“Why, sir,” I said, “I’d travel it if all I had was a handful of salt and a lump of pork to cook with trouts.”
“That’s quibbling!” Colonel Enos said. “I detest quibbling! Answer truthfully, now: if you had provisions for only a few days, and couldn’t get more, would you be willing to make the journey to Quebec from here, especially if it was your duty to conduct others who looked to you for safety?”
“Sir,” I said, “you’re a colonel. I’m only a guide. If I should speak out, my words might be held against me. I might be accused of disrespect. I know little about the ways of an army. Some of them seem to me to be thought out by lunatics.”
“Disregard our rank, sir,” Colonel Enos said. “Give us the information we’re seeking.”
“Well, then,” I said, “there’s two ways of going to Quebec: one in wartime and one in peacetime.”
“Now you’re quibbling again!”
“Sir,” I said, “I’m not quibbling! I’d go to Quebec in wartime with no provisions at all, so long as there was another man left to go with.”
“Let’s get at this another way,” said Captain Williams, a pleasant, polite man. “Do you know the instructions in Colonel Arnold’s letter?”
“Yes. He ordered Colonel Enos to send forward all the men to whom he could give fifteen days’ rations, and send home all the others, both sick and well.”
“That’s correct. Now let me ask you what you’d do about going to Quebec in this case: Suppose you could only send forward thirty men with fifteen days’ provisions, while the rest of your men, three hundred and more, would have to be sent back with no provisions of any sort—sent back to struggle through these forests and bogs and keep up their strength for a week—two weeks, maybe—without a damned thing to eat.”
“Now you’re asking about an impossibility,” I said.
“Not at all, sir; not at all!” Enos cried. “That’s our predicament exactly! Tell us what you’d do in such a situation?”
“Well,” I said slowly, “I think I’d put all my provisions in one place and count ’em.”
“Just what do you mean by that?”
“Why, sir,” I said, “I mean there’s no doubt in my mind you’ve got more provisions than you think.”
“Drat you!” the colonel began, purple with rage; but Captain Williams stopped him.
“We invited it, Colonel.” He spoke to me politely. “We’d like you to see this as something apart from your personal desires. Our own men are sullen from fearing their food will run out. We have others to consider, too. We’re obliged to support all the sick sent back by Morgan and Meigs and Greene. I suppose you think it’s our duty to let these sick men starve in the wilderness?”
“No,” I said, “I don’t.”
“Then you think it’s our duty to give them enough food to get back to the settlements, because without food they’d certainly starve?”
“Yes,” I said, “I do.”
“Then if you think that’s our duty,” Captain Williams said, “you must think it’s our duty to return home with the entire division.”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” I exclaimed in disgust.
“But we can’t do two things!” Captain Williams protested. “We can’t send the sick home, and go forward at the same time. You say yourself it’s our duty to supply the sick with food. As soon as we do that we can’t give anyone enough provisions for fifteen days. Colonel Arnold asked only for such men as could be supplied with provisions for fifteen days. It seems to me you think it’s our duty to return home.”
“That would be all very well,” I said, choking with rage, “if you had as few provisions as you say.”
“Well, do you think we’re better judges of that, or you?” Captain Williams asked sweetly.
“I think I’d be, if I could count your provisions without getting a bullet through the head from one of your bravehearted boys.”
“We couldn’t think of exposing you to danger.”
“No,” I said, “and damned good reason, too! You can’t think of exposing anyone to danger, including yourselves.”
I have often waked up at night regretting what I said next; but I was in a fury at being talked in a circle by this sea lawyer of a Williams.
“Here’s another thing I think,” I added. “I think if I were in your place, and thought as you think, I’d pack up my bateaux even if I had provisions for a thousand men for fifteen days! I’d run off home with ’em, leaving the heartbreak and fighting for those who don’t live by measurement: for those willing to trust to God and their own efforts to have shoes on their feet and air in their lungs and food in their bellies in a week’s time.”
