. That gits you inter the proper channel fur enough up from th’ Falls. Then y’ turn around quick an’ come fast, stayin’ ’bout a couple hunnerd yards offshore. Y’row a-hellin’, t’ keep from gittin’ sideways, an’ y’ beeline f’r that gap thar—y’ see th’ white water ’bout halfway crost? You dassn’t miss it—an’ go inter that, an’ hang onter y’r hat, suh, cause hit’s like th’ world falls out from under you. Then y’ go asplooshin’ an’ asplashin’ mebbe five hunnerd yards, abearin’ sorta right toward the shore, t’ avoid that big knob-rock y’ see down thar, go smooth another half-mile er so, astayin’ in that northerest channel thar; then that drops you through another chute o’ white water right under yon high bluff-point, see it? At th’ bottom o’ that, they’s a big ol’ churnin’ eddy that y’ have to ride out of, an’ y’ do that by tryin’ t’ row right at th’ foot o’ th’ Falls. Th’ current will carry you then straight inter th’ last funnel; you sort of fall through that for a long spell, an’ then th’ river jest sort of spits y’ out slick as a cherry pit inter the smooth water below, an’ ye’re home safe. Soaked through, prob’ly, but safe.” After that long discourse, Butler had to spit into the river, and his gob headed off toward the Falls. George looked at him, retraced by eye the channel he had described, then looked at him again, took off his hat, and rubbed his forehead with his fingertips. He cleared his throat, then said:

“As simple as that, eh?”

Butler grinned, nodded, and spat again into the river.

“Well,” George went on, “would you say that boatloads of troops could make it down that route without spilling?”

Butler gave him a thoughtful sideways look, then gazed back down over the roaring waters. “Wal, suh, some o’ them likely might spill in th’r drawers. But a loaded boat would go through thar, yes, suh. If th’ helmsman knows how t’ git inter that gap thar, an’ the water’s runnin’ high like t’day. Yup. It would be possible.”

“I thank you, Si. Now, promise me you won’t tell any of the men about our conversation here?”

Butler gazed at him through his canny light blue eyes, and shifted his quid to the other cheek. “Certainly, Cunnel.” He grinned and grunted, looked over the rampaging rapids, and shook his head. “They wouldn’t b’lieve y’re thinkin’ ’bout such a thing nohow. Heh!”

C
OLONEL
J
OHN
B
OWMAN
, J
OE’S BROTHER, APPEARED ON THE
south bank on horseback before sunset; with him were James Harrod, the founder of Harrodsburg, and a score of gentlemen and leaders from the Kentucky frontier settlements. They picketed their horses and were ferried across to the island, where they enjoyed a maudlin, back-thumping reunion with their brothers and friends, and gulped cup after cup of rum taffia as the sun descended in the spume of the Falls and the entire island seemed to ripen in an enchanting, cross-lighted glow of warm gold.

George, warm and expansive with rum, led the officers and gentlemen away to the north shore where he had stood with Private Butler a few hours before, seated himself with them on the bank, the thunder of the Falls behind him, the laughter and voices of his little army audible from the center of the island, and read and explained Governor Henry’s secret orders, then sat and awaited their reactions.

They were silent at first, looking at him with ruddy faces that could not mask their astonishment. Then they began to stir with excitement and eagerness, and agreed that the plan, if carried out in total surprise, could be successful. John Bowman, like his brother a man of eerie indigo eyes, made it clear at once that he was not enthusiastic. Several of the gentlemen exchanged glances. John Bowman’s jealousy of George was well known. “I worry for the small size of your army,” he growled, “and it pains me I can’t spare a man for you.”

“We didn’t expect
you
could, John,” drawled Jim Harrod. “But, by Jove, if you can do it, George, the salvation of Kentucky is in reach!”

Among those who seemed particularly agitated by the prospects of the raid was a fine-looking young lieutenant named Hutchings, from Smith’s contingent. He said nothing, but his whipstock of a body seemed to strain with eagerness and his intelligent face fairly shone with excitement. That one, George
thought, might well make a special mark in this campaign. I’ll watch him.

At twilight, in the new clearing which would become the parade ground of the fort but was as yet only trampled earth littered with woodchips and leaves and studded with fresh stumps, stacked logs, and half-hewn timbers, a huge bonfire blazed, its flames leaping ten feet high; around it, sitting, standing, lounging against tree trunks, even perched in the branches of trees at the clearing’s edge, more than a hundred and fifty men were gathered. They drank their ration of rum, laughed, told tall tales, and sang in small groups, waiting for Colonel Clark to come out and say what it was he had assembled them to hear. Davey Pagan had produced a hornpipe out of his shirt and was playing a jig for a small group of stomping, whooping dancers. But they had rowed and worked hard all day and soon flopped to the ground, laughing, and Pagan returned the pipe into his shirt. From a sentry-post fire on the shoreward side of the island a jew’s-harp faintly buzzed and twanged. Near the big fire a fifer then drew his fife out from his knapsack and began playing sweet, nonmilitary airs, home songs full of longing, and the crowd of tired men was subdued and mellow when George came out to speak to them. He mounted a platform made of raw new planks fastened on barrelheads, the officers standing on the ground around him, waited for complete stillness, and then began: