Long Knife

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “Three more leagues down the Ohio,” he said, “is the old French Fort Massac. It’s abandoned now, but we can’t risk staying on the water past that point, because we’re too nigh the Mississippi and all its unfriendly traffic.” He showed them another map. “We’ll row down here just above Massac, then debark on the Illinois side, conceal the boats there, and set out overland in a beeline to the northwest. That, in about a hundred and twenty miles, will fetch us up at the Kaskaskia River, which we’ll cross by night and take the town and fort by surprise. That means, you understand, that we absolutely must not be seen until we’re there …”

  “Hi, sir!” rasped the sharp voice of a sentry at the shore. “A canoe!”

  He pointed up the river.

  “Get your men under cover,” George ordered, watching the distant vessel approach the island. He and Bowman lay on their stomachs behind a shrub, a malodorous coil of stool on the ground between them. George watched the canoe, which seemed to have four or five hunters in it, coming parallel with the shore of the little island. Bowman glanced in disgust now and then at the great turd by his elbow.

  “I’d say we could claim Baritaria now as true Virginia soil,” he joked in a whisper.

  “Aye,” replied George. “By squatter’s rights, eh?”

  Bowman snorted laughter into the ground.

  “They haven’t seen our boats, yet,” George said, “but they’re bound to when they clear that point. I’m afraid we’re going to have to bring ’em in. Get some men ready and man a boat, Joseph.” Bowman scuttled off. Then George stood up and addressed a row of rifle muzzles which peeked out of the grass nearby. “Stand up and cover them,” he said. Several riflemen rose out of the grass and brought their guns to bear on the canoe. “You there!” he shouted. The men in the canoe turned and saw him, and saw the long rifles aimed at them. They were clad in fringed yellow buckskins and wore bandannas around their heads. Their rifles were stacked amidships in the canoe, leaning on the carcass of a small deer. “Come ashore,” George called, “or you’re dead men.” They stopped paddling for a moment, then saw Bowman’s boatful of armed men slide out from beyond the point, coming to flank them. Bowman stood bareheaded in its bow, the sun blazing on his yellow hair, a pistol aimed at them.

  The hunters shrugged, smiled nervously, dipped their paddles, and turned shoreward without a word.

  They stepped ashore, rangy, sunburned, unshaven men, soiled and sweaty. Their eyes darted. They could not guess how many men lay in cover, but they saw the gleam of sunlight on gunmetal in many places as they strolled up to George, taking in his formidable bearing and cold eyes. “State who you are,” he said.

  “I’m John Duff,” said the man in front, a freckled man with a broken nose. “This here’s John Sanders, my guide. We’re just hunters, sir.”

  “Americans?”

  “Uh, formerly. Till we come here.”

  “What are you now, then?” He said it in a very menacing tone.

  “Well, just hunters. Free agents, I reckon.”

  “Based where?”

  “Kaskaskia.”

  “Now that’s real interesting. Are you in the British pay?”

  “Nope. Like I said, just free fer hire.”

  This John Duff is being shrewd, thought George. “How long out?” he asked.

  “What, Mister Sanders? Eight days? Yup, I think eight days.”

  The troops were beginning to rise from cover and drift forward, curious. George turned and pointed at them. “Get back and work on your gear, all of you. There’ll be plenty of time to meet our guests later. Now. Sit and have some tea, gents. If you’re Americans, I must demand your oath of allegiance, or else you’ll have to consider yourselves my prisoners. I have questions for you about the state of things at Kaskaskia.”

  The hunters took the oath amiably enough, though still bemused. George then introduced himself and began examining their knowledge of Kaskaskia. He tried to conceal his eagerness for their information. It had been a year since he had sent his spies Linn and Moore to Kaskaskia, and he knew the situation there might have changed drastically in the meantime. He had been running this expedition on very old intelligence. What rare luck to have these people show up from that very place, he thought.

