Long Knife (51 page)

H
ENRY
H
AMILTON WAS UNEASY, AND COULD NOT QUITE EXPLAIN
why. He stalked about in his headquarters, now and then sitting down at the hearth and sipping brandy. The evening had come down dry and cold, the kind of bracing weather that usually gave him a sense of well-being. But tonight his heart seemed to keep rising in anxiety. Perhaps it was the failure of LaMothe and Maisonville to return with some report on the mysterious fires downstream. Or that strange, unexplained bustling about
that had taken place in the town that afternoon. Sentries had reported that for a few minutes everybody in the town had been in the streets, then had vanished back into their homes; yet not a word of explanation had come to the fort.

The orderly knocked and opened the door. “Sir, Captain Helm requests permission to see you.”

“Ah, good!” said Hamilton. “Have him brought around.” Maybe that genial old reprobate will dispel these spirits, he thought. And make me one of his great toddies for this cold night.

Helm entered, looking even more smug than usual.

“Good evening, Captain. What brings you here tonight?”

“Just payin’ my respects, Mister Hamilton, and compliments on th’ fine work you’ve done repairin’ this fort.”

“Thank you. Thank you very much indeed. Quite an improvement over the ramshackle thing it was when you commanded it, eh?”

“Aye, that it is, and we appreciate it. It’ll save us a great deal of labor and expense.”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow you, Captain.”

“Wal, surely, Mister Hamilton, sir, you don’t think we’re a-gonna let you keep it.”

Hamilton laughed. “Oh, that again, is it? You amuse me, Mister Helm, with your absurd faith in that boy colonel of yours. Well, would you care to fix us one of your lovely toddies, mine fond enemy?”

“Honored! Honored!” Helm bustled to the sideboard, humming happily like some old servant, and clinked among the glasses and decanters. He shook cloves and cinnamon bark from two porcelain jars into mugs. Then he came to the fireplace and stuck two irons in the fire’s embers. He sat by the fire, took the kettle off the iron swing-arm and poured hot water into the mugs. He stirred in the honey, stuck a red-hot iron hissing into each cup, gave Hamilton his cup, smiling and humming all the while, then held his own cup up for a toast. They clicked the vessels. “Success to Colonel Clark,” Helm proposed.

“Blast your lights, you old sot. I’ll drink to no such thing.”

“As you will.” Helm sipped, then sat looking about at no particular place in the room, leaning slightly forward in an attentive position. Hamilton finally laughed at him.

“You’re a bloody imp this evening, Mr. Helm. What the devil are you listening to, the song of the leprechauns?”

Outside, a gunshot banged.

“That,” Helm said, grinning and raising his cup again.

Four more shots were heard. General Hamilton cocked his head and looked askance at the window, still half smiling. “That?” he said. “Likely a party of the savages welcoming themselves home. They often do that, as you know. Or perhaps some frolic in the village.” He sipped his toddy and shifted uneasily in his chair.

“Wal, General, I’ll not argue with you. You’re in command here. For th’ moment, anyways.”

There were shouts in the compound now, and as Hamilton rose to his feet scowling and reached for his cape and hat, there was a sharp
smack
as something hit the chimney, and mortar sifted down into the flames. As Hamilton opened the door, Leonard Helm went into gales of laughter. To the orderly, who stood bent half out of his chair, eyes wide in alarm, the general snapped, “Put that old fool back in his quarters.” Then he stepped out into the cold, purple-gray twilight. British redcoats and French militiamen were scurrying over the parade ground in confusion, some mounting the parapets, carrying their muskets. Gunners were climbing to the blockhouses, on whose second floors stood the garrison’s artillery.

What the devil is this? Hamilton wondered as he hurried toward one of the blockhouses. He could hear an uproar of whooping and laughter outside the walls. He couldn’t believe the fort was under attack, and was growing indignant at the thought of this disturbance which, he was sure, stemmed from someone’s drunken exuberance and would have to be punished severely, whether the culprit was Frenchman or Indian.