With this I walked out of the tent, hot with anger and expecting a bullet or a club in the back of the head.
Natanis and Hobomok drove the canoe across the river when they saw me. As I climbed in, too disquieted to rejoice at the two raccoons and the bundle of fat spruce partridges that lay in the bottom, I heard Enos’s peevish voice behind me. “Tell Colonel Greene to wait for me in the morning. I’ll hold a council of war when I come up with him.”
In his voice I sensed a number of unspoken words; and I wished I could pick up one of the partridges and jam it down his throat.
The rain turned to snow as we went up to Greene’s camp in the semidark—a gurry of weather that made it hard to pick our way around the falls, nor could we have done so without Natanis to guide us. Even so I stumbled perpetually, my mind being on the lack of provisions of which Enos and his men complained. I didn’t believe their food was as low as they claimed, nor do I believe it to-day, it being in my thoughts then and now that the men, affrighted out of all reason by Treeworgy’s tales, had hid provisions so they might run home, uncovering the hoards as they ran. Yet if it was true, Enos and his officers were indeed in a parlous situation; for if they went on, leaving sick men to suffer and starve, they would be damned for cruelty; and if they turned back, leaving the rest of the army to go on without them, they would be equally damned for cowardice.
Also there rested heavy on me the knowledge that Treeworgy from the first had sown discontent among Enos’s men, and that I had failed to get at the bottom of it in spite of my suspicions. Nor was it, I thought, any great comfort to know that if Enos’s division turned back, Treeworgy would turn back with them.
It was dark by the time we saw Greene’s campfires through the snowflakes, and I was in no pretty frame of mind, what with my anger and the burning of my feet from tramping over the carries in shoes broken in a dozen places, so that I might as well have been barefoot.
But when I left Natanis and Hobomok kindling a fire in the lee of our canoe and went with the raccoons and partridges to Greene’s tent to give him Enos’s message, the welcome I got was as good as warm clothes on my body and an opened window in my head to let out the darkness and gloom that had filled me at Enos’s camp.
It’s doubtless a fine thing to be serious-minded, preserving a dignified and ponderous demeanor toward life; but if I must fight or march I prefer to do it with frivolous, light-minded folk; for they are the ones who fight and march while others give serious thought to how it should be done.
“Dear, dear! Dear, dear!” said Colonel Greene, feeling of the raccoon absent-mindedly and passing it to Major Bigelow, who cuddled it as though it were a child, “I’m sorry to hear these tales about Enos’s division, though it’s no more than I expected. I’m sure the colonel will do what’s best.”
Bigelow, a wiry, brown-faced officer with heavy black eyebrows and a peculiar habit of breaking into imitation peals of laughter at unexpected moments, had placed the raccoon’s body on his knees and was parting its hair carefully at various spots. He whistled shrilly, pointing with apparent horror at the parted hair of the raccoon. A large black flea moved languidly against the white skin. “Colonel Enos!” Bigelow said gravely.
“Moves a little fast, doesn’t he?” Captain Thayer asked.
“Yes,” Bigelow said. “He’
s going south.”
“He can go south for all of me,” said Captain Topham. “If he doesn’t, and we take Quebec, we’ll have to stay there twenty years waiting for him to catch up.”
“Gentlemen! Gentlemen!” Colonel Greene protested.
“Gentlemen hell!” said Bigelow. He went to the rear of the lean-to and tossed the raccoon to the cook, who was working over a kettle under a pine tree. “Put this in the gruel, Luke,” he shouted, “and see if you can get it strong enough to hold up a hair.”
He turned back to Greene. “He’s an old woman and you know it, Colonel! Don’t be so easy on him! If he was a hen, he wouldn’t cackle till he’d looked under himself twice to see whether the egg was really there. If I can get him behind a pine tree with nobody looking I’ll kick him all the way back to Norridgewock. Don’t say Gentlemen to me! I’m nothing but a carter where Enos is concerned!”
“It may be,” the colonel said, “that he’s out of provisions, as he says. If it’s true, I don’t envy him, with all our sick on his hands.”
