Long Knife (69 page)

For the truth is, thought the handsome, graceful-looking captain, putting down his quill and gazing out the tent door into the crowded, dusty, sunlit glade, though we purport to be in command, seven hundred Shawnees really can hardly be controlled.

***

A
T
F
ORT
J
EFFERSON ON THE MORNING OF
J
UNE TENTH, SOLDIERS
and workmen loading munitions and rolling cannon in the parade ground paused in their work and watched in astonishment as three tall, muscular, bare-chested Indians in leggings, feathers, breechclouts, and war paint, emerged from the doorway of Colonel Clark’s quarters with Captain John Slaughter and strode across the sunny enclosure toward the fort’s gate.

Their surprise turned to incredulity as the three savages passed near them with their long rifles cradled in their arms; the Indian at the head of the trio had a strange, ruddy coloration, and on his chest, where a small, round, circular silver medallion hung by a thong, golden chest hair caught the sunlight.

“By the eternal!” exclaimed one of the soldiers, a veteran of the original Illinois regiment, pointing, “That’n’s Cunnel Clark or I don’t know my own name!”

“Damn me if it ain’t,” breathed another, “an’ them two’s Major Harlan an’ Captain Consola!”

The three “braves” went out through the gate with the American captain and stood for a moment with him, looking eastward over the stump-dotted clearing and fields of waist-high, green young corn, toward an infinity of dark-green treetops.

“Let’s pray,” smiled the red-haired one, “that we won’t be so easily recognized by the Indians ‘twixt here and the Falls.”

“Then better pray, George, you don’t get that close to any of ‘em,” said Captain Slaughter. “You’re the only Indian I ever seen with redder hair than skin. You sure this ain’t a folly? I’d feel a heap safer if you’d an armed company around you.”

“I know that, but there’s not time, and we’d be too easily discovered. Besides, I rather relish traveling light for a change. Now, see that you have that convoy on the way up the Ohio by tomorrow. God and our shanks willing, we’ll have a defense organized and waiting by the time you sail up.” He gave the captain a handshake and a hard squeeze on the shoulder, then turned to the two other disguised officers who, with their straight black hair and craggy, weathered features, might have had little trouble passing for Indians. “Now, my chieftains, d’you feel fit for a three-hundred-mile run through yon pristine forest?”

“We’d best start now afore I have time to think on’t,” grinned Major Harlan.

George turned back to the fort and saluted the men who had stopped working and stood along the parapets and the road
down to the boats at the water’s edge looking at him. “See y’at the Falls, boys!” he yelled, then turned and led his companions at a long-legged lope down through the clearing and into the shadowy green wilderness, the huzzahs and farewells of the garrison soon being blotted up by the dank green curtain of foliage that closed behind them.

They sped single file among the gigantic hardwoods, heavy rifles now at their right sides, now at their left. They ran with the Indian stride, moccasin toes pointed slightly inward, both to avoid entanglement in roots and to leave no obvious whitemen’s spoor. Within an hour they were breathing like horses, deep, slumping breaths in rhythm with their softly thudding feet, ignoring the pain, their sweat-stung eyes darting constantly among the columnar tree trunks ahead, with that woodsman’s determination always to see an Indian first.

The forest floor was moist and springy, free of almost all undergrowth except shade-dwelling fern, mayapple, and the minute wildflowers of the deep woods. The sun was evident in this green gloom only as an occasional spark of light on the eye when the runners would pass through some thin sunbeam that penetrated the lofty canopy of leaves. Musty black carcasses of giant oaks and maples lay decaying among the ferns, flecked with shelf fungi and lime-green mosses. Orioles, tanagers, cardinals, buntings darted away from their approach, shooting through the woods like flakes of red and indigo. So swiftly and quietly the runners came on that they surprised several deer where they stood; George once had to leap to clear the back of a fawn which had spraddled in terror in his path, too petrified to flee.

Squirrels swarmed up trees; opossums peered up myopically, then blundered away among the ferns; once a black bear and its cub, surprised, scampered behind a hollow-beech honey tree and peered curiously out at the passing runners. George smiled with joy at these sights, and his mind slipped back to those carefree days, seven and eight years before, when he had roamed the inner frontiers where no white man had ever trodden before, then as now surprising animals who didn’t know what to make of him.