“Man the pieces!” he roared at the milling troops. “But hold fire until I know …”

He was interrupted by a scream of pain. A sergeant, lighting his fuse-match near the firing port of the cannon, caught a rifle ball in the chest, reeled out the blockhouse door and fell off the parapet, his body thumping to the gravel a few feet from General Hamilton. A shiver of awe spilled down the general’s flanks as he stood looking at the twitching victim and heard the frightened shouts of the other soldiers who had witnessed this.

He rushed up the ramp to the parapet and peered out through a firing loophole into the early night. In the shadows among the dim houses and barns of the village, muzzle flashes winked and sparkled, the sporadic crackling and roar of rifles swept to and fro, and bloodthirsty howls and wailing laughter filled the air. The nearest houses were about two hundred yards from the fort,
but the balls were hitting the palisade with intimidating precision, making their resounding
thwacks
or whistling mere inches overhead. When a ball thrummed through the loophole like a bumblebee and left its breath on his right ear, General Hamilton realized that he was silhouetted against the evening’s red afterglow in the tiny porthole and quickly decided he had seen enough of the enemy’s activity for the moment; he ducked away from the opening bathed in cold sweat and shouted:

“Return their fire! Gunners, rake those buildings!”

Soon the musket fire from the fort began banging, more resonant here within, against the distant crackling of the enemy’s weapons. Then there was a flash of yellow-red from the nearest blockhouse and the roar of a four-pounder, followed immediately by another, and another, and the hearty shouts of the British gunners. The acrid sulphuric smell of gunpowder rankled like snuff in his nose, stimulating him as it always did, and momentarily his dread solidified into a happy, clearminded ferocity. He thought of Leonard Helm’s mockery, and wondered how Helm had learned of this before the fact. It could be his friend Clark out there, Hamilton thought, though
I
don’t see how he could have come here. But whoever it is, and whatever he has in mind, he’ll find that he’s dealing with Englishmen, not Creoles, this time.

At that moment, another of his English gunners yelled in pain and fell back from the palisade, his collarbone broken by a rifle ball that had whistled in through the embrasure.

Damn it! Hamilton thought. Where’s LaMothe with his volunteers? We’re going to need every man we have.

The British regimental surgeon trotted to Hamilton across the parade, huffing and blowing, eyes wild.
“I
just made it in through the gate,” he exclaimed.

“I’m glad you’re here, Doctor McBeath. I’m afraid we’re going to need you.”

“I was in the village when the shooting began,” panted the surgeon. “The lady of the house told me Colonel Clark has arrived from the Illinois with an army of at least five hundred.” Two cannon in the blockhouses boomed.

“Clark, eh? That’s hardly credible. But never mind that, Doctor. Have the wounded moved into my quarters, out of this cold, and attend to them.”

And another soldier yelped and spun to the ground.

I
T WAS REMARKABLE THAT THEY WERE EVEN ON THEIR FEET
. B
UT
they were, and they were doing with a fervid eagerness everything
George needed done, and it seemed that he well might have more of a problem holding them back than driving them forward.

They’re like wolves, he thought, made even more reckless and determined by their starvation.

He knew, from his own state, that they all were in an almost disembodied frame of mind from hunger and suffering, that clear-eyed and dauntless condition which he knew the Indians sometimes attained through deliberate fasting. They all seemed to be beyond fear or pain now, and he was certain that any one of them was worth ten British soldiers in this fight.

They had secured the town without firing a shot and now had surrounded the garrison completely. They had found natural cover behind houses, garden walls, ditches, and the riverbanks. Some of the woodsmen moved forward in the darkness and set up breastworks of logs and old timbers within twenty or thirty yards of the fort’s walls, so close that the cannon muzzles could not be depressed enough to fire on them, and from this range they could put almost every shot right through a firing port or embrasure. The cannon belched smoke and fire over their heads as the night deepened, shattering a few walls and outbuildings, but so far not one of the Americans or their partisans had been wounded. The British soldiers on the walls poured out musketry as if powder and ball were inexhaustible, and their shots went whining and cracking everywhere but never found flesh. The Americans had found or made such good cover that they were almost as well protected as anyone within the fort. George knew he could not afford to lose men, and so had admonished his officers not to let them grow careless of themselves.

