Long Knife (56 page)

Hamilton now let his eyes stray to the ragged ranks of American woodsmen who flanked the gate. They stood, leaning on their rifles, clothes so filthy they were of indescribable color, many wearing red bandannas around their necks which furnished the only bright color to their general soiled gray, yellow, brown, and green drabness. Only their neckerchiefs and their predatory eyes were bright. They all had shaved. Many had nicked their chins and cheeks.

General Hamilton mentally summed up the little band, scarcely more than a squad, on his left, the one on his right, and the frazzled, weather-wasted knot of men backing up Clark. Then he swept his eyes over the meadow, and finally said:

“May I ask, Colonel Clark, where is your army?”

“This, sir,” replied the Virginian with a sudden, dazzling smile, “is them.”

After a minute of silence, Hamilton dropped his head forward, and gave a guarded, barely audible, strangled little whimper.

This man, George thought, waving his flag-bearer and Bowman’s and McCarty’s companies forward through the front gate, is going to spend the rest of his days making excuses to his Britannic Majesty for this, I expect.

George Rogers Clark turned from General Henry Hamilton, and held the fine English sword aloft. “Boys! Post Vincent …
is ours!”

From their throats burst a deafening chorus of cheers and war whoops and shrill yokel yells; the company in the road broke ranks and stampeded for the gate, snatching Colonel Clark off the ground and bearing him laughing on their shoulders past the astonished redcoats into Fort Sackville.

Hamilton, stunned at first by this indecorous demonstration, watched the Americans disappear through the gate. Then his eyes fell on the morose faces of his regulars, whom he had failed. He turned his face from them and tears ran down his long shapely nose, as much from frustration and envy as from remorse.

Captain Helm was given the honor of raising the American and Virginian flags over Fort Sackville. The British and
LaMothe’s French troops were marched out and disarmed, and Helm ran the victorious banners up the pole in the cool sunlight, as the woodsmen gave three cheers and threw their hats in the air.

Captain Bowman’s company was then sent through the fort with permission to fire a salute with the cannon. Colonel Clark inspected the fort, looked over its general condition, its stores, its situation, and marveled that Hamilton had yielded such a stronghold. Bejesus, he thought, a company o’ Kentuckians would’ve held this place for a year!

The cannon began discharging their salutes, and suddenly one battery erupted in a crackling roar of confusion. Smoke and orange flame billowed out of the northeast blockhouse, followed by screams and wailings.

George sprinted across the parade and up the ladder to that blockhouse. Sulphurous blue smoke boiled out its embrasures and doors. Inside on the floor lay Bowman and Worthington, and four of their men, writhing and coughing on the floor with their hands over their faces. Through the air in the blockhouse floated paper shreds of cannon cartridges. The men on the floor were blackened and burned, all these valuable people who had survived the campaign without a scratch; smoke rolled off their scorched clothing. George grasped his beloved aide under the arms and dragged him out into the fresh air, calling for help. Worthington and three others staggered out under their own power, and the fourth private was carried out. The skin of Bowman’s face and hands was scorched and blistered, and embedded in it were black flecks, knurls, and gouts of hot powder.

Powder burns, George thought bitterly, as the men’s wounds were being dressed with bear grease and rags. Always disfiguring, relentlessly painful, and so subject to fatal infection. The worst of accidents to befall these best of men. As well as an investigation of the shambles could determine, it had happened because the British gunners had left dozens of powder cartridges stacked in concealment near the guns, and those had been ignited by the firing of the victory salute.

There’s always something to tarnish the perfectest joy, George thought. Always.

Bowman reached up and touched George’s sleeve. “Hey, now, don’t fret so,” he mumbled through his bandages. “It’s a small price t’ pay for such a victory. We’re all alive, ain’t we?” He coughed. He had inhaled hot powder smoke. It hurt him to talk.

“Aye, Joseph,” George replied. “Very much alive, thank you.” He looked up at the colors flapping languidly around the flagstaff above the fort, and at the pale blue sky above, its downy clouds hinting at spring. Bowman held George’s wrist, and said:

“Tell me what you’re thinkin’.”

