Panther in the Sky (110 page)

Suddenly Tecumseh’s eye caught a glimpse of gold braid on a horseman on the far side. An elegant officer in top hat and gold-faced frock coat was looming in the smoke, sword raised high, boldly maneuvering along behind the firing rank on a capering white war-horse with black legs. Tecumseh’s heartbeat quickened, and he brought his rifle to bear on the officer, who surely was Harrison. In the smoke with his tall hat, this was the figure that had rushed upon Tecumseh time after time through the mists of his dreams!

But when his sights were on him and his rifle cocked, Tecumseh heard the officer’s voice and saw his face and even at this distance and through the smoke saw that it was not Harrison at all, but a younger, prettier officer. In this moment’s hesitation, Tecumseh’s target disappeared into the distant thickets.

So now Tecumseh despaired of getting a shot at Harrison, who probably was somewhere in the rear, safe among his Blue-Coat
soldiers. Without killing Harrison, the warriors could not hope to have a victory here at the Forks of the Thames.

If only Procter had stayed here with his cannons!

This thought rose again and again in Tecumseh’s boiling mind, distracting him, souring his soul, making him hate his ally Procter as much as he hated his enemy.

Suddenly such a fusillade of fire came from across the creek that the warriors had to hug the ground to avoid the lead storm. And then under its cover, fifteen or twenty soldiers emerged from the cloud of gunsmoke and plunged down the far creek bank and waded into the water. Within the time of a few breaths they had rooted themselves under the near bank, almost under the muzzles of the Indian defenders—a precarious perch, but one that made them a worrisome presence. Some of Charcoal Burner’s warriors tried to go to the edge of the bank and dislodge them but were driven back by another fusillade.

Tecumseh felt a tug on the sleeve of his hunting shirt. He turned. There as always was the long face of Thick Water, who shouted over the gunfire:

“Naiwash sent this man to tell you something!”

It was one of the Ottawas, who were fighting on the left end of the line, near the other bridge. Tecumseh and the messenger knelt behind a thick-trunked oak to get out of the rain of lead. The Ottawa, using hand language and a few Shawnee words, told him that the Wyandot chief Walk-in-Water had deserted his sector of the battle line with sixty of his warriors and was going over to the Americans’ side to offer Harrison their hand. “Ahhhh,” Tecumseh growled in his smoke-tortured throat.

It was not a surprise; Walk-in-Water had swayed for months back and forth always with the stronger wind. But happening now, it was still another sign that the great cause was falling apart.

Thick Water was kneeling in the brush beyond the shelter of the great oak, head swiveling, watching for any approaching danger, hardly bothering to fold his long frame down into real cover.

“Thick Water!” Tecumseh suddenly called to him. The bodyguard turned and scooted down closer in the wet leaves. One of the American cannons discharged again, shaking the ground and splintering another swath of underbrush. Tecumseh leaned toward Thick Water to make himself heard and told him:

“Brother, do this for me. I want you to go away.…” With his left arm he indicated a sweep around to the north and west and saw the pathetic look of disbelief in Thick Water’s face.
“Go,” Tecumseh said, sweeping his arm wide again, shouting over the battle din, “and follow Walk-in-Water.…”

A gunshot cracked very close by, and Tecumseh lurched backward, grunting as he fell into the leaves. His left arm was suddenly numb, but his shoulder felt as if it had been pulled out of its socket. Thick Water hovered over him, face full of anguish, and with the help of the Ottawa raised him and leaned his back against the roots of the oak. Blood was seeping all over Tecumseh’s upper sleeve. Grimacing, Thick Water pulled his knife and slit open the sleeve, and they examined the wound. Tecumseh could see the oozing, puckered hole where the ball had slammed into his bicep muscle.

“Here it came out,” Thick Water said, looking at the tattered flesh on the rear of the arm. Tecumseh raised and moved the benumbed arm and was satisfied that the ball had missed bone. Several warriors nearby had seen their chief fall and were gathering, crouched around him.

“See!” he told them, waving the limb and grinning ferociously. “It is only little! Go back and shoot the Long Knives! This bullet came from down there, those soldiers under the bank! We must drive them out! Quick, now!”

