Peter Loon

by Van Reid

  “I haven’t,” said Peter. They were squeezing out the door like water through a hole. The horses were nickering and shifting feet with sympathetic excitement; the men noisily harangued one another.

  Captain McQuigg laughed humorlessly, baring his teeth like a wolf. “We’ll have this little riot down and be to bed before cockcrow.”

  “Here,” said Kavanagh to Peter, when he reached his horse. “Take this,” and he handed Peter a pistol and priming pouch. “Can you load it?”

  “I think so, Mr. Kavanagh, thank you, but–”

  “It’ll be like firing off guns at Christmas,” said the big man with a smile meant to reassure.

  Peter found himself mounted and trotting out of town with the militia, like flotsam pulled along by the current. The moon had risen to a position of authority and its crescent lent a silver contour to every object. Breath steamed from the horses. One of the men was knocking the coals from his pipe and shifting it to his coat pocket; the sparks from the bowl flew like cats’ eyes in the breeze.

  The militia thundered out of town and were half the way to the line of trees, where the forest first asserted itself in small clumps. Beyond and above the silhouette of the woods, the mound of a low hill blocked the stars.

  Peter pulled up and called out to Mr. Kavanagh. He had expressly kept himself beside the man, and Kavanagh’s head turned first, and then his mount. Peter held out the pistol. “Thank you, Mr. Kavanagh,” he began, “but I have to go the other way.”

  “Do you?” Kavanagh’s horse danced impatiently. One or two of the other riders had slowed their mounts a short distance away; the rest rumbled off unheeding. “What is it, Peter?” asked Edward Kavanagh.

  “I must warn the others,” said Peter lamely.

  “There’s no need, I promise you,” said the man. One of the other riders trotted up to them.

  “Well, there’s my aunt,” said Peter.

  “Your uncle’s wife?”

  “I have to tell her what’s happening.”

  “Do you? Well, she keeps late hours if she’s waiting for word now.”

  “I told my mother I would keep out of trouble,” added Peter with an uncomfortable shrug.

  Kavanagh nodded with a smile. The other rider, who had caught the end of the conversation, looked askance at Peter. Clearly they thought he was afraid and simply making excuses.

  “Well,” said Mr. Kavanagh, “it’s better, perhaps, that the Liberty Men don’t see you, after you’d been among them. No need to let them know who warned us.”

  Peter only looked more uncertain. Kavanagh let out a short laugh, said something that was lost in the breeze and spurred his horse after the disappearing troop. The second fellow turned his horse’s head without a word and followed.

  Peter watched them go, watched the contour of the land and trees and the darkness swallow them. I must get up to the company, he thought and with another glance toward the river road, he turned Elspeth’s horse up the slope.

  But the Liberty Men were already flowing down to him like silent wolves. Peter saw the occasional gleam of a musket bore, or perhaps the flash of a face in the moonlight. He unshouldered the roll at his back and shook out his father’s hat and coat. It had grown colder; there was a bite in the air, and he was glad to have his father’s things wrapped about him.

  Then the men in the van of the company, running softly in their outlandish dress, were almost upon him. He could hear their feet as a low rumble in the ground, though unlike the pounding of horses’ hooves. They were already dividing toward their separate objectives, each loose group of men turning aside to block some course or road, or to confront authority at the jail itself.

  Manasseh and Crispin reached him first. “Good lad,” said the older woodsman, and the big man simply nodded his approval.

  Another figure hovered just within the jurisdiction of Peter’s moonlit sight. “There’s that strange fellow,” said Crispin, pointing. “Wants his horse back, I warrant.”

  24

  How Peter Loon Came to the Jail at Wiscasset and What Happened There

  LIGHTS ROSE IN SEVERAL HOUSES IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD OF THE Whittier Tavern. The sudden gallop of twenty-nine horses, it appeared, had wakened townspeople to the possibility of danger; Peter wondered how conscious they would be–or how quickly conscious–of the hundred men and more who tromped through their yards.

