Arundel (67 page)

“Did you see anything familiar about those men?” I asked.

She said nothing for a time, but watched her dog staring reproachfully at the remnant of his tail, first from one side and then from the other.

At length she said: “No, but I won’t forget the one with the brown beard and the white blanket coat—the one that shot Anatarso! His face—” She broke off suddenly and pointed her knife at me. “Why, yes! Treeworgy! That was Treeworgy!”

So Hook was in Quebec!

We could hear distant shouting, and the beat of a drum, and there was movement among those who stood behind the ramparts, watching us. Looking back along the road, we saw a column of troops coming down it.

Arnold led them, with Oswald, Ogden, Colonel Greene and Major Bigelow. I thought to fall in with Morgan’s men, but Bigelow motioned me in beside him.

“What happened?” he asked. “We heard they were coming out.”

“No,” I said, “they caught Merchant, out of Morgan’s company, in a hole and dragged him into the city before you could say Sam Adams.”

“Well,” he said, “the colonel thinks if they see what we look like they’ll come out to drag all of us in. That’s why he’s parading us.”

“I wish to God they would!” I said, thinking that if they did I might have a chance to get at Hook. “Maybe they will! They came out for Wolfe.”

“The
French
came out for Wolfe,” Bigelow corrected me. “Montcalm happened to go crazy on that particular day, and accidents like that don’t happen twice in succession. Besides, these people are English. They won’t go crazy. I can hear them in there now!”

He aped an Englishman’s speech, chewing his words in the fore part of his mouth. “What! Go out among a lot of silly rebel tradesmen? Faugh, faugh! Pugh, pugh! Remember Montcalm!” He shook back imaginary lace from his wrist and took a pinch of imaginary snuff, affecting to sneeze horribly. I left him and fell in behind Morgan’s men.

We were a sorry-looking crew, and fewer than I supposed, what with Captain Hanchet having been left at Point Levis with sixty men to guard our scaling ladders, and those who had been unable to get in the canoes, and the sick who had remained on the other side to regain their health.

When we deployed before the walls the folk on them set up a cheer and waved their hats. It may have been, as some thought, a friendly cheer; but to me it seemed ironical, as if they held our pretensions lightly. My suspicion was confirmed when, after our exchange of cheers, they let off a thirty-six pounder at us. I think they forgot to aim in their excitement, for the balls went every which way. Our men made contemptuous jeering noises by thrusting out their tongues and forcing air around them. Also they pursued the cannon balls through the snow, and brought them back to show to the garrison in derision. Some of the riflemen moved in closer to pick off a few lobster-backs, but the range was too long. From where we were we could see the icy patches on the walls we hoped to scale, and the deep stone trench below them like an open, icy grave—a most displeasing sight.

When it became apparent that the British were content to remain behind their ramparts, jeering at us and playing with their thirty-six pounder, Colonel Arnold sent Ogden forward to the gate under a flag of truce, with a demand that the city surrender. The garrison may have thought the white flag was a French flag; or they may merely have been British, great believers in their own nobility in war, but not so noble in actual practice, as we discovered on every occasion when we met them. At all events, they let off their thirty-six pounder at Ogden and his white flag when he was halfway to the gate, missing him, though not by a sufficient margin for comfort. He marched serenely back to us, but I suspect he had a shrinking feeling in his rear during the march, from the thought of receiving a thirty-six pound ball in that quarter.

So we went back again to Caldwell’s manor house; and, knowing him to be the commander of the militia who had fired on our flag of truce, we slaughtered his cattle with clear consciences, which we would have done no matter who he was.

XXIX

W
E LACKED
many things in those first days before Quebec: breeches, shoes, razors, soap, shirts, blankets, hats, money, stockings, muskets, needles, thread, bayonets, pipes, tobacco… . No beggars, in short, could have had less than we.

Yet we might have endured our destitution without much trouble but for two things: we lacked men to set up a proper blockade of the roads going into Quebec, and powder to make a fight in case a force should come out from the city and take us front and rear. When our powder was measured there was enough to provide each man with four rounds; and four rounds is barely enough to smell up the barrel of a musket, let alone raise a dust on folk who are after your life.

Therefore the colonel, learning General Montgomery had captured Montreal and would soon march down river to join him, made up his mind to drop back out of danger and wait for Montgomery’s arrival; then return to Quebec again with enough men to blockade the roads and cut off the city’s provisions, and enough powder to blow holes in everybody.

When I heard the army was to fall back, I went hunting Cap Huff; for I hadn’t seen him since he was disappointed in his personal looting of Major Caldwell’s manor house.

Remembering his dislike of the French, and his determination to take home one of their queues as a souvenir, I was uneasy about him. It may be Cap was rude and uncouth, as some folk have ever believed and said, and seldom a beautification of the politer side of social life. Yet I found him restful because what he said never caused me to feel the need of thinking. The fact is that whatever he was, he was my friend. I need say no more to any man who has had a friend. One who has no friends could never understand my disquiet at this time, no matter how much I might say.

I asked here and there concerning him; but no man, it seemed, had seen or heard of him for days. I sent Natanis, Hobomok, and Jacataqua to find him if they could—Natanis along the road that skirts the St. Lawrence, to the little town of Sillery; Hobomok along the main road to Montreal, running out through the town of St. Foy’s; Jacataqua toward the settlements along the St. Charles River. While they hunted I sat worrying and cursing Cap for an irresponsible fool; for it had been decided that early on the following morning the army would move back through St. Foy’s to Pointe-aux-Trembles, some twenty-four miles up the St. Lawrence; and God only knew what would become of Cap if he were left alone.

