The Seekers (3 page)

As if hunting for stars behind the sky’s haze, Wayne tilted his graying head back. “I can suggest an alternative to commerce or the army, Cornet. You could settle out here.”

Mildly astonished, Abraham replied, “Why, yes, sir, I suppose I could. Truthfully, that’s never occurred to me before.”

“When we raised the stockade at the confluence of this river and the Aux Glaize”—the general was referring to the fort he’d christened Defiance—“I was struck by the remarkable beauty and fertility of the land. Nature’s dealt bountifully with it. A man could hew his house from these forests. Fill his table from the trails and streams”—a boot scraped a furrow in the loam of the bank—“raise enough crops in this soil to provide for his household and have ample corn meal or flour left to transship across the Great Lakes, or back up the Ohio in exchange for the manufactured goods he needs. You know what they call me these days. One of the old Revolutionary warhorses. I suppose I’ll never shed the label—nor lose the urge to lead men. But I’ve found that life on the land can be very good. Very good. I own a rice plantation in the south—Hazzard’s Cowpen, it’s called. A gift of the people of the state of Georgia for my services during the rebellion—” His voice had grown dreamy, remote. “Yes, a man could do far worse than to stay here when the battle’s done—”

Abraham had to admit the idea was intriguing. Escape to a homestead in the Northwest Territory would solve his problem with his father. As Wayne said, a man could live well.
If
the Indian threat were gone—

Abraham’s brief enthusiasm faded as footsteps approached. Northward along the Maumee, his whole life could be decided in an instant. It could end in an instant. The recollection of that set his palms itching and started rivulets of sweat trickling down his neck to his linen collar.

He’d been foolishly carried away by Wayne’s remarks. Even if he survived his first test in battle, the chance of pulling away from his father was a slim one. Philip Kent would not easily loose his hold on his son—

Abraham put the whole vexing question out of mind, turning along with Wayne as a wiry young officer approached. The officer carried his cockaded bicorn hat under his arm. Despite the semidarkness, Abraham recognized one of the general’s aides, William Henry Harrison.

Harrison saluted. Wayne returned it smartly. “What is it, Lieutenant?”

“The barber has arrived at the headquarters tent, sir.”

“Ah, yes—” Wayne smiled again. “I don’t want to lead the Legion with my hair unpowdered and disarrayed.” The general’s vanity, like his courage, was familiar to the men he commanded. But on the wilderness march, he’d had few chances to indulge his penchant for elegance. Care of his hair was one of the rare exceptions.

Stifling a groan and clamping a hand around his bandaged left leg, Wayne started to hobble off. The mist hanging over the Maumee had begun to turn a pearly color. A few drooping willow branches were discernible in the murk now. Dawn—

Wayne stopped, glanced back.

“Whenever I’ve had the opportunity to speak privately with one or more of my officers, I have acquainted them with a letter I recently received from the secretary of war—”

“General Knox is a friend of my father’s, sir.”

“Then your father is fortunate. Henry Knox is a sagacious man. He wrote to say that the nation has waited two years for this morning. So have the hundreds of thousands seeking to leave the seacoast. And those six hundred brave men whose remains will stay forever along the Wabash—they’re waiting too. I trust each officer will carry that thought in his heart today.”

Abraham could only give a quick nod as Mad Anthony leaned on William Henry Harrison’s offered arm and labored back toward the camp where men were rousing around the fires. In the gray light Abraham heard the first drums beating.

On the way back to his tent for his sword and pistols, Abraham Kent was hailed from an officer’s tent belonging to the Third sublegion. He angled through the noisy press of men turning out with their muskets and approached a handsome twenty-year-old. The officer held his spontoon in one hand while he crooked the index finger of the other.

On his blond head the young man wore one of the shaggy fur caps designed at Wayne’s request by the tailors at Legionville. The cap in this case was decorated with a plume of the Third sublegion’s particular color—yellow.

The lieutenant kept beckoning with his finger. “Come here, dragoon. We’ve a present for you.”

“Not now, Meriwether—they’re beating assembly.”

But Lieutenant Meriwether Lewis, whom Abraham had frequently engaged at cards in winter quarters back at Greenville, set his spontoon aside and practically dragged the junior officer to the tent entrance.

