The Story of Old Fort Loudon Part 4

She had bled for the things she had brought through the wilderness. She had wept for others that she had left. And if for such gear Sandy had come to grief--"I wonder--I wonder if I could find a pretext to care for them still!"

But she only said aloud, with a strong effort to control her attention, "And for men, too."

"Men must needs follow when duty leads the way," said Captain Demere, a trifle priggishly.

Odalie, trying to seem interested, demanded, lifting her eyes, "And what do women follow?"

If Captain Demere had said what he truly thought, he would have answered:--

"Folly! their own and that of their husbands!"

He had had close observation of the fact that the pioneers gave heavy hostages to fate in their wives and children, and a terrible advantage to a savage foe, and the very bravery of so many of these n.o.ble helpmeets only proved the value of all they risked. He could not elaborate, however, any scheme by which a new country should be entered first by the settlers aided by a strong occupancy of soldiery, and only when the lands should be cleared and the savages expelled the women and children venture forth. So he said:--

"They follow their destiny."

He had a smile in his eyes as if appealing to her clemency not to tax him with ascribing a humbler motive to the women than to the men, as he was only making talk and spoke from a natural deprecation of dangers to non-combatants who of right should be exempt from peril. His eyes, which were large, were of a color between gray and brown--darker than the one and lighter than the other. His hair was brown and smooth; he was slender and tall; his aquiline nose and finely cut lips gave a certain cast of distinction to his face, although the temples were slightly sunken and the thinness of his cheek revealed the outline of the jaw and chin which showed determination and force, despite his mild expression at present. Josephine fixed an amazed stare upon his polished shoes as he crossed his legs, never having seen any men's foot-gear save a buskin of deer hide.

"The men have a natural interest in warfare," suggested Odalie, forlornly, seeking to be responsive to his conversational efforts.

"Warfare!" exclaimed Captain Demere, with sudden animation. "Contention with savages is not warfare! It cannot be conducted on a single recognized military principle." He went on to say that all military tactics counted for naught; the merely mechanical methods of moving bodies of troops were unavailable. Discipline, the dexterities of strategy, an enlightened courage, and the tremendous force of _esprit de corps_ were alike nullified.

The problem of Indian fighting in America was then far greater than it has been since the scene has shifted to the plains, the densely wooded character of the tangled wilderness affording peculiar advantage to the skulking individual methods of the savage and embarra.s.sing inconceivably the more c.u.mbrous evolutions of organized bodies. But long before Captain Demere's time, and often since, the futility of opposing regular scientific tactics to the alert wiles of the savage native in his own difficult country has been commented upon by observers of military methods, and doubtless recognized in the hard knocks of experience by those whose fate it has been to try again the experiment.[6]

"As to military ethics," he added, "to induce the Indian to accept and abide by the principles governing civilized warfare seems an impossibility. He cannot be constrained for a pledge of honor to forego an advantage. He will not respect his parole. He continually violates and sets at naught the provisions of his solemn treaty."

Odalie would not ask if the white man never broke faith with the red--if the Indian had not been taught by example near at hand of what brittle stuff a treaty was made. It was not worth while to reason logically with a mere man, she said to herself, with a little secret sentiment of derision, which served to lighten a trifle the gloom of her mental atmosphere, and since she could not eat and little backwoods Fifine's eyes had absorbed her appet.i.te, it was just as well that Hamish, who had been greatly interested in being shown over the fort by the jolly Corporal O'Flynn, appeared at the door with the intelligence that their quarters were a.s.signed them. The courteous Captain Demere handed her to the door, and she stepped out from the bizarre decorated mess-hall into the dark night, with the stars showing a chill scintillation as of the approach of winter in their white glitter high in the sky, and the looming bastion close at hand. The barracks were silent; "tattoo" had just sounded; the great gates were closed, and the high walls shut off the world from the deserted parade.

Naught was audible in all the night save the measured tread of a sentry walking his beat, and further away, seeming an echo, the step of another sentinel, while out in the wilderness the scream of a wildcat came shrilly on the wind from the darkness where Alexander roamed with savage beasts and still more savage men far from the sweet security so trebly protected here.