Hobomok came back in the afternoon, declaring nobody in St. Foy’s had seen hide or hair of him; and toward dusk Jacataqua returned from the banks of the St. Charles with similar tidings. But when Natanis came in, a little after nightfall, he had news. He had gone out along the bluff of the St. Lawrence toward Sillery, passing the tree-surrounded summer homes of wealthy Quebec folk, and had found scuffed footprints wavering toward one of them. The footprints, big as bear-tracks, led to a side porch, where there was a broken window. He entered the house and found himself in a kitchen, in which were many empty brandy bottles, and a feather mattress on the floor, and on the white wall the print of an enormous hand, where its owner had leaned against the wall to raise the trap door which, in all Canadian kitchens, conceals the staircase to the cellar. This print, Natanis said, must have been made by the hand of Cap Huff.

Cap had gone staggering off through the trees, bumping into them and failing down, as Natanis could see from the tracks in the snow; so Natanis trailed him. The tracks led to another summer house, where there were more empty bottles, and on the kitchen floor a bed made out of pillows.

I think,” Natanis said in conclusion, “that even still your friend cannot go far without falling down in the snow. If we go at once to Sillery, we may find him before he does himself a hurt.”

We set off, the four of us, as soon as we could roll our packs. The night was dark and the snow deep; and I was glad we were groping for the roads of Canada rather than those of New England. They have a custom in Canada, because of the violent snows, of marking the roads on each side with upright pines, so that even though snow falls each day, which it often does, there are always lines of pine trees to guide the traveler on his way. It is the law, too, that after a storm each Canadian must go out with a horse and one of the squat sleighs they call carioles and drive along that portion of the road that lies before his property. Thus the roads are always partly broken.

Natanis showed us the first house where signs of Cap’s occupancy had been discovered. The second house, he said, was half a cross beyond—half the distance between two of the crosses that the papist French plant along their roads, as thick as fence posts in Maine, each cross surmounted with all manner of implements: shears, scaling ladders, hammers and tongs; frog-spears, bottles and roosters.

We came up to this second house to hear a tumult within, shouts and thumps and laughter, and then a bawling voice, familiarly hoarse, shouting the words of a song I came to know better, later:

I opened the door and walked into a dark little hall and thence into a snug candle-lit kitchen with strips of colored paper pasted around the windows to keep out the bitter wind and the snow powder. There were Cap and an old, old Frenchman with a queue so long he could sit on the end of it, and a younger Frenchman and his brown-faced wife. There were three brown-faced girls, two about the age of Jacataqua and the other the size of a mosquito, and a brown-faced boy not more than five years old with a pipe between his teeth and a rope end braided into his queue to give it substance, all of them sitting before a pot-bellied iron stove red-hot around the neck.

The boy with the pipe was perched on one of Cap’s knees, and the small girl on the other. When Cap saw my face at the door he leaped to his feet, spilling his young friends on the floor.

“Ho!” Cap bawled. “It’s about time you got around! Hey, Zhulie! Hey, Lizette! Friend! Friend!
Amee! Amee!”

He bellowed in a way to deafen everybody, as was his habit when he hoped to make himself understood by persons of alien speech. His French friends stared silently and timorously at the four of us: me with my rough clothes, and Natanis and Hobomok, and Jacataqua with her hand twisted in the scruff of Anatarso’s neck. We must have had a look of wildness that would have quieted a gathering of New York gaolbirds, let alone a peaceable French family.

“What in God’s name have you been doing?” I asked. “I’ve been in a state about you, you blundering ox!”

“What are you talking about!” he exclaimed. “Can’t I take a little walk without being spied on?”

“A little walk!” I cried. “How many days do you need for a little walk? Didn’t you get enough walking on the Chaudière?”

“What’s the matter with you!” he growled benevolently, giving Jacataqua an affectionate slap in the ribs that made her cough.

“The matter is that the army moves back to Pointe-aux-Trembles at dawn to-morrow. I’ve been hunting you high and low so you wouldn’t be left alone in this damned country, and spend the rest of your days in a British prison.”

Cap rubbed his red face with his vast hands.

“To-morrow! They couldn’t go to-morrow! They just got there!”

“You fool! How long do you think you’ve been away?”

“Two days,” Cap said, scratching his head.

“Well, there’s something wrong with your arithmetic, because all of us know you’ve been gone five days.”

“Like hell I have! I slept in a kitchen night before last. Last night I slept here in this kitchen with Pierre Lemoine and his wife and his mother and his son and his three daughters and a dog, and I think there was a pig as well, though maybe it was a cow.”

“It’s not worth arguing about,” I said, “but Natanis found two kitchens where you slept, both full of empty brandy bottles. God knows how many other places you occupied!”

Cap came close to me, smelling brutally of garlic and wearing a smirk that made his round red face look like the full moon coming up out of the ocean on a hot summer night. “That accounts for it! I was put to it to understand how all that stuff could have come out of one house.” He came closer and breathed on me until I near choked. “Listen, Stevie: did you ever hear of Normandy cider?”