  His interrogation, which he kept on a polite and conversational tone, meanwhile weighing each fact against the others for consistency and any hints of untruthfulness, revealed that the fort was still under the command of Philippe de Rocheblave, functionary for the British, and that there were no British troops there at the moment. Rocheblave kept the French and Creole militia in a good state of readiness and well-trained, though perhaps as much for love of parade as for any expectation of attack. Duff said however that Rocheblave did maintain spies on the Mississippi and had ordered all hunters, Indians and other, to keep a sharp lookout for American rebels. There had been raids conducted recently against British settlements on the lower Mississippi by an American captain striking out of New Orleans with a gunboat. That raider, James Willing, had plundered and raised a great deal of havoc along the river, and news of his barbarities had reached as far north as the Illinois country, and the inhabitants, Duff said, were resolved to defend themselves.

  Duff apparently was canny enough to see that George and his woodsmen were not here with a mere idle interest in the state of things as Kaskaskia; he offered the comment: “Them Frenchies is scared white o’ the rebels. They been told by the British that the Americans—Virginians in pertickaler—is ten times worse’n any savage. They been told fer a long time now that Virginians ’re the awfullest barbarians as ever got up off all fours. Heh! Anyhow, I reckon if they had any notice you was a-comin’, they’d gather t’ give you a hot reception, sure enough. But if you could surprise the place, I don’t doubt you could have your way. Them Frenchies aren’t exactly in love with th’ British, either, y’ understand.” Duff estimated the population at Kaskaskia at something between five hundred and a thousand, depending on who was in town or out trapping and trading, and maybe five hundred at Cahokia up the river. And the number of Indians about was always in flux. Duff didn’t know anything about Vincennes way over east on the Wabash, he said, except that it was a big place.

  George was satisfied with this information; it showed that not much had changed since his previous intelligence, and when Duff and his hunters asked leave to join the expedition, he welcomed them, first specifying that whatever knowledge of Kaskaskia’s defenses they might share in conversation with the troops should be of a sort which would make them confident of success.

  As the force embarked and left the small island to row the last three leagues down to their landing site on the Illinois shore, George digested the information these hunters had brought him. Of all he had heard, the most intriguing was that the inhabitants considered Virginians to be such fiends. That kind of a fear in itself multiplies our strength, he thought. It makes up a little for those three hundred and fifty more troops we ought to have had.

  As the boats moved down the Ohio in the stifling heat, George smiled and thought still more happily about this dreadful reputation of the Virginians. It was something he could improve upon if given any opportunity. The greater we can shock them at first, he thought, the better they will respond when they discover our humanity. The best way to get rid of an enemy is by making him a friend.

  Well, he thought, patting in his blouse the letter from Colonel Campbell of Pittsburgh, the letter telling of the new alliance between France and America. Well then. We shall see about these Frenchmen.

  DUFF’S GUIDE JOHN SANDERS LED THE CONVOY, WHICH NOW INCLUDED the hunters’ canoe, into the mouth of a small creek a mile above the ruins of Fort Massac. The stream here debouched through a swampy place thick with saplings and scrub and reeds which made it possible to hide the beached boats so that one would have to step in them to find them. The men’s feet sucked in the black, rot-stinking muck, and clouds of mosquitoes bit and droned as the troops unloaded provisions for four days
of marching. George had never seen such an unhealthful sump of a place, and quickly formed the four companies of men into a single file and led them out.

  It soon became apparent that a disproportionate part of their four days would be spent in struggling through these first fifty bottomland miles of the route to Kaskaskia, a hundred and twenty miles away. The region was a pathless maze of marshy bottoms, thickets of briar and thorns, great mats of vines, and acres of tall cane whose leaf edges sliced skin like razors. It was miserable going, but he chose not to get on the old trail from Massac to Kaskaskia for fear of being seen.

  Throughout the steaming afternoon the single file of sweating, scratched, hard-breathing, wild-looking men in filthy buckskin and homespun slithered like a snake through the snarls of vegetation. There was no talk along the two-hundred-yard-long procession, there was just the swish of foliage over clothing, the thud of moccasins on soft earth, the crackling of twigs, creaking of leather, the occasional small wooden knock of a rifle stock against a knife handle or brandy flask, now and then a throat-clearing, a spitting, a breaking of wind, the drone of insects, a skin-smacking sound marking the death of some deerfly or mosquito.

