The Hidden Children Part 69

Cattle, sheep, horses were being driven off down the trail by which we had come; men everywhere were stuffing their empty sacks with green vegetables and household plunder; the town fairly whistled with flame, and the smoke rose in a great cloud-shape very high, and hung above us, tenting us from the sun.

In the midst of this uproar the Grey-Feather came speeding to me with news that the enemy was a little way upstream and seemed inclined to make a stand. I immediately informed the General; and soon the bugle-horns of the light infantry sounded, and away we raced ahead of them.

I remember seeing an entire company marching with muskmelons pinned on their bayonets, all laughing and excited; and I heard General Sullivan bawl at them:

"You d.a.m.ned unmilitary rascals, do you mean to open fire on 'em with vegetables?"

Everybody was laughing, and the General grinned as Hand's bugle-horns played us in.

But it was another matter when the Seneca rifles cracked, and a sergeant and a drummer lad of the 11th Pennsylvania fell. The smooth-bores cracked again, and four more soldiers tumbled forward sprawling, the melons on their bayonets rolling off into the bushes.

Carbury, marching forward beside me, dropped across my path; and as I stooped over him gave me a ghastly look.

"Don't let them scalp me," he said--but his own men came running and picked him up, and I ran forward with the others toward a wooded hill where puffs of smoke spotted the bushes.

Then the long, rippling volleys of Hand's men crashed out, one after another, and after a little of this their bugle-horns sounded the charge.

But the Senecas did not wait; and it was like chasing weasels in a stone wall, for even my Indians could not come up with them.

However, about two o'clock, returning to that part of the town across the river, which Colonel Dearborn's men were now setting afire, we received a smart volley from some ambushed Senecas, and Adjutant Huston and a guide fell.

It was here that the Sagamore made his kill--just beyond the first house, in some alders; and he came back with a Seneca scalp at his girdle, as did the Grey-Feather also.

"Hiokatoo's warriors," remarked the Oneida briefly, wringing out his scalp and tying it to his belt.

I looked up at the hills in sickened silence. Doubtless Butler's men were watching us in our work of destruction, not daring to interfere until the regulars arrived from Fort Niagara. But when they did arrive, it meant a battle. We all knew that. And knew, too, that a battle lost in the heart of that dark wilderness meant the destruction of every living soul among us.

About two o'clock, having eaten nothing except what green and uncooked stuff we had picked up in field and garden, our marching signal sounded and we moved off; driving our captured stock, every soldier laden with green food and other plunder, and taking with us our dead and wounded.

Chemung had been, but was no longer. And if, like Thendara, it was ever again to be I do not know, only that such a horrid and pitiful desolation I had never witnessed in all my life before. For it was not the enemy, but the innocent earth we had mutilated, stamping an armed heel into its smiling and upturned face. And what we had done sickened me.

Yet, this was scarcely the beginning of that terrible punishment which was to pa.s.s through the Long House in flame and smoke, from the Eastern Door to the Door of the West, scouring it fiercely from one end to the other, and leaving no living thing within--only a few dead men p.r.o.ne among its blood-soaked ashes.

*Etho ni-ya-wenonh!

[*Thus it befell!]

By six that evening the army was back in its camp at Tioga Point. All the fever and excitement of the swift foray had pa.s.sed, and the inevitable reaction had set in. The men were haggard, weary, sombre, and hara.s.sed. There was no elation after success either among officers or privates; only a sullen grimness, the sullenness of repletion after an orgy--the grimness of disgust for an unwelcome duty only yet begun.

Because this st.u.r.dy soldiery was largely composed of tillers of the soil, of pioneer farmers who understood good land, good husbandry, good crops, and the stern privations necessary to wrest a single rod of land from the iron jaws of the wilderness.

To stamp upon, burn, girdle, destroy, annihilate, give back to the forest what human courage and self-denial had wrested from it, was to them in their souls abhorrent.

Save for the excitement of the chase, the peril ever present, the certainty that failure meant death in its most dreadful forms, it might have been impossible for these men to destroy the fruits of the earth, even though produced by their mortal enemies, and designed, ultimately, to nourish them.

Even my Indians sat silent and morose, stretching, braiding, and hooping their Seneca scalps. And I heard them conversing among themselves, mentioning frequently the Three Sisters* they had destroyed; and they spoke ever with a hint of tenderness and regret in their tones which left me silent and unhappy.

[*Corn, squash, and bean were so spoken of affectionately, as they always were planted together by the Iroquois.]

