“When are they expected?” I asked, thinking of Natanis, and in a turmoil inside for fear something might go wrong to keep me, at this late day, from reaching Mary. “If there’s time I might try the trip myself, with Natawammet, to see how it looks.”
“You can’t do it! They’ll be here any time—in three days, four days—a week anyway.”
Determined to have word of Natanis, Natawammet and I filled ourselves with cider and dumplings at Smith’s Tavern, above the shipyard, and set off upstream for Patrick Conkey’s cabin, ten miles beyond Fort Western.
By good fortune I found Conkey, dirty, unkempt, and newly returned from his scouting trip, seated on the ground outside his cabin, comfortably wriggling his bare toes in the afternoon sun and engaged in a spitting contest with his brother Michael and one of his scouting companions. In front of them, removed from the line of spitting, stood a gray stone jug. I gave them good-day and offered them my letter from Colonel Arnold. Conkey took it, looked at both sides with half-closed eyes and returned it without comment.
I asked if there had been changes in recent years on Dead River. Conkey asked who I might be. I said I was Steven Nason, as he had read in the letter. Conkey said, “I thought it was a map.”
After some meditation he said he had heard of me. He spat carefully, protecting his chin by a quick outward and upward motion of his lower lip, and his companions followed his example. Conkey out-spat them. I asked if he had crossed the Height of Land on this trip. He shook his head, tersely remarking, “Dangerous!”
From Conkey’s thick and fragmentary conversation I gathered he and his companions had carried from the Kennebec to Dead River and there encountered Natanis, who traveled with them for one day but would go no farther, though they offered him a dollar a day. Their suspicions were aroused by his refusal of such riches. The only explanation that could reach their rum-fuddled brains was that somebody had paid him more money to remain where he was. Since there could be no one but the English who would pay money for any such service, Conkey had accused him of being in the pay of the English. Conkey declared Natanis had confessed this to be true, and had threatened to carry word to the English if they attempted to force him to go farther. Because of this, he mumbled, they had proceeded a little along Dead River, then returned to the Kennebec and come home.
I sat and whittled at a twig, looking down on the tumbling quick water of the river. Inwardly I damned this drunken, lying fool until my stomach tightened with rage. I was sure I knew how it had come about: how Natanis, having received my message, would not go far from his camp lest I come for his help and find him gone; and how, when accused of spying for the English, he had joked derisively with them, threatening to perform an impossibility—to race on ahead and tattle to the English, which would have been of no use to anyone.
“If he said he was a spy and would tell on you,” I said to Conkey, “why didn’t you shoot him? We’re at war with England.”
Conkey made no answer, but spat repeatedly. Then I knew he was a coward as well as a drunkard, and had run home with his tail between his legs without bringing a farthing’s worth of information concerning the carries on the Height of Land and beyond it, as he had been told to do—bearing only lies concerning one who would be of more value to the army than a thousand Conkeys.
I knew it was no duty of mine to reach over and cram his blackened teeth down his throat. Arnold and the army would require his services, worthless as they were. My only duty, as I saw it, was to give Natanis whatever protection I could from this strange patriot. Not only was Natanis my friend; but he could, I knew, guide the army more skillfully than any other man, and so must be protected at all hazards.
We left Conkey to his drinking and spitting, and went rapidly downstream, as if hell-bent for Fort Western. No sooner, however, were we safely out of sight of Conkey’s hovel than we ran ashore, made camp, and took trouts for our supper. While the trouts were broiling, skewered between slices of salt pork, I said to Natawammet: “If Natanis isn’t warned that he’s supposed to be a spy, he may have trouble and we might lose his help. This we can’t afford. Someone must warn him; but I can’t do it, for Colonel Arnold expects me to meet him on his arrival. What do you think? Can you travel alone to Dead River?”
Natawammet nodded. “Easily, if you’ll give me all the salt pork and all the powder.”