Not even the flare of another big homelike fire in the cabin a.s.signed to her could efface the impression of the bleak and dark loneliness outside the walls of the fort, and when the three were together, untrammeled by the presence of others, they were free to indulge their grief and their awful terror for husband and brother and father. They could not speak of it, but they sat down on a buffalo rug spread before the fire, and all three wept for the unuttered thought. The suspense, the separation of the little party, seemed unbearable. They felt that they might better have endured anything had they been together. Perhaps it was well for the elder two that their attention was diverted now and again by the effort to console Fifine in a minor distress, for with the ill-adjusted sense of proportion peculiar to childhood she had begun to clamor loudly too for her cat--her _mignonne_, her _douce fillette_ that she had brought so far in her arms or on her back.

Alas, poor Fifine! to learn thus early how sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child! For indeed Kitty might have seemed to lie under the imputation of having merely "played baby" in order to secure free transportation. At all events, she was a cat now, the only one in the fort, and for all she knew in the settlement. The _douce mignonne_ was in high elation, now walking the palisades, now peeping in at a loop-hole in the upper story of one of the block-houses where a sentinel was regularly on guard, being able to scan from the jutting outlook not only the exterior of the fort on two sides, but a vast extent of darkling country. In his measured tramp to and fro in the shadowy apartment lighted only by the glimmer of the night without, he suddenly saw a flicker at the loop-hole he was approaching, caught a transient glimpse of a face, the gleam of a fiery eye, and he nearly dropped his loaded firelock in amazement.

"By George!" he exclaimed, "I thought that was a blarsted cat!"

He had not seen one since he left Charlestown a year before.

He walked to the loop-hole and looked far down from the projecting wall and along the parapet of the curtain and the scarp to the opposite bastion with its tower-like block-house.

Nothing--all quiet as the grave or the desert. He could hear the river sing; he could see in the light of the stars, and a mere flinder of a moon, the clods of earth on the ground below,--naught else. For the _douce mignonne_, with her back all handsomely humped, had suddenly sprung aside and fled down the interior slope of the rampart into the parade and over to the cook's quarters neighboring the kitchen. She nosed gleefully about among pots and kettles, feeling very much at home and civilized to the verge of luxury; she pried stealthily, every inch a cat, into the arrangements for to-morrow's breakfast, with a noiseless step and a breathless purr, until suddenly a tin pan containing beans was tumultuously overturned, being within the line of an active spring.

For the _douce fillette_ had caught a mouse, which few sweet little girls are capable of doing;--a regular domestic fireside mouse, a thing which the _douce fillette_ had not seen in many weeks.

The stir in the neighboring cabin did not affright Kitty, and when the officers' cook, a veritable African negro, suddenly appeared with an ebony face and the rolling whites of astonished eyes, she exhibited her capture and was rewarded by a word of commendation which she quite understood, although it was as outlandish as the gutturals of Willinawaugh.

When the night was nearly spent, a great star, splendidly blazing in the sorceries of a roseate haze, seemed to conjure into the blackness a cold glimmer of gray light above the high, bleak, serrated summit line of the mountains of the eastern horizon, showing here and there white blank intervals, that presently were revealed as stark snowy domes rising into the wintry silence of a new day. The resonant bugle suddenly sounded the reveille along the far winding curves of the river, rousing greetings of morning from many a mountain crag, and before the responsive echoes of the forest were once more mute the parade was full of the commotion elicited by the beating of the drums; shadowy military figures were falling in line, and the brisk authoritative ringing voice of the first sergeant was calling the roll in each company.

And on the doorstep of Odalie's cabin, when Josephine opened the door, sat the _douce mignonne_ with her most babified expression on her face, now and again mewing noiselessly, going through the motions of grief, and cuddling down in infantile style when with wild babbling cries of endearment the little girl swooped up maternally the renegade cat.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote C: Friendship! Friendship!]

CHAPTER IV

With the earliest flush of dawn Hamish MacLeod was seeking one of the officers in order to solicit a guide to enable him to go in search of his brother with some chance of success.

