George marched with his eyes squinting against the shimmering prairie for a few paces, then glanced at Sanders, at the high, pockmarked cheekbones, the yellow complexion almost the color of his buckskins, the leached blue eyes. “Seems like if you knew how dry it is out here, you’d’ve told us before we left the river country, so we could fill up some. Didn’t you think of that at all?”
“Nope,” said the laconic guide. “First place, I never seen people guzzle water like these o’ your’n. Second, I didn’t know you’d be a-sweatin’ ’em quite so.”
“Hm.” George sent him on ahead to the point. He looked back. Along they came, the long line of yellow and gray and brown, the black hats, glinting rifles, dogged expressions, sunken cheeks, chapped white lips drawn across their bristly faces. Bowman, just behind him, winked. George faced front again and strode on.
Well, he thought, they haven’t asked about water yet. No sense telling them that bad news till they ask.
No one asked. Apparently it was quite plain to them that this was dry country, and that was just the way it was.
The thirst made parched corn and pone and jerky seem less appetizing, which in a way was just as well, as most were down to their last few crumbs. They had provisioned themselves for four days on the trail; but the overland journey by now had stretched to five days and they still were not in the Mississippi Valley country. They were tiring quicker without food or water, going at a slower pace, needing to rest longer. They watched the sky for signs of rain, but saw only an intense nacreous haze. Night brought cooler air but no rain.
On the sixth day they found a trapped pool in a dried-up westerly creek with barely enough murky water to half-fill their canteens. But it was enough to put them back in high spirits for a while. A few sips of water even gave them the temporary illusion that they had something in their shrunken bellies.
It was then that the guide’s behavior began to arouse George’s suspicion.
Sanders hesitated ahead, then made quite an obvious change in his course. He did this two more times within the hour; George grew annoyed and the men were beginning to mutter. George ran forward to the guide and grabbed him by the shoulder to spin him around. “Just what are you up to, Sanders?”
The guide’s eyes were shifting and fearful. “Uhm, sorry, Colonel, I … I expected we’d meet up with the hunters’ road to Kaskasky right about here, but I don’t seem to recognize …”
“You what?”
Sanders stammered and glanced around at the horizons, sweat beading his lip. The troops had caught up and were drifting into a semicircle to listen. Their eyes were narrowed and they did not appear very happy. Sanders cleared his throat. “I think a way over there …” He raised his arm toward the north. When he saw the colonel’s flashing eyes and grim mouth, he had to drop his gaze. George barked into his ear.
“What d’you mean, think, you scurvy fool? Don’t you know? By God, man, if you’ve got us off the trail …”
The troops were muttering now, reacting as much to their commander’s anger as to their own confusion. Among their murmurings could be heard the words “traitor” and “Tory.”
“Hang th’ scut,” somebody suggested in a murderous flat tone.
“Yah,” chuckled another. “If he can find us a tree.”
George looked at the nervous guide, at his wavering, hunted-beast eyes, and felt the worst torrent of rage he had ever experienced in his life. He grasped the hilt of his sword with a shaking hand, ground his teeth, and nearly burst with fury. His head was roaring and every muscle was straining to draw steel and run Sanders through on the spot. Control, he warned himself. If this poxy scoundrel has led us into an entrapment it’ll be up to me to extract us from it. Control. Control! He took several deep breaths and let them come quaking out, and the muscles of his arms and back relaxed a bit.
“Now, Sanders,” he began, barely above a whisper. “Here I am wandering with my army, out in the open, in a country where any tribe of Indians could raise three or four times our number. These precious men have followed me more than a week by water and land, ready to do anything they’re asked. But if they’re asked to perish out here short o’ their goal because you, a so-called guide, have got us lost, they may choose to cut you down, Sanders, an ounce at a time, and I personally shall start it by snipping off your manhood.”
“Damn, I’m not lost, Mister Clark. I’m only confused! If you’d give me a little time …”
George glanced around at the terrain, which here had begun to undulate, with copses of oaks in the low places. “From the time I employed you, Sanders, you told me you knew the way well. This doesn’t look like the kind of country a man would forget soon, if he really was acquainted with it. Frankly, Sanders, I don’t find it in me to trust you any more.”
