by Ron Carter
Eli and Billy each wrapped his hands around his cider mug and sat quietly, their heads tipped forward.
The four soldiers moved toward the tavern door, pushing their way past tables and men. They came abreast of the table where Billy and Eli were seated, and as they passed, the heavy one glanced down at them, and stopped. His thick face knitted down in question, and he shoved an elbow into the ribs of the soldier next to him, then pointed.
“One burly, one like an Indian.” His voice was loud, his tone insolent.
All four redcoats stopped to stare. Every head in the room turned and every voice fell silent. The eight other British soldiers stood and started for the table.
The heavy soldier commanded, “Get up slow and stand where you are!”
Billy and Eli were a blur as they came off their chairs. They brought the table and all that was on it with them to smash it into the four soldiers before them. Three of the redcoats staggered backward and went down in a tangle of men and chairs and tables, rolling on the floor, then scrambling to get to their feet. The fourth hesitated briefly, then made a lunge for Billy, who swung his pewter mug hard, to smash it into the side of the soldier’s head and the man went down in a heap. One redcoat on the floor came to a crouch and made a grab for Eli’s knees. Eli’s hand came down with his mug, and it bent as it slammed onto the crown of the soldier’s head, and he dropped.
In the bedlam that erupted, civilians scrambled toward the door, while British soldiers reached for their racked muskets and the officers shouted orders to everyone. Eli pivoted to his right and bolted through the archway and into the hallway at a run, Billy close behind. They hit the end of the hall and barged through a door into a small storage room with a barred door at the far side. In one motion Billy jerked the bar up and out and threw the door open, and the two men leaped through the door and sprinted into an alley shrouded in heavy rain, billowing black clouds, and misty steam rising from the cobblestones. They paused for a moment at the mouth of the alley to look back and saw crouched figures spilling out of the lighted doorway into the darkness.
Billy pointed. “The shipyards.” Eli nodded, and they ran on through the rain and now deserted, darkened streets, watching and listening as they worked their way south. Behind they heard the pop of a musket, then another, and they wondered who had fired, and at what.
On they went, one block south, one west, then back south. Homes gave way to warehouses and storage sheds, and then they were at the shipyards among great stacks of lumber and piles of peeled pine trees, waiting to be shaped into masts and spars. They dropped to their haunches in a cluster of barrels of pitch used to seal joints and seams and waited, listening for anything above the sound of the pelting sheets of rain.
Five minutes became ten before Eli whispered, “We ought to cross the river. We need a count of cannon and wagons and a few things over there.”
Billy nodded, and they raised up, listening, watching for the regulars who were certain to be standing picket duty in the drenching rain. They moved south past a place where the keel of a ship had been laid, and the giant ribs loomed above them in the dark, and then a ship with the twenty-inch-thick oak hull half-finished, and knew they were close to the river. They stopped, straining to see and hear in the steady drumming and the blur of the heavy rain.
The sound of a human voice quietly cursing stopped both men in their tracks, and Eli raised a hand to Billy, then pointed. Less than twenty feet away was a picket with his musket slung on his shoulder, venting his grievances into the darkness at the misery of being hungry and rain-soaked. Eli turned to Billy and raised all ten fingers six inches from his face.
Billy nodded, and Eli disappeared to his right.
Billy counted ten breaths, then walked boldly toward the sentinel. At ten feet he called quietly, “Hello, the picket.”
The redcoat jerked the musket from his shoulder and brought it level, bayonet pointed in Billy’s direction and challenged, “Halt. Who comes there? Friend or—”
Billy heard the muffled sound of wood striking a skull through a soggy felt hat, and the soldier went down, his musket clattering on the ground. Billy picked up the weapon while Eli unbuckled the soldier’s belt and draped it over his shoulder with the cartridge case and the tinderbox still connected. Silently they moved down the slight incline to the bank of the river. It took three minutes to locate a rowboat tied to a piling, and one minute later they were seated side by side, throwing their backs into the oars as they dug deep into black water with the rain pounding their heads and shoulders and making a froth of the river. They stopped rowing once to look back, and in the deluge saw four tiny flecks of blurred light moving through the shipyard toward the river.
