Arundel (64 page)

When we came out, Lieutenant Church and Lieutenant Steele and Major Bigelow were in front of the house. Bigelow lounged over to us. “My, my!” he said, and clicked with his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “I always wondered what a couple of spies looked like!” He turned to Steele.

“I don’t see how you tell ’em when they’re different colors, Archibald,” he said, pretending to an exaggerated admiration in his voice and attitude. “One of ’em’s brown, and one of ’em’s white.” He looked quickly back at me, seeming to scan my face closely. “Nearly white, that is.”

He winked at Natanis and shook hands with him; then took me by the front of the shirt and shook me a little. “Well,” he said, “it’s a good thing you stopped playing spy, because now Steele can stop worrying. He was pretty sure you were one, he said, because you looked as if you had something on your mind. He isn’t accustomed to people who look like that.”

Steele came to me, shamed-like, and spit carefully to leeward. “Glad you got back all right.” He grinned sheepishly at Natanis and held out his hand.

“Lieutenant Steele,” I told Natanis. “You remember him.”

“He hopes,” I translated to Steele for Natanis, “you enjoyed the two moose he sent you.”

“He thought it was careless of him not to send cows instead of moose,” Bigelow said. With that he burst into his wild, false laugh, and we were glad to laugh with him, all of us. Thus we were more at our ease together than if Arnold had called out all the drums and drummed us back into favor again.

There was a great to-do over Natanis; and since it was known that he spoke to the other Indians as Brother or Cousin, always, the word went about that Eneas and Sabatis and Hobomok and Natawammet and all the rest of them were either brothers or cousins of Natanis. This is a fair sample of how much the white man knows about the Abenakis.

We went on down the Chaudière to the village of St. Mary’s—a village that sticks in my head because it was the scene of a mysterious occurrence, one that showed clearly how injustice often meets a stern and righteous reward.

There was an inn at St. Mary’s, a whitewashed wooden inn with clay-chinked boards, and in it were Frenchmen selling food: turkeys, bad brandy, and Spanish wine. We went in to ask the prices, and found Burr already there, busy with the wine and jabbering with a French girl. Somehow he contrived to look courtly and pretty, in spite of his torn breeches. He winked at me knowingly, as if to say he would show this lady a thing or two, which I had no doubt he would. I think he couldn’t keep from saying soft things to any woman so long as there was none other in sight that pleased him better.

When I found out the prices I was stonied by them, and left Burr to his gallantries, glad enough to go back to the beef and potatoes that Colonel Arnold had bought for us in bulk. Cap Huff, though, seemed to have something on his mind.

While we were eating, Major Bigelow and Captain Dearborn came up on horseback, the major riding close to Dearborn and supporting him. He was bent over the horse’s neck with sickness, his face above his black beard looking like the parchment of a drumhead.

We went to help Dearborn, Cap among us, and the rat-faced Flood, who had gone with Asa Hutchins to kill Dearborn’s dog. We had lowered the captain to the ground and were standing about, eager to do more, when I heard an enraged bellow from Cap, and saw him take Flood by the waist and throw him on the ground.

There was a turmoil. Flood was snatched to his feet. One of the men thrust his hand into Flood’s breeches pocket and drew out a purse, which Bigelow took and gave to Dearborn. I heard Cap shout, “Whip him! Whip him!” People poured from the inn; and in the twinkling of an eye, while Flood shouted, “I never! I never!” he was spliced to a post, and two men were belaboring him with willow switches.

As for Cap, he had vanished—reluctant, I thought, to witness the punishment for which he was responsible.

At St. Mary’s the army was formed into companies again and we struck away from the Chaudière and across the flat plains of Canada, with Arnold stopping to watch us every little while, and Major Bigelow and Captain Thayer and Captain Topham and Captain Morgan going up and down the straggling little line of men, all of them saying nothing but “Hurry, boys; hurry! Hurry on, boys; it’s not far now! Hurry along! Hurry along!”

When we came up with Cap, he was sitting on an oval-shaped wooden keg. What was in it, he said, he didn’t know; but he had found it and so brought it along. It was full of Spanish wine; so we managed to be cheerful as we plodded over the snow-covered ground and through the mud of the low spots, terrible going, the mud up to the middle of our legs.

Now I spoke of what happened at St. Mary’s as mysterious, and in truth the incident was mysterious for all time to its victim Flood, but it was so no longer to me. I learned from Cap Huff how he had slipped the purse into Flood’s pocket, so it might be found there, and under cover of the uproar that followed had filched the Spanish wine from the inn.

By the grace of God the weather was warm and sunny, so that the feet of the men were not torn to pieces. Provisions were plenty, and every ten miles there was a scattering of whitewashed houses with a papist chapel in their midst, so we could sleep under roofs at night. Around the houses were Frenchmen in blanket coats and red sashes and knitted caps, each with a queue down to his waist and in his mouth a smoldering pipe smelling like the fires we have in the spring in Arundel, when we burn the sweepings of the house and all the trash accumulated beneath the winter’s snows.

