Long Knife

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “Me too, Mister Crump. And you’ve defied me one time too many. Have at it, man!” George took a deep breath and prepared to move harder and faster than he ever had. There was a great risk involved here, he knew full well, not just for himself but for the entire expedition, perhaps for the preservation of the Kentucky frontier; Crump was indeed one of the fiercest creatures George had ever seen on two legs.

  Crump suddenly handed his rifle to the man next to him, crouched, and hurled himself across the five feet of distance between them, hands reaching like grappling hooks.

  George dodged to one side and brought both fists, one clenched inside the other, up in a mighty blow which thudded into the side of Crump’s hurtling torso. It was like hitting a falling tree, but it did knock a loud grunt out of Crump. He landed on his hands and knees and was instantly back on his feet, but he was staggering and he had the round glassy eyes of a fish.

  George stepped forward to finish him off with a gathered-up blow to the middle, but even as he threw it, Crump was coming at him through the air again and in the next instant George found himself straining to stand up under a huge, hard, sweat-stinking, tobacco-reeking, groping, bellowing, struggling wild man. One of the sergeant’s merciless arms snaked around his neck and clamped down; George saw red and yellow blazes behind his eyes, could not breathe, and thought his head was going to be torn off in that instant.

  But something told him that he must stay on his feet as long as he was alive, or everything he was trying to gain with these men would be as good as gone.

  So, refusing to buckle under Crump’s weight and what seemed like twenty of Crump’s gouging hands, elbows and knees, strangling in that great crooked arm, George kept Crump’s feet off the ground and ran with all his remaining strength in the direction where he thought the platform stood.

  They hit it with a force that collapsed the structure; Crump’s furious bellowing was punctuated by a yelp of pain, and the arm loosened just enough for George to extract his searing head from it and dump the big sergeant like a meal sack upon the pile of clattering planks.

  Crump was in an abandoned, pained rage now, and when he clambered to his feet he brought up a plank with him, holding it in both hands like some enormous broadsword, drawing it back as if to deal the death blow.

  But that moment of drawing back was just enough for George to step in close and aim one blow at Crump’s breastbone. It nearly stove in his wrist, but it sufficed. Crump dropped like a poleaxed steer and lay face down among the yellow-white boards, a pathetic rasping sound in his throat as he tried to draw breath. George stood over him for only a moment, catching his own breath and forcing his legs to remain steady. He was aware that the men had not hooted and goaded as they usually did while watching brawls; he presumed it was because he was not just another backwoods scrapper but their commander. Some of them, he thought, probably didn’t know which of us they should be cheering anyway.

  Now he turned to them, hoping he did not look ridiculously disheveled; from his sensations, he could not guess whether he had any skin, hair, or even ears left on his head. Chest heaving, standing straight, he looked around at their expressionless faces. He hoped his voice would work.

  “Now,” he said calmly. “Is there anyone else disinclined to follow me?”

  No one moved. But slowly all the faces melted into grins. Friendly grins.

  He glowed inside. He turned and hauled Sergeant Crump to his feet. The sergeant was just beginning to breathe. He was rubbing his hip and shaking his head. He stooped to pick up his fallen muskrat cap, beat the dust out of it on his thigh, and jammed it on to cover the spot of skullbone in his scalp. Then he shoved his face close to George’s, gave him a raffish look and a final shake of the head, and put his arm over his shoulder. George’s strained face managed a smile. Crump held him there and turned a fierce vulpine grin on the onlookers.

  “Now then, you motherless jackasses,” he roared. “If they’s any of you who don’t want t’ go after that there prancin’ British hair buyer, y’ jest come and try t’ git past Cunnel Clark an’ me!”

  GEORGE WORRIED ABOUT THE SUCCESS OF THE PURSUING PARTY throughout the day, but continued with other business, supervising the erection of the fort and dividing the island into garden land for the families.