“Stuff and feathers!” Thayer said. “How can he be out of provisions when he started with twice what any of us carried!”
“What do you think?” the colonel asked me.
“Sir,” I said, “I don’t know. I was in a rage at him and Williams and McCobb, thinking they were shameful cowards; but the men are frightened and sulky, bound to save their own skins and be damned to Enos and everybody else. It may be they wasted food, cooking more than their needs. They may have hid some, unknown to Enos and the rest.”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Bigelow cried, “he could chance it with some men, couldn’t he? Do you think we’ll turn back if we have less than fifteen days’ provisions, such as the colonel tells us to have in his letter?” He struck an attitude. “I shall go forward even though I have provisions for only fourteen and one half days!” He burst into shrill, false laughter; and the rest of us laughed at his clowning, knowing he would go forward with the colonel and the rest of the division if he had nothing more than a cupful of flour to get him to Quebec.
I make no pretense of reading men’s minds, since I have found so many of them cheerful in war when they might reasonably be sad, and sad when there seems fair cause for cheerfulness. Yet if Colonel Enos was dispirited when I gave him the message from Colonel Arnold, he had more reason for being so on the following morning.
There was a blanket of snow on the ground; and the air had an edge to it that took men piercingly in the knees and behind the ears. It may be I speak overmuch of the biting nature of the cold along the Kennebec; but I do so because it was one of the enemies we fought, as well as the British, and because it seemed a peculiar racking cold that slid down from the Height of Land, creeping and twisting along the winding coils of the river, undulating in a sort of clammy mist that clung to the valley through its whole length.
Then there were the sick men coming down on him, bateau after bateau filled with them, more than twenty-five men from Morgan’s and Meigs’s divisions, and some sixty from Greene’s, men so weakened with the flux that they could scarce stand, and so racked with rheumatism that if they fell, which they often did when out of the bateaux, they dragged themselves along on hands and knees until someone came to lift them up.
Greene sent off his division as soon as it was light, staying behind himself with Bigelow and the other officers to wait for Enos and the council of war.
“When the council’s over,” he told me, “I’ll give you a message for the colonel.”
I watched the men set off, churning the new snow into slush. There were barely a hundred of them, all badly off in the matter of clothes, and two with no shoes at all, though I make no doubt their feet were tough as leather.
I caught Burr on the run and asked him the whereabouts of Jacataqua.
“Gone ahead to hunt,” he flung at me over his shoulder. “Send your Mr. Pitt to get food if there’s time. I could do with a juicy crow to-night!”
This I did, telling Natanis and Hobomok they were safe in hunting for a matter of three hours, though it was a move that did me no good. Yet I cannot rightly say I regretted it; for it has always seemed to me that if we regretted and sought to avoid all the small movements that lie behind our misfortunes and disappointments, we’d spend our lives in regrets and our days in immovability.
It was noon when Enos came up the river with his officers, Williams, McCobb, Scott, Hyde, and Peters; and after all these years I cannot set down their names without cursing them, even though I know in my heart there may have been good and sufficient reason for what they did. They were in a bateau, driven by Treeworgy and Swashan. I knew at once they were going no farther; for in the bateau was neither baggage nor provisions.
They crowded into Colonel Greene’s tent, and after a time I crouched beside it, to hear, if possible, what might be going forward. Major Bigelow was speaking, as careless as though he spoke of scraping barnacles off a sloop.
“There’s no use huffering and chuffering about what Colonel Arnold would have us do if we can’t live up to the letter of his instructions,” he said, “because Colonel Arnold has gone beyond our reach. He said he wants no sick men and no faint hearts, but must have fighters; so I’m going on, and my men with me, and all the talk in the world can’t change that!”
“But you’ve got to figure,” Enos complained, “that it takes three days to cross the Height of Land and two more to reach Lake Megantic and another three—”
“Begging the colonel’s pardon,” said Major Bigelow, “I haven’t got to figure, and I’m not going to. I’m going to go, and not waste time figuring.”