They felt the current drawing them downriver, and they swung the nose of the boat to the left. With rain dripping from their hair and noses and chins, they pulled the heavy oars with all their strength in the darkness, while the hiss of rain drowned out every other sound. The lanterns behind faded and were gone and for a time they labored in blackness before a speck of light appeared on the New Jersey shore. They felt a slight jolt as the boat struck mud, and both men stepped into knee-deep water to grasp the gunwales and drag the craft ashore. For a moment they peered about for landmarks that would help them find the boat again, then, with the musket and belt in hand, they sloshed through the willows and muck lining the riverbank, through the tangled growth on shore, and angled north, toward the single point of light in the darkness.
They stopped every ten yards to listen, then dropped to their haunches when they could distinguish figures sitting on a log beside a small fire. Two pickets had rigged a tarp in the shape of a lean-to, to shed the rain and protect the burning wood. Billy tapped Eli’s shoulder, then made a circular motion with his right hand, and Eli nodded.
Five minutes later the two came in behind the tarp, one on each side, stepped around the edges into the light, and seconds later both pickets were on the ground, unconscious. Billy and Eli dropped the three-foot chunks of pine limbs, stripped the belts off the two inert redcoats, and dragged the unconscious men forty feet into thick bushes. They took the muskets and stuffed the cartridge boxes inside their shirts and continued north.
A little after ten o’clock the rain slackened. By eleven o’clock stars were showing through gaps in the clouds, and before midnight a half-moon and endless stars were looking down on a soggy world. Fifteen minutes later a soft south breeze drifted up the river. At one o’clock Billy and Eli dropped to their haunches behind a line of wagons. The British picket was one-hundred-fifty feet north of them.
Billy spoke in a whisper.
“We passed the cannon. We need a count on the wagons and cannon and the horses.”
Eli closed his mouth and breathed lightly, testing the southerly breeze. “The horses are still north of us. We need light, and we can’t wait. We got to be back across the river before daylight. When they change pickets they’ll find those two back there and raise the alarm. Watch for gunpowder. Ought to be covered by a tarp, or in wagons. Let’s go.”
It was half-past one when Billy stopped and pointed. Ahead were two mounds, sixty feet apart, both covered by half a dozen tarps. A picket marched back and forth in the faint moonlight at each mound, mud splashing, muskets slung over their shoulders. Eli studied the redcoats for a few moments, then pointed to Billy and to the one on the left, and to himself and the one on the right.
Three minutes later both pickets were flat on their backs in the mud, and Billy and Eli were jerking the tarps away. Beneath each tarp were ten large wooden barrels of dry gunpowder. With swift precision the two men dug the bungs out of the barrels and spilled several pounds of the black granules onto the ground. Then they dragged one barrel fifteen feet away from the heaped powder, leaving a heavy powder trail in the mud.
Each opened a tinderbox taken from the pickets, and when Eli saw Billy strike a spark in the charred linen and blow it until it flamed, he also struck a spark, and each set the flaming tinderboxes i
n the trail of gunpowder, and watched it catch, hissing. Then they sprinted due east, away from the river, into the thick forest. Ten seconds later flame leaped one hundred feet into the air as the first ten barrels ignited. The blast and concussion wave swept outward and struck the two running men, knocking them forward onto their knees. They sprang back to their feet and continued sprinting as a second blast erupted, hurling flaming powder and burning bits of wooden barrels outward over one hundred yards. Nearby wagons were shattered and blown sideways, burning. Tents of sleeping soldiers one hundred yards away were torn from their pegs. Wild-eyed regulars, half-dressed, came running, barefoot in the mud, trying to understand what had happened. Officers threw back the flaps of their tents to stand in shocked silence, staring at the towering fires burning in the central section of their great camp, unable to give coherent orders because they didn’t know what had gone wrong. In less than one minute, the entire British contingent on the New Jersey bank was in pandemonium.