Miles, leagues unwound backward under their padding feet. The little footrace medallion jounced upon his chest with every step, and he thought now of Teresa, with the other medallion on a chain around her neck, lying in the musky valley between those apple-firm little breasts. He had learned long ago that the
burning agony of long-distance running could be blanked out if the runner allowed his mind to go elsewhere. In the runner’s wakeful trance, then, he led Harlan and Consola relentlessly eastward until, on the slope of a gully, Harlan fell to the ground and lay face down in the humus, sucking breath with a rasping sound, his legs twitching. A probing vertical finger of sunlight told the time as noon, and the three rested near a trickling mossy spring to eat strips of jerky and starchy crumbs of parched corn, which they chased down with a nutritious brew made by mixing a powder of corn flour and maple sugar with the crystal spring water. Now that they had stopped, they were beset by the nettlesome bites of huge black-and-tan deerflies, the nasal drone and toxic nips of mosquitoes. They anointed their sweating shoulders and backs with more bear grease to fend off these annoyances, looked each other over for wood ticks, then rose on twitching limbs to resume their progress. Shunning the bank of the Ohio, which they were sure would be heavily patrolled by Indians, they were heading eastward over untracked ground toward the Tennessee River—which they would have to contrive a means to cross—then some twenty miles farther on, they would have to cross the great Cumberland River. The mouths of both of these rivers would be watched, George was sure, and he intended to cross them far upstream from their junctures with the Ohio.

They sped onward through that first afternoon, through that deep green humid gloomy silence, hearts slamming, lungs burning. Their perceptions grew unreal with their increasing exhaustion, and at times it seemed to George that they were progressing across the bottom of some fantastic green sea. They paced on until the last flickering peeps of sunlight turned red-gold and winked out. Then it was less than an hour before the foliage grew black and the terrain too dim to travel.

Reconnoitering for a few minutes in the darkening woods, they found no sight or sound of Indians, discovered a trickling spring in a steep-sided ravine, and decided to risk a small fire, as the place was so sheltered.

Having refreshed their burning skin with the chilly spring water, they heated strips of jerky over the fire to create the illusion of having a hot meal. They chewed strenuously on the smoky fibers, munched parched corn, chased it down with water, then sat, embracing their knees, gazing into the licking yellow flames and orange coals and feeling their stomachs transform the food into new vigor for their spent limbs. George
began to smile as he studied the scene: the mossy stone from which issued the spring; the ferns and the great twisted root-knees and fissured trunks of the venerable trees all softly illuminated by the firelight; the encircling blackness with its choruses of night-creature sounds probably unchanged for eons; his companions with their berry-stained skin and sweat-streaked war paint, bear-claw necklaces, fringed breechclouts, and beadwork moccasins, gazing mesmerized into the campfire. Major Harlan yawned, the firelight shining into his great cave of a mouth with its bad teeth like stalactites and stalagmites, then caught George gazing at him with that half smile on his lips.

“You seem amused, sir.”

“Aye, Major. Reckon I am, thinking about things in general.” He shook his head and gazed at the flames another moment, still smiling. “As a boy I had the scriptures drummed into my head at home. Then a hard Scot tutor filled me with history, and geography, mathematics, and the ancient tongues. Mr. Mason then imbued me with moral precepts and philosophy, and I learned to minuet at the hands of pink misses of the Tidewater aristocracy …” Harlan and Lieutenant Consola were listening blank-faced to this unexpected recitation. “… and now,” he concluded, indicating with a sweep of his hands their primitive little enclave, “look how far all that civilizing has brought me!”

T
HEY WERE OFF THE NEXT MORNING AS SOON AS THE WOODS WERE
light enough to see their way in. Their feet and muscles protested with stiffness and pain for the first few miles, until it was all worked out by the relentless moving. They ate their noon meal on the run, following the easterly tributaries toward the Tennessee River.