“You’re a good friend, Natawammet,” I said. “You can have whatever of mine you want. You’ll have to be off at daybreak and travel fast, for there’s little time remaining. When you find Natanis, tell him what we’ve learned. Tell him never to show himself to white scouts or war parties, for fear they might shoot first and ask questions afterward. Tell him I’m his friend and brother, always, and in need of his help. Tell him to be on the lookout for me.”
Natawammet lifted the trouts from the fire and laid them on a strip of bark. “I’ll stay with him,” he said, “watching for you.”
“One more thing,” I said. “This is important. Natanis must draw a true map, showing the path across the Height of Land: showing also the length of the carries between his cabin and the Chaudière. Tell him to put it where the advance scouts will find it. They need such a map; and it may be helpful to Natanis if it’s known that he provided it.”
Natawammet nodded, stuffing himself with trouts and salt pork.
I racked my brains, but could think of no other way to help Natanis; and I hoped nothing more would be needed.
At the crack of dawn Natawammet daubed his face with red paint, rolled his blanket, and set off afoot toward the north. At the same time I slid the canoe into the river and went back to the southward, past Fort Western and down to Colburn’s shipyard.
… The place was busy as a beehive with preparations for Arnold’s arrival; but busiest of all was Cap Huff, who had come up from Swan Island and was engaged, he told me loudly, in helping the Commissary from Cambridge buy provisions. He had risen in the world, for he had a canoe of his own, paddled by Hobomok. It was a sort of public canoe, he said, loaned to the army by Jacataqua, and when he got through with it, anybody could have it who wanted it—and have Hobomok too. Hobomok, he declared, made him nervous—not because of anything he did, but because of what he might do. The truth seemed to be that Cap lived in dread of hearing Hobomok scream again.
In his canoe Cap darted up river and down at all hours, looking for things, as he put it, to pick up. He had picked up aplenty; not only cornmeal packed in deer bladders to help feed us on our journey to Quebec, but so much hard money that he had been at a loss how to carry it, and so had stitched it in rows to the tail of his shirt, where it covered the lower portion of his body like a sort of armor. He was vague as to where he got it; but I gathered he had accepted it from settlers who sought his influence to keep from being drafted into the army.
Jacataqua was there, too, with buckskin shirts and leggins for Arnold and his officers; but from the manner in which she avoided the affectionate slaps aimed at her by Cap, I somehow sensed that the two of them had not, as our Arundel people say, hit it off together.
… Those of us who knew the river and the Maine woods were in a stew over Arnold’s slowness in arriving. The season had been dry, and the water was low. As is always the case after a dry summer, the leaves turned early; so we waited amid a profusion of colors such as can be seen nowhere else in all our eastern country—gold and russet and crimson, flame red and orange and pink, pale green and dark green.
They were the colors of advancing autumn—a sure sign that winter was not far away; and autumn being what it is along the Kennebec, we knew the need of setting off before the northern frosts took too high a toll of us.
With each passing day we said to ourselves that Arnold was never coming; and we fumed and swore and snapped at each other until we forgot our hatred of England in our desire to fight among ourselves.
Cap and I, with some of the workers on the bateaux, were at Smith’s Tavern eating a dinner of soggy dumplings and corned beef, sour bec
ause of having been killed in the hot weather, and we were fretful because of the delay and the bad food and the flies that buzzed about us, walking on our faces and hands, very persistent. We bickered somewhat over the date—Friday, the 22nd of September—which is why I remember it, for Cap was bawling that all we needed to make everything perfect was to have Arnold get here on a Friday—when a boy rushed in screaming that a schooner and two sloops were coming upstream.
We ran to the shipyard, leaping over the long lines of bateaux that covered acres of the shore, and saw the reach full of sail, white and gleaming against the glowing leaves that fringed the river.
We could see crowds of men on the decks, and among the sloops and schooners a number of birch canoes; and from all the craft there rose such a clamor of shouting and laughter that we would have started with them that minute to storm the gates of London itself, and counted ourselves certain of success, Friday or no Friday.
XVII
TO SPEAK with Colonel Arnold, that September afternoon, a man needed to be quicker than a flycatcher after a gnat. When he was not among the bateaux, peering into and hefting them, he was racing along the shore, shouting orders to his lieutenant colonels, or saying whom he would see at Colburn’s and whom at Fort Western, thinking of a thousand things and doing them with the speed of five men.
