Prelude to Glory Vol, 3

by Ron Carter

  Eli walked back to Billy. “See anything?”

  “No.”

  “I doubt they’re following.”

  “If they intend marching on Trenton, they’ll be coming this way with daylight.”

  “Probably so. I figure they’ll take the Princeton Road, west of here. It’s better than the Quaker Road, but they’re going to have trouble with the cannon in this mud.” A wry smile crossed his face. “I expect they’ll get a late start, with their horse herd scattered and two powder wagons gone.”

  “Likely. We better get over to the woods west of the Princeton Road and wait. General Washington needs a count on how many are coming.”

  Billy dismounted. “I ran the horse pretty hard. I’ll lead him for a while.” He turned southwest and Eli fell in beside him, slogging through the mud and melting snow in the dim light of the partially obscured moon.

  Suddenly Eli asked, “Where’s your musket?”

  Billy’s eyebrows arched in surprise. “I guess I lost it somewhere back there.”

  “Did you get those twenty-two horses on the tether rope?”

  “No. No time. When those powder wagons blew things happened pretty fast.”

  “No matter. They’ll be a while gathering the ones you scattered.”

  Dull moonlight sifted through the trees as the two men moved southwest, across the narrow bridge spanning Stony Brook, past Worth’s Mill on their right. There the Princeton Road ran southwest through land that flattened into gently rolling hills with fields divided by heavy woods. Small streams worked their way to larger ones, all eventually joining the Assunpink to flow into the great Delaware River. Two hundred yards past the Stony Brook bridge they moved west of the road into a thick stand of trees and settled to wait in the patchy snow and mud, listening for the first sounds of fife and drum, and horses and marching men slogging through mud, and cannon rumbling in the night.

  Minutes passed, and they lost track of time. The horse moved its feet impatiently in the soggy snow and soft layer of forest mulch beneath, uneasy, sensing the tension in the men. The eastern sky changed from black to deep purple, then gray. A light skiff of clouds appeared above the skyline, and both men watched as the sun, not yet risen, turned the undersides to deep crimson, then rose and yellow.

  The temperature was rising. The woods were filled with the steady drumming of water dripping from icicles melting in the barren trees, drilling holes in rotting snow. Dark patches of hard earth appeared, then turned to mud, and in the low places puddles grew. Snow and ice that had lain six inches deep on the Pennington Road disappeared to expose the brownish-red clay, and then turn it into a sticky quagmire.

  Eli glanced up at the pale sky, then loosened his coat. He looked about at the snow and ice, melting so rapidly it seemed the countryside was changing while he watched.

  Don’t remember it ever being this warm early in January. Not natural.

  The thought bothered him. Everything he had learned taught him that all things in life finally came to rest on nature—what was natural. And when unnatural things happened, it unsettled him.

  Eli broke the silence. “Maybe they decided to come on the Quaker Road.”

  Billy started to answer, then stopped, and turned his head to listen. The unmistakable sounds of chortling fifes came faintly on the clear air, and then the steady rattle of drums. Thirty seconds later the red coats, crossed white belts, and white breeches of mounted British officers flashed bright and proud as they rounded the gentle bend in the road approaching Stony Brook. The red, white, and blue of the Union Jack, and the regimental colors of the marching men sparkled in the brilliant light of a sun just rising. Behind the officers came the first rank and file of the regulars, followed by a company of green-coated Hessians jaegers, the elite German troops with their tall hats sparkling in the early light.

  Billy drew the telescope from its case and studied the oncoming column for a full minute, then handed it to Eli, his face grim.

  Eli waited until the British appeared at the turn coming into the Stony Brook bridge. He raised the glass and began the count.

  More than twelve mounted officers led in a file. The one in front was fair sized, portly, with more gold on each shoulder and on his hat than Eli had ever seen before. He sat a tall, heavy-boned sorrel with four showy stockinged feet, and rode erect, head high, resolute, determined. The officers crossed the narrow bridge, followed by the first company of regulars. The sound of their fifes and drums was a steady, throbbing beat that was growing by the minute. The second company crossed the bridge, then the third, and Eli’s breath came short.

  Eli lowered the telescope and looked at Billy. “The main force. That officer in front must be Cornwallis. Leslie and Grant have to be there somewhere.” Eli reflected for a moment. “One of us should go on down to Five Mile Run to tell them Cornwallis is coming, while the other one waits to see how many men and cannon are following.”

  “I think you’re right.” Billy raised the telescope and for a time watched and counted before passing it back to Eli. Billy pursed his mouth for a moment. “I’ll go on down to Five Mile. You take the horse and see who’s coming behind. I’ll meet you there.”

  Eli nodded, and Billy handed him the reins to the horse. Eli said, “Stay out of sight. You don’t have a musket.”

  Billy nodded as he turned, and Eli watched him move through the trees west to a streambed, then angle southwest, following it through the woods at a trot.

  Eli continued the count as the column moved steadily southwest in the mud of the Princeton Road, which was growing worse with each passing minute. Horses were sinking halfway to their knees with each step. Soldiers’ boots were sticking above their ankles in the soft brownishred clay. Officers shouted orders and some companies left the roadbed, hoping for more solid footing, only to mire down in muck worse than what they had left. The column struggled on, mud splattered to their hips, angry, frustrated, cursing.

