Long Knife (22 page)

It was about ten o’clock when the boats, with oars muffled
and without lights, began ferrying the men and their weapons across the Kaskaskia River. Few of the men could swim, but many hung to the gunwales and transom of the vessels, to facilitate the ferrying of so many troops in so few small boats. The men then lay low along the muddy riverbank in the darkness almost under the very doors and windows of the town, checking their powder and flintlocks in the damp stillness while the boats returned to bring over more men.

Shortly after midnight the crossing was completed. It had been done so stealthily that not even a dog had been aroused. Most of the lights of the village were out now, but from somewhere near the fort the music could still be heard.

George put Bowman in charge of two companies and sent them out to surround the town, and they vanished into the darkness. George, accompanied by John Sanders and Simon Butler, led the other company straight up through a darkened alley toward the gates of the fort, which stood silent and dark. He sent Butler ahead to reconnoiter the gate. Butler disappeared, silent as a ghost, then returned in ten minutes with the remarkable news that not only was one gate of the fort standing open, there was no sign of a single sentry. The music, he revealed, was coming from a fine private home near the fort, where about two dozen persons were having a dance to the music of fiddles and a flute. There was no sign of Indians within the fort, and the barracks building was dark, he said. George looked at the fort, a black, undefinable silhouette against the stars, looked back to the dark and silent file of frontiersmen who hovered in the alley behind him, then rose and went straight for the gate. There was no sound but the breathing of the nearest men. As the ghostly file passed a yard, a dog came forth to investigate; it gave a short growl, then was mysteriously silenced before it could emit a first bark. The music grew louder now as they approached the large stone house outside the fort.

Arriving at the open door of the lighted house, George halted the column, looked in for a moment at the swirling, laughing dancers, and thought of the countless happy occasions of this sort that he had attended as a young man in Virginia. Then, summoning a few men, he went to the door and stepped in.

A Negro servant leaning on the wall near the door, half asleep, looked up, saw him appear out of the darkness, and, taking a deep breath while his eyes grew large in the light of the chandeliers, gave a wavering, moaning cry which got the attention of the nearest dancers. In a moment the music trailed off in
confused discord and a heavy silence filled the room, broken only by the gasps and murmurs of dancers whose eyes began to turn to this apparition in the doorway. Two women at once put their wrists to their foreheads and tried to swoon on the same fainting couch at the end of the room, resulting in a bit of clumsy confusion there.

George stood for a moment enjoying the incredulous expressions on the faces of the young officers, gentlemen, and ladies, then said to Sanders:

“Tell ’em they may continue their dancing, but to remember that they now dance under the flag of Virginia, not England.” While Sanders announced this in his clumsy French, George sent a few of the half-clad, mud-smeared frontiersmen through the room to collect swords and pistols, then turned to go out. But a handsome, dark-eyed man, who had been standing in the company of two beautiful women, suddenly left them and came forward.

“Sir,” he said in correct but strained English, “several of us here are Spanish citizens from St. Louis, and we are merely guests here of the French. Are we to be detained?”

George looked at the elegant little man, then said: “If you’ll be patient, I’ll attend to your situation. For the moment I must advise you and all the others not to stir from this house, for your safety. Is Chevalier de Rocheblave here, may I ask?”

“He went home not more than an hour ago,” the Spaniard said.

George watched, over the man’s shoulder, the younger of the two women who were with him, and felt a bittersweet pang in his breast. She was dark-eyed, oval-faced, transfixed by terror, but beautiful. He turned, ordered the musicians to continue, and left guards at the doors. He heard the fiddles resume hesitantly as he led his men on to the fort. The troops whispered their amusement as they came ahead in the darkness. Soon he saw the black bulk of the gates looming on either side of him, then knew from the starry space of open sky above him that he was within the compound of the fort.

He sent the men of his company around to infiltrate every corner within the walls, then followed Sanders directly to the house of Rocheblave. A dim light shone in an upstairs window. One hatchet blow opened the doorlatch, and a squad rushed silently into the house. George drew his pistol and mounted the staircase with three men at his heels. Lamplight showed through a door at the end of the upstairs hallway. He stepped into the
room, a lighted bedchamber, in which a middle-aged man and woman, in nightcaps, sat against propped pillows, holding a bed sheet to shield themselves. A huge armoire stood open on each side of the room, one full of hanging uniforms and formal wear, the other of dresses and gowns. Cricket calls filled the room through open windows hung with mosquito cloth.