And then, while the battle roared on and Thick Water packed the wound with moss and humus and bound a white strouding cloth around it to stanch the bleeding, Tecumseh continued his instructions: “Follow Walk-in-Water,” he said. “Go where he goes, if he does not stay in the American camp. If you can find him and talk to him, tell him to come back and rejoin us, and we will not think or say evil of him.” Rifle balls were still whickering through the foliage, bringing down a rain of bark and twigs and yellow bits of leaves, and the dank air was full of concussions, rank with powder smoke. Tecumseh studied the grief on Thick Water’s face and went on: “Tell him we will win when we fight with the British cannons tomorrow at the Jesus town. Tell him we want him to be with us instead of the Long Knives when we defeat them. You know his tongue. Go tell him that, Thick Water.”

“I do not want to go.”

“Yes. Go, brother. You can do us good this way!”

“But if I leave the battle now, our brothers will say I was a coward!”

“Our brothers know you are no coward. And I will tell them what I sent you for. I ask you to go, my brother. Do this!” In Tecumseh’s arm there was no bad pain, just a great ache underlying
the numbness. He did not feel faint or weakened at all and rose and picked up his rifle with his right hand, looking around, seeing his warriors still shooting, still howling, still bleeding. More soldiers were trying to get down under the near creekbank. “Soon we will have to get out of this,” he said. “We will all draw back, to fight better tomorrow, with the cannons and Redcoats beside us. You will miss nothing by going now to do what I asked you.” And he reached over with his left arm, as if it were not even hurt, and clasped his hand on the side of Thick Water’s neck, then grinned and pushed him away.

When the bodyguard was gone into the undergrowth, Tecumseh pulled the Ottawa messenger close and told him: “Go and say this to your chief Naiwash: tell him to burn down the building where the Redcoats left the things they couldn’t carry. Do this so the Long Knives cannot use those things when they come over. Say that when it is on fire, we will begin to leave this place. We have done all we can do here. We have given our families some time. Tomorrow we will have the fight we have wanted with the Long Knives, and there we will stop them, or there we will leave our bones.”

T
HICK
W
ATER STALKED THROUGH THE RAINY WOODS, AWAY
from the noise of the battle. He clenched his teeth to keep from crying out with the desolation in his heart.

It was true, what he had protested to Tecumseh; he did not want the others to think he had left the battlefield in fear. But even more true was the other thing.

He was afraid that if he went far from Tecumseh, his great friend would be killed, and he would never get back to his side. Weshemoneto had put him here and made him invulnerable so that he could always protect the greatest chief of the People. They had gone all over this land together and had escaped death more times than he could remember.

Now Tecumseh was without his protection, and Thick Water was so full of fear for him that he could hardly breathe, could hardly see, as he thrashed through the wet, yellowing woods.

I
NSIDE HIS WHITE TENT THAT NIGHT,
W
ILLIAM
H
ENRY
H
ARRISON
dismissed his secretary and aide-de-camp and stood up beside his field desk, the fingertips of his left hand resting lightly on the green deal cloth that covered it. The young men clicked their heels and ducked out of the tent. A whale-oil lamp and an inkstand sat on the green cloth, and a stack of papers and maps
lay beside them. Governor Harrison kept meticulous papers, even in the field, even on days like this when he had battled Indians. Being such a dedicated student of military history, he was always aware that he was making more history, and he always liked to get his version down on paper as quickly as possible, before anyone else’s interpretation of his actions could circulate.

From all around came the late evening sounds of a large army camp: axes and shovels chunking as breastworks were finished up around the perimeter; the drone of hundreds of voices talking, boasting, laughing; here and there a Jew’s harp twanging and a fragment of song, now and then a yelp or scream from the surgeon’s tent where bullets and arrows were being extracted from flesh.…

It had been a hot skirmish, but surely it had not been the retreating enemy’s last stand. There had been only Indians at the Forks, no British artillery, infantry, or cavalry. Just Tecumseh’s Indians.