Fifty yards east of the fringes of the camp, Billy and Eli crouched in the woods behind the trunk of a giant pine that had been toppled a century earlier by a catastrophic wind. They raised their heads just high enough to study the black silhouettes running, disorganized, frantic, shouting. The light from the spreading fires cast a dancing, eerie yellow glow for a thousand yards in all directions. Eli pointed toward the north end of the camp, and the two broke into a run, low, dodging. They passed the horse herd, held in five massive, separate rope pens, and came in from the north end in the dark. The horses were skittish—throwing their heads, stuttering their feet, snorting—ready to run, eyes glowing ruby red in the yellow light of the fires to the south.
There were no pickets, and it was impossible to count the five great gathers of the milling horses. Both men made their judgment of the number in one pen, then both raised their muskets and fired them into the air. They shouted at the top of their lungs while they leaped up and down, waving their arms. The nearest horses went berserk, bolting from the two dark hulks firing muskets and leaping like they were insane, slamming into the herd. Panic flashed through the packed horses, and in an instant their heads came up and they turned south and two seconds later were in a dead run.
They hit the rope corral like a tidal wave and it went down, and then they plowed through the ropes of the pen to the south, and within thirty seconds the ropes of all five pens were down and five thousand terrified horses were in a stampede, scattering in all directions, some toward the fires in the center of camp, some away toward the river, some toward the forest to the east. Terrified redcoats dodged and ducked and ran for their lives.
The moment the horses broke free, Billy and Eli sprinted south, following the path of destruction as the animals overran tents and every movable thing in their path. The two men slowed as they came to the rows of cannon, and at a trot they made their count. Forty rows, thirty guns to the row. Twelve hundred.
They sprinted on, with British regulars running less than twenty feet away, paying no attention to them in the bedlam that had seized the entire camp. The two men slowed at the wagons, and again made the count in the dull light of the distant fires as they trotted past. Fifty rows, fifty wagons per row. Twenty-five hundred.
Beyond the wagons were rows of wooden crates with markings on their sides, indicating they held muskets, medicine, food, or clothing. The two trotted through the rows of stores, counting, then ran on south to the fringes of the camp. At the edge of the forest were twelve stacks of barrels covered with tarps.
There were no pickets. They had all left their posts to run into the chaos of the camp. Quickly Billy and Eli jerked the tarps from two of the stacks and thrust their faces close to read the printing on the side. Gunpowder.
Without a word they swung their musket butts to smash in the tops of the barrels, then tipped them over to spill powder on the forest floor. They drew dry paper cartridges from the inside their shirts, ripped off the tops with their teeth, primed the frizzens, rammed the remainder of the cartridge down the barrel with the ramrod, cocked the big hammers, shoved the musket muzzles into the heaped powder, and pulled the triggers.
With the hissing powder burning a bright yellow trail, the two ran thirty yards for their lives and dived to the ground one second before twenty barrels blew in rapid succession. The blast ignited the tarps on the other clustered barrels and ruptured half a dozen of them, and within seconds they also exploded. Billy and Eli turned to look back one time, to see three other stacks of barrels erupt, and then they turned their backs to the carnage and ran for the river, with the acrid smell of burned gunpowder reaching them and a great cloud of white gun smoke rising into the night sky to cover most of the camp.
It took them five minutes to find their beached rowboat. They threw their muskets clattering inside, then seized the gunwales and drove the craft into the black water of the Delaware. North of them, the river was jammed with watercraft of every description, filled with British soldiers coming from the Philadelphia waterfront to the New Jersey shore to help gather five thousand horses and save all the supplies and wagons they could. Eli and Billy glanced at the eastern sky where the first shades of dawn were touching the scattered low clouds. They lay down in the rainwater gathered in the bottom of the boat and let it drift south for three hundred yards before they raised their heads. The nearest British boats were four hundred yards upriver. Quietly they set the heavy oars in the oarlocks, kept low, and stroked with all their strength for the Philadelphia shore, letting the current carry the boat farther south.