  Toward sundown a group of the pursuers returned leading and dragging eight forlorn deserters whose skin and clothing were awesomely scratched and torn. They had been overtaken about twenty miles away, but, having seen their pursuers at a distance, had scattered. Lieutenant Hutchings and about twelve others had not been found. Riders from the chase party had been sent ahead to advise the settlements to watch for the fugitives.

  The captured deserters were held under guard, sitting in a circle, until late evening, watching sullen and shamefaced as the industry proceeded all around them. From every passing man and woman they received mean looks and verbal abuse.

  By torchlight the men were hauled up after dark and forced to watch as the soldiery prepared a special entertainment they had dreamed up and George had approved: an effigy of Lieutenant Hutchings, made of clothing he had left behind and stuffed with dry grass, was hanged and burned, to the tune of much fierce cheering and jeering and the beat of Dickie Lovell’s drum. The fugitives now seemed totally terrified, unsure whether they would themselves become the principals in a similar entertainment. Instead, George appeared before them and gave them an opportunity to return to the ranks, upon taking an oath that they would obey his subsequent orders to the letter and would not try to desert again. “Do that,” he told them, “and you’ll be welcomed back like brothers.”

  One of the fugitives dared to ask an obvious question. “What alternative do we have, sir?”

  “I’ll let the men decide that,” George answered with a grim smile.

  Taking one look at the ring of menacing faces and the spilling sparks of the effigy, they all immediately gave their word. Their bonds were cut, their arms returned to them, and they were left to make themselves a part of the army again. George ordered that they should not be unduly harassed, but watched closely. “You’ll have a certain amount of coolness to overcome,” he told them. “But,” he grinned, “welcome back among us.” He looked at their wavering eyes and gulping throats, and dismissed them with a feeling that in trying to regain their honor they might well surpass the others in their conduct.

  IN A FEW DAYS THE STRUCTURES WERE COMPLETED AND PLANTING was underway, and the troops were undergoing intensive drill which was aimed not so much at teaching maneuvers—“Leave ranks and files to the Redcoats,” he told them—as at the instilling of morale and absolute discipline. George was forced to hurt one more unruly subordinate before this was complete; overhearing a gigantic Carolinian who was casting doubt on his sergeant’s ancestry and refusing to stand at attention, George spun the astonished fellow about, grabbed his ample chin-whiskers and propelled him headfirst against a palisade pole. That man completed the day’s drill in perfect obedience, his head swathed in a bloody turban of bandage.

  The troops seemed to take heart from their young commander’s obvious strength and decisiveness; they grew even tougher from the constant drill and labor, and more keen to fight, and whatever doubts they had shown in the first days on the island evaporated and they began talking about the upcoming westward raid as if it surely would be a lark. Every evening was given over to wrestling, running, and jumping matches or wild, earthshaking dances around the bonfire, to the tunes of a very facile fiddler from the Holston Valley contingent who had brought along a family heirloom violin his great-grandfather had made before emigrating from Scotland. As George watched these happy brutes cavort and whoop around the fire, he smiled to remember their consternation the night he had told them of Henry Hamilton’s savage war-dancing.

  Often George himself was prevailed upon to participate in the contests. He was outrun only once, by a nineteen-year-old Virginian built like a whippet, and in the jumping contests only Simon Butler cleared a higher bar
than he did. The men watched him, marveled at his steel-spring physique, reveled in the colorful harangues and tongue-lashings he gave them on the drill field, and listened like children to the eloquent and cheerful predictions he made around the bonfire at night. Some who had been slouchers even began emulating his bearing. It gradually became apparent to every man that, even had George Rogers Clark not come to them armed with the authority of the governor’s commission, he was the man among them who would have become their leader. George kept on a face of absolute confidence at all times, never giving an outward hint of his own trepidations. He wanted to give the impression of an iron fist in a doeskin glove, knowing that this would keep the men in assurance, keep them from fearing the unknowns that lay ahead. And even while constructing this image of himself for them, he felt his own need and his true affection for them growing. He saw the trust and camaraderie in their eyes when they looked at him and was aware that he, who in effect owned them for the short months of their enlistment, was actually their most cherished possession. “God in heaven, Joseph,” he confided to Bowman one night as their departure down the river grew imminent, “these people are so in the palm of my hand that I should rather eat the aft end of a skunk than fail to keep them safe!”

