Long Knife

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  Big Gate now proceeded to rip open his red coat. Brass buttons sprayed about the room and rolled into corners. He stripped off the coat and threw it on the floor also, and now stood naked except for his breechclout and moccasins, his lithe physique gleaming.

  “Big Gate delights in war,” he pronounced loudly. “The English told me that the Big Knives were in the wrong. I have been to war against the Big Knives three times, and I was ready to go again. But I said instead, no, I will rest myself a while and come and see what sort of people the Big Knives are and how they talk.

  “Now,” he said, “I have been here for days and I have listened to everything that was said, and now I am convinced that the British are liars. They are wrong and the Big Knives are right! As a man and a warrior I will not fight in a wrong cause.

  “Now I have flung away the bloody clothes the British gave me …” With that he began stamping on the discarded flag and apparel, and finally gave them a mighty kick which sent them across the room. The American officers kept their faces as straight as they could.

  “From this day,” the Indian said, “I am a Big Knife!” He stepped over to George then, and shook his hand, and all the officers erupted in cheering and applause. The chief went around both tables now, wreathed in a huge smile, shaking the hand of every officer. They laughed and praised him, and the room was full of a merry commotion.

  “Captain McCarty,” George cried, “our guest is quite naked. Would you fetch him something elegant from the village, please!”

  The captain returned within minutes, having procurred somewhere a suit gaudy with gold lace, which Big Gate put on, to the approbation of the whole company. He was easily now the finest spectacle at the table, and, exuberant in his new dignity, he ordered his warriors to come in and wait upon him. The food was good; rum flowed freely; the party was lively and continued far into the night, with this fancy new brother proving to be the merriest reveler in the house.

  After the dinner, Big Gate made one more bid for special attention, saying that he wished to have a private conversation with Colonel Clark. He pointed to an adjoining room, which had a large window opening onto the street. George, though somewhat drunk by now, became suspicious that his new brother intended perhaps to stab him and flee through the window. But he saw no way to deny the interview, and so went in with him and the interpreter, and closed the door. He waited, poised, ready to fight if necessary. The officers grew quiet in the dining room, and waited near the door, ready to burst in at the first cry or sound of a scuffle.

  “My brother,” Lajes began. “I can tell you much about the state of the defense of Detroit. I am free to go there and do what I please. I can get any information from there that you need. If you doubt that I can, I will prove it to you by going there and getting for you a British scalp or a prisoner, and bringing it back within forty days.”

  George relaxed. It was obvious that Big Gate simply wanted an opportunity to prove himself further, this time for his new allies.

  “I will be happy to have any information you can bring me about Detroit,” George said, “as I am somewhat interested in that place. But we do not want the Indians to fight and kill for us, but just to sit still and look on. I want you by no means to kill anyone for us. But you may bring me news, or any prisoner who might be full of information, if you can get one handily. But do not hurt him; it’s beneath us to treat prisoners ill.”

  The good cheer resumed when George and Big Gate returned to the dining room. George gave Big Gate a medal and wrote out for him a commission as a captain of the Big Knives, all of which brought tears to the eyes of the stoic chief.

  And when he departed into the night, being steered and kept upright by his warriors, the Americans sent him off with three cheers and gave him a final salute by firing their pistols out the windows and doors into the night sky, waking the entire town once again.

  17

  ST. LOCUS, UPPER LOUISIANA TERRITORY

  August 1778

  A PUFF OF WHITE SMOKE BLOSSOMED FROM THE PARAPET OF THE little Spanish fort on the bluff and drifted away in the breeze. A moment later the boom of the cannon rolled across the caramel-colored river water to the Americans’ boat.

  George was sitting in the stern with Captain Bowman and Lieutenant Jean Girault, a young import-house clerk from Kaskaskia, whom George had made his official interpreter because of his command of the English, French, and Spanish tongues.

  “Well, now,” said Bowman. “There’s our salute.”

  Another cloud of smoke and another report rolled over the river.

  “Rather extravagant with their powder, aren’t they?” observed George. “I would have preferred they give it to us in kegs.”

  “They’re terribly excited about your visit,” said the slim, dark Girault. “Monsieur Vigo told me so.”

