Arundel (48 page)

Colonel Enos had lost none of his importance; so I was as full of politeness as a Boston hairdresser when, on coming up with him, Natanis swung our canoe alongside.

“Colonel Arnold’s compliments and a letter,” I said, handing it to him and keeping tight hold of his gunwale to see as much of Treeworgy as I could. So far as I could tell, Treeworgy took no interest in any of us after his first glum nod at me.

As the colonel read, he continually scratched at his knees and made a sucking sound with his tongue to show displeasure. He read the letter twice from beginning to end; folded it and put it in his pocket; then snatched it out and read it again. “Well!” he said. “Well!” and fell to scratching himself, his forehead all wrinkled.

At length he looked up, puzzled-like. “How do the men feel up ahead? Are they for going on, Morgan’s men and Meigs’s men?”

“Yes, sir. Even the sick we’re sending back.”

“Gah!” He made a noise in his throat, such a noise as a cleanly housewife makes on seeing a kitchen in a mess, “Gah! These sick men! If I could be rid of ’em, I might do something! Sick men! Sick men! Sick men! All to be looked after and fed like a lot of yowling babies!”

He glared at me. “How do Arnold and Morgan and Meigs have provisions for fifteen days, when all I’ve heard from ’em is calls for food? Food! Food! Food! Don’t they do anything but eat?”

“Sir,” I said, “I only know what the colonel writes. They lost a deal of supplies from the flood and overturned bateaux, so they’re on half rations; but they’d go on if they had no rations at all.”

“Morgan and Meigs and the colonel are good officers: they wouldn’t permit such a thing,” he said pompously. “The first duty of an officer is to his men.”

I thought of the tales I had heard of General Braddock at the Monongahela in the last war; how he beat our men with the flat of his sword to make them come from behind their trees and stand in line like good British soldiers, to be shot to shreds by the hidden French and Indians. There also came into my mind the many times I’d heard my father say the first duty of most British officers sent to America was always to themselves. But since I was facing a soldier who believed in discipline, I made no reply.

“I have no such supplies as Colonel Arnold speaks of,” he said querulously. “My men have barely three days’ provisions left! It’s common knowledge among ’em that if they advance another day’s march into this howling wilderness they’ll starve whatever they do: starve if they go forward; starve if they go back.”

“Up ahead,” I said, “they think that since Colonel Enos’s division had more provisions at the start than any of the others, it still must have more.”

“ ’Tain’t true!” he shouted, hammering his fist on the canoe thwart. “We’re near starvation ourselves! We lost food from rains and the damned leaky bateaux; then we fed the sick and gave flour to Greene’s division.”

“I was told,” I said, meaning to be sarcastic, “that what Greene got from you was two whole barrels of flour.”

“Yes,” said Enos petulantly, seeing no sarcasm in it, “and now I’m told to send on as many men as I can supply with fifteen days’ provisions, and send the rest back! How in God’s name can I do two things at once when I haven’t the means to do either!”

I gave him the message Greene had given me for him—that he was waiting for provisions. Enos made his housewifely noise in his throat, “Gah!” and prodded Treeworgy’s shoulder. “I’ll go ashore. Go back, Treeworgy, and tell Captain McCobb to hurry up here with the rest of the officers. I want to talk to ’em.” To me he added, “I’ll need you, too! There may be questions you’ll have to answer.”

He strode up and down the bank, rumbling to himself and making sucking sounds against the roof of his mouth, like a toothless old woman.

This, Natanis told us while we waited, was good hunting country. Not far from us, on the west side of Dead River, there was a wide brook rising in two ponds, thick with beavers. On this brook, he said, he had a burying place, as well as on the next stream above, and on the fourth pond of the Chain of Ponds and the first pond on the far side of the Height of Land.

I’d almost forgotten that spare canoes are often buried in the winter by all Northern Indians for safety and preservation; that a diligent Indian in rough country, where there are many falls and bad carries, will have several canoes scattered through his territory, either buried or, in the summer, carefully covered with branches.

When the bateaux of Colonel Enos’s division came up I sent Natanis and Hobomok away again, telling them to get game if possible, but to keep an eye on me in case I wished to move. There was a slow surliness about these men of Enos’s. They seemed more wretched than any of those in the other three divisions, though it was impossible that they had suffered greater hardships.

Two of them, Connecticut men, came over to me to ask whether I had come from up front. When I said I had, one asked when the front divisions were starting back.

“What makes you think they’re starting back?” I asked.

“Everybody says they’re starving to death,” he said. “Everybody says we’ll starve to death ourselves if we go beyond here. They can’t go on! They’ve
got
to come back.”

“I haven’t heard anybody say so,” I said. “Probably you’ve been listening to some crazy man: somebody that never left his mother before. Some cry-baby, maybe.”

“No,” the bateauman said, “all the sick from Morgan’s division are saying it.”

“Did they say it to you? Did you hear them?”

“No,” he said, “but Treeworgy was talking with them. They told him.”

Well, I thought, there it was, what I had been sure of at Fort Western: Treeworgy spreading fearsome tales!

“I’ll bet they didn’t tell him the worst of it, though,” I said, hoping they’d tell me more.

“Prob’ly not,” said the bateauman. “They told how the officers have to lick the men with whips to git ’em to carry their bateaux over the bad spots, so’s their backs are all bloody.”

“Well, well!”

“Yes,” the other bateauman said, “and how the water beyond here is poisoned by the rains so them as drinks it are all swoll up, and can’t walk.”