  The company was like an army of ghosts, passing in and out of the moonlight, disappearing among the shadows, with nary a sound but the occasional nicker of a horse and the hush of stealthy movement that gathered in the ear like the wind. Peter felt as if he had become a part of the deer herd he had encountered in the forest, and he was astonished how silent these men were, till someone cut through a fenced yard and stumbled over a sleeping pig. This led to some night-piercing squeals and a shout or two, and every man in the company felt his heart rise to his throat.

  Contrarily, once the startled animal had settled itself again, some of the house lights dwindled.

  “Step carefully,” said Manasseh in a whisper. “There will be muskets at every door, and in nervous hands.” And then he led them southwest, catty-cornered among the houses and outbuildings. They ran alongside a brook and below a graveyard, where the slate markers formed regular silhouettes against the western sky. Peter could see dark clusters of men fanning out on either side, drifting toward the wharves or disappearing over the next rise. Through the alleys and over the roofs, he saw glimpses of the shoreline and vessels at anchor in the moonlight.

  They left the brook and had crossed a second narrow water when Manasseh stopped them and pointed out a building that stood against the sky about half a mile away. The splash of a horse through the brook, however, merited the old woodsman’s attention and he told the rider to stay back.

  “My father is up there,” said Elspeth Gray, endeavoring to alter her voice by lowering both pitch and volume. The result sounded false and suspicious.

  Manasseh Cutts moved closer to the horse and peered up at the rider’s face. “Your father?” he said. “You come along, then, but stand down from that animal and stay back when I tell you to.”

  Elspeth had been discovered, it seemed, but Manasseh was not going to send her back in the night alone. The woodsman cast a glance toward Peter, though Peter couldn’t quite see, in the shadows, the old fellow’s expression. “Let’s have done with it,” said the old man.

  There were several houses along the well-kept road to the jail, and as they passed these homes, Peter had the uncanny sense that their progress was observed, and not only by human eyes, but by the sights and bores of several firing pieces. They moved through back fields; men dropped off to watch the crossroads and their numbers dwindled till there were only twenty or so that actually came within a few yards of the jail.

  It looked an imposing structure, standing on a small eminence above the town. It wore weather-darkened shingles along its forty-foot length, and only the jailer’s house had more than slits for windows. Two chimneys smoked above the building. Peter was surprised to see the vicinity dark and apparently unguarded, though he recalled Manasseh Cutts’s forecast of muskets and nervous hands in the town below.

  The jailhouse itself had a single iron-bound door on its eastern end, which faced their approach. This door may have been a small thing to anyone having entered Newgate or the Bastille, but to the silent company approaching in the moonlight with the barren trees about them and the bushes rushing in the cold breeze, it seemed the very Gate of Perdition.

  They were finishing the distance to the jailyard when the glow of a torch, and then the torch itself, and finally the man carrying the torch appeared from over the further slope of the hill. A man on horseback came next, almost leaping to the top of Jail Hill, and he was followed by a small mob of men who carried torches and waved their weapons above their heads.

  The vicinity of the jailhouse had transformed from secretive darkness, where only the breeze spoke above a whisper, to fierce torchlight a
nd bounding shadows. The eastern wall of the jail was orange with reflected light and the air was dense with, if not shouts, then barely muffled growls and invective.

  Manasseh’s company fell into a defensive posture; several veterans of revolution among them found rocks and pockets of ground to either side where they laid down as flanks for the line.

  With reins in hand, Elspeth looked uncertain where to go, and Peter was ready to shoo her horse away and force the young woman to take cover when Manasseh said aloud and gruffly, “Barrow! It’s Nathan Barrow!” and, indeed, it was; if Peter could not recognize any particular man in that mob, he had understood, even before the old man had spoken, who they were by their collective demeanor. Once his eyes had adjusted to the sudden glare of their torches, he could plainly see the grotesque spectacle of their dress–the animal furs, and the antlers, and the feathers–the whites of their eyes looking feral and mad, peering from their charcoaled faces.