Captain Stuart, whom he finally found at the block-house in the northwestern bastion, was standing on the broad hearth of the great hall, where the fire was so brightly aflare that although it was day the place had all the illuminated effect of its aspect of last night. The officer's fresh face was florid and tingling from a recent plunge in the cold waters of the Tennessee River. He looked at Hamish with an unchanged expression of his steady blue eye, and drawing the watch from his fob consulted it minutely.

"The hunters of the post," he said, still regarding it, "have been gone for more than half an hour. There is no use in trying to overtake them.

They have their orders as to what kind of game they are to bring in."

He smiled slightly, with the air of a man who in indulgent condescension would humor natural anxiety and overlook the effort of intermeddling, and as he returned the watch to his pocket, Hamish felt dismissed from the presence. The sun was well over the great range of purple bronze mountains in the east, their snowy domes a-glister in the brilliance between the dark slopes below and the blue sky above, and the fort, as he came forth, was a scene of brisk activity. The parade ground had already been swept like a floor, and groups of soldiers were gathered about the barracks busily burnishing and cleaning their arms, pipe-claying belts and rotten-stoning buckles and b.u.t.tons, and at the further end near the stables horses were in process of being groomed and fed; one of them, young and wild, broke away, and in a mad scamper, with tossing mane and tail, and head erect and hoofs scattering the gravel, plunged around and around the enclosure, baffling his groom. A drill-sergeant was busy with an awkward squad; another squad without arms, in charge of a corporal, was marching and marching, making no progress, but vigorously marking time, whether for exercise or discipline Hamish could hardly determine, for he began to have a very awesome perception of the rigor of authority maintained in this frontier post. He had noticed--and the gorge of a freeman had risen at the sight--a soldier mounted high upon a trestle, facetiously called a horse, and he was well aware that this was by no means a new and a merry game. Hamish wavered a little in his mental revolt against the powers that be, as he noticed the reckless devil-may-care look of the man. He was a ruddy young fellow; he had a broad visage, with a wide, facetious red-lipped mouth, a quick, blithe, brown eye, and a broad, blunt nose.

Hamish knew intuitively that this was the typical inhabitant, the native, so to speak, of the guard-house; his sort had ridden the wooden-horse, for many a weary hour in every country under the sun, and when an Indian's tomahawk or a Frenchman's bullet should clear the ranks of him, the gap would be filled by a successor so like him in spirit that he might seem a lineal descendant instead of a mere successor in the line. He had long ago been dubbed the "Devil's Dragoon," and he looked down with a good-humored glance at a bevy of his comrades, who from the door of the nearest log-cabin covertly cast gibes at him, calling out _sotto voce_, "Right about wheel--Trot!--March!"

In another quarter of the parade the regular exercise was in progress, and Hamish listened with interest to the voice of the officer as it rang out crisp and clear on the frosty air.

"Poise--Firelock!"

A short interval while the sun glanced down the gleaming barrels of the muskets.

"c.o.c.k--Firelock!"

A sharp metallic click as of many sounds blent into one.

"Take--Aim!"

A moment of suspense.

"Fire!"

A resonant detonation of blank cartridges--and all the live echoes leaped in the woods, while the smoke drifted about the parade and glimmered prismatic in the sun, and then cleared away, escaping over the ramparts and blending with the timorous dissolving mists of the morning.

Several Indians had come in through the open gate, some arrayed in feather or fur match-coats and others in buckskin shirt and leggings, with their blankets purchased from the traders drawn up about their ears; they were standing near the walls of one of the block-houses to see the drill. A certain expectancy hung upon this group as they watched the movements of the men now loading anew.

"Half-c.o.c.k--Firelock!" came the order in the peremptory voice of the officer.

Once more that sharp, metallic, unnerving click.

"Handle--Cartridge!"

A sudden swift facial expression went along the line with a formidable effect. With the simultaneous show of strong teeth it was as if each soldier had fiercely snarled like a wild beast. But each had only bitten the end of the cartridge.

"Prime!"

The eyes of the Indians followed with an unwinking, fascinated stare the swift, simultaneous movement of the rank as of one man, every muscle animated by the same impulse.