Long Knife (52 page)

“And I with you. Now let us take a walk and see how this business goes.”

They found Captain Bowman outside in the street. He reported that his tunnel-diggers were being slowed by cave-ins as they tried to burrow under the fort’s powder magazine. “By God, George,” he breathed happily. “We’ve not had a man scratched yet, but I think we’re playing havoc with ’em inside. Fine sport for the sons o’ liberty, eh?”

“Fine sport indeed. Their hearts’ desire. But this business has to be resolved quick, Joseph, before we get overrun by his Indians and reinforcements … What’s that?”

There was a crackle of gunfire in a quarter of the town far
from the fort. “What could be happening over there?” Bowman asked.

An emaciated woodsman, one of the scouts who had been sent down the riverbank to watch for the
Willing
, soon came panting up with the answer. “They’s a party of the enemy out south side o’ th’ town, colonel. ‘Bout two dozen, it was. They tried to break through our line an’ scamper into th’ fort, it looked like. We turned ’em back and gave a chase but they just plumb disappeared.”

“What, Indians? British?”

“One o’ Charleville’s boys said they was Canadians, an’ said he heard th’ voice of a Captain LaMothe.”

“Aye, I know of that one,” George said. “A dangerous rascal, I’ve heard.”

“Captain LaMothe is like the fox,” said Tobacco’s Son. “He will be hard to find in the night.”

“Tell Charleville to keep a detail looking for LaMothe,” George said to the scout. “He could cause considerable mischief being at large thataway.”

L
A
M
OTHE
, M
AISONVILLE, AND THE
C
ANADIANS AT THIS MOMENT
lay panting in a cold wet bed of straw and manure inside a barn south of the town. The fetid moisture soaked into their clothes. But the hazards of being outside were, for the moment, worse. LaMothe peered out between stones of the barn’s wall. A tumbrel with a broken wheel leaned on its hub just outside, and now and then its outline would leap into clarity with the light from a cannon blast at the fort. LaMothe sent one of the Canadians out to seek a way into the fort. After a long wait, the man had not returned, and LaMothe sent out another.

He leaned against the stone wall and wrinkled his nose at the stench. His party had been returning from scouting the flood-lands down the Wabash at sunset when the sound of cannon gave them their first knowledge that the fort was under attack. Returning to the village, they had made several rushes to get back into the cover of the fort, but had succeeded only in getting themselves pursued. And now here they were.

“Merde,”
cursed LaMothe with a bitter smile unseen in the dark. “Now I doubt they would let us into the fort even if we could get there.”

Maisonville smiled. LaMothe was much more personable in danger. It seemed to bring him to life.

“Lieutenant,” LaMothe said, “send another one out.” Another Canadian crawled through the wall and vanished.

“Do you think they’re getting caught? Killed?” Maisonville whispered.

“Non. Defecting, more likely,” LaMothe whispered, then spat.
“Canaille!”
He spat again.
“Eh bien
, Maisonville, we’ll have to get into that compound before daylight. They’ll find us here otherwise.”

“Listen. We might be of more service out here,” Maisonville suggested. “We could go among the tribes and gather enough to trouble the rebels.”

“What’s this? Afraid to return to a besieged fort?”

“Mais non!
Only that I could do better! Rather I should ask, are
you
afraid of being away from the fort among the
Bostonnais!”

“Listen, m’sieur: LaMothe fears nothing!”

“Pardon.”

“Lieutenant, send out another one. And warn this cur that if he doesn’t report back, I’ll find him someday and cut his throat.”

Another Canadian went out, thus warned. The hours wore on, punctuated by constant gunfire, and he did not come back either.

T
HE SMELL OF GUNSMOKE WAS DENSE IN THE COLD AIR BEFORE
dawn. George looked out into the fading darkness. The ring of muzzle flashes and verbal abuse around the fort continued as it had for the last twelve hours.

He was very pleased that despite all the lead the British had poured out into the surrounding darkness, not one of his men had been wounded. They were combining his cautionary orders with their own huntsmen’s cunning to keep themselves virtually invisible, while at the same time doing more shooting than twice their number could have been expected to do. But George was growing anxious about Captain LaMothe. After midnight LaMothe had shown up in several places around the perimeter trying to make a break for the fort. Each time he had failed, but had escaped each time and was still thought to be hovering about the town waiting for his opportunity.