“You can trust him, Colonel,” offered John Duff, who had crowded forward.
“You! I trust you just as little, Duff.”
“Please, sir,” implored Sanders. “Just let me go out on yonder meadow there and look around. I’ll get my bearings … There’s a trail I can find …”
“Oh, aye?” growled Sergeant Crump from the edge of the menacing circle. “Let you go off alone? an’ maybe bring back a few hunnerd Kaskasky soldiers, eh? You take Cunnel Clark fer a simpleton, do you?”
“No, Crump,” George said. “We’ll let him go find that trail. But Si Butler and yourself will go with him and watch ’im close. If he hasn’t found the way in two hours, bring ’im back here and he’ll be put to death with no further ado. Take your ease, boys,” he told the troops. “Check your powder and enjoy a rest. One way or another we’ll be on the move again in a couple of hours.” He stalked about, cooling his temper, which had absolutely drained him, and watched Crump and Butler escort the miserable and disarmed Sanders down a long, grassy draw. Their forms shimmered in the heat as they went away.
George could not entertain the thought of turning back. He walked back and forth in the dry, ovenlike heat, slapping his hat against his thigh, imagining and discarding all sorts of consequences. The men lounged on the meadow, many of them stripped to moccasins and breechclouts against the heat, speculated on Sanders’s loyalty, eyed Duff and the other hunters wordlessly, boasted of what they would do at Kaskaskia, carried on detailed reminiscences about splendiferous meals they had sometime enjoyed, rubbed their feet, wondered aloud about Frenchwomen, checked their rifles, or dozed, or examined the myriad cuts and bruises they had sustained coming through the swamp and thickets. Others simply watched their young commander in sympathy or wonderment as he waited.
Soon they saw him straighten up and, looking down the draw, beheld Si Butler summoning with sweeps of his arm.
Sanders had found the trail. He had indeed been not lost but only bewildered. George forgave him with comradely slaps on the back, and Sanders was almost in tears with relief and happiness. Soon the troop was running along a well-worn trail, cautious but in high spirits, and began descending into a wide and fertile valley.
By that evening, the fourth of July, they lay in the warm grass a few miles above the town of Kaskaskia, a cluster of handsome and well-built houses standing within the acute angle where the Kaskaskia River flowed southward into the Mississippi. They lay almost invisible in the meadow grass, mostly naked to catch any breeze of evening on their filthy, sweaty bodies, looking over the lazy valley and the broad, curving Mississippi, to the Indian villages north of the town, the gardens and fields and roads, the huge Old World windmill, the dim low bluffs on the distant shore of the Mississippi, and the blood-red sun setting over the Spanish territory beyond the gigantic stream; they waited here on the edge of a different world, light-headed with hunger and dreams of glory, bodies stinking and stomachs gnawing, for the darkness which would cover their attack on this strange, British-controlled little pocket of French civilization between two wildernesses.
“Them Frenchies down there is at heart a lazy, good-for-nothin’ breed,” John Duff observed. “It’s a land o’plenty
, and they work about half the time. Their niggers do most o’ that. Git in their gardens with no effort a-tall, an’ drink an’ gossip the afternoons away. Never saw the like fer gossip. Guess they have a lot of fun, but I wouldn’t give y’ a shillin’ fer the lot of ’em as men.”
“I hear tell they git along famous with th’ Indians,” remarked a woodsman.
“’Course they do,” agreed Duff. “Just like ’em. Cunning. No ambition. They sell their furs and what little else they produce downriver in New Orleans and bring finery up by boat. But they act like the lilies of the field. Whatever the Lord sees fit t’ give ’em that’s all they ‘spect. You won’t often see a Frenchie out clearin’ land fer corn. Grapes and herbs, maybe, but not corn.” He spat.
“What kind of finery d’you mean, Mr. Duff?” one of the Virginians asked, laving his hands.
“Oh, high falutin’ stuff. Like lace and silverware, candlesticks, delicate underwear, even jewelry. Imagine jewelry out here ‘twixt nowhere an’ nowhere else!”