“I hear. But you’re outranked, Cornet. You’re not permitted to reject a gift from a couple of Virginians who’ve taken so much of your pay.”

“Stolen would be a better word,” Abraham said with a grin not completely genuine.

Lewis spoke to someone inside the tent. “This horse soldier’s questioning our integrity, William. Suggesting we deal with sharp’s cards—”

“Didn’t know New Englanders were that astute,” came the laconic reply of another lieutenant, a tall, red-haired fellow some four or five years older than the other two. Abraham was pushed bodily into the tent.

“Shut the damn flap before we’re all cashiered!” the red-haired officer whispered. As he rummaged through the folds of his blankets, he added, “Don’t tell me you’re going to refuse a tot of prime Kaintuck whiskey.” Abraham’s grin looked less forced. “I didn’t realize that was the gift you had in mind, William.”

Lieutenant William Clark, youngest brother of the famous frontiersman George Rogers Clark, displayed his jug. “Most carefully smuggled in—at a cost of five new dollars per gallon.”

Clark walked toward Abraham, stepping over the pile of sketch pads he was using to develop his natural aptitude for drawing and map-making. Clark’s intelligence reports, illustrated with small charcoal scenes, were well known in the Legion—and reputedly brought General Wayne diversion while increasing his regard for the junior officer.

Clark propped a boot on one of two brass-latched wooden cases in which his friend Lewis, almost his match in height, collected mineral and botanical samples. Clark waggled the jug at Abraham again, his eyes losing a little of their mirth.

“If you can’t use a couple of swallows on a morning like this,” he said, “I’ll be happy to down your share.”

“Or I,” Meriwether Lewis said.

Touched by the gesture of friendship on the eve of battle, Abraham looked at the two officers from Virginia—men with whom he’d spent many an enjoyable, if unprofitable, hour over the past twelve months. A shiver chased down his backbone as he thought of the massed might of the tribes awaiting the Legion to the northeast. He grabbed the jug.

“Yes, I can use it—on a morning like this,” he said.

Somber-eyed, he drank while the Legionary drums beat steadily louder in the dawn heat.

S
HORTLY AFTER SEVEN, WITH
the sun spearing oblique shafts of light through the mist on the Maumee, the Legion of the United States assembled for the attack.

The Legion itself, four sublegions of foot preceded by a small mounted patrol, formed in columns of fours on the right flank, close by the shore of the river. Scott’s Kentucky mounted militia would advance along a parallel route on the left flank, through the cornfields that stretched northeast between the river on one side and thick woods on the other.

Mounted on Sprite, whose restlessness seemed to match his own, Abraham gathered with the rest of MisCampbell’s dragoon officers at the rear of the Legion columns. The commanding officer explained their orders in a few words.

“We’ll be held in reserve, behind the fines, and ordered forward if they need us.”

On hearing that, Abraham gave voice to the annoyance most of the officers expressed with scowls and grumbles. “Sir, if the Indians are really waiting for us upriver—”

MisCampbell swiped at his perspiring cheek. “We believe so, Kent. But we’re not positive. They were seen there on the eighteenth. They may have pulled back to the British fort.”

“Even so, shouldn’t the horse be going in first? If the terrain’s as rough as I hear it is, columns of foot can hardly maneuver there.”

“To the contrary, Cornet. Only columns of foot can maneuver well on such ground. A head-on cavalry charge with all those fallen trees lying every which way would be impossible. Perhaps General Wayne will utilize us for an assault on the flank—”

The captain’s stern eyes softened, cynically amused. “Don’t be so anxious to shed blood. I’ve done it, and it’s far from pleasant.”

Abraham saw some of his fellow officers grinning and turned red. He was the greenest of the lot, and he’d unwittingly demonstrated it. Fortunately discussion was cut short.

MisCampbell shouted: “Prepare your troops to advance and await the command!”

Tugging Sprite’s rein, Abraham turned the mare back toward his men. All were dressed much as he was: shirt, trousers, boots. Sabers hung from leather belts. Pairs of primed and loaded pistols were snugged in saddle holsters. At least the Americans had learned something from the agonizing years of the Revolution. Wayne suited the army’s clothing and equipment to the country and the temperature; there was no laboring under monstrously heavy packs and blanket-rolls, as Abraham’s father said the British infantry had always done during the Rebellion.