“Joseph, I’ve been thinking about this fox, LaMothe.” He paused for a nearby fusillade of rifle fire to die down. “We’ve been trying to keep him from getting in the fort. But, you know,
I’ve been weighing it in the balance: If he got in, he’d reinforce the garrison by maybe twenty men, would you say?”

“Aye.”

“But if he was to get discouraged and give up trying to enter, I suspect he’d soon think of going out to stir up the Indians against us. There’s a lots of ’em in these parts, you know, that are inimical to our interest.”

“I hadn’t thought of that, but it’s true.”

“Well, weigh it: Where would we rather have an enemy like that, hemmed in or running loose?”

A cannon roared from the fort and simultaneously a shower of broken stone flew off the corner of a nearby house and rattled against walls and fences, leaving a rankling smell of stone dust.

“Why, put that way, George, I’d say inside, where he can be watched.”

“Then I believe we should give him a chance to get in.”

G
ENERAL
H
AMILTON OPENED THE DOOR OF HIS QUARTERS, WHERE
four wounded soldiers lay or sat. He stepped out into the cold air, pulled his cloak about him, and listened. The gunfire had stopped, and the silence was as startling as the first gunshots had been twelve hours before.

The stars were fading. A smear of gray-pink light silhouetted the naked trees of the forest far to the east. The soldiers and militiamen along the parapets were cautiously peering over the palisades into the predawn gloom.

Hamilton crossed the parade and mounted a ladder to the parapet near the gate. He looked out over the window toward the town. There was total calm, not a sign of an enemy except the barricades and breastworks that had grown up in the meadow during the darkness since the moon set, and a fortified ditch that had been dug across the gate road.

Along the parapet the British soldiers were reloading their muskets, moving ammunition, blowing their noses, hawking and spitting, or simply stretching the stiffness and tension out of their shoulders.

“Surely they’ve not simply quit,” said a lieutenant nearby.

“No such thing, I’ll vow,” said Hamilton. “Now, stand ready. They may be gathering for a rush. Load. Get the reserves up here!” He strained his hearing for the sound of troops moving in the distance, but heard nothing. He hated these stealthy methods of warfare. They seemed suitable only for Indians, and, to
his mind, robbed warfare of its grandeur. Rationally, of course, he understood its superior effectiveness; as the perpetrator of Indian attacks against the rebel settlements, he was its chief advocate. But as a traditional British officer he deplored it, and often daydreamed of having a command in Europe where men still fought standing up on a field.

There was a sudden murmur of excitement along the parapet to his right. “Look you there, Gov’nor!” cried a soldier, pointing to the southeast quarter. Others were training their muskets there.

A group of men was halfway across the meadow, running at full tilt toward the fort, their forms dark against the pale, dead grass. As they drew near the palisade, feet thudding, arms rattling, one cried out:

“I’m LaMothe! Ladders! Ladders!”

Joy leaped in Hamilton’s breast. “Drop over the ladders! Give them ladders!”

In seconds, Captain LaMothe, Lieutenant Schieffelin, and about fifteen of their men had swarmed over the eleven-foot palisade and leaped down into the arms of their comrades, panting and gasping. The soldiers cheered them and pounded their backs. “My God,” LaMothe exclaimed shakily to Hamilton, “never was I so ready to feel a ball in my back, as when I topped that wall!” At that moment, a cackle of derisive laughter swept through the distance outside the walls, followed by a sudden hail of rifle balls which hummed past their ears and sent them all diving for cover. The Americans’ harassing fire resumed full force.

“Congratulations on your safe return,” Hamilton said with a trace of sarcasm as they crouched behind the palisade. “But I can’t help feeling you were
let
in. Where’s Maisonville?”

“He chose to stay outside,” panted LaMothe, “to go among our Indians and rally them. We parted on that …”

“Damned good thinking!” Hamilton hissed. “You might have done better to stay with him.”

Captain LaMothe’s exuberance drained out of him.

Hamilton looked at him with a cold eye. It was altogether odd that a vigorous siege of the fort should have been totally suspended just long enough to let him get in safely.

Can I trust even LaMothe now? he wondered. Damn, damn, he thought. It’s my perdition to serve among faithless Frenchmen. Well, then. I’ll just have to watch him like the rest, he decided.