  The cannon boomed again. The ten pairs of oars rose dribbling, dipped, rose, dribbled, and the boat crawled at an almost imperceptible pace across the broad, sunflashing surface of the great river. It was so broad, one had the impression of crossing a bay instead of a river. As the cannon sounded a fourth time, George gazed up the river and wondered about its sources. He had a general notion of its origins around the huge lakes in the north, whose routes were well known to the traders of several nations, but he was most intrigued by reports of the huge muddy tributary, called Missouri by the Indians, which poured into it from the west a few leagues above St. Louis. He had heard legends of endless plains, evergreen forest, deserts, and sky-scraping mountains lying to the west, of areas more vast even than all the half-explored lands east of the Mississippi. These legends came from the Indians, as no known white man had ever ventured far into those awesome distances. The Indians told of places where hot water shot out of the ground into the sky, places where the ground was blood-red, places where perpendicular towers of stone a mile high jutted from the plains, places where not a blade of grass grew, and places where one could ride for weeks and see nothing but grass. And somewhere beyond it all, it was said, the continent ended at the Pacific Ocean.

  Here in this Mississippi valley, George fancied he could feel the immense, tilted tables of the land, sloping gradually upward to the far eastern mountains that he had crossed, and upward also in the opposite direction toward the western mountains which were said to be there. Down this river flows the drainage of the entire continent, I suspect, George thought. God permit me someday when these duties of war are over to follow those western rivers and learn whence they come.

  The reverie was broken by still another cannon shot, louder now, and the faint, breeze-borne timbre of human voices from the nearing western shore. He could see the Spaniards and the west-bank French now, tiny and colorful, crowded on the wharf at the foot of the village.

  “Look perty hospitable to me,” Bowman said with a smile. “How long d’you reckon we can stay, George?”

  “Not beyond two or three days, I think. There’s a lot of Indian business left for us back in Cahokia. Weeks of it, I expect. Mister Black Bird will show up any day, and I wouldn’t care to keep him waiting.”

  “Yeah. Sure hope he’s as jolly a feller as ol’ Big Gate. I ain’t had so much fun since Logan’s gran’ma boiled a tit in th’ cook pot.”

  George chuckled and shook his head. Jean Girault looked at Bowman for a moment with his mouth agape, then exclaimed, “Nom de ciel! Did that really happen?”

  “Might of,” Bowman laughed.

  “But how can one laugh?” Girault exclaimed. “It must have been utter agony.”

  “Udder agony,” said George, and Bowman nearly rolled into the bilges.

  LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR DE LEYBA HIMSELF, WITH A SQUAD OF INFANTRYMEN sweating at attention in their uniforms, met George and his officers on the wharf. The entire population of the town seemed to have crowded down to the river’s edge to see the Big Knives, and gazed in wonderment at them, at their extraordinary stature, their ruddy faces, their fierce but merry demeanor. Most of the officers were still in buckskins,
though freshly scrubbed and clean-shaven; only George and four of the others had been fitted for uniforms in Kaskaskia. De Leyba appraised George’s magnificent military appearance, greeted him with a proper Spanish salute, then a bow with smartly clicking heels, and finally gave in to his emotions and threw his arms around him in a French-style embrace. Flowers rained on the Americans as they filed off the wharf to the lively rattle of trap drums.

  The Spaniard had brought down saddled horses to accommodate the American party, and George whistled in admiration at the sight of them. He mounted a glossy black warhorse of high spirit, and de Leyba made note of George’s skill in establishing for the beast’s edification who would be boss. Obviously this Virginian was as good a horseman as he was a trail runner, a fact which pleased de Leyba as much as anything else.

  Another small but dashing uniformed Spanish officer rode forward. “Colonel Clark,” said de Leyba. “Perhaps you remember Tenente Francisco de Cartabona, commandant of militia. He was with us at Cerré’s ball.”

  “Very pleased, sir,” said George, taking the soft but strong hand. “I have the greatest respect for militia, that being what my boys are themselves.” The lieutenant bowed his head. The horses milled and pranced, impatient to go; the crowd maintained a cheerful uproar, laughing, shouting, and gawking.