“That’s what I’m figuring on doing,” said Captain Thayer, mild and pleasant as always.
“But an officer is responsible for his men,” Colonel Enos objected. “I must think of my men.”
“Holy mackerel! begging the colonel’s pardon,” Bigelow cried. “What are you going to do if we have to ram our men against the guns of Quebec? We haven’t any written guarantees from England that we won’t have to. I hope we wouldn’t be supposed to wrap ’em up in feather beds until the British are all dead!”
“That’s another matter entirely,” said Colonel Enos. “I have to think of my men.”
“So do I!” said Bigelow. “I have to think of them, and of Colonel Arnold, and of the men in Morgan’s and Meigs’s divisions. That’s why I’m going!”
“My men refuse to continue,” said Captain Williams.
“So do mine,” said McCobb.
“And mine,” said Scott.
“Sir,” said Enos, seemingly speaking to Major Bigelow, “I protest against your manner of spitting when my officers have stated a fact calculated to enable us to arrive at a decision. It’s an act unworthy of an officer and a gentleman!”
What reply Major Bigelow made I never learned; for a hand touched me on the shoulder. It was Natanis.
“Where is the canoe?” he asked.
“Our canoe?”
He nodded. “It is gone, with our blankets and food.”
“Treeworgy!” I said under my breath. We ran to the spot where we had camped. There was no need to look at the tracks leading to the river. Treeworgy and Swashan had robbed us. From the marks on the bank we saw they had gone upstream.
“How far,” I asked Natanis, “to your laid-up canoe?”
“Ten times the flight of a partridge, on the opposite bank.”
This was about a mile. “Quick,” I said, “get across with Greene’s bateau, you and Hobomok, and uncover it! For God’s sake, hurry! This Treeworgy is up to some deviltry! He’s a spy and there’s no two ways about it!”
I recall no particular despair at our situation, despite our lack of food and blankets and the loss of my musket, but only a longing to have Treeworgy at the end of my sights, or my hands on his lying throat. Both Hobomok and Natanis had muskets and carried fishing lines, flints, and steel in their pouches, so that there was no danger of starvation. But Treeworgy’s dash towar
d the front of the column was something on which I hadn’t counted. There was a feeling in the pit of my stomach that it had something to do with me—something bad.
I ran to Greene when he and Enos came out of the council, followed by the other officers. Enos bawled for Treeworgy; and Bigelow and the rest of Greene’s officers went off toward their bateau without so much as a farewell glance toward Enos’s men.
“My compliments to Colonel Arnold,” said Greene, with a look about his mouth as though he had eaten something hateful. “Tell him my division, reduced to one hundred and seven effective men, will join him with the others.”
“And the council of war?” I asked.
“That’s a message I hate to send,” he said mildly. “Colonel Enos’s officers voted against proceeding, on the ground that their provisions were insufficient and their men unruly. Colonel Enos voted with us to proceed, but yielded to the pleas of his officers and will return at the head of his division.”
We stared at each other. “Is that all, sir?” I asked.
“Yes, I think that’s all,” Colonel Greene sighed. “It’s difficult and painful. He’ll have to stand a court-martial when he gets back, of course.”
“That shouldn’t be hard to stand,” I said, “with Williams and McCobb testifying for him, and no Bigelow or Thayer to distract them.”
Greene nodded and turned away, a fine gentleman, but a little overkindly and obliging, it seemed to me, for an army not officered exclusively by gentlemen, which our army wasn’t, any more than was the British army.
I hid in the pines near the camping ground, watching Enos fuming and fussing in the snow and occasionally whooping for Treeworgy. At the end of an hour Natanis and Hobomok came around the bend, driving a small canoe against the current so that the water curled away from its stem, showing it was well loaded. There was an odd hump in the middle, and over it a blanket. They came up on the far side of the river: then, as I showed myself, cut across. Beside the blanketed hump lay a spare musket.
“What’s all this?” I asked.
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