Long Knife (17 page)

Reaching the bottom of the page, he sprinkled it with sand to dry the ink, funneled the sand back into its jar, drew forth another sheet of paper, dipped the quill and continued:

He paused, wiped the pen, thought, sighed, and then refreshed the pen and added:

Why should I keep making this apology, he thought angrily, rising from his chair and stalking about with his fists on his hips. If we did not hire the Indians, the bloody rebels would have overrun the Ohio Valley like ants by now! But those things need to be said, as long as Abbot goes on trying to shame our use of the tribes.

By God, if the Indians weren’t raiding the settlements for our benefit, they’d be doing it for their own, to preserve their country from those land-greedy Yankees.

And who is to say the Americans themselves would not be using the Indians against us, if we couldn’t afford to pay them better, he thought with grim satisfaction. The Indians know well the poverty of the bloody rebels! He returned to his desk. He had had this argument with himself countless times. And every time, he had been able to rationalize it to his satisfaction.

The simple truth is, he thought as he took up his quill again, I alone have had to bear the responsibility for keeping the rebellion under control here in these parts, and, by Jove, I am doing it.

Let him who could do better condemn my method!

B
EFORE DAWN
, G
EORGE
R
OGERS
C
LARK WAS AWAKENED BY A VARIETY
of itchings, predominant among them being clusters of mosquito-bite swellings in the skin of his wrists and around his collarbones. Eyes still closed, he worried the bites with his fingernails, each deliciously, maddeningly tingling until it was scratched into submission. The Falls rushed in his ears; birds were beginning to twitter; men snored. He opened his eyes. It was still dark, but a gray-pearly softening of the night was beginning. In his nostrils was a commixture of wood-smoke from the smoldering fires, river mud, tang of fresh-cut hardwoods, flower perfume, and, when he moved in his blanket, the warm stale stink of his own body, which he had not had time to bathe for days. This condition, he presumed, was giving rise to some of his other itches, which ranged from his feet to his groin and scalp.

Tugging out the pouch he had used as a pillow, he groped in it for his lump of soap and a folded change of linen and stockings. He rose silently from his dew-damp blanket, made his way among the forms of the sleeping officers, went down to the riverbank, shushed a sentry who sat draped in a blanket with his long rifle across his knees, pissed on the ground, stripped, and went into the water. It was warmer than the morning air and its current tugged at him. He held his footing on the mossy slick bottom, stooped to submerge himself, shivering and exhilarated. He washed out his dirty linen and threw it ashore. He went into the deep water again to rinse off the soap, and lolled in the current as the morning light strengthened, and watched river-mist tumble in a breeze. For a few minutes he was enthralled by the simple wholeness of this moment, the animal contentment, the disregard of effort and consequence. He remembered a hot summer
day before Dunmore’s War when, passing time with a small party of Mingoes, he had sat smoking with the braves while squaws and children bathed naked nearby in a pebble-bottomed pool. Through that entire day his mind had been drugged by a primitive sense of suspended time, seduced from any thought of the surveying, clearing, or planting to be done, immersed in one boundless moment, driven by nothing. That idyll came into his mind as a picture now, then faded, leaving only poignancy and vague voluptuous yearnings. He heard a horse neighing softly down at the picket post on the Kentucky shore. Then he waded out and sluiced the water off his skin with the edges of his hands. He pulled back his hair and knotted it, let his hard body dry in the air, feeling like an inseparable element of the wild riverscape itself, then dressed and went back to the camp. When you’re naked, he thought, it is only now. Clothes are the uniforms of time.

The officers were still sleeping. There was Helm, his hat over his face as a shield against the night damp; there was Joseph Bowman, curled on his side; there was his brother, John Bowman, hair lank with dew, breathing in long rumbles. There …

George paused, noticing that the bed of flattened leaves where Lieutenant Hutchings had been sleeping was empty; there was not even any bedding there. Would he have gone down to sleep near his men? George wondered about that, and then noticed that Captain Dillard’s blanket had been thrown back and was empty. Hutchings and Dillard were members of the same contingent, and George felt a sudden, unexplainable rush of suspicion; he recalled dimly now a moment of uneasiness during the rum-enhanced excitement of the night before: Hutchings and some of the men in that contingent drawing aside into the shadows, looking darkly at him as he glanced at them. The moment had been too slight to dampen his exuberance but now the memory of it seemed full of portent.

Walking with soft tread but swiftly toward the west end of the encampment where that detachment was bedded, wading through a miasma of sleepers’ breath, he was startled by the sudden appearance of Captain Dillard, who was rushing wild-eyed toward him. Dillard stopped before him, expressions of surprise, fear, then guilt fleeting in succession across his face. Before he could gather his wits to speak, a scrawny woodsman with no front teeth ran up behind him, then stopped and drew himself to an agitated stance of attention when he saw the commander. George felt a rush of anger and impatience.

“Well, damn you, speak, man!” he roared.

“Oh, God, Colonel, I’m mortified!” Dillard burst out, looking as if he might cry. “They’s up and went! Hutchings took ’em, that weasel! He …”

“Hutchings, you say!” Even with the rage and frustration pouring through him, George was appalled at himself for having made such a misjudgment of the young officer. “By God, I’ll have his guts for garters, if I find him! How many went?”

“I don’t …”

“About twenty, sahr,” interjected the skinny militiaman. “I jest took a muster. Some stayed.”

“But damn them! We can’t spare twenty! We can’t spare a bloody one!” It was all he could do to speak through his rage. Twenty men deserted, out of this pitifully small excuse for an army! “How in blazes did they get away?” He had thought this island in fast waters deep in the wilderness would make desertion impossible; he had chosen it with that as well as its other attributes in mind.