“Them French ladies wear jewelry?” exclaimed a frontiersman with four front teeth absent. “They pretty? Worth a-chasin’ down?”
“Barefoot most o’ the time,” Duff chuckled. “But they put on their trimmin’s fer special times, and you never seen nothin’ so saucy.”
He pointed out to them the big house within the fort where Philippe de Rocheblave lived, and the men stared down at it with malignant fascination. Rocheblave. They had memorized the French commandant’s name from Colonel Clark’s contemptuous pronunciation of it the night of their big powwow on Corn Island. And now, incredibly to their minds, here they were, two weeks and three hundred miles later, looking down from concealment onto the house of the notorious Rocheblave, just as his hireling Indians had so often lurked in the wilds around their own Kentucky and Virginia settlements waiting to attack and murder. Colonel Clark had made Rocheblave a proper villain for them to set their vengeful thoughts on, and it seemed to them neatly and wonderfully just that they should be stalking him now.
And it was their young colonel who had made this nice piece of justice possible. They glanced at him now and then, at that handsome and likable but sometimes soul-chilling young man who somehow, it seemed, could do the craziest things with the best of horse sense. They watched him study his Kaskaskia town map with his officers in the waning light. It was a map he had obtained a year ago from spies he had sent up here from Kaintuck, all on his own, a total secret.
“Daggonedest thing I ever did see,” Sergeant Crump was saying to Duff. “He runs at things lookin’ like a blind bull, then you find out he’s done planned every step of ’t.” He rubbed his breastbone, which still ached whenever he recalled the fight Clark had coaxed him into on Corn Island. “B’lieve me, I know,” he added.
“He always drive folks this hard?” Duff asked.
“Aye, oh, it ain’t easy, Mr. Duff. It ain’t easy. But all in all, I wouldn’t a missed it fer anything.”
In the meantime, George had been briefing his captains in a perplexing vein.
“Make every man understand that I’ll tolerate not one act of plunder or savagery of any kind. There’ll be no scalping, there’ll be no looting, there’ll be no raping, or even an ungentle gesture at any woman there. They’ll use only what force they need to keep the civilians out of the way, and there’ll be no intercourse of any kind with the inhabitants until I say so.”
The captains looked at each other with raised eyebrows, then back to him. “No looting?” said Helm. “Th’ boys won’t like that; takes th’ fun out of it. To th’ victor goes th’ spoils.”
George gave him a hard, level look, indicating that such remarks deserved no comment. Then he went on:
“There is one other caution, most important. We’ll take pains never to reveal how few we are. We must never be all together where we could be counted. If we can, we must seem a thousand. We’ll simply have to be everywhere. You can negotiate only from a dominant posture, and that’ll be no mean trick where we’re outnumbered ten to one, But it has to be that way.”
The officers looked confused, and a momentary apprehension flickered across their faces. They had not really let themselves think about numbers. “What d’you mean ‘negotiate,’ George?” asked Bowman.
“I mean first, their surrender. Then, this.” He drew out Campbell’s letter about the French-American alliance and showed it to them for the first time. They studied it with great curiosity, then looked back at him.
“It means,” he said, “we invade them as enemy. Then with the help of God and what wisdom we have, we turn their loyalty around.”
The officers scratched their scalps, squinted, grimaced. They had come all this way inspired by him into a simple raiding mood. And now he was giving them responsibilities far more complicated than that. He had had this treaty thing in his pocket for weeks and had waited until now to tell them about it. It was like the other trick of his, bringing them all the way down to Corn Island under a simpler pretext.
It was pretty perplexing, this matter of dealing with a man who always knew more than they did. But what choice was there, besides doing what he decided? And so the four captains shrugged, nodded, and agreed once again to do it his way.
He looked over the violet twilight in the valley, and pointed. “Y’see that big farmhouse just this side o’ the river, below the old abandoned fort? Duff tells me there’s a ferry of sorts there and we can acquire boats for the crossing. Now tell your companies what I said about their conduct, and tell ’em violations will be on pain of death. In ten minutes we’ll move down the bluff to that farmhouse …” The severity of his tone suddenly softened, and in the dusk they could see him smiling. “Thank you, gents. Let’s be about it now.”