They beached the boat in some willows on the Pennsylvania shore, gathered up the heavy British Brown Bess muskets, and started north at a run. The morning star was rapidly fading in a clear sky before they saw the first British regulars, patrolling the city’s edge. They stopped in the thick forest to study the movement of the mud-spattered soldiers.
“They’re guarding the waterfront.”
“We go around.”
They worked their way west through the woods, into farmland criss-crossed with split-rail fences and green fields with grain a foot high and growing, and orchards with apple nubs green and hard. Farmers stopped their work to study them as they angled north through the fields, then came around toward the east. The sun was high in a clear sky, with a low haze of black smoke hanging over both sides of the river and the city, when they came to the crooked road on which they had come into Philadelphia. They stayed hidden in the woods as they approached the road, and they waited, listening for sounds of anything moving.
There was nothing. Eli stood. “We’re about a quarter mile north of where we left our weapons.”
They started south, staying off the road, close to the woods as they passed through the narrow neck, and instantly faded into the forest at the sound of men’s voices at the stacked tree stumps and roots. Silently they crept forward to peer through the foliage at six British regulars with muskets and bayonets, and two mounted officers gathered in the clearing fifteen yards away. Before them, Eli’s long Pennsylvania rifle and Billy’s musket, with their powder horns, shot pouches, and weapons belts, were thrown together in a heap.
They heard the curt orders from one of the officers.
“Two squads of three. One go north, one south, for one hundred yards, then each circle to their right for one hundred yards until you return to the road. Look for tracks or any sign of who left these weapons here. Report back here within five minutes.”
Billy and Eli did not move as they watched three of the regulars turn on their heels and trot up the road, while the other three went south. They watched them out of sight, then turned back to study the officers. One was tall, slender, weak-chinned, the other average height, average appearance. Both of their uniforms were disheveled—wrinkled and soiled from the storm and the mud. Both men dismounted their horses and went to their haunches to study the cache of weapons.
Eli held up all ten fingers once, then again. Billy nodded, and Eli silently moved away to his right, gone from sight withi
n twenty feet in the dense forest. For a moment Billy marveled at how a tall man could move without sound, and disappear as if by magic, in the woods. Billy counted twenty breaths, then stood and leveled his musket at the two officers. Both saw the movement and instantly rose to their feet, hands on the handles of their swords.
“Stand where you are,” Billy called, then turned his head. “You boys hold your fire.”
Both officers drew their swords and dropped into a crouch, heads swiveling, searching for other men, other muskets trained on them. Then, from their left, Eli suddenly stood and called to Billy, “Get their weapons. You boys don’t shoot unless they make a wrong move.”
Billy covered the fifteen yards at a run and seized both swords and flung them aside. “You two sit down where you are.”
The taller officer grunted, “There’s mud.”
“Sit!” Billy ordered, and both men sat down.
Eli came in from the side and seized the reins of the nervous horses. He reached for his tomahawk and knocked the frizzen from both British muskets, then threw the weapons into the undergrowth. In twenty seconds Eli and Billy both had their weapons belts buckled on, their canteens, powder horns and shot pouches slung about their necks, and their guns in their hands.
Billy turned to the infuriated officers. “Strip off your clothes.”
Both men looked up, faces red with outrage. “We’re officers! You have no right—”
Eli fingered his tomahawk. “Take ’em off and be quick. We got no time to argue.”
Spouting invective and curses the officers had stripped down to their red underwear when Billy said, “That’s far enough.”
In one minute Billy had the rumpled uniforms rolled into a ball and bound with one of the white British belts, while Eli sat the officers down back to back and bound their hands together behind them with the other belt. Satisfied, Eli and Billy caught up the horses and mounted, guns in their hands and Billy with the bundle of British uniforms slung over his shoulder. Without a word they reined the horses around and kicked them to a high run on the muddy, crooked road, northbound.