George laid his hand lightly on Bowman’s powder-scorched coat sleeve, searched the sky with tears in his eyes. “As I live, my dear friend, I think I’m just beginning to comprehend what we’ve done!”

“You happy, man?”

“Never so happy as this day.”

“Likewise!”

O
VER THE INDIGNANT PROTESTS OF
G
OVERNOR
H
AMILTON,
George ordered neck chains and fetters made for Major Hay and the other Indian agitators among the prisoners.

“I must remind you, Colonel Clark,” Hamilton said, “that these persons are prisoners of war, included in the capitulation that you’ve so lately set your hand to. By the common courtesy, they ought not to be chained.”

“And then I should apprise you in turn, Mister Hamilton, that I’m going to have my hands full keeping my boys from killing them. I can only hope that seeing them helpless in irons will partly assuage those passions.”

“But those men were acting under my orders, and my orders were that they should never encourage barbarity among the savages.”

George looked at him coldly. “That remark, sir, would be comical, if we could bear to laugh over the scalps of whole families of my people. Now, bother me with any more pleading
on behalf of those polecats and I’ll have a nice suit of chains tailored for yourself as well.”

Hamilton threw back his head and scowled. “Sir, I would gladly wear them, rather than let this go unremarked.”

“Then it is remarked. Let me say in candor, Mister Hamilton, that you have certain qualities and I regard you better than I thought to. For your safety’s sake, I advise you to be humble and stick close to me until such time as I pack you off to Williamsburg.”

L
EARNING THAT
H
AMILTON HAD SENT A PARTY UP THE
W
ABASH TO
Post Miami to bring down ten boatloads of stores and provisions for the spring campaign, and that the convoy was expected to arrive at Vincennes at any moment, George on the twenty-seventh sent three armed boats, outfitted with swivel cannon, up to intercept and take it. He put Leonard Helm, with Moses Henry and two French militia officers, in charge of the expedition. “You’re the only officer I’ve got who’s had a chance to rest lately,” George explained.

“Aye, by God, and spoiling for some action,” Helm replied. “And,” he said softly, with an exasperated glance at Tobacco’s Son, “willing to put our good friend the chief thar int’ yer care for a spell. He’s been a-stickin’ t’me like stink on a skunk ever since I come here, an’ much as I like th’ feller, I c’d stand to leave ’im dog somebody else’s heels. Let ’im be
your
brother f’r a few days now, eh?”

George, with the grave and splendid chief now standing beside him on the parapet, watched Helm’s three gunboats row up the swollen Wabash in a gray downpour. “He is my brother,” the Piankeshaw said wistfully. “I told General Hamilton that I am a Big Knife. I told General Hamilton that while Helm is prisoner I too am prisoner. And you,” he said, turning to meet his eyes with great emotion shaking his voice, “you are my brother. I request to come to your house at the end of the day and speak to you of a matter important to my people.”

“I’ll be happy to see you then.”

The chief arrived that night accompanied by a young squaw, whom he directed to remain in the shadows near the door while he spoke.

Tobacco’s Son stood tall and stolid as if in a ceremony, and George stood facing him in the candlelight, a little uneasy.

“It is true what they have said,” the chief began. “Clark is the greatest of the Big Knives. The people of other tribes said Hamilton
was a god, but Tobacco’s Son shut his ears. And now the Long Knife has come to prove Tobacco’s Son right. The Big Knives are greater than the British, and Clark is the greatest of the Big Knives.” He paused, his eyes searching George’s face with pride and admiration. “The Piankeshaw people,” he said, “desire to have the powerful blood of the Long Knife Colonel Clark running in the veins of their children.” He raised his right hand and summoned the squaw, who advanced silently into the candlelight with small, graceful steps, the toes of her moccasins turned slightly inward at each step. Her eyes were glinting obsidian, her eyelashes straight and long like those of a deer. The skin over her high cheekbones was smooth, russet, and, under the square, strong line of her jaw, her neck was tawny and gleamed with unguent. She looked directly at George’s face, neither smiling nor not smiling, her eyelids half shut. Tobacco’s Son stepped behind her, put his hands on her shoulders and pulled away the blanket.

The drunken laughter of the celebrating victors in nearby barracks came faintly into the hushed room. Rain rushed on the roof.