Or maybe only Tecumseh himself alone, Harrison thought with a smirk of amusement; just about every soldier who had taken part in the engagement claimed to have shot at Tecumseh or been shot at by him, even though in this whole army there were only a handful who knew the chief by sight. Tecumseh was their bugbear; they hardly thought about the Redcoats. Harrison was aware that the British army was in disarray; it was shedding equipment and boats and vehicles all along the road. Nevertheless, the Redcoats were up ahead there someplace and could not be dismissed. The fact that it had not been engaged in any of the rearguard skirmishes indicated to Harrison that it was going to be used in a big way someplace ahead. Yes, there had been a fight today. But somewhere ahead, there would be a battle. Harrison thus knew that his best hope lay in pursuing the British so closely that they would not have time to set up a real defense anywhere. It was true that for now Tecumseh was
the
enemy, and sometimes Harrison fancied that he was in a personal conflict with that Shawnee, which would not be concluded until one of them lay dead.

Harrison had become chilled in the unheated tent while dictating his reports and dispatches and got up stiffly from the camp chair intending to go out and warm himself among his officers at the bonfire. He paused beside the desk, slowly twisting in the top button of his cloak, musing on a thought that had just visited him.

He had just thought of Julius Caesar: Caesar standing like this
in a tent by lamplight, a tent somewhere in Gaul, perhaps, or beside the Rhine, or in ancient Britain … Caesar in a tent on foreign soil, at any rate, surrounded by the men of his legions and their campfires, and those in turn surrounded by night and barbarians. Harrison thought of Caesar with a surge of empathy.

He had had that feeling often. More and more lately he had reviewed the Roman conquerors, and to him, Caesar and Tacitus and Aurelian were very sympathetic souls. He could see their faces in his thoughts sometimes, and he had a habit, in his voluminous correspondences and the gigantic tracts on honor and discipline that he penned for the Vincennes newspaper, of making analogies between his purposes and theirs. As he paused now in the cold tent, his fingertips trailing on the table, he felt his soul leap back nineteen centuries, and he
was
Caesar, Caesar crossing borders into wild and hostile lands, the vanguard of a great empire, call it Rome or call it America, and out there someplace in the wild darkness was Tecumseh the Shawnee, his own Vercingetorix, the barbarian leader he must conquer in the building of empire. “Hm,” he said in his throat, cocking his head. He ran his hand from his crown down over his forehead, smoothing his short Caesar-styled hair forward onto his brow. Then he put on his bicorn hat, ducked out of the tent door, and strolled to the bonfire.

Several officers and scouts, sipping from cups, sat on camp stools and on large logs flanking the bonfire. Their talk and laughter fell off, and some of them started to rise as Harrison came into the firelight, but he told them in a soft voice, “As you were, gentlemen,” and they eased back, holding their cups and basking in the comfort of the crackling fire. They had smelled gunsmoke today—their army had killed perhaps a dozen savages, at a loss of only three dead soldiers—and were mellow with whiskey, enjoying that satisfying sense of camaraderie and manly purpose that old campaigners feel when there has been a not-too-costly victory.

Those who sat in this privileged circle were all heroes—either very recent heroes like Captain Perry or long-ago heroes like Shelby and Kenton. Their uniforms, except for the blue-and-braid of the regular army, were an anarchy of comic-opera soldier suits, many designed by the militia commanders themselves or perhaps by their wives or mistresses: top hats with rosettes and plumes, frock coats of many colors and cuts, hunting shirts, silk sashes, thigh-high boots or leather leggings. These heroes, Harrison knew and often regretted, were not the sort of obedient, anonymous
drones that would make up an ideal legion. They were frontier adventurers, undisciplined individualists, glory seekers, politicians, scoundrels, aging revolutionaries, each bent upon making himself a legend, it seemed. They were a commandant’s nightmare. Though at times they were as brave as centurions, their discipline was as motley as their fancy costumes. As they had shown at Fort Meigs six months ago, they were as quick to flee in panic as to charge with, reckless bravery.

Especially so were the Kentucky Mounted Riflemen, whose commanding officer just now had risen and was coming toward Harrison, carrying in each hand a pewter cup that gleamed in the firelight. This officer, of patrician features and grand bearing, was Colonel Richard Mentor Johnson. He was also Congressman Johnson. He was one of the congressmen known as the war hawks, and he had left Washington to come out and gain laurels in this war he had helped to start. Colonel Johnson’s dress reflected his two roles: the beaver top hat and elegant, fur-collared frock coat of the statesman were veneered with the plume and gold braid of the soldier.