by Ron Carter
Idly he reached for the bundle of papers in his knapsack, unfolded Brigitte’s letter, and read each word slowly while the breeze fluttered it slightly between his hands. He glanced south where the rain clouds were billowing, their tops golden in the light of a sun already set. The rising breeze fanned his small fire, and he laid on more sticks of dried, aged driftwood and picked up one of the written coded messages. He read it without thought and refolded it and dropped it on his blanket with the others.
For a time he watched the storm moving in from the south. Clouds covered the fading sunset, and early dusk changed to full darkness and the breeze stiffened in his face.
A movement from behind brought him around. Eli stood there, rifle in hand, and then settled onto Billy’s blanket. “After the rain starts, I’ll go.” He reached to pick up one of the maps and unfolded it. He held it between his hands in the wind and leaned towards the fire for light to study it one more time. The wind stirred the other papers, and Billy gathered them. He glanced at the back side of the map Eli was reading as he wrapped the tie cord around the bundle, and suddenly Billy froze.
Eli lowered the map. “What’s wrong?”
Billy snatched the map from his hands and held it with the diagram towards the fire, staring at the back side. “Look! The ink drop on the back side! Look where it is when you hold it to the light!”
Eli seized the map and held the face of it towards the firelight, peering at the ink dot on the back. It was at the rear of the building, near one corner. Eli’s head jerked, and he breathed, “That home! I’ve been there! The diagram was backwards until I saw it from the wrong side.” He lowered the map and his eyes locked with Billy’s. “That’s General Washington’s headquarters!”
Far to the south, lightning streaked the clouds yellow, and seconds later the deep rumble of thunder rolled past. The wind began to moan in the trees and brush, and tug at their hair, and fan sparks from the fire. Eli thrust the map back to Billy. “Put that away and don’t let anyone near it. Watch my rifle. I’ll be back.”
Billy grabbed his arm in a grip like iron. “Eli, you’re walking into trouble. I’m coming.”
The firelight played on Billy’s face, and Eli sobered at the mortal concern he read in Billy’s eyes. For a split second Eli’s face softened, and he reached to place a gentle hand on Billy’s arm. “You’ve got to stay here to tell the story if I don’t get back.” A smile formed for a moment and the scar on his jaw was prominent. “I’ll be all right. It’s hard to catch an Indian in a storm at night.”
The first huge drops of rain came slanting on the wind as Eli stood, and he moved north, peering into the darkness. He paused at camp’s edge to locate two pickets, moved out between them, and turned northeast at a trot, with the wind driving rain against his back and lightning flashing as the storm rolled in.
He came in on the two-story building from the east side and dropped to his haunches behind bushes to wait for lightning to show him where the pickets were. Two minutes later the city of New York was bright as midday as lightning streaked ten miles through the clouds, and in that instant the six pickets in front of the house and the two at the side were there, blurred in the cloudburst. Eli calculated the time between the lightning flash and the thunder, counted two breaths, and sprinted in the howling wind, crouched low, directly towards the space between the two pickets at the side of the house. Thirty feet before he passed between them the thunderclap shook the house and the ground, and Eli slammed against the wall and dropped to lie flat in the mud, watching, listening to see if either picket had seen or heard him and was going to raise the alarm. There was only the singing of the wind and the roar of rain and the thrashing of the trees.
He crawled on his stomach to the rear of the house and lay in the mud, peering desperately into the darkness, probing. Where’re the ones in the back? Where?
He felt heavy planks stacked against the house, moved away two feet, drew his knees up, set, ready, and waited for the next lightning bolt. It came, and the three pickets were there, standing in the mud across the big yard twenty feet in front of a row of great maple trees. Their heads were ducked into the south wind as they clutched their hats onto their heads and sheets of rain pounded them. Again he counted two breaths, and as the thunderclap struck he sprinted between two of them and dived sliding in the mud behind the massive trunk of a maple and lay still, again waiting and listening for a challenge or an alarm, and there was none.