  Hunting parties went out. Venison, bear, and buffalo meats were salted or made into jerky in preparation for the expedition. Corn kernels left over from the planting were parched by the women to gray-black crunchiness in mud kilns; these would be carried in the troops’ pouches as the trail substitute for bread.

  There were days of heavy rain showers, which kept the river level high. George watched this with pleasure, as the long rapids could be run only when the water was high like this, and a portage of the heavy boats would have been a cumbersome task for this now highly keyed guerrilla force of his.

  Two river messengers arrived in a pirogue from Fort Pitt one afternoon during such a downpour, bringing some mail and news, the best of which was that King Louis XVI of France had made an alliance with the Colonies. George thought an announcement of this information might further lift the spirit of his troops, then changed his mind. Their morale was good enough at present; they probably would see no immediate benefit from it here in the western frontier, but doubtless it might be used to some advantage upon his arrival among the French and Creoles at Kaskaskia. So he folded that information into his mind, revealing it not even to his officers.

  On the twenty-third day of June, the new settlement being in good order, the seven men deemed not strong enough for the rigors of the march having been detailed to stay behind and garrison the island, George proclaimed a full day of amusement, broached a barrel of rum, enough to heighten the merriment but not so much as to debilitate the force next morning, and announced that they would leave the island by boat at daybreak to go against the British outposts on the Mississippi, some three hundred miles farther into the wilderness.

  The sun went down, torches were lighted in a purple dusk, fresh meat was broiled over great fires, the fiddle squeaked and jiggled into the night, George danced with a gray-haired, gray-toothed grandmother in a gray dress while the troops cheered, and before midnight, all mellow, their granite faces all but melted by their complex emotions, the men sang a few melancholy songs around the dying fire, muttered a few embarrassed curses at their inner softness, then rolled into their blankets for their last night’s sleep on Corn Island.

  11

  INTO THE ILLINOIS COUNTRY

  June 1778

  THE SUN WAS UP IN A BLAZING MORNING SKY OVER THE KENTUCKY bluffs when the men clambered into the boats and once again applied themselves to the oars they had pulled already for so many hundreds of miles.

  George had announced only this morning, at muster, that they were going to be shooting the rapids, so that they would not have time to think about it. Many had blanched under their weathered skin at the news, but they had learned to keep their mouths shut and do as they were told. They had listened grimly as he told the helmsmen how to get through the channel. They were to follow his boat, which would be in the charge of Simon Butler during the three-mile descent. Butler had acted jolly and nonchalant, joking with the helmsmen and trying to make it seem like child’s play.

  Now, double-manning the oars, they rowed upstream against a fast current, heard the rush of the Falls with high-beating hearts, then turned the boats about a mile upstream, swung close to the northern shore and started down past Corn Island and into the intimidating maelstrom. They had a glimpse of two or three people watching them from the north shore of the island.

  George was in the bow of the lead boat, the red-and-green Virginia flag rippling beside him, and Butler stood braced in the stern, directing Davey Pagan the steersman with cheerful orders. The crews of the following vessels, with orders to row faster than the current and stay on the tail of the command boat, whooped encouragement to themselves as the vessels plunged one by one into the glassy green and frothy white chute of water like corks on a flood.

  At the awful moment when they seemed to be slipping over the very brink of the world, an eerie dim pall began to pervade the morning. And as the boats careened among the roaring spillways, dropping from one level to the next with water-cushioned jolts, rowers drenched with spray and lashed by the exhortations of the steersmen, the sun grew dark in the cloudless sky. Those who dared look up saw it diminish as if being gnawed away by some great black mouth, being reduced to a narrow shimmering crescent, then go black—a black hole in the hellish colored sky with a halo of misty rays. The helmsmen set their teeth on edge and aimed for the white water they could see, and there were as many prayers and curses and bewildered invocations as there were men in these boats.