  It occurred to George once that Sanders might be leading them deliberately off course, or at least delaying them by taking them through the worst jungle he could find. But, referring often to his own pocket compass, he verified that this was the exact northwesterly heading that he had chosen himself. And it certainly was not the kind of country in which there was a likelihood of being discovered, there was no sign that any man, red or white, had ever been through here, and it would have been easy to understand why none had.

  When the late sun quit flashing its red needles of light through the foliage in the west, darkness quickly filled the woods. With it came more mosquitoes, by the thousands, and the glunk and peep of innumerable frogs. Going without light, soaked by sweat and the crossings of creeks and swamps, the slogging men were beginning to stumble, to mutter curses containing the names of God, of Sanders, of Clark, of mosquitoes, of hidden roots, of lashing thorns. And so, when their progress brought them up on a slight rise of ground where the overhead foliage broke enough to show a few stars twinkling, George ordered the column to enter the glade, form in squares, halt, and settle for the night. No fires could be risked in the heart of hostile territory, so each man simply sat or hunkered in the darkness, munched stale johnnycake and parched corn or masticated leathery meat jerky out of his own pouch, curled up on the bare ground with his gun’s flintlock between his thighs for protection against the damp, covered his face and hands as well as possible against mosquitoes, and dropped into the sleep of exhaustion. George had his captains post their sentries around the perimeter, with orders to keep an especially watchful eye on Duff’s party, then he stretched out on the damp grass, felt the fatigue burning away in the muscle of his legs, and calculated gloomily that they surely had not managed to march more than fifteen miles through this tangle during the terrible afternoon. The next thing he knew was that it was morning.

  All through the second day from dawn to darkness, stopping only to drink from streams and feed themselves from their pouches, they trekked through more of this stubborn country, occasionally emerging into pockets of ancient wood where gigantic black forest trees lay rotting and the only undergrowth was fern and mayapple. Here the progress was easier, and they surprised many deer, but despite their yearnings for fresh meat dared not fire a shot or build a fire which might give them away. Then they would plunge into still more areas of thicket and thorn, whose only recompense was that wild berries might be plucked in passing and popped into the mouth to relieve the monotony of corn and jerky. Again that night they dropped to the ground in alien darkness and slept like dead men, only to rise at dawn on the third day and continue.

  At midday, having been through fifty miles of that wilderness, the army came out upon a level, nearly treeless plain, covered with waist-high grass rippling in the breeze as far as the eye could see. Grazing bison dotted the distance. The expanse of unbroken blue sky overhead made everyone look up and breathe deeply, as if they had crawled out of some dank tunnel into brave daylight, and they smiled to see the clear ground stretching away forever like a soft rug for their feet. After a few cheerful minutes for eating, resting, and stretching in the sunlight, they strode forward onto this great, clean prairie, the sun and wind drying the old humidity out of their clothes, so rejuvenated by the openness that their pace quickened to a lope which ate up the miles.

  But George’s pleasure at the freedom of such marching was marred by the realization that his line of riflemen could now be observed by anyone within miles. The grass was not high enough for concealment. There was nothing to do but keep the point men and flanking scouts out as far as possible, keep up the pace and hope for good luck.

  The hundred and seventy men now sped rather like an arrow over the yellow-green plain toward the northwest; the point man and flankers fanned out in the shape of an arrowhead, the main column being the shaft and the rear flankers angling back like the fletch of the arrow. Each man stepped into the footprints of the man ahead so that anyone coming upon their trail could not have guessed how many they were.