He stood and seized the lowest branch and swung into the pitching, flailing tree and climbed ten feet, facing the back of the house. He could see nothing in the blackness nor hear anything above the howling storm, and he waited. Again and again lightning flashes showed the pickets rooted in place, heads still bowed against the wind, drenched by the torrential rain. Minutes became half an hour, and no one came, no one left.
Was I wrong? Nothing here? Wait. Wait.
The storm center roared overhead, ripping branches and leaves from the tree while Eli clung to the swaying trunk. Lightning flashed white so close he could smell the acrid taint, while thunder cracked above the treetops. Slowly it passed northward and the wind slackened. The lightning flashes dimmed and the thunder rolled in the distance. The wild motion of the trees settled, and the rain fell straight down, drumming. In the house, two lights, both on the second floor, showed blurred through drawn curtains and the rain. Nothing moved. No one had come or gone.
I was wrong. Wrong.
Eli dropped one foot to a lower branch to drop from the tree, when a long sliver of dim light suddenly showed at ground level near the left corner of the house, and he froze.
The dot on the map! That’s the corner!
He watched the thin shaft of light widen, and he understood that someone had opened a cellar door and lighted a lantern that was burning in the cellar. He watched a man cautiously emerge upward on the cellar stairs, pause to look, then quickly motion with his arm. The three pickets in the backyard walked splashing through the mud to the cellar door, stopped for a few moments, and then turned to their left, towards the corner of the house, and Eli lost them in the rain blur and the blackness as they left the light. Seconds later they reappeared, laying planks in the mud from the corner of the house to the edge of the cellar door. They disappeared once more into the darkness, and he heard sounds of men straining. Then he saw two of the pickets rolling a large barrel. It was tipped on its side, and they worked it carefully on the planks from the darkness to the light at the cellar door. They heaved it up onto its bottom; then one stepped into the cellar stairwell, and they lowered it downward, one step at a time.
Eli’s mind raced, remembering the bundle of papers he had left with Billy. Barrels of salt cod? at night? in General Washington’s cellar?
The two figures blocked the light as they walked back out of the cellar, and then they stood to one side while the other picket and a new man rolled a second barrel on the planks to the dim light of the cellar door. They moved it down the stairs, and suddenly Eli tensed.
That last man—a beard? black seaman’s cap? He narrowed his eyes, peering in the darkness and the rain to be certain.
The two men emerged upward on the cellar stairs, silhouetted by the dim yellow lantern light below, and Eli’s breath came short. The black seaman’s cap, and that beard. Is he the one who burned that woman’s home in Charlestown! Delivering salt cod here at midnight in a storm? No. Not fish. Then what?
The thought struck into his brain and he stopped for a moment. Gunpowder! It has to be gunpowder!
The pickets disappeared for ten seconds with the planks, then moved quickly back to their posts. The fourth man disappeared in the blackness at the edge of the house, while the man who had opened the cellar door lowered it into place, and blackness closed in. The dim light of the two windows on the second floor showed through the rain blur, but there was no other light, no other movement.
Silent as a cat, Eli dropped to the ground and worked his way east behind the trees to the side street,
crossed it, angled south until he was past the pickets in front of the house, then broke into a run, headed back in the steadily falling rain towards the regimental camp at the end of Reade Street.
The instinct and the whisper of sound from behind came in the same instant, and he dived to his right, rolling splashing in the mud of the street and then back onto his feet as the thought flashed, The Indian, I forgot the Indian. He took the hurtling body head-on, frantically reaching down for the knife that had to be coming up looking for his bowels, and he felt the quick shock on his left forearm as he locked onto the wrist of the knife hand. He went down backwards, pulling the knife hand as he went, reaching across with his right hand to wrench the knife around, twisting, and as he hit splashing on his back in the mud he drove the twisted hand upward and the blade sank to the guard under the ribs of the body as it fell on him. He heard the gasp and the whine, and he felt the knife hand jerk and the man’s body convulse. The struck man tried to rise, and then he relaxed on top of Eli.