  The men atop the hill had not detected the company below and it was easy to see how vulnerable Barrow and his men were, had Manasseh and his fellows been Captain McQuigg’s militia instead. Barrow himself was mounted and he stood in his stirrups and roared at the jail an imprecation meant for the devil.

  “They’ll bring the whole town on us,” said Crispin.

  “Well,” declared Manasseh, “the entire town will have to contend with me to be the first to shoot thattooX off his horse!” and he led his company the final rods to the jailhouse door. “Barrow!” he shouted, now that silence was a useless artifice. “You and your men were to watch the western approaches!”

  “And you were to break our fellows from jail,” said Nathan Barrow. The torchlight caught a wild and heedless expression in his eyes. Those eyes shifted past Manasseh’s company, but settled for a moment on Peter. “ You were to be the first through the door.”

  There was a concerted shout from several stragglers among Barrow’s men as they dragged a large piece of timber up the opposite slope, and advanced with it toward the jail. Between the great pole and the torchlight, it was a primitive sight that might have been enacted at the gates of a thousand battlements. Peter had never imagined anything like it. Elspeth’s horse shied back from a torch that was carried too close to it and Crispin had to take hold of the animal’s makeshift bridle to keep it from bolting. Elspeth’s hat–or, rather, her brother’s hat–was brushed from her head, and in the confusion she stood among them, quite obviously feminine with her dark hair falling out from beneath her kerchief.

  The effect of this was to confound everyone but Peter and Manasseh Cutts. The scar of disease had not entirely marred the handsome cut of her features, and the torchlight caught something that was fierce and striking in her eye. “Are you going to break it down, then?” she demanded of Nathan Barrow.

  “I will burn it down before I’m done,” said Barrow.

  “You’ll break and burn nothing, that can be taken peaceably,” said Manasseh, and there was a perceptible wariness between the two bands of men that suddenly focused into something more dangerous as Barrow jerked the head of his horse around and faced the old woodsman.

  “When I give the word,” said Barrow through his teeth, “you had better stay out from between.”

  “It’s a wonder,” maintained one of the veterans in Manasseh’s company, “if there aren’t guns in those slots, just waiting for the first attempt on that door.” He pointed to the window slits in the eastern wall, which did indeed look like the gunslots used in forts and barricades. The notion appeared to dispel somewhat the enthusiasm of Barrow’s men, and Barrow himself cast an uncertain look at the jailhouse. There was a moment of near silence. Elspeth’s horse shifted its feet. The torches crackled in the breeze.

  “It was a woman,” said Crispin Moss, who was still weighing his earlier impressions of Elspeth Gray.

  Most of the men in the yard considered the jail as if its walls were ready to bristle with musket barrels and pistol bores at the slightest threat. The building itself seemed to grow, looming in the night, as it loomed in their thoughts.

  “We didn’t come here to serenade,” said Manasseh Cutts finally, and with Peter and Crispin beside him, he moved up the last of the slope. The two companies tensed like nervous horses as they closed. Peter considered the great timber that lay before the jail, and to the men who had carried it there he said, somewhat amazed, “That’s a battering ram!” He almost laughed to recall the image of a large goat he had conjured only a few days ago. He stood before the jail with Manasseh and Crispin, and with a nod the older woodsman gave the young man the opportunity to remain true to his word. Before he properly knew what he was doing, Peter had raised his fist and banged upon the door.

  The room beyond the door resounded with three hardy thumps. There was a moment’s near silence, and then there came a voice from inside that sounded remarkably cordial. They could not quite hear what was said, and Peter thumped again. “We’re here to collect our fellows as peaceably as we can,” he shouted.

  “Don’t make any pledges you can’t keep,” said Nathan Barrow from his horse.

  Then, very distinctly, the voice repeated itself, saying “Come in, come in! The door’s unbarred.”

  Nervously, Peter reached for the latch and Manasseh grabbed his arm. “There might be a trap gun, or any sort of trap inside,” said the woodsman, who mistrusted something so easy.

  “Come in,” came the voice again. Peter thought it sounded familiar. Elspeth had wormed her way to the fore and she said something silently to him when he glanced her way. The two companies waited in the light and crackle of the torches.