“Are you the Chevalier de Rocheblave?” George demanded.

The man only nodded, looking into the barrel of the pistol.

“It’s my pleasure to inform you that you’re now a prisoner of war and your town is under the control of the Virginia militia. I’m Colonel George Rogers Clark. This, I presume, is Madame Rocheblave?”

“Of course it is,” croaked the man, whose look of astonishment was giving way to an ashen-faced expression of stark fear and dismay. George, nearly giddy with hunger now that the tension of the approach was past, felt a powerful urge to laugh at the absurd circumstances of the great and terrible Philippe de Rocheblave, but at the same time was moved by pity. What a mortification for a military commander, he thought, to be caught by complete surprise, cowering under a bed sheet. And looking like some gross dame in that silly nightcap! To keep himself from breaking out in hilarity, George went to the open window, leaned out into the night, discharged his pistol, and cried:
“Yaaaa, hooooey! Rocheblave is ours!”

Immediately the night was filled with answering huzzahs and shouts from every corner of the town, and a babble of querying voices could be heard coming from everywhere. Soon the streets were full of the sounds of running men and the rattle and jingle of weaponry. Duff’s French-speaking hunters, in response to George’s signal, were racing through the streets ordering the awakening citizens to stay inside their houses on pain of death. Standing in the window, George grinned with thorough satisfaction and watched the town come alive with lights and cries as if some midnight festival had just begun. Finally he drew himself inside and turned to the speechless couple in the bed, who were contemplating the muzzles of the long rifles trained on them by the naked, hideously grinning woodsmen.

“Now, sir,” he said, “you and Madame will kindly get up and dress. And you had best pack up the necessaries for a long journey.”

“Journey?” Rocheblave asked, while his wife drew the bed sheet tighter around her and looked still more terrified.

“You’ll be going under guard to Williamsburg,” George answered.
“May I assure you, it is a long, long journey.” He thought back quickly over the thousand-mile odyssey which had brought him here to this instant of bloodless victory, and the recollection almost dizzied him. Noticing the panic in Madame de Rocheblave’s eyes now, he added: “You’ll have privacy, Madame. Contrary to whatever you may’ve heard, Virginians are gentlemen. I shall take your weapons, Mister Rocheblave,” he said, lifting the sword and brace of pistols from their peg on the wall. His eye fell on a writing desk which stood in the adjoining room. “I must have your word that you’ll not destroy one scrap of paper. Do I have that?”

“Yes,” muttered the Frenchman, who now pulled off his nightcap, revealing a head of iron-gray hair, thus transforming himself from a comic figure to a formidable, imperious, strong-jawed man.

When George went downstairs and into the yard, he found his men holding at gunpoint the officers of the French garrison, most of them in drawers or shirt-sleeves, doing their poor best to exhibit some semblance of dignity. “Put them in chains,” he said. “I’ll deal with them later.”

Going to the gate, he looked down the main street and saw by the light of torches and lanterns that his troops were staging their occupation of the town with all the sense of drama he could have hoped for, and more. They ranged up and down the streets half-clad, scratched, filthy, bewhiskered, rifles in one hand, tomahawks in the other, glancing about with a kind of depraved, ferocious, wolfish authority which was thoroughly intimidating to any townspeople who dared come out to their street gates or stay at their open doors and windows. As ordered, the troops were refusing to converse with those few inhabitants who had the courage to come to the street and try to speak with them, and soon even those shrank from the wild, glowering eyes of the raiders and withdrew from the streets. Children could be heard crying, women simpering; soon all the citizens had retreated into their homes, apparently to ponder their fates; doors and shutters were being closed and latched everywhere. Good, George thought. We shall let their imaginations work on them for a while. They’ll be begging for their lives by morning, I’ll wager.