  Eli held his place, telescope raised, counting intently. The commissary and ammunition wagons passed, sunk halfway to their axles in the sticky red clay, the horses straining into the horse collars to move them at all. Orders were shouted and men came with more horses, and the column stopped while they hitched them to the wagons, and once again the column moved on.

  Sun glinted off brass and iron, and Eli swung the telescope back to peer as the first cannon came rolling onto the bridge. Their carriage wheels were clogged with mud, their crews covered with it as they grasped the spokes and bowed their backs trying to make the thick, sixfoot wheels turn.

  The sun was climbing in the east before Eli saw the last company cross the bridge and mire down in the ruts and thick morass of mud.

  Close to eight thousand men. Twenty-eight cannon. They’re fresh now, but they won’t be after they’ve marched to Trenton in the mud.

  He collapsed the telescope and shoved it back into its case, his thoughts leaping.

  They got twice the number Washington’s got in Trenton. The men at Five Mile Run don’t have a chance against a force this size.

  He was reaching for the reins of the brown when movement to the northeast caught his eye, and he raised a hand to shade his eyes as he studied Stony Brook bridge and Worth’s Mill, beside it. A regiment of regulars had left the main column on the Princeton Road and were marching east, towards Quaker Road. Instantly Eli jerked out the telescope and extended it.

  Two more regiments followed the first. The three of them marched one hundred yards from the road, where an officer stopped his horse, pointed, and the troops formed in an open field, near a stand of oak, maple, and pines. The mud-spattered regulars shrugged out of their knapsacks to leave them on the soggy ground while they began setting up their nine-foot iron tripods and hanging cook pots from the chains.

  Eli stared in puzzlement. Setting up camp? Within a mile of Princeton?

  He buckled the telescope back into its case, untied the reins to the brown, and quickly led it west through the stand of trees, away from the road
and the three-quarter-mile long column struggling southwest through the quagmire. The trees thinned, and then Eli was out in an open meadow. He mounted and turned the brown southwest, parallel to the British column on the Princeton Road. He raised the horse to an easy lope, soft mud flying twenty feet in the air behind. Within minutes the brown was splattered from its chest to its hindquarters, and Eli’s moccasins were covered.

  Still half a mile west of the British, he caught up with the head of the main column as it reached the bridge spanning Eight Mile Run. While the leaders crossed the bridge, Eli put the brown down the slight embankment into the shallow creek, and stopped to let it bury its muzzle in the clear, flowing water to drink. A minute later he eased back on the reins and the horse raised its head, water dripping, munching at the bit. He reined it up the far bank, then on southwest, maintaining his half-mile interval with the column as it struggled on.

  The sun was climbing when the column reached the bend in the road that turned due south, four hundred yards north of the place where the Princeton Road intersected with a northwest road that led to the town of Pennington. Eli stopped the brown and once again drew out the telescope to study the movement of the column. Suddenly he sat tall, watching intently as a section of the main column pulled out of line and left the road to continue on southwest across open farmland towards the tiny village of Maidenhead, just a few hundred yards west of the Princeton Road. Eli sat still as he counted.

  Nearly fifteen hundred headed for Maidenhead. What’s at Maidenhead?

  He shifted the glass. The main column was relentlessly moving on towards the bridge at Five Mile Run. He replaced the glass in its case and made an instant decision.

  That leaves five thousand five hundred with twenty-eight cannon, headed for Five Mile Run. I have to get there first.

  He kicked the brown to a high lope, mud flying, and he held the pace as he passed Maidenhead and the road to Pennington. He reined left, towards the Princeton Road, and half a mile ahead of the British main column he came onto the roadbed with the British officers pointing at him, exclaiming. There was no musket that could reach him, nor could the short German rifles, and it would take five minutes to pull a cannon out of the column, load, and fire it. The frustrated British realized he had scouted their strength and position, and believed he was headed for Trenton to report to General Washington. The red-coated officers shouted obscenities and shook angry fists at him, but could do nothing more as they watched him ride out of sight, plowing through the mud on the Princeton Road.

  Five Mile Run was a branch of the Assunpink Creek and all traffic on the Princeton Road traveling between Trenton and Princeton had to cross the Five Mile Run bridge, or ford the stream.

  One hundred yards south of the bridge, Billy crouched in a stand of trees with ten soldiers under the command of General de Fermoy, eyes locked onto the bridge and the curving roadbed beyond, waiting for the first sign of an incoming rider, or marching British soldiers. The forest floor beneath their feet, thick with fallen leaves and pine needles, was spongy with the melting snow, and their hair, shoulders, and faces were wet with the dripping from the barren branches overhead. They held their hands over the powder pans of their muskets and waited in silence. Billy squinted up at the sun, moved his feet to relax cramping leg muscles, then settled.

  He’s had enough time. Too much. Where is he?

  A bearded soldier beside him spoke quietly without turning his head. “Maybe they crossed over to the Quaker Road.”