  Barrow, however, leaned over his horse’s neck and scoffed at Peter. “You did say you’d be the first through the door.”

  “The door is unbarred,” came the voice from within.

  “We’d cherish greatly to see it opened from the inside,” called Manasseh Cutts and this raised a laugh from the other side of the door.

  A long interval followed, then the outside latch jumped and the door swung out. Peter stepped to one side and several men moved back. Like a father gripping the arm of a child who insists on peering over a great height, Manasseh had not let go of Peter; with a tug, he encouraged Peter to step back from the door, which opened to reveal a man standing at the threshold of the jail.

  “I’m not sure you didn’t come at a bad time,” said the fellow pleasantly. “The old knight was about to attack a flock of sheep.”

  Very little could have disarmed the mob outside the jail as surely as this extraordinary pronouncement, and perhaps it was meant to do just that, for the man smiled at the effect.

  “Poppa,” said Elspeth, and there was more reprimand than surprise or relief in her voice.

  “Elspeth?” said the man, and it was his turn to be surprised. “What are you doing here with these Indians?”

  “I’ve come for you, Poppa. Momma is about fallen out of mind.”

  Sam Gray appeared touched to hear it, but he said, “Whose clothes are those you’re wearing,” and to the rest of the company, “What are you fellows about, taking my daughter on such a business?”

  “We didn’t know it was your daughter,” said Manasseh. “She’s dressed like a man.”

  “Did you think a boy was that pretty?”

  “Poppa!”

  “You come in here, now, girl. This is too rough a venture for any of my children.”

  “Are the prisoners guarding themselves these days, Mr. Gray?” asked Manasseh Cutts.

  “The jailers here have proved a pleasant lot, in the end, sir,” said Sam Gray. “But, come in, two or three of you, and we can all go home, it seems, when this is done.”

  There were uncertain looks cast about the company, and Manasseh was tugging at Peter’s arm again–pulling the young man back as he pulled himself forward; Peter resisted and said, almost wryly, “I did say I’d be the first through the door.”

  Manasseh nodded then, and said softly, “I don’t suppose he would invite his d
aughter in if there were any danger.”

  Sam Gray stepped aside, and Peter and Elspeth and Manasseh entered the jailhouse. Barrow, looking uncertain, chose to remain atop his horse.

  Inside, the guard room was cheerily lit by a fire in a large hearth, and an older man sat there in fine clothes and an oldfashioned wig. He had a book opened in his lap, and he was just in the act of laying a ribbon between its pages before closing it. “Come in, come in,” said this elderly fellow, “I am acting the host at jail tonight.”

  Peter was astonished to see Captain Clayden sitting there, and it was his first thought to pull his father’s hat over his eyes and hope that his father’s coat disguised the clothes that must be familiar to the old man. There were two other men sitting nearby, and they looked a shade less certain than Sam Gray and a good deal less certain than Captain Clayden.

  “Do you know Moses and Enoch Donnell, gentlemen?” asked Captain Clayden. “I hear, from your conversation, that you know Samuel Gray. Pardon me, I beg you, if I don’t stand; I suffer the gout some in this old foot, and the ride from Newcastle has set it to shouting.” He pointed to one shoeless foot that was raised on a rude-looking stool. He shut the book in his lap and held it up, saying, “I couldn’t bear to leave this behind, as I just obtained it, so I’ve been reading selections to my companions here.”

  “He was quite a man, that old Long Jaw,” said Sam Gray, who apparently admired the reading. The Donnell brothers continued to look less definite about matters in general.

  Peter took off his hat. “Good evening, Captain Clayden,” he said.

  “Who’s that?” said the old man. “Who’s that?” and then, surprised, he leaned forward a little and said, “Mr. Loon? Is that you, young man?”

  “It is, sir. It’s Peter Loon. I left Beam in New Milford so no harm would come of her.”

  “That’s very good of you, lad, but Mr. Leach tells me that you were supposed to stay there yourself. Were you the fellow banging on the door and bellowing about peaceable means?”