The sudden sight of the maiden’s nakedness had nearly made George fall backward. Now he stood, speechless for the moment, trying to sort out the storm of thoughts and emotions that rampaged through him. He was astonished by the instantaneous flood of desire that rose up in him, galvanizing every animal part of him, blood and humors; but that part of his soul which was still Episcopal Virginian gentry was for the moment outraged by the chief’s presumption. Yet there was, too, a powerful satisfying notion that he was indeed a victor, a man of superior blood, and that such a reward should be his.

But through the confusion of urges and instincts there came, like a faint, haunting handful of delicate plucked chords, the thought of Teresa. It cleared his head.

“Cover her,” he told the chief, turning toward the hearth to shut out the tormenting beauty of her nudity. Now for his sake, George thought, I have to say the right thing. He is the best sort of ally and must not be offended.

“My friend,” he said, placing a hand on the chief’s shoulder. “The Piankeshaw are a great people and I am flattered that they want my blood in their veins. The woman is of great beauty and any man would want to lie with her. But I tell you this—and the woman will understand it well—that I have pledged my troth already to another woman, also of great beauty …” he thrilled
as he said these words that he had kept to himself for so long, “and among my people, the pledge of a man to a woman is as sacred as the pledge of one chief to another.”

The chief’s face, which had begun to look stricken with disappointment, softened, then broke into a smile. “Ah! This
I
did not know, that the Long Knife already has his woman.” He turned to the squaw, now wrapped in her blanket and looking much cast down, and spoke to her briefly in their tongue. And suddenly a smile of happy comprehension broke through on her comely face, and she looked at George now with an expression compounded of admiration and girlish delight, and she stood there as if impatient to be dismissed.
I
suspect, he thought, that she’s dying to tell this tale. He smiled back at her. What a stroke of luck, he thought. Now
I
’ll doubtless be as much favored among the squaws as the warriors, which can do our cause no harm.

As Tobacco’s Son was dismissing the young woman, another good idea emerged in George’s mind.

“Wait,” he said, after considering it for just a moment. “The Piankeshaw are said to be great healers.”

“They are that,” said Tobacco’s Son.

“You know that the greatest of my chieftains,” said George, “I mean Captain Bowman, was burned by fire from the British cannon powder. Being a Big Knife, he does not complain, but I know he suffers. This princess you’ve brought to me might nurse him and give him great comfort. Bowman,” he added, “is one of a family of great chiefs among the Big Knives. There is no stronger blood than that in his veins.”

Tobacco’s Son spoke again to the woman, and she left.

Joseph, my lad, George thought, I only wish I could give you more.

I
N MIDMORNING OF THE NEXT DAY
, G
EORGE WAS BROUGHT FROM
his quarters by a sudden uproar of gunshots and cheerful yelling from the river side of the fort, and mounted the wall to see on the broad yellow-brown flood below the oaken prow of the long-lost
Willing
, making her tedious headway against the current, all oars lifting and falling. So laborious was her progress, foot by foot, that he at once understood why she had arrived these three or four days late. Taking the sentry’s spyglass, George rested it on the top of a palisade and trained on the vessel. There in the prow stood his cousin, Lieutenant John Rogers,
in turn scrutinizing the fort with his own telescope. He’s seen our colors over the fort by now, George thought.

“Too late for the fight, m’lad, but by Heaven am I glad to see you all the same!” George greeted him as the vessel was moored at the landing below the palisade. The troops aboard the vessel were mortified that they had arrived too late to contribute to the victory, but quickly turned to rejoicing when they learned that not one of their comrades had fallen in the battle. “We need people,” George said. “We’ve got almost as many prisoners as troops. I’ve decided there’s nothing for it but to release the French Canadian militia on probation and let them go back to Detroit. From the change I’ve observed in their temper these last two days, I believe they’ll actually do us more good there than harm. In truth, I’ve never seen so smug and merry a passel of captives. As for Hamilton and his partisans, I see no other way to get them back to Williamsburg but to take them in the
Willing
as far as the Falls, then march ’em the last eight hundred miles. But b’gad, cousin, d’you know these lads o’ mine are all but screaming for a chance to go on to Detroit? What?”