The hoarded supply of powder and lead turned over by Messieurs Bosseron, LeGras, and Gibault was, to George’s mind, another of those small miracles that had come to his aid throughout this expedition. Marching on the town at sunset, with most of his ammunition still aboard the absent galley and the rest somewhat deteriorated by the conditions of the march, he had not expected to have firepower to spare. But when his allies had greeted him with the great cache, giving him the luxury of sustained fusillade, the effectiveness of his sharpshooters was vastly increased. A hail of rifle balls would riddle any spot where an Englishman showed his head, and it was not long before the British firing was nearly silenced.

At this time the woodsmen began to play with their enemy.

“Hey, laddies,” one would cry toward the fort in that maddeningly
insolent tone that only an American hill man can produce, “stick yer arse up, an’ I’ll wager I can put a ball through it without makin’ another hole!”

“Hey in there! How about Mister Hamilton’s scalp, in trade fer th’ one you took off my daughter?”

“Aye, you cowardly redcoat scuts! You dare come out from behind yer Indians an’ meet a Kentuckian face to face?”

“Come out, you boneless buggers! Come on out! Come on, God blast you, an’ have a taste o’ long knife!”

“Hi bully boy! I’ll snip off yer family jewels, if y’ have any!”

“Here’s the answer to your dumb ballyraggin’!” a voice would cry back from the fort; an embrasure would be thrown open and a cannon flash fire, but before its ball could even crash into the rubble, a dozen Kentucky rifles would be fired through the embrasure and a British gunner would spin away with an ear shot off or a ball through his shoulder.

And so this deadly riposte of word and gunshot continued into the night. Sometimes a volley of fire would come from one corner of the town, then stop instantly and a volley of nasal laughter would come from another quarter. A nasty snigger would draw fire, which would be returned instantly, tenfold. The British troops dared not go on relief, for fear that the walls might be stormed or sapped at any instant. Redcoats stood on the western parapet, tormented by the sounds of digging a mere thirty feet below, where Captain Bowman’s men were undermining the wall near the powder magazine, but dared not raise their heads above the parapet to fire down because of the bullets and splinters that would meet them if they did.

George moved from one place to another watching this grim amusement, cheering the men on but warning them to protect their precious heads and save themselves for the morning. His men could not have performed more satisfactorily or with higher morale; he marveled that they could even lift their rifles after almost a week without food or warmth, yet here they were firing away in the darkness with the steady accuracy of starved hunters in the joyous pursuit of meat.

An ensign came to George shortly before midnight, where he had set up a command post in the old church, and told him that Tobacco’s Son, the Grand Kite of the Wabash, had come to see him. The Piankeshaw chief, who had treated with Leonard Helm in the fall and proclaimed himself a Big Knife, strode into the candlelight, looked at George, smiled, nodded, then came
forward with his eyes full of tears and gave him an earnest handshake. He was tall and proud, with deep parenthetical lines in his cheeks enclosing his thin mouth, with strands of gray in his greased and braided hair. He wore leggings and a hunting shirt of soft, nearly white deerskin, and had two pistols in his belt. His glittering eyes feasted on George for a moment as rifles crackled in the night outside. “You know,” he said in a resonant voice, “that I am a Big Knife, your brother.”

“I know that and I am content,” George replied.

“I have told the Englishman Hamilton that I am a Big Knife, when he tried to buy my warriors to fight for him.”

“Good. To fight for the British is a low thing.”

“I have many warriors,” said Tobacco’s Son. “I have one hundred warriors with me near this place, and I wish to join my brother the Long Knife tonight and strike against the British fort.” His straight white teeth glinted in the candlelight as he talked. A cannon boomed in the night outside and there was a shower of falling stone nearby but the Indian did not flinch.

George thought for a moment. Then he said, “I thank you for your friendly disposition.” He did not want to risk the confusion that might result if a body of Indians mixed with the Americans in the dark, and was not altogether sure the chief could be trusted. “We are sufficiently strong ourselves,” George said, “and would prefer that you keep your braves back. But I personally would like to have your counsel and your company, and invite you to stay at my side.”

Tobacco’s Son beamed with pride and pleasure. “This is a great honor. I have yearned to stand beside my brother the Long Knife, whom the Master of Life has sent among us to clear our eyes and make our paths straight. Now you are here and I am pleased with you.”