To slay in the heat and fury of combat is one matter; to scar and cripple the tender features of humanity's common mother is a different affair. And I make no doubt that every blow that bit into the laden fruit trees of Chemung stabbed more deeply the men who so mercilessly swung the axes.

Well might the great Cayuga chieftain repeat the terrible prophecy of Toga-na-etah the Beautiful:

"When the White Throats shall come, then, if ye be divided, ye will pull down the Long House, fell the tall Tree of Peace, and quench the Onondaga Fire forever."

As I stood by the rushing current of the Thiohero,* on the profaned and desolate threshold of the Dark Empire, I thought of O-cau-nee, the Enchantress, and of Na-wenu the Blessed, and of Hiawatha floating in his white canoe into the far haven where the Master of Life stood waiting.

[*Seneca River.]

And now, for these doomed people of the Kannonsi, but one rite remained to be accomplished. And the solemn thunder of the last drum-roll must summon them to the great Festival of the Dead.

CHAPTER XV

BLOCK-HOUSE NO. 2

On the 14th the army lay supine. There was no news from Otsego. One man fell dead in camp of heart disease. The cattle-guard was fired on. On the 15th a corporal and four privates, while herding our cattle, were fired on, the Senecas killing and scalping one and wounding another. On the 16th came a runner from Clinton with news that the Otsego army was on the march and not very far distant from the Ouleout; and a detachment of eight hundred men, under Brigadier General Poor, was sent forward to meet our Right Wing and escort it back to this camp.

By one of the escort, a drummer lad, I sent a letter directed to Lois, hoping it might be relayed to Otsego and from thence by batteau to Albany. The Oneida runner had brought no letters, much to the disgust of the army, and no despatches except the brief line to our General commanding. The Brigadiers were furious. So also was I that no letters came for me.

On the 17th our soldier-herdsmen were again fired on, and, as before, one poor fellow was killed and partly scalped, and one wounded. The Yellow Moth, Tahoontowhee, and the Grey-Feather went out at night on retaliation bent, but returned with neither trophies nor news, save what we all knew, that the Seneca scouts were now swarming like hornets all around us ready to sting to death anyone who strayed out of bounds.

On the 18th the entire camp lay dull, patiently expectant of Clinton.

He did not come. It rained all night.

On Thursday, the 19th, it still rained steadily, but with no violence--a fine, sweet, refreshing summer shower, made golden and beautiful at intervals by the momentary prophecy of the sun; yet he did not wholly reveal himself, though he smiled through the mist at us in friendly fashion.

I had been out fishing for trouts very early, the rain making it favourable for such pleasant sport, and my Indians and I had finished a breakfast of corn porridge and the sweet-fleshed fishes that I took from the brook where it falls into the Susquehanna.

It was still very early--near to five o'clock, I think--for the morning gun had not yet bellowed, and the camp lay very still in the gentle and fragrant rain.

A few moments before five I saw a company of Jersey troops march silently down to the river, hang their cartouche-boxes on their bayonets, and ford the stream, one holding to another, and belly deep in the swollen flood.

Thinks I to myself, they are going to protect our cattle-guards; and I turned and walked down to the ford to watch the crossing.

Then I saw why they had crossed: there were some people come down to the landing place on the other bank in two batteaux and an Oneida canoe--soldiers, boatmen, and two women; and our men were fording the river to protect the crossing of this small flotilla.

I seated myself, wondering what foolhardy people these might be, and trying to see more plainly the women in the two batteaux. As the boatmen poled nearer, it seemed to me that some of the people looked marvelously like the riflemen of my own corps; and a few moments later I sprang to my feet astounded, for of the two women in the nearest batteau one was Lois de Contrecoeur and the other Lana Helmer.

Suddenly the Oneida canoe shot out from the farther sh.o.r.e, pa.s.sed both batteaux, paddles flashing, and came darting toward the landing where I stood. Two riflemen were in it; one rose as the canoe's nose grated on the gravel, cast aside the bow-paddle, balanced himself toward the bow with both hands, and leaped ash.o.r.e, waving at me a gay greeting.

"My G.o.d!" said I excitedly, as Boyd ran lightly up the slope. "Are you stark mad to bring ladies into this d.a.m.nable place?"

"There are other women, too. Why, even that pretty jade, Dolly Glenn, is coming! What could I do? The General himself permitted it. Miss de Contrecoeur and Lana heard that a number of women were already here, and so come for a frolic they must."

"Who accompanies them? I see no older woman yonder."