“Is everybody swoll up?” the first bateauman asked.

“You gosh-blamed idiots!” I said, “do I look swoll up?”

“No; that’s what Treeworgy said,” growled the first bateauman.

“What was it he said?”

“That they’d be sending back somebody as wasn’t swoll up, to say everything was all right, and git our food away from us.”

“There ain’t going to be nobody git no more of my food away from me!” the second bateauman growled.

“Me neither,” said the first.

The two guffawed. “Anybody that gits food out of us from now on,” said the second, “will have to git our muskets away from us fust.”

I turned to look at Enos, who stood on the bank, pinching his lower lip and staring down river.

“The damned old woman!” the first bateauman said, following my glance.

“Yes,” said the second, “he’s gave away enough provisions to fellers that say they’re sick. To hell with him and to hell with them! If we don’t look out for ourselves, nobody will!”

“Well,” I said, “they don’t feel that way up front. They’d rather die than give up.”

The first bateauman snorted. “What’s the good of that? It’s like Treeworgy was saying: if it’s sure death to go some place, you’re more use to your country if you don’t go there.”

Rain had begun to fall again, a cold drizzle that might, I knew, change to snow.

“Look at this!” the second bateauman cried. “Look at this stinking country! Look at those damned mountains! I go no further!”

I heard Enos calling. Sickened by their talk, I left the bateaumen and went to him. Other bateaux had come up, and some of the officers of the Fourth Division—Williams, Scott and McCobb, captains; Lieutenant Hyde and Lieutenant Peters. A fire had been lit for them and a tent pitched, whereas I doubt there was a single tent left in all of Morgan’s and Meigs’s divisions. They sat disconsolate in the tent, looking out at the rain. I marveled how it was possible for men of the same size and muscle and upbringing to be so different. The minds of Morgan’s, Meigs’s and Greene’s officers worked swiftly, seizing on favorable and happy things; but those of Enos’s officers worked slowly and moved little, like a cow quivering the skin over her shoulder to drive away flies on a hot afternoon. They saw no ray of light or hope in anything.

“Here’s the messenger that brought the letter,” Colonel Enos said as I came up.

They glowered at me. Captain Scott, a heavy-paunched man with a thin face and a red nose on which a drop of moisture hung, asked gloomily whether I knew what lay between us and Quebec.

I said I knew from hearsay, whereupon Captain Scott asked me to tell him honestly whether I would undertake to travel the route with insufficient provisions.

“Why, sir,” I said, “I’d travel it if all I had was a handful of salt and a lump of pork to cook with trouts.”

“That’s quibbling!” Colonel Enos said. “I detest quibbling! Answer truthfully, now: if you had provisions for only a few days, and couldn’t get more, would you be willing to make the journey to Quebec from here, especially if it was your duty to conduct others who looked to you for safety?”

“Sir,” I said, “you’re a colonel. I’m only a guide. If I should speak out, my words might be held against me. I might be accused of disrespect. I know little about the ways of an army. Some of them seem to me to be thought out by lunatics.”

“Disregard our rank, sir,” Colonel Enos said. “Give us the information we’re seeking.”

“Well, then,” I said, “there’s two ways of going to Quebec: one in wartime and one in peacetime.”

“Now you’re quibbling again!”

“Sir,” I said, “I’m not quibbling! I’d go to Quebec in wartime with no provisions at all, so long as there was another man left to go with.”

“Let’s get at this another way,” said Captain Williams, a pleasant, polite man. “Do you know the instructions in Colonel Arnold’s letter?”

“Yes. He ordered Colonel Enos to send forward all the men to whom he could give fifteen days’ rations, and send home all the others, both sick and well.”

“That’s correct. Now let me ask you what you’d do about going to Quebec in this case: Suppose you could only send forward thirty men with fifteen days’ provisions, while the rest of your men, three hundred and more, would have to be sent back with no provisions of any sort—sent back to struggle through these forests and bogs and keep up their strength for a week—two weeks, maybe—without a damned thing to eat.”

“Now you’re asking about an impossibility,” I said.

“Not at all, sir; not at all!” Enos cried. “That’s our predicament exactly! Tell us what you’d do in such a situation?”

“Well,” I said slowly, “I think I’d put all my provisions in one place and count ’em.”

“Just what do you mean by that?”

“Why, sir,” I said, “I mean there’s no doubt in my mind you’ve got more provisions than you think.”

“Drat you!” the colonel began, purple with rage; but Captain Williams stopped him.

“We invited it, Colonel.” He spoke to me politely. “We’d like you to see this as something apart from your personal desires. Our own men are sullen from fearing their food will run out. We have others to consider, too. We’re obliged to support all the sick sent back by Morgan and Meigs and Greene. I suppose you think it’s our duty to let these sick men starve in the wilderness?”

“No,” I said, “I don’t.”

“Then you think it’s our duty to give them enough food to get back to the settlements, because without food they’d certainly starve?”

“Yes,” I said, “I do.”

“Then if you think that’s our duty,” Captain Williams said, “you must think it’s our duty to return home with the entire division.”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” I exclaimed in disgust.

“But we can’t do two things!” Captain Williams protested. “We can’t send the sick home, and go forward at the same time. You say yourself it’s our duty to supply the sick with food. As soon as we do that we can’t give anyone enough provisions for fifteen days. Colonel Arnold asked only for such men as could be supplied with provisions for fifteen days. It seems to me you think it’s our duty to return home.”

“That would be all very well,” I said, choking with rage, “if you had as few provisions as you say.”