They reached the Tennessee shortly before sundown. They estimated that they had made sixty or seventy miles in their first two days. They scouted the wooded banks of the deep stream, finding evidence of recent Indian landings but seeing no Indians. As evening fell, they pitted their reluctant muscles against the task of binding two logs together with grapevines to make a raft. They slept beside it on mossy ground, too exhausted to try an evening crossing.

They awoke before dawn, to a sensual chaos of itchy mosquito bumps, bleeding fly bites, dewy gooseflesh, and aching joints, the watery murmuring and gulping of the Tennessee a few feet away immediately reminding them of their hazardous first duty, the crossing. In the semi-darkness they dragged the
heavy makeshift raft down to the river’s slippery edge and launched it, wading it up to their waists in flowing water which was, fortunately, warmer than the morning air. The ooze of the river bottom dragged at their moccasins as they strapped their precious rifles, food, bullet pouches, and powder horns atop the raft with leather thrums cut from the fringe of their leggings. They then covered the cargo with brush from the shore. As gray light began dissolving the darkness, they saw that a mist hovered over the river surface, obscuring everything more than ten feet away. Major Harlan and Lieutenant Consola worked grimly, trying to hide the dread in their faces. Neither of them could swim, and the narrow raft was too small for both men and baggage to ride upon.

“Very well now, gents,” George whispered, bracing his legs against the pressing current. “I don’t have to tell you to hang on tight. Keep your heads low. Kick, but kick deep and don’t splash the surface, if you please.”

“We know how, sir,” Harlan whispered back, almost testy in his uneasiness. “God knows we’ve snuck acrost many a river since we met you.”

George grinned. “Then get hold, and shove off!”

The mucky bottom released its grip on their feet; they felt themselves borne away into the liquid flow; the shore dissolved from sight behind them. George commenced making powerful frog kicks under the water, and felt that he must be doing all the work while the other two hung on for their lives. “Give me some power, boys, or we’ll be in th’ Ohio ‘fore we make the other shore!” Soon their surging breathing told him they were at work.

It was a delicate balancing act in the disorienting mist. Consola tended to pull down hard on his side with each kick and George had to strain to keep the narrow conveyance from rolling over several times. Being rudder as well as propeller, George had no reference for navigation but the faint sense of current on his right side. He was aware of the invisible and unknowable depth below him, and he was sure that the others were doubly conscious of it. A fragment of cut bough slipped off the raft and drifted downstream; he hoped no Indian patrol down near the mouth would find it and paddle up to investigate.

A low black shape materialized out of the mist at that moment, heading straight at the raft. “Consola! Look right!” George hissed, just as the object, a splintery-ended drift log, bumped the front of the raft and began to swing around, as if
to crunch Consola’s head between itself and the raft. George thrust the aft end of the raft downstream with a powerful kick of his legs, and the log swung off and dissolved in the mist downstream. Consola, eyes wide in his red-stained face, edged forward hand over hand to check the condition of the forward end of the raft.

“Busted a vine,” he whispered back. “Pray it’ll hold t’ shore.”

They prayed, and it did. After half an hour in the current, they saw through the thinning fog the dark foliage of the east bank looming a few yards ahead, then their feet found the squishy bottom.

They unloaded the raft, slung on their gear, and put dry powder in their rifles’ flash pans. While Major Harlan was checking his flintlock, George waded back into the river, drawing his long skinning knife to cut the grapevines and dissassemble their telltale raft.

As he slashed at the tough vines, something slithered suddenly under his hands. He recoiled and grasped, the spade-shaped head of a huge water moccasin suddenly jabbing the air where his hand had been. The glistening serpent cocked its head for a second strike, and George stared in horror at the wide, white maw of its mouth, his hunting knife at the ready, wondering if he could be quick enough to decapitate it without being pierced by the venomous fangs.

But suddenly the reptile’s head disintegrated with a cracking roar, bits of it spattering on the river. The mottled body convulsed and fell off the raft. George, with a metallic taste in his mouth and his heart slamming at his ribs, looked up at the cloud of gunsmoke billowing away from Harlan’s rifle. The report’s echo was repeating itself between the riverbanks.

George’s eyes explained everything to Harlan. Gratitude and reproach.

“Sorry,” said the major, reloading. “Wa’n’t no time t’ think.”