THE SUN ROSE, MAKING A MORNING OF GLITTERING FROST, YELLOW
winter grass, long blue shadows, and bright, clear targets. The sun came up behind the town, at the Americans’ backs, and shone blindingly into the eyes of the British defenders on the front wall of their fort.

Behind a jumble of stacked logs, carts, and barrels in the meadow, scarcely thirty yards from the looming fort, a company of American sharpshooters in filthy buckskins, fur caps or black hats, and mud-caked leggings, their toes showing through split-seamed moccasins, stood or crouched or lay prone, their cheeks sunken, eyes glittering, keeping up a tireless round of firing and loading. Blue-white smoke billowed constantly along this breastwork. Sunlight gleamed dull on the oily blue metal of hexagonal rifle barrels. Brass and hickory ramrods slid in and out of muzzles. Black powder trickled from powderhorns into flintlock pans; dirty thumbs cocked the hammers; callused forefingers fissured black squeezed the triggers; sinewy shoulders absorbed the recoil. If their shooting had been intimidating by moonlight, it was awe-inspiring now in the sunlight. The cannon fired a few rounds toward the village, but by now the merest crack in a gun port would admit well-aimed rifle balls; a rifleman watching a chink of light between two palisade logs would send a ball spinning through it the instant it was darkened by the movement of a body within. Soon the fort was buttoned up so tightly against this deadly hail that the cannon fell silent.

A young American private named Edward Bulger knelt behind the breastwork, diligently loading and firing. He trembled violently between shots, and sniffled constantly, but managed to pull his shivering body into a posture of statue stillness before each shot.

A shadow fell across the lad’s gun as he reloaded, and a deep voice said:

“Wipe your nose, Mister Bulger, lest you wet your gunpowder.”

Looking up, the private saw Colonel Clark standing before him, grinning. The lad beamed, ran the sleeve of his hunting shirt under his nose, poked the muzzle over a log, rested his cheek on the rifle stock, closed one eye, squeezed the trigger and shot the hat off an Englishman on the parapet.

Moving a few paces down the line, George and Bowman were amused at the sight of the lower half of a rifleman who
lay firing from a prone position under an oxcart; the seat of his breeches was in shreds and his white buttocks shone through. Bowman laughed giddily. “Poor feller,” he said, “Wonder whether them was blowed out or rotted out!”

“Now, Joseph,” George said, “I have some nice news for you. The ladies o’ Vincennes have kindly laid a great hot breakfast for us. If you’d relieve a half of your company at a time, so that they might go down and enjoy that welcome occasion …”

His words were drowned out by cheers.

“L
ORD HELP US, THEY’VE GOT
M
AISONVILLE, SIR!” EXCLAIMED A
British officer.

General Hamilton went up a ladder to the parapet and, eyelids trembling in anticipation of more of those precise American rifle balls, peered out through a gap in the palisade at a sight that made his blood run cold:

A mere thirty yards in front of the fort gate, François de Maisonville, arms bound behind him, was being led to an upright post in front of the American breastwork by two hideous, whooping woodsmen. The two tied the handsome French Indian agent to the post, exposing his chest to the fort, then stood behind him and, using his shoulders as rifle-rests, began with an air of confidence and immunity to snipe cheerfully at the fort, while Maisonville screamed his name frantically and begged the British not to return their fire.

Dear God, the wretch, Hamilton thought. He passed the word down the line not to risk hitting the captive. A shot fired by one of the snipers buzzed past General Hamilton’s cheek, but he remained there, fascinated by the incredible sight, growing more furious and frightened with each passing second as this bizarre incident wore on.

The American Captain McCarty, drawn to this scene by the Frenchman’s screams and the laughter of the riflemen, took one look at it, judged it as an unchivalrous way to use a prisoner, and ordered them to cease their amusement, untie the prisoner, and take him to the guard. The two men obeyed, but as they untied him, one of them, explaining to McCarty that this was the notorious Indian agitator Maisonville, drew his long knife, snatched a handful of hair and sliced off a patch of his scalp. Maisonville screeched in anguish and evacuated his bowels.

“Hey, you, Hair-Buyer!” the woodsman shouted back at the
fort as he led the stumbling Maisonville away, “You’re next, yer Lordship!”