Downstream I saw the Eunice; but since she was lying off, waiting for the others to get clear, I watched the landing of the three rifle companies from the leading sloops, under the direction of Daniel Morgan, an enormous man, bigger even than Cap Huff, and harsh in his orders.
Those riflemen were worth watching. They came ashore as quick and sure-footed as squirrels: tall men, dressed in queer jackets of gray canvas.
I had heard about these men at Cambridge, for they had marched six hundred miles from Winchester in three weeks without losing a man. The other two rifle companies were from Pennsylvania, both as tough and able as Morgan’s, and their shooting such as to fill our Maine marksmen with amazement.
Young Nathaniel Davis told me they were trained to load and fire their rifles while running over a broken field. While doing this they pierced targets the size of a saucer at two hundred and fifty paces—a great distance to shoot with a rifle, even when both marksman and mark are motionless.
When the Eunice moved inshore I walked down through the piles of packs and the waiting groups of musketmen, hoping to spend an hour with Phoebe and send messages by her to Arundel.
She was so small, pushing her way among the hulking militiamen, making fast a rope here and a rope there, that I pitied her and her swaggering foolishness of sea boots and brass-studded belt and cat’s eyes and blue bandanna, and sentimentally considered giving her a kiss to take each one of my sisters as well as my mother, an act of kindness that would do me no harm.
While I watched her slipping forward and aft like a child, a waiting musketman caught her around the waist and swung her off her feet. Quick as a cat she caught at a stay with her left hand and whacked the musketman on the head with something in her right. He fell down like a log, and she stepped over him and went on with what she was doing, though I thought with less of an appearance of childishness.
I waved to her, and could have sworn her eye caught sight of me, but she gave no sign, and in a moment popped into her cabin; so I studied those who were disembarking. Among them, I saw poor Nathaniel Lord and Noah Cluff and that limb of the devil, Asa Hutchins. When I caught sight of the grave and benevolent face and dignified figure of James Dunn coming over the side, I said to myself I would drag Phoebe from her cabin and read her a lecture that would send her home in tears. Before I could do it there was some bellowing from the captain of their company, Goodrich, whereat they all hurried upstream and fell in line.
I thought of going to Phoebe’s cabin, but she came out of her own accord and said something to two men who still remained on deck. They started to heave up the anchor, and Phoebe swung herself ashore and walked by me, her nose in the air, as impudent as any Falmouth baggage. Yet it was not her impudence that held me speechless, gawking at her as a dog gawks at a cat up a tree, but her garb; for she had replaced her sea dress with a deerskin jerkin and leggins and moccasins. She might have been an Abenaki except for the blue handkerchief around her head, and the cat’s eyes at her neck instead of wampum.
She put down her bundle and went to fixing her waist, sliding a glance at me as she did so. I saw that under her jerkin she wore her breeches and brass-studded belt, though leggins and moccasins had supplanted her sea boots. I went to her and shook her arm.
“You idiot,” I said, “what do you think you’re doing? What do you think this looks like!”
She puckered her brows, seeming hurt and puzzled by my anger, though I knew she was neither puzzled nor hurt. “Now what’s the matter?” she asked, peering around at herself, first over one shoulder and then over the other, as women have a way of doing. “Jacataqua made them for me like her own, and we’re both of a size.”
“Jacataqua!” I shouted. “Matter! Why aren’t you on our sloop? Where do you think you’re going? Why did you let James Dunn come on this expedition?”
“Don’t shout,” she said. “I’m not deaf!”
Now if ever I saw a human, man or woman, always able to say the one thing that was the wrong thing, it was Phoebe.
“I’ll shout all I please,” I said, “and if you’re not deaf, then I think you’re blind and dumb and witless to boot!”
“You won’t think so,” she said, “when I tell you the price I got for the sloop.”
“What do you mean, price?” I asked in a fog of rage and bemuddlement. “Price for what?”