  “If we may, now,” de Leyba said, “first a tour of the fort, and then an entertainment at my house.” And the entourage clopped up the cobbled streets, between rows of neat stone houses. The sun was low in the west now and the streets seemed full of clean blue shadow. The procession wound upward until it was atop the bluff and in sunlight again. George turned in his saddle and looked back across the river to the far shore, to the distant white specks of Cahokia’s houses, to the lake by the Indian camps, to the wide floodplain and the purple bluffs of the Illinois, that land which he and his little troop of rustics had so swiftly won and occupied. Bowman, riding beside him, watched his face, gazed back over the river himself, then looked back at George.

  “I know what you’re thinkin’, George,” he said softly. “And I’m just as confounded as y’rself. Believe me, I am.”

  ***

  TERESA DE LEYBA HAD CROSSED HERSELF AND JUMPED UP TO LOOK out the window five times already this afternoon, whenever she had heard hoofbeats on the road below. Now she heard them again, many horses this time. Almost faint with fright and anxiety, she knelt and crossed herself once more, and went to the dormer casement just in time to see the mounted party arrive at the mounting blocks below.

  There was a rosy-gold sunset glow enhancing the colors of the various uniforms. The grooms were moving out from the portico to take the horses in hand; the last members of the column were drawing up and preparing to dismount; there was a swirling movement of dancing horses in the area below, and a hubbub of cheery voices. But Teresa’s eyes, as if guided, immediately fell to the center foreground, upon one figure astride a nervous black warhorse; her heart suddenly frolicked in her breast and she clapped her hand over it as if to hold it in place. Blood rushed to her face.

  He sat there, not ten feet below her window, between her brother and Tenente de Cartabona, controlling the great animal by the reins in his left hand without seeming even to pay attention to the task. The evening sunlight flamed in his sun-bleached red hair and eyebrows, and modeled the hard, sharp bones in his brown face. He was looking up at the front of the house. And his eyes, those glittering dark falcon’s eyes that had haunted her nightmares for more than a month, were full upon her. He had found her face in the window.

  Her thighs began to quiver. Mother of God, she thought, Señor Vigo was right about him.

  And now, but in a different way, she was more afraid of him even than she had been.

  THERE, CENTERED IN THE OPEN WINDOW A FEW FEET ABOVE HIM AS if in a picture frame, was the face which even the whirlwind of recent events had not been able to sweep out of his memory. That delicate pale oval, those immense, frightened eyes. A shiver began in his scalp, cascaded down his back, through his loins, and to his knees. The noises close around him, the very presence of men and horses, seemed to slide away, leaving only himself and that face up in the window.

  Tenente Francisco de Cartabona turned to speak to the colonel of the Virginians, to welcome him to the headquarters of the Spanish empire in Upper Louisiana. He saw the colonel looking up as if thunderstruck, and followed his gaze to the dormer window. He saw there Teresa, his own heart’s only serious object, her eyes momentarily locked on those of the Virginian.

  The little lieutenant felt his words stopped in his throat by a shock of despair.

  JOSEPH BOWMAN, CHEWING A PIECE OF SPICED DUCK, SUDDENLY winced in pain. “Damnation!” he cried, drawing the attention of the thirty people who were seated along the sides of the great table.

  “Watch your language,” cautioned George, who sat several feet away at the head of the table.

  “What is it, capitán?” queried Governor de Leyba, sitting at the other end.

  With elaborate grimaces, Bowman worked his tongue around in his mouth, pushed something forward to his lips, and then spat it into the palm of his hand. George rolled his eyes toward the ceiling at the manners of his second-in-command. “This,” said Bowman, glowering at the small metal pellet in his palm.

  “Ah, I am so sorry!” explained de Leyba. The ladies were looking all around Bowman but not at him, hiding their smiles behind palpitating fans. “It’s a piece of scattershot,” the governor explained. “My hunters bagged these fowl in the marsh just yesterday. Expressly for you. One must bite gingerly, capitán. Forgive us.”

  “Scattershot?” exclaimed Bowman, laying the pellet on the linen beside his plate. “Why, that ain’t hardly sportin’. Now, our boys’d bring ’em down with a rifleball, if it was us.”