I don’t know why these Frenchmen have faces the color of my musket stock when it needs oil, a dusty grayish brown. But in all their houses there was no male who didn’t smoke, even boys of three and four years old having short pipes at which they sucked; so I think the color is smoked into their faces, as into a ham.

It was the eighth of November when we shook ourselves free of a fresh fall of snow and came up a little rise on which stood Arnold and Bigelow and Steele and Church and a score more, looking off to the northward. Down beneath us was a wind-whipped river, so wide that two frigates lying in midstream looked no bigger than peapods. On the far side was a tremendous headland, higher at the upstream end, like a giant dog, all picked out in dazzling white because of the newly fallen snow.

There was a fringe of houses along the legs and belly of this giant dog, and a jumble of spires and gray stone buildings around its flanks. On its head were squat buildings with a blood-red flag flying above them.

We stood there silent. Others moved up the ridge, musket straps squeaking, rawhide moccasins rasping, and stood silent beside us as well. What the others thought I don’t know; but I thought that in one of those jumbles of gray buildings was Mary Mallinson, beautiful and slender, with a dust of golden freckles on her white skin. I had a powerful fear I might somehow be prevented from going to her, now that I had waited all these years, and come through a terrible journey for the chance.

I might have had other and greater thoughts, but just then a boy from Thayer’s company, a boy with no shoes, came up behind us, standing on one foot and then on the other, to keep the numbness from them.

He stared long across the river, silent with the rest of us. At last it was he that broke the silence.

“Gosh! Is that Quebec?”

XXVIII

Q
UEBEC
, scornful and aloof in her white mantle, put me in mind of a woman: caring nothing, to outward view, for these dirty, ragged, limping, hairy men who had accomplished the impossible and burst from the trackless wilderness to stare at her with hot and hungry eyes, yet watchful of their every move; eager to know their thoughts; fearful lest she succumb to them against her will; subject, even, to moments of weakness when, had we known, she might have softened at our touch.

I cannot tell how dangerous we were in those first few days that we lay strung along the high bank of Point Levis; but I know there was never a band of men who looked readier for rapine or murder. There were six hundred of us when the wanderers had straggled in; and none with anything to his name save the scurvy rags in which he stood, the shredded remnant of a blanket, a battered pack, and a musket foul with rust. Many had less; for even blankets had been torn from some by the rivers we had passed, or used long since for clothing.

There was a devilish wind each night, kicking up a chop that would swamp the staunchest canoe; so we could do nothing but lie where we were until the wind went down.

Here we heard how General Schuyler, commanding the army that aimed to come down the St. Lawrence, capture Montreal and join Colonel Arnold before Quebec, had been obliged to go away on other military matters, leaving the leadership of his regiments to General Richard Montgomery. Then there was incessant talk of Montgomery, how he had been a respected British officer, and had come over to us to fight against his own people because, some said, he had married an American, and because, according to others, he had not been treated justly by the British. We didn’t care what the reason was, so long as he fought for us. In such a case, it seems to me, any reason becomes a good reason, just as any reason that leads a man to fight against us is considered a bad reason.

While we waited, the companies were mustered, and passed in review before Colonel Arnold; and I swear that any man who saw them without knowing what they had encountered would have laughed himself sick at such travesties on troops.

What with starvation, fluxes, coughs and rheumatics, they limped and wavered in their marching, more like cripples than soldiers. Half went barefoot in the snow, though the hides of our beeves had been turned into moccasins. Mostly they marched bareheaded to the cold Canadian wind, their hats long lost in the swamps of Megantic.

Their breeches were in shreds, held together by strips cut from the edges of blankets, or not held together at all. Stockings had vanished, and their legs were scarred beyond belief by the roots and brambles through which they had stumbled.

I have built many a scarecrow since that day, to keep the crows from our young corn in Arundel; and I have never done so without thinking how much more warmly and genteelly my scarecrows have been dressed than were the men who marched in review in sight of proud Quebec, white-cloaked and scornful in the distance.

It was on the thirteenth that the wind went down for the first time. I have little patience with those who fear the thirteenth day of any month as one that will bring disaster; but I would have been better pleased if we had crossed on some day other than the thirteenth; and so, too, would Colonel Arnold; for he had gnawed his fingers since our arrival at Levis on the eighth, fretting to get across and at the city’s throat.

We had thirty-five canoes; four passengers to a canoe was all we could carry; for there were two British frigates in mid-stream, eager to blow us out of water, and so stationed that we must pass between them. Thus we had to go swiftly and silently; for with the discovery of one canoe, the entire flotilla, strung out on that mile-wide river, would be in danger.

At dark we brought the canoes out of hiding at Caldwell’s mill, a stone building on the shore of the St. Lawrence where a little stream flows in. There the ragged army waited. The night was bitter cold, and dark as pine woods at midnight. We stood and shivered in this blackness when Arnold came among us and spoke to us. There was a rasping quality to his voice, always: irritating when he was in a rage; but one that moved his hearers to excitement when there were stirring things afoot. I think we shivered as much from the sound of his voice as from the cold.