“They found a wadin’ place down yonder,” the woodsman answered, pointing downstream. “Yestiddy when they was a-bathin’ …”

George was aware now of stirring and movement all about. Troops were awakening, propping themselves on elbows to hear this intriguing exchange. Some of them, doubtless, had entertained similar thoughts of leaving upon hearing last night of the formidable and dubious mission ahead of them in the remote western distances, this incredible mission into which, they might rightfully argue, they had been tricked. For a moment George simply did not know what he could do.

“Some of ’em … eh, some of ’em,” Dillard whined, as if trying to salvage what honor he could out of this betrayal, “… some of ’em wouldn’t go …”

“Is their trail cold?” George demanded. “When did they go?”

“Hanged if I know. I run down there when I woke an’ saw Hutchings’ bed gone. Before daylight sometime. No sentry saw or heard anything …”

“Go wake Colonel Bowman and the others. Tell John we’ve got to borrow their horses. Never mind, I’ll tell them.” As he issued orders, he turned and strode toward the place where the officers were. Troops rising from their blankets were murmuring the rumor excitedly among themselves.

“By God,” George snapped at Dillard, “any we catch that won’t come back peaceably will be shot where they stand!”

As a party of twenty picked men thundered up the bluff into Kentucky on the borrowed horses, the rest of the force was summoned to an assembly around the same platform where they had so exuberantly received their orders the night before. Now they looked bewildered, scared, some sullen, as they stood puffy-eyed and rumpled under the blistering stare of their leader. They knew what the blaze of murder looked like in a man’s eyes, and they recognized it now.

“I’ll say this short and absolute for any here as might be doubtful,” he began in a hard voice that cracked open the dawn. “A small and despicable company of cowards has sneaked off in the night, to avoid their duty. They are a crew of filthy squaws, not fit to be among men of purpose. Tell me what you think of that, now!”

“Aye,” came their muttered reply. They seemed a half-hearted lot now.

“If there are any more such squaws here who think they’re privileged to desert their country now or after and leave the fighting to the men, let them come one at a time and try to walk past me! Any who can and will is then free to go. If I stop him, he can swear his allegiance to this task and his folly will be forgot.” He stared around. “Do I have any comers?” He felt at this moment so charged with the power of fury that he could dispatch five men at a time.

Several big men shifted their positions tentatively, but fell to examining their fingernails or the branches overhead when his eye struck them. Then a familiar voice came from behind him, a snarling brawl.

“Beg to ask, Cunnel, but don’t y’admit we was summat tricked?”

George whirled on him. It was Sergeant Crump.

“You again! All right, Crump, do I take this to mean you’ll try to leave?”

Crump hesitated; it was obvious that he had meant only to voice a thought that had been in many minds. Now he found himself directly challenged, though, and rather than back all the way down, he straightened up and said, “Wal, suh …”

George saw through his own anger suddenly and realized that he had put Crump on a spot he did not really deserve to be on; Crump surely was not the sort who would have deserted. But he was not the sort to back down from a challenge, either. George realized this now, and regretted that he would have to bait Crump, but he needed an object right now to make an important
point to the whole troop, and Crump was the ideal object: he was brawny and formidable; he had spoken up before and he had spoken up now. If this expedition was to be held together and succeed in what lay before it, Crump would have to be made an example for the lesson of discipline.

George leaped down from the platform and advanced like a hungry cat on Crump.

The sergeant looked astonished for a moment, then his heavy black brows knotted in anger. George pressed on:

“Are you going to try to get through me, Crump? If y’are, then make your move!”

Crump turned his head slightly to one side to look at George warily through the sides of his eyes. He had no real idea what the full consequence of doing personal battle with a militia commander might be, and the situation was being unfolded on him faster than he could think about it. But he had been on the brink of his very life more than once, and was not one to shrink away from a provocation. He held up one palm toward the lithe red-haired officer before him. “I better warn you, Cunnel, when I git cornered, I’ll chaw th’ ears right off a bear!”

“Me too, Mister Crump. And you’ve defied me one time too many. Have at it, man!” George took a deep breath and prepared to move harder and faster than he ever had. There was a great risk involved here, he knew full well, not just for himself but for the entire expedition, perhaps for the preservation of the Kentucky frontier; Crump was indeed one of the fiercest creatures George had ever seen on two legs.

Crump suddenly handed his rifle to the man next to him, crouched, and hurled himself across the five feet of distance between them, hands reaching like grappling hooks.

George dodged to one side and brought both fists, one clenched inside the other, up in a mighty blow which thudded into the side of Crump’s hurtling torso. It was like hitting a falling tree, but it did knock a loud grunt out of Crump. He landed on his hands and knees and was instantly back on his feet, but he was staggering and he had the round glassy eyes of a fish.

George stepped forward to finish him off with a gathered-up blow to the middle, but even as he threw it, Crump was coming at him through the air again and in the next instant George found himself straining to stand up under a huge, hard, sweat-stinking, tobacco-reeking, groping, bellowing, struggling wild man. One of the sergeant’s merciless arms snaked around his neck and clamped down; George saw red and yellow blazes behind
his eyes, could not breathe, and thought his head was going to be torn off in that instant.

But something told him that he must stay on his feet as long as he was alive, or everything he was trying to gain with these men would be as good as gone.

So, refusing to buckle under Crump’s weight and what seemed like twenty of Crump’s gouging hands, elbows and knees, strangling in that great crooked arm, George kept Crump’s feet off the ground and ran with all his remaining strength in the direction where he thought the platform stood.