Captain Bowman arrived in a few minutes, and George sat at the table in Rocheblave’s parlor with him, reviewing a plan by which Bowman would acquire horses, take about thirty mounted men the next day and capture the smaller towns to the
north, Prairie du Rocher, St. Philippe, and Cahokia. He would use a tactic similar to this one which had succeeded so well at Kaskaskia. “You’ll need to effect total surprise as we did here,” George said, “so you’ll have to leave in the morning. There’ll be no time for rest before you go. I’m sorry. I don’t know how the men have stayed on their feet this far.”

Joseph Bowman shook his head and clucked instead of answering.

“To keep the alarm from getting ahead to those places,” George continued, “take prisoner anybody you encounter along the road. White men or Indians either.”

“I understand that,” Bowman agreed.

“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think Mister Rocheblave has had enough time to get ready up there.”

When he opened the door of the bedroom, he smelled smoke and found a guilty-looking Rocheblave and his wife huddled over a plate full of ashes. Drawing his sword in a rage, he forced the Frenchman to the wall and held him there with the swordpoint pressing his abdomen. With his left hand he fingered the ashes of what had been a quantity of papers. “By God,” he hissed. “If the word of a French gent is so worthless, Heaven help us! I should run you through right now!” Rocheblave broke out in a sweat and looked as if he were expecting to die, while his wife began wailing. “Lieutenant,” George called to one of his aides. “Put this ‘honorable’ polecat of a French lord in two suits of chains. So much as an unkindly glance from him should earn him a rifle ball straightway between his eyes. I’ll decide at daylight whether to let him live or die.” He whipped the sword away, slashing open Rocheblave’s silken waistcoat, grabbed the gasping Frenchman’s shirt-front and nearly jerked him off his feet, throwing him into the grasp of the lieutenant, then turned contemptuously from him. “You, Madame, who have the misfortune to be mated to such a scoundrel, you have my sympathy.”

“He did not violate his word, m’sieur!” she cried with an imperious toss of her head. “I burned the papers!”

George glared at her in anger and admiration. “Go with him,” he said finally. “I want you both out of my sight before I lose control of myself and hang him from the rafters by his own guts!”

I
N THE GRAY LIGHT BEFORE DAWN
, G
EORGE WALKED DOWN THE
main street, viewing the circumstances of his men and the captive
town. He sensed the eyes of the townspeople peering out at him through cracks in the closed shutters. His men, posted at intervals along the street, leaned on their guns, silent, emaciated, some of them swaying with hunger and exhaustion, but each grinned proudly at him as he passed. Others kept moving up and down the streets in squads, as he had ordered, constantly prowling, to give the impression that the force numbered in hundreds. In his tour of five blocks, he encountered the same squads two and three times, and each time they winked and leered at him as cunningly as so many foxes. Starved though they were, not one had entered any house to pillage a single pantry. By the time he returned to his command post at Rocheblave’s house, his heart was in his throat and he was close to laughter, or tears, or both.

Duff made arrangement with two American traders in the town to supply meat, bread, and fruit to the fort; by the time the sun was above the bluff on the other side of the Kaskaskia River, makeshift tables in the yard of Rocheblave’s house were heaped with food, and the frontiersmen came through in orderly details to be fed for the first time in nearly four strenuous days. They ate standing in the yard, joking, exclaiming over the heavenly flavors, and accepting their colonel’s praise in shuffling embarrassment. By mid-morning he had thanked each man individually.

And to substantiate the illusion of numbers he was trying to create, his men ate enough for a thousand.

C
APTAIN
H
ELM CAME IN BEAMING AS
G
EORGE SAT READING THE
documents that Rocheblave had not had time to destroy. “These folks is in a perfect state of confusion,” he said. “There’s a delegation of their old men at the gate now to beg fer mercy. They’s a-cowerin’ behind th’ skirts of a little scarecrow priest. They say they’ll be our slaves if we’ll jes’ let ’em live. Hee, hee! We got some reputation in these parts, George. If you was t’ walk down there an’ say shit they’d all squat right in th’ street!”

George thought for a moment. “I think they ought to stew a little longer. But bring them up. I want to get a look at this delegation. Judging by some of this correspondence, they ought not be too hard to sway to our cause at all.”