  They flopped along the line of march again at sundown, chewed their dwindling rations and washed them down with water or brandy from their canteens, relieved themselves, joked and laughed softly, and being dog-tired, stretched out in the dry, springy, fragrant grass, watched hawks circling in the high rosy sky, and prepared to go to sleep. But to their consternation, their young commander came back along the file, cheerfully urging them to their feet. “We can see where we’re going out here,” he told them as he moved along. “And we can travel at night with no danger of being seen. Up; now! Hey, Marr! You, Mayfield! Wake up, you beauties, and on your shanks! Get those sea legs in motion, Mister Pagan! I know this nice little walk can’t be half as bad as beatin’ around the Horn!”

  They groaned, but rose, and soon the human arrow was again moving westward at a strenuous pace through the twilight, the stars winking on over their shoulders, fatigue blazing in the fibers of their legs. Still more hours of nothing but long breathing and light footsteps. They passed the point of pain now; they were numb and felt as if they could bear this dull discomfort forever if that danged Clark was so bent on making up for time they had lost in the thickets.

  The sky was enormous. There seemed to be more stars, twinkling more cleanly from horizon to horizon, than they had ever seen. Passing nothing that gave them any sense of their progress, they had the strange sensation that the trail was simply slipping backward under them and they were stationary, the same stars standing in the same places overhead, the same silhouetted hats and shoulders bobbing up and down before them, the same aromas of old sweat and leather and gunpowder eddying backward like a wake, the same cushioned footfalls endlessly repeating after their own. Only at midnight did George bring the day’s trek to a halt. The force was led aside a few yards from its trail, the companies formed into four squares, and sentries were named; the rest were dismissed, sank to the ground too tired even to eat, and were dreaming as soon as their heads touched the grass.

  George stood in the starlight and looked at this little group of dark forms scattered about on the ocean of smooth pale plain. Six hours of squirming through the forests this morning, he thought; six more racing along in the blazing sun, and now six more marching through the night. Eighteen hours on foot at this pace, and not one solitary straggler! He tipped up his flask and took a long pull of brandy, his eyes on the stars, the cool wind drying the sweat on his neck. He lowered the flask, continued to look up at the sky, thought of the eclipse that had so frightened the men a week ago on the Falls—a week it’s been! he thought—and yet they had come on with him, overcoming the many fears they must be having, and still, even as he drove them on and on into this strange unfriendly country, they kept up, and kept up in good spirits. He listened to their sleep-breathing now, sighed, and looked at the hi
gh constellations and the stardust of the Milky Way. I thank Thee for bringing me men like these …

  He was awakened to the sound of his flask dropping to the ground, and realized he had fallen asleep on his feet in the middle of a prayer. Shaking his head and smiling, he stretched out on the grass, put his hat over his face, and, with a sensation like lying on a raft in a whirlpool, spun slowly off to oblivion.

  THEY HAD BEEN ON THE TRAIL FOR TWO HOURS THE NEXT MORNING when the sun rose behind them, lighting the high cumulus clouds piled above the horizon ahead. It was a glorious morning. Small birds flickered among the grasses and wildflowers, hunting, and as the sun climbed and burned off the dew that drenched the marchers’ leggings, countless butterflies tumbled and drifted everywhere. Each step George took sent gray-green grasshoppers with black-banded legs scattering ahead through the grass, like the drops one splashes ahead when wading in shallow water.

  The sun climbed higher and bore down on their heads and shoulders, the hot, dense ground-smell rose to their noses, and long brittle screeches of locusts drilled on the ear from everywhere. It soon became apparent, as they crossed miles without seeing any streams, that here was another price they must pay for this smooth passage: thirst. These woodsmen were accustomed to well-watered country, where clear brooklets babbled down every ravine, and springs trickled from mossy limestone. But now the hard march through the ovenlike air was drying them up and there seemed to be not so much as a mud wallow where they might find a little moisture.

  “Sanders!”

  “Sir?” The guide turned and waited for George to come abreast of him, then fell in step with him.

  “D’you know of any water hereabouts?” he asked quietly.

  “None for certain this time of year, sir.”

  “Oh? None for how far?”

  “Well, Colonel, we’ll be reachin’ Missipp Valley tributaries sometime tomorrow, I reckon.”