The Little Red Foot Part 93

Well, G.o.d's will must obtain on earth; none can thwart it; none foretell----

At the thought I looked down at Penelope, where I held her clasped; and I told her of the vision of Thiohero.

She remained very still when she learned what the Little Maid of Askalege had seen there beside me in the cannon-cloud, where the German foresters of Hainau, in their outlandish dress, were shouting and shooting.

For Penelope had seen the same white shape; and had been, she said, afeard that it was my own weird she saw,--so white it seemed to her, she said,--so still and shrouded in its misty veil.

"Was it I?" she whispered in an awed voice. "Was it truly I that the Oneida virgin saw? And did she know my features in the shroud?"

"She saw you all in white and flowers, floating there near me like mist at sunrise."

"She told you it was I?"

"Dying, she so told me. And, 'Yellow Hair,' she gasped, 'is quite a witch!' And then she died between my arms."

"I am no witch," she whispered.

"Nor was the Little Maid of Askalege. Both of you, I think, saw at times things that we others can not perceive until they happen;--the shadow of events to come."

"Yes."

After a silence: "Have you, perhaps, discovered other shadows since we last met, Penelope?"

"Yes; shadows."

"What coming event cast them?"

After a long pause: "Will it make his mind more tranquil if I tell him?"

she murmured to herself; and I saw her dark eyes fixed absently on the dusty ray of sunlight slanting athwart the room.

Then she looked up at me; blushed to her hair: "I saw children--with _yellow_ hair--and _your_ eyes----"

"With _your_ hair!"

"And _your_ eyes--John Drogue--John Drogue----"

The stillness of Paradise grew all around us, filling my soul with a great and heavenly silence.

We could not die--we two who stood here so closely clasped--until this vision had been fulfilled.

And so, presently, her hands fell into mine, and our lips joined slowly, and rested.

We said no word. I left her standing there in the golden twilight of the curtains, and got to my saddle,--G.o.d knows how,--and rode away beside the quiet river to the certain destiny that no man ever can hope to hinder or escape.

CHAPTER x.x.xI

"IN THE VALLEY"

On the 24th of June, 1777, Major General Lord Stirling had disobeyed the orders of His Excellency; and, in consequence, his flank was turned, he lost two guns and 150 men.[44]

[Footnote 44: The British account makes it three guns and 200 men.]

It is the only military mistake that my Lord Stirling ever made; the only lesson he ever had to learn in military judgment and obedience.

I was of his family for three years,--serving as one of his secretaries and aids-de-camp.

I was present at the battle of Brandywine; I served under him at Germantown in the fog, and at Monmouth; and never doubted that my Lord Stirling was a fine and capable and knightly soldier, if not possibly a great one.

Yet, perhaps, there was only one great soldier in that long and b.l.o.o.d.y war of the American Revolution. I need not name His Excellency.

For nearly three years, as I say, I served as a member of Lord Stirling's military family. The lights and shadows of those days of fire and ice, of plenty and starvation, of joy and despair, of monstrous and incredible effort, and of paralyzing inaction, are known now to all.

And the end is not yet--nor, I fear, very near to a finish. But we all await our nation's destiny with confidence, I think;--and our own fate with composure.

No man can pa.s.s through such years and remain what he was born. No man can regret them; none can dare wish to live through such days again; none would shun them. And how many months, or years, maybe, of fighting still remain before us, no man can foretell. But the grim men in their scare-crow regimentals who today, in the present year of 1780, are closing ranks to prepare for future battles, even in the bitter aftermath of defeat, seem to know, somehow, that this nation is destined to survive.

From the month of August in 1777 to May, 1780, I had not seen Penelope; I had asked for no leave to travel, knowing, by reason of my confidential office and better than many others, how desperate was our army's plight and how utterly every able-bodied man was needed.

In consequence, I had not seen my own Northland in all those months; I had not seen Penelope. Letters I wrote and sent to her when opportunity offered; letters came from her, and always written from Caughnawaga.

For it appeared that Douw Fonda had never consented to return to Albany; but, by some miracle of G.o.d, the Valley so far had suffered no serious harm. Yet, the terrible business at Wyoming renewed my every crudest fear for the safety of Caughnawaga; and when, in the same year, a Continental regiment of the Pennsylvania Line marched out from Schoharie to destroy Unadilla, I, who knew the Iroquois, knew that their revenge was certain to follow.

It followed in that very year; and Cherry Valley became a bloodsoaked heap of cinders; and there, under Iroquois knife and hatchet, and under the merciless clubbed muskets of the _blue-eyed_ Indians, many of my old friends died--all of the Wells family save only one--old and young and babies. What a crime was done by young Walter Butler on that fearful day! And I sometimes wonder, now, what our generous but sentimental young Marquis thinks of his deed of mercy when he saw and pitied Walter Butler in an Albany prison, sick and under sentence of death, and procured medical treatment for him and more comfortable quarters in a private residence.

And Butler drugged his sentry and slipped our fingers like a rat and was off in a trice and gone to his b.l.o.o.d.y destiny in the West!

Lord--Lord!--the things men do to men!

When Brant burned Minnisink I trembled anew for Caughnawaga; and breathed freely only when our General Sullivan marched on Tioga with six thousand men.

Yet, though he cleaned out the foul and hidden nests of the Iroquois Confederacy, I, knowing these same Iroquois, knew in my dreading heart that Iroquois vengeance would surely strike again, and this time at the Valley.

Because, out of the Mohawk Valley, came all their chiefest woes; Oriskany, which set the whole Six Nations howling their dead; Stillwater; Unadilla; Tioga; The Chemung--these battles tore the Iroquois to fragments.

The Long House, in ruins, rang with the frantic wailing of four fierce nations. The Senecas screamed in their pain from the Western Gate; the Cayugas and Onondagas were singing the death song of their nations; the proud Keepers of the Eastern Gate, driven headlong into exile, gathered like bleeding panthers on the frontier, their glowing gaze intent and patient, watching the usurpers and marking them for vengeance and destruction.

To me, personally, the conflict in my Northland had become unutterably horrible.

Our battles in the Jerseys, in Pennsylvania, in Delaware, and farther south, held for me no such horror and repugnance; for if the panoply of war be dreadful, its pomp and circ.u.mstance make it endurable and to be understood by human beings.