For a moment Eli lay in the mud and the rain, and then he heaved the body to one side and rose to one knee, flexing the fingers and wrist of his left hand to be certain the slash had not severed tendons. He rolled the body onto its back and felt the throat and there was no heartbeat. In the dark he drew the knife from the chest and shoved it back into its sheath, then unbuckled the weapons belt from the body and looped it around his own neck. He systematically patted the shirtfront until he located a large lump underneath, then pulled the leather hunting shirt up and reached to draw out a flat package wrapped in oilcloth. He shoved the package inside his own shirt, then dragged the body through the mud to a ditch and rolled it in and covered it with tree branches broken and scattered by the storm.
The heart of the rainstorm had rolled north, leaving a heavy drizzle falling. Eli gauged the time to be around midnight and turned southwest once more at a run, back towards the regimental camp. Not one campfire had survived the rain, and one hundred yards before he reached the outer picket line of the dark camp he began calling, “Friendly coming in. Don’t shoot. Friendly coming in.” The pickets challenged, and he paused long enough to be identified, then continued on, picking his way in the dark, stepping around men sleeping in drenched blankets until he found Billy.
Billy sat up and Eli didn’t hesitate. “Remember the man with the full beard and the seaman’s black cap? the bad one in the letter?”
“Yes.”
“I think he was there tonight. The dot on the map marked the basement door to Washington’s headquarters. They put two barrels down there about an hour ago.”
Billy’s mind began to race. “Barrels of what?”
“It has to be gunpowder. I started back here and the Indian tried to kill me, and I don’t think he’d do that over two barrels of salt cod.” Eli drew the oilskin package from within his shirt. “He had this.”
“Where is he?”
“Dead.”
Billy swallowed. “You killed him?”
Eli ignored the question. “We got to see what it is.”
Billy struck flint to steel, blew on the tinder, and lighted a lantern, and together they unwrapped the oilskin. Inside was a packet. They ripped it open and unfolded the document. With Eli holding the oilskin against the rain, Billy read it. “It’s like the other ones we have. Same handwriting, I think.”
“Know what it says?”
“Talks about more barrels of salt cod coming into different ports.”
“If I’m right about the gunpowder, it sounds like they’re planning some bad surprises in a lot of places. Is this a big plan to try to stop the war by killing the American generals?”
Silence held for a moment as both men let their thoughts run, while raindrops hissed on the hot lantern chimney and the light cast strange shadows. Slowly their thoughts settled, and then a sure conviction crept into them, and they felt the tingle on their arms and the backs of their necks. Billy refolded the letter, worked it back inside its oilskin wrapper, and spoke. “We’ve got to take this to Thompson. Now.”
Eli shook his head. “No time. When that Indian doesn’t show up back at headquarters, whatever they put in that cellar could be gone before we get there.”
“If we go back alone, those pickets could shoot us and tell everyone we were spies.”
Eli stared at the lamp intently for a moment. “Let’s go see Thompson. Bring your bundle of packets with the one in oilskin.”
The pickets at the command tent stopped them at bayonet point and one spoke. “Identify yourselves.”
Billy answered. “Privates Weems and Stroud. Life-and-death business for the colonel.”
“Life and death?” the picket snorted. “Whose life? Yours?”
“General Washington’s, and maybe others,” Eli said flatly. “You better roust Colonel Thompson now, or I will.” The purr in Eli’s voice silenced the picket. While two pickets held their bayonets at the ready, the third one backed to the tied flap of the tent, loosened the strings, and ducked inside. Thirty seconds later a lantern glowed. Billy and Eli listened to muffled voices and watched the shadows play on the tent walls, and the tent flap opened. Israel Thompson stepped outside in his trousers, barefooted, hair awry, face dour, lantern held high. “What’s this about life and death?”
“Sorry, sir,” Billy said. “We have a story to tell and little time to tell it.”