  “On the wing?” said de Leyba, a mocking but good-natured smile tilting across his face.

  “Heck, yeah,” said Bowman, putting another piece of the bird in his mouth and masticating it very carefully. “On th’ wing, sure. I always say, it ain’t sportin’ to kill a sittin’ duck. ’Less he’s bigger ’n you.”

  George grinned, shaking his head. “Joseph, I question the propriety of boasting when you’re a guest.”

  “Sorry, George, but you know it’s true. You’ve seen ’em shoot often enough.” Bowman washed the duck down with another long draught of wine, which he had been pouring down like water.

  “Well, then, if you say it, capitán, I take it to be so,” said de Leyba. “But how remarkable! And so, here’s to American marksmanship.” He raised his glass and all drank. George, his own head swirling a little, remembered with a rush of nostalgia the turkey that his brother Edmund had decapitated with a rifle ball for the Clark family table the winter before, and opened his mouth to speak of it. Then he remembered his own admonition about boastfulness a moment ago, and held his tongue. It might be a bit gruesome for the ladies to hear anyway, he thought; and at the notion of protecting the ears of the exquisite Teresa from his own words, his heart skipped again. It had been behaving that way the entire evening. He was astounded by his feelings. One instant he felt like a hero, the next like a bumpkin.

  He had been trying not to look too long or too often at her. He had the strange notion that he needed to protect her from the hunger of his own eyes. And each time his gaze would stray to her, she would be flushing, all along that sublime long neck and to her flaming ears, stirring the air with that dainty fan, which she seemed to hold more this evening than she did her fork and spoon. And each time he glanced at her, he had an instinctive certainty that she had just dropped her eyes from his own face. She seemed to be as agitated as he was.

  There were musicians now moving into the next room. It meant that he soon would be, no doubt, swooping around the room with this fragile, timorous creature inside the curve of his arm.

  His hand shook as he lifted his wineglass again.

  Dear God, he thought. To touch her!

  TENENTE DE CARTABONA, SEATE
D DIRECTLY ACROSS THE TABLE from Teresa, had not failed to notice the glances that passed between her and the Virginian. The lieutenant had not eaten anything either. He could not swallow. He was so heartsick he had not heard a half of the dinner conversation. He had prayed that the American colonel would make one of the awful gaffes that some of his oafish aides, like that Bowman, had made, so that Teresa with her perfect sensibilities would at last detect some flaw in him. But it seemed to be no use hoping that way. The damnable fellow seemed somehow, even in the primitive and churlish society of the American Colonies, to have acquired all the courtly graces.

  De Cartabona’s only immediate hope lay in the sight of the musicians’ arrival. The fellow’s as big as an ox, he thought. Surely he’ll clump about and make a hopeless ass of himself.

  The lieutenant’s hopes lasted no longer than the first cuadrilla. The American moved with as much grace and ease as anybody de Cartabona had ever seen. The Spaniard’s heart clenched each time Teresa’s tiny white hand was lifted by the colonel’s huge tan one, every time their wondering eyes met, every time that telling blush he had so long studied arose in her neck, every time she lowered her lashes before the colonel’s adoring gaze, every time, especially, she swirled close to de Cartabona and was unable to meet his anguished eyes.

  TERESA FELT AS IF SHE WERE A BUTTERFLY BEING BLOWN ABOUT IN the room by a warm zephyr. It was a thrilling sensation, but one not altogether good; it was frightening to have so little control over herself. The Virginian’s hands and arms were as hard as steel, but warm and gentle enough, it seemed, that he might handle a butterfly without dusting its wings. Indeed, she felt a more palpable force from his eyes than from his hands. He seemed to be guiding her more with his intense, desperate will than with his physical body. He spoke no words, perhaps because he was, as was she, afraid any words would sound absurd.

  Now and then, looking up from his broad chest to his chiseled face, she would recall the dread he had caused in her that first night, and she would be frightened again. Even the adoration in his eyes could not dispel that odd premonitory dread. In some strange way, it precipitated even worse fears, deep in the unfamiliar recesses of her inner self.