  “What in the name of God!” cried Joseph Bowman.

  “It’s an eclipse!” yelled George when at last he understood, as the boats leaped and rocked down through the hideous gloom. “A bloody omen to send us on our way!” He thought of his men. Surely they had never been as scared in all their adventurous lives as they were now, snatched down by the merciless swift power of the falling river and shadowed by this ominous malfunctions of their familiar and dependable sun. George’s heart was in his throat and quavering; he felt as if he were riding pell-mell into the jaws of a cold and watery hell, and the Great Spirit of the wilderness was making one last desperate attempt to frighten him out of his purpose. From the stern, Simon Butler’s now frantic orders bellowed, and Pagan grimaced and fought the rudder as if he were the mythical helmsman Charon of whom Mr. Mason had taught George in his boyhood. May God be with us in this moment, he thought. You mean something by this, I know!

  And then, as Butler had predicted, the boats one after another glided out of the thundering turbulence into the gentle river below. The men were thoroughly shaken, giggling with relief; the superstitious among them were making of it what they would, and watched, squinting, with gaping jaws, as the sun emerged a bit at a time from behind the hard black disc of the moon, grew too bright to watch, and flooded once again the greenish waters and lush dark foliage of the river bluffs. It was hard to believe. Suddenly their world was normal again and they had come through the tumult of water.

  “Hey, good work, Mister Forepoop Swabman!” someone yelled, and Davey Pagan took a bow.

  But George gave them no time to ponder whether the eclipse had augured good or ill; ordering a quick cadence on the double-manned oars, he soon had the convoy speeding down the lower Ohio’s mile-wide stream, the leagues measured by the bending and straining of bodies.

  There was little talk. The men not rowing lay low in the boats with their long rifles loaded and primed, scanning the shore, or slept in shifts. These shores were hostile now; they were pulling steadily into regions under British control, leaving far behind the last outposts of American settlement. Here on the lower Ohio they could expect to meet no friends.

  The blistering sun sank below the river bluffs; the air of dusk grew cool and damp; the rose tinge drained out of the western sky; the shores tur
ned to purple and then receded into blackness; the stars came out; fresh hands took the oars, and those who had exhausted themselves lay down like rows of logs in the boats’ damp bilges and plummeted into sleep. They were awakened in the slipping, gurgling, rushing darkness long before dawn and put back on the oars, and the night-rowers then slept as the eastern sky paled and became infused with pink. At midmorning the shifts were changed again, fed on cold meat, pone, and river water, sleeping and rowing and sleeping again; the sun set on the second day and rose again on the third. They passed the mouth of the great Wabash by morning light and the mouth of the Cumberland in the night, and when the fourth day dawned they learned that they were approaching the mouth of the Tennessee. They had come two hundred miles through heavily patrolled enemy country and, to their knowledge, had not yet been observed.

  George led the boats toward a small uninhabited island called Baritaria in the mouth of the Tennessee, and the men murmured and groaned happily as the prows of the boats grated up onto the pebbly beach. Here the men were given a few hours to unbend and refresh themselves. A small, smokeless fire of white-oak bark was built and water was boiled for a kettle of powerful morning tea. Dozens of men squatted about, their lean white haunches exposed. “Ahhh!” crooned one. “Man jest ain’t designed t’shit off the side of a boat!” Others simply stalked about stiffly, stretching their cramped limbs, grinning and holding their noses. When the troops had liberally fertilized the island and sipped the bracing tea, they moved back down to the shore near the boats to get their marching gear in order. George meanwhile conferred by the fire with his four company captains, Bowman, Helm, Harrod, and Montgomery.