Thompson’s face thrust forward, and he stared wide-eyed in the yellow lantern glow. “Aren’t you the two who took on that North Carolina regiment back where they’re building Fort Lee? and brought those documents?”
“Yes, sir, but this has nothing to do with that.”
Thompson backed into the tent, holding the flap while Billy and Eli ducked inside. Thompson gestured to chairs beside his table, set the lantern down, and sat opposite them. “Go ahead.”
Billy turned to Eli, and for three minutes Eli spoke. Billy laid the bundle of packets on the table, followed by the one document in the oilskin. Thompson unfolded the oilskin and read the letter and compared it briefly with those from Billy’s bundle. Then he raised his eyes to Eli. “What’s that around your neck?”
“The weapons belt of the Indian who ambushed me.” He dropped it on the tabletop, and Thompson stared for a second, then noticed Eli’s left hand. Blood was dripping from his fingertips onto the dirt floor of the tent.
“How bad?”
“No tendons. It’s all right.”
“Orderly!”
The tent flap jerked open instantly. “Yes, sir.”
“Get the regimental surgeon. Now.” Thompson stood and reached for his socks and boots.
“Should we wait outside, sir?” Billy asked.
“You’ve seen a man dress before. Stay where you are.” He shrugged into his tunic and buttoned it to the throat. “We’ve got to get General Scott into this. I have no command authority in New York.”
The flap opened and the surgeon burst in, thinning hair awry, unshaved, thin, bony, a black bag in hand, pants held up by one suspender, and no shirt. “Who’s injured?”
Eli held out his arm, and the surgeon examined the cut, five inches long, a quarter inch deep. “That’ll take stitching.”
Eli shook his head. “Not now, there’s no time. Bind it. Stitch later.”
The surgeon looked at Thompson, who nodded, and one minute later the surgeon pulled Eli’s shirtsleeve over the white bandage. “That’ll hold for a while. I don’t know what’s going on, but you be back here for stitching as soon as you can, understand?”
Eli nodded and turned to Thompson.
“Let’s go.”
The storm was only faint lightning glow and distant rumbles far north. The rain had stopped, leaving the world a sea of mud and puddles and water dripping from bushes and trees. Overhead, stars began to show through the first breaks in the fast-moving clouds, and the wind had dwindled to a chill, mild breeze. Thompson strode through camp, leading Billy and Eli past the picket lines, due east on Reade Street, then south t
owards the common. He approached the headquarters building of General Scott and stopped when the pickets challenged. Five minutes later General Scott was working on buttons to his tunic when he gestured Thompson and Billy and Eli to chairs at his office desk, and sat down, waiting.
“General Scott,” Thompson said, “Private Stroud has a story you need to hear.”
Ten minutes later Scott abruptly stood and called, “Lieutenant,” and a young lieutenant was in the door frame immediately. Fifteen minutes later Scott and Thompson strode rapidly north up Broadway, each carrying a lantern, splashing through the water puddled on the worn cobblestones. Billy and Eli were behind, followed by a squad of ten armed, uniformed New York militia, muskets primed, loaded. The weapons belt Eli had taken hours earlier swung from his right hand.
They turned left, and three minutes later Scott pointed in the starlight. “There it is. The Mortier house. General Washington’s headquarters.” It was just past two a.m. The heavens had cleared. Countless stars shined, and the quarter moon was high over the New Jersey Palisades.
The pickets challenged the tiny column as it approached, and General Scott came to a stop, lantern held high. “I’m General John Scott, New York militia. I must speak with General Washington now.”
The pickets saw the gold on his shoulder gleaming in the yellow lantern light. “Sorry, sir, General Washington is across the river where they’re building Fort Lee until tomorrow night.”
“Who’s in command here?”
“Brigadier Jonah Ulrich.”
“Rouse him.”
“Yes, sir.”
The picket vaulted up the steps, boots clomping, and entered the house. Lights came on in the lower floor, then the upper floor. Minutes passed, and then the front door opened and the picket led Brigadier Ulrich out onto the high four-columned porch.
“General Scott?”