“For the sloop. I sold the sloop to Nathaniel Tracy.”
“You couldn’t! It isn’t yours to sell! I wouldn’t consent to the sale of it, and therefore it couldn’t be sold.”
“I spoke about it to your mother,” she said. “Your mother considered it a fine trade. She owns two fifths, and I one fifth, so we voted to sell it. If you’d refused to sell for the price we got, I think you’d have been as great a goose as ever was.”
“How much did you get?”
“Four hundred and fifty dollars. Twice what we paid; so when we get back from Quebec we can have a fine brig, or two brigs if we want them, or even a ship.”
“We!” I exclaimed, dropping the matter of the sloop, since the price had indeed been large. “We! What sort of talk is this? How can you go to Quebec when there’s no one to look after you? We’ll be busy enough saving our own lives without having you on our hands!”
“It’ll be a cold day, Steven Nason,” she said, with an air of disdain that made me want to lay her over my knee, “when you find me on your hands.”
“Now here!” I said. “This is enough! Either you set off for Arundel, where you belong, or I’ll go to Colonel Arnold and have you put out of camp at the point of a bayonet!”
“That’s a good scheme,” she said, “but I’ve already spoken to Colonel Arnold. He said if my husband had no objections to my following the army he saw no reason why he should raise any. You aren’t my husband, unless I’m greatly mistaken; and if you’ve been given the right to speak for him, I haven’t heard of it. I’m weary of all this twaddle about having women on your hands; so I’ll tell you now that Sergeant Grier in the rifle corps has his wife along, a woman three times my size, yet no one’s raising a hullabaloo about having her on his hands; and Warner of the rifle corps is taking his wife as well, and glad to have her. As for James Dunn, I’ve heard him raising no objections to my going—nor have I heard any from you over the going of Jacataqua.”
“She isn’t going, is she?”
“Yes, she is, is she!” said Phoebe, dropping her lower lip vacantly in a manner she doubtless felt to be an imitation of me, “and a strange thing, if you ask me, that one who goes around miawling she’s your sister, and hanging to your waist like a sick ninny, should have said nothing to you about it!”
“What do you mean
?”
“Sister, indeed! What I mean is clear enough! It wouldn’t be so pleasant for you, would it, if a woman from your home followed this army and saw you at your innocent play with a brown hussy calling herself your sister? Sister! Pah!”
“Phoebe,” I said, “there’s no sense in what you say. She was a little girl, playing with her doll, when I was hurt going after Mary Mallinson. How could she be anything but what I tell you, Phoebe? There’s no room in my mind for anyone but Mary!”
Phoebe shouldered her pack with a sniff. “Then you don’t fear what I’ll see, and don’t mind my being with the army?”
“I do not! It would make no difference to me if you marched three feet from me all the journey!”
“Then we’ll say no more about it,” she said. “If you’re going up to Fort Western by canoe I’ll go with you.”
She was bound to have the last word, I saw, and nothing was gained by arguing with her, any more than with any other woman; so we set off for the tavern together.
Already order was appearing. The bateaux, drawn to the edge of the river, had been filled with packs and supplies. Strings of them were being launched and detachments of men rowing them upstream. The water was dotted with loaded bateaux, all moving toward Fort Western; and detachment after detachment was setting off afoot along the rutted wood road leading north from Agry’s Point.
On a knoll at the lower end of the shipyard, surrounded by captains and lieutenants, stood a high officer of the expedition supervising the formation of three companies of musketmen. What caught my eye was the face of a man standing a little behind him—a long, sour face of a flat gray color, as though modeled in the clay from one of our Maine coves. It called to my mind the inside of the council house at Swan Island and the cold spring day when my father, dripping wet, dragged himself for the last time up the stairs of our inn at Arundel. I leaped away from Phoebe, raced around the group of officers, and took the gray-faced man by the front of his buckskin hunting shirt. What was in my mind I’m not quite sure; but I know I had often thought, in the half-dreams that lie between sleeping and waking, that I would like to take this man in my hands and pull him slowly to pieces in revenge for what he had done to my father.
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