The foot too were lightly dressed this morning, carrying only canteens and weapons. The trappings of rank—waistcoats, epauletted outer coats—had been left in heaps behind Captain Pike’s earthwork.

The Indians fought with even less equipment, Abraham knew. They wore only hide trousers or waist clouts, and moccasins.

And paint.

He’d listened to descriptions of those ugly slashes of color with which the braves decorated their faces, arms and torsos. This morning, he’d probably see war paint with his own eyes—

Head aching from the heat and the whiskey he’d drunk with Lieutenants Lewis and Clark, he swung Sprite into line behind his troop’s senior officer, Lieutenant Stovall. Abraham didn’t care much for the chubby Marylander, reputed to be a sodomite. Stovall had made one advance, months ago, but Abraham’s gruff reply and clenched fists quickly persuaded the young officer from Baltimore to seek his pleasure elsewhere.

Stovall occasionally bragged that his parents had hustled him out of his home city and into the army because of a scandal whose enormity remained a source of amusement to him. Abraham never learned the full nature of the scandal, but an incident a few weeks prior to the abortive seduction gave him a clue.

One of Stovall’s treasured possessions was an expensive, rather large oval locket on a chain. A woman’s locket; a curiously effeminate souvenir for a man in the army. In a rare hour of drunken camaraderie, Stovall had opened the locket and shown Abraham a miniature which even the young Bostonian, no prude, found shocking because it represented something he had never seen before: a full-figure miniature of a dark-haired young woman reclining on a drapery, nude.

One coy hand partially concealed a dusky triangle, which the anonymous artist had detailed with the same attention to eroticism he’d given to the young woman’s somewhat sleepy eyes, her wide mouth and her large breasts, carefully reddened at the tips.

The young woman in the portrait:—she could be no more than sixteen or seventeen—had a voluptuous, puffy decadence that disgusted Abraham even while it aroused him. As Stovall snapped the locket shut, Abraham offered the expected ribald compliment, then asked, “Is that your mistress, Lieutenant?”

Stovall chuckled, using his amusement as a pretext to touch the back of Abraham’s hand. “A gentleman never compromises a lady by answering such a question, dear boy. It’s sufficient to say the locket was given to me by a charming creature who loves me deeply, and whose love is reciprocated.”

Days later, Abraham brought up the locket in conversation with another officer. His scalp crawled when the officer identified the girl in the painting. “His mistress? Yes, he intimates she is. She’s also his sister, Lucy Stovall.”

“Good Christ! I thought his remarks about a scandal in Baltimore were only boasts.”

“To the best of my knowledge, I’m right in the identity of that pretty whore he carries around in his breeches. There was a scandal, and a juicy one. The girl’s married now, to some chap named Freemantle—Stovall fairly seethes whenever he mentions him. In case it’s not clear, Cornet, Stovall is a libertine of the worst sort. Don’t let him catch you alone! I understand his family’s damned rich, by the way. That probably helps buy official silence about his little escapades—”

“And helps bribe recruiting officers to look in the other direction?”

“And sign his papers in haste—yes.”

After that, Abraham avoided the lieutenant, save for the one time he was unavoidably alone with him, and slyly propositioned.

Stovall’s unpopularity was heightened by a condescending manner he displayed even to superiors—and to Abraham this morning. “Damned silly of you to run about pretending to be a bloody firebrand, Kent.” Stovall sometimes affected diction he imagined to be British; Abraham considered it a sign of Federalist leanings. “I’ve no desire to be potted by a bloody lot of howling heathen. Riding in the rear suits me admirably—”

Abraham couldn’t resist a jab at the soft-featured officer. “Off the field as well as on, eh, sir?”

Stovall colored, started to retort. MisCampbell’s shouted command distracted him. Stovall reined his horse around and repeated the order loudly,
“For-aaard!”

In a moment they were moving with a jingle of metal, a slap of leather, a plop of hoofs in the black earth leading to the slope that angled down into the cornfields. Abraham still felt foolish because of his comments to MisCampbell. Perhaps that was the reason he’d dared to jape at a senior officer.

Why
had
he made those idiotic remarks about wanting to be first to charge the enemy? Was he secretly afraid he lacked courage? Yes, that might be the reason—