  Billy shook his head. “Not likely. Too much mud.”

  The soldier wiped a wet sleeve across his mouth and resumed his silent watch, when suddenly his arm jerked up to point. “There! A horseman!”

  A quarter mile past the bridge, at the place where the road turned southwest around a grove of trees, a mounted rider plowed steadily towards them, mud flying high behind the loping horse. The ten men each brought up their long, beautifully hand-tooled Pennsylvania rifles, ready, then glanced at Billy, waiting for his word as to whether the incoming rider lived or died on the bridge.

  Billy’s breath came short as he waited. The big-boned brown gelding came on, spotted with red-brown mud from shoulders to flanks. The rider raised his right hand and Billy saw the buckskin hunting shirt trimmed with Indian beadwork, then the face.

  “Hold your fire. It’s him.”

  Billy broke from cover as the horse’s hooves rang hollowly on the bridge. He trotted out of the trees onto the road, waving, five of the soldiers following. Eli pulled the horse down to a walk, then a stop as he closed with Billy and the men behind him. He dismounted from the winded brown as Billy spoke.

  “You all right?”

  Eli nodded and wasted no time. “There’s between five and six thousand British soldiers with twenty-eight cannon behind me, and they’re primed for a fight. How many men you got here?”

  “Eleven of us here. More back in the woods.”

  “With de Fermoy?”

  Billy glanced at the man next to him for a moment. “General de Fermoy left a while ago. Headed back to Trenton alone. We’ve got about six hundred men here.”

  Eli’s head thrust forward in disbelief. “De Fermoy what?”

  “He’s gone. Never said why. Just left.”

  “Then who’s in command?”

  “Colonel Edward Hand. We’re part of his Pennsylvania regiment.”

  For the first time Eli paused for a moment to study the men gathered around Billy. They were bearded, tanned from summers in the sun and winters in the snow, dressed in buckskins and moccasins, long hair tied back, and each carried a long Pennsylvania rifle with an engraved walnut stock worn smooth. Their eyes were calm, disciplined, steady as they silently watched him, judging. He realized they had noticed his buckskins, his tomahawk, and knife as he rode in and had taken him to be an Indian, only to discover that he was a white man.

  He could only guess how they were silently explaining it to themselves, but one thing became clear. These men had come from the deep woods of Pennsylvania where they had learned from the Indians to clothe and feed themselves from the land in all seasons. From the worn look of their buckskin bullet pouches and engraved powder horns, they knew that their lives depended on their rifles and their ability to use them with deadly accuracy over long distances. Instinctively Eli knew they would fight like Indians—remaining invisible while they struck, then disappearing instantly without a trace or sound to lay another ambush, strike, and disappear.

  In the few moments of silent exchange, an odd feeling of acceptance, understanding, took root between Eli and the men facing him borne of their intuitive sense that they had all been forged and formed by the same laws of nature, and nature’s God. Without a word passing between them, they understood and trusted each other.

  “We haven’t got much time. Where’s Hand?”

  Billy and those with him turned on their heels and set off at a trot back towards the woods, slogging through the mud and snow; Eli followed, leading the brown. They passed through the stand of trees that had hidden them, into a small clearing, where they stopped. There were moccasin tracks in the snow and mud, but nothing more. Then, in the surrounding trees, Eli sensed movement, and suddenly men silently walked into the clearing. They were clad in buckskins, and each carried a rifle, loose and easy, as they came to Billy and those with him.

  There was no question which man was in command. Colonel Edward Hand stood over six feet tall, lean, tanned, broad in the shoulders, dressed exactly like his men. His long brown hair was tied behind his head. The aura of natural leadership and authority surrounded him like a great, invisible cloak, and in his eyes Eli saw the rock-solid determination, the compassion, and the respect that had made Hand a legend among his own men. They would follow him wherever he led.

  Hand’s voice was gentle, soft, and he did not waste words. “I’m Colonel Hand. You’re Stroud?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are the British on the Princeton Road?”

  “Yes.”
/>   “How many?”

  “Altogether, about eight thousand of them. But about fifteen hundred stopped at Maidenhead, and another thousand are back at the south side of Princeton. The main column has five thousand men with twenty-eight cannon.”

  “Know who’s in command?”

  “Cornwallis.”

  For a moment Hand pursed his mouth as he considered.

  Eli spoke. “What happened to de Fermoy?”

  Hand lowered his face for a moment. “I don’t know. A little while after Weems got here and told us about the British coming, General de Fermoy left for Trenton. Didn’t tell us what he had in mind.” He raised smiling eyes to Eli. “Seems he drank about a gallon of rum before he left. Sure hope he can see straight enough to get back to Trenton. Be a shame if he wound up in Brunswick, or maybe New York.”

  Every man within earshot grinned, and Eli found himself grinning with them.

  Hand paused for a moment. “Our orders were to wait here to see how many British are coming, and to slow them down to give Washington more time to dig breastworks and gun emplacements.”

  “How many men you got?”

  Hand gestured as he spoke. “Some Pennsylvania Germans over there with a few Virginians, and my Pennsylvania riflemen, about six hundred. Captain Tom Forrest has two cannon.”