12
KASKASKIA, ILLINOIS COUNTRY
July 4, 1778
DON FERNANDO DE LEYBA, LOOKING MOST GUBERNATORIAL IN HIS long coat of black velvet, sat in the chair at Teresa’s right, and his wife Maria, in a dress of black silk, sat on her left. It seemed to Teresa, who wore taffeta the color of old ivory, that their somber mien and sentry-like flanking positions must make any of the young Kaskaskians fearful of approaching her. The violins squeaked away busily at a minuet; many of the French militiamen and dandies gazed longingly her way as they danced past with their partners, but not one had dared to approach.
The de Leybas were being entertained as guests of honor by the wife of the merchant Gabriel Cerré. Monsieur Cerré was, as usual, away trading. The de Leybas had sailed down the river from St. Louis on a week-long excursion, and this ball was the culmination of their visit. They were to embark for their return to St. Louis the next morning.
Though Teresa was impressed by the elegance and voluptuousness of the French social life, she remained somewhat uncomfortable in the midst of it, never quite sure how far to unbend from that quiet reserve in which she had been conditioned since earliest memory. She had noticed that her brother’s careful formality and studied hauteur were being eroded little by little as the weeks went by here in this remote little Franco-Spanish society strung along the banks of the Mississippi, but still, in comparison with the French, he was quite controlled, and a zealous warden especially of the properties surrounding a maiden sister.
No Frenchman had managed to penetrate the fine sieve of Don Fernando’s discrimination, though there were four or five rather handsome and respectable ones who had, or whose fathers had, accrued substantial fortunes through trade in furs, hemp, tobacco, and grain. The few soldiers in the Spanish garrison at St. Louis were a rather coarse lot, some of them part Indian, and of course only an officer would have the right to play suitor to Teresa. Besides Don Fernando, who commanded the garrison, there were only two other Spanish officers, one of them, Cruzat, being middle-aged, married, and overfed. The other, Francisco de Cartabona, lieutenant of militia, was youthful, slender, and nearly as handsome as her brother. Teresa had met him but once before, at her brother’s office in St. Louis.
At this mome
nt, as if her thoughts had summoned him, Lieutenant de Cortabona appeared in the doorway at the far side of the ballroom. His intense gaze swept around the room and came to rest on her, and with a flush of self-awareness, Teresa lowered her eyes, and the lace-webbed fan in her hand began to fibrillate against her bosom. Maria, noticing these slight motions, sat up straighter, like a sentinel sensing danger; her sunken black eyes darted to the far side of the room just in time to see the lieutenant gather himself up and start making his way toward the de Leybas around the end of the ballroom, his cocked hat tucked under his left arm, his sword scabbard hanging from his belt. He stopped at attention before Don Fernando, bowing quickly and snapping his boot heels. “Good evening, Excellency,” he said, not yet permitting himself to look at the ladies.
Don Fernando rose, returning the bow with a smile. “Good evening, Lieutenant. We see you so seldom. You’ve been seeing to the militia over at Ste. Genevieve, have you not? How do they stand?”
“Quite well, Excellency. For militia,” he added with a mocking half smile. Then he turned to the ladies. “What a great pleasure to see you,” he said, bowing again, now looking directly at Maria for just an instant, then at Teresa’s eyes for a perceptible second longer. Teresa dropped her gaze with proper modesty.
Such fine skin and eyes, she thought. And so graceful. What a shame he is so little, no taller than I. She produced a guarded hint of a smile which, as she knew from a thousand past glimpses in her bedroom mirror, bowed her lips to the slightest degree and surely created a puzzle in the mind of any young man who saw it.
Lieutenant de Cartabona paused for a moment, as if interpreting that very enigma, then looked to Don Fernando. “It may be a little forward of me, Excellency, but would you allow your sister to dance with me in the next cuadrilla?”
“With her permission, gladly.”
“Señorita?”
“Sí,” she replied after a moment of conscious fan-fluttering which, she was sure, had its desired effect upon the anxious little lieutenant.
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