Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

“It is wiser.”

  “There is no wisdom in me, pretty boy in buckskin. And I love thrums better than red-coats and lace.”

  “Love spinning better than either!”

  “Oh, la! He preaches of wheels and spindles when my mouth aches for a kiss!”

  “And mine,” said I, “ — but my legs ache more for my saddle; and I must go.”

  At that moment when I said adieu with my lips, and she did not mean to unlink her arms, came Nick on noiseless tread to twitch my arm. And, “Look,” said he, pointing toward the long, low rampart of Maxon Ridge.

  I turned, my hand still retaining Jessica’s: and saw the Iroquois signal-flame mount thin and high, tremble, burn red against the stars, then die there in the darkness.

  Northward another flame reddened on the hills, then another, fire answering fire.

  “What the devil is this?” growled Nick. “These are no times for Indians to talk to one another with fire.”

  “Get into your saddle,” said I, “and we shall ride by Varick’s, for I’ve a mind to see what will-o’-the-wisps may be a-dancing over the great Vlaie!”

  So the tall lad took his leave of his little pigeon of Pigeon-Wood, who seemed far from willing to let him loose; and I made my adieux to Jessica, who stood a-pouting; and we mounted and set off at a gallop for Varick’s, by way of Summer House Point.

  I could not be certain, but it seemed to me that there was a light at the Point, which came through the crescents from behind closed shutters; but that was within reason, Sir John being at liberty to keep open the hunting lodge if he chose.

  As for the Drowned Lands, as far as we could see through the night there was not a spark over that desolate wilderness.

  The Mohawk fires on the hills, too, had died out. Fish House, if still burning candles, was too far away to see; we galloped through Varick’s, past the mill where, from its rocky walls, Frenchman’s Creek roared under the stars; then turned west along the Brent-Meester’s trail toward Fonda’s Bush and home.

  “Those Iroquois fires trouble me mightily,” quoth Nick, pushing his lank horse forward beside my mare.

  “And me,” said I.

  “Why should they talk with fire on the night Hiakatoo comes to the Hall?”

  “I do not know,” said I. “But when I am home I shall write it in a letter to Albany that this night the Mohawks have talked among themselves with fire, and that a Seneca was present.”

  “And that mealy-mouthed Ensign, Moucher; and Hare and Steve Watts!”

  “I shall so write it,” said I, very seriously.

  “Good!” cried he with a jolly slap on his horse’s neck. “But the sweeter part of this night’s frolic you and I shall carry locked in our breasts. Eh, John? By heaven, is she not fresh and pink as a dewy strawberry in June — my pretty little wench? Is she not apt as a school-learned lass with any new lesson a man chooses to teach?”

  “Yes, too apt, perhaps,” said I, shaking my head but laughing. “But I think they have had already a lesson or two in such frolics, less innocent, perhaps, than the lesson we gave.”

  “I’ll break the back of any red-coat who stops at Pigeon-Wood!” cried Nick Stoner with an oath. “Yes, red-coat or any other colour, either!”

  “You would not take our frolic seriously, would you, Nick?”

  “I take all frolics seriously,” said he with a gay laugh, smiting both thighs, and his bridle loose. “Where I place my mark with my proper lips, let roving gallants read and all roysterers beware! — even though I so mark a dozen pretty does!”

  “A very Turk,” said I.

  “An antlered stag in the blue-coat that brooks no other near his herd!” cried he with a burst of laughter. And fell to smiting his thighs and tossing up both arms, riding like a very centaur there, with his hair flowing and his thrums streaming in the starlight.

  And, “Lord God of Battles!” he cried out to the stars, stretching up his powerful young arms. “Thou knowest how I could love tonight; but dost Thou know, also, how I could fight if I had only a foe to destroy with these two empty hands!”

  “Thou murderous Turk!” I cried in his ear. “Pray, rather, that there shall be no war, and no foe more deadly than the pretty wench of Pigeon-Wood!”

  “Love or war, I care not!” he shouted in his spring-tide frenzy, galloping there unbridled, his lean young face in the wind. “But God send the one or the other to me very quickly — or love or war — for I need more than a plow or axe to content my soul afire!”

  “Idiot!” said I, “have done a-yelling! You wake every owl in the bush!”

  And above his youth-maddened laughter I heard the weird yelping of the forest owls as though the Six Nations already were in their paint, and blood fouled every trail.

  So we galloped into Fonda’s Bush, pulling up before my door; but Nick would not stay the night and must needs gallop on to his own log house, where he could blanket and stall his tired and sweating horse — I owning only the one warm stall.

  “Well,” says he, still slapping his thighs where he sat his saddle as I dismounted, and his young face still aglow in the dim, silvery light, “ — well, John, I shall ride again, one day, to Pigeon-Wood. Will you ride with me?”

  “I think not.”

  “And why?”

  But, standing by my door, bridle in hand, I slowly shook my head.

  “There is no prettier bit o’ baggage in County Tryon than Jessica Browse,” he insisted— “unless, perhaps, it be that Scotch girl at Caughnawaga, whom all the red-coats buzz about like sap flies around a pan.”

  “And who may this Scotch lassie be?” I asked with a smile, and busy, now, unsaddling.

  “I mean the new servant to old Douw Fonda.”

  “I have not noticed her.”

  “You have not seen the Caughnawaga girl?”

  “No. I remain incurious concerning servants,” said I, drily.

  “Is it so!” he laughed. “Well, then, — for all that they have a right to gold binding on their hats, — the gay youth of Johnstown, yes, and of Schenectady, too, have not remained indifferent to the Scotch girl of Douw Fonda, Penelope Grant!”

  I shrugged and lifted my saddle.

  “Every man to his taste,” said I. “Some eat woodchucks, some porcupines, and others the tail of a beaver. Venison smacks sweeter to me.”

  Nick laughed again. “When she reads the old man to sleep and takes her knitting to the porch, you should see the ring of gallants every afternoon a-courting her! — and their horses tied to every tree around the house as at a quilting!

  “But there’s no quilting frolic; no supper; no dance; — nothing more than a yellow-haired slip of a wench busy knitting there in the sun, and looking at none o’ them but intent on her needles and with that faint smile she wears — —”

  “Go court her,” said I, laughing; and led my mare into her warm stall.

  “You’ll court her yourself, one day!” he shouted after me, as he gathered bridle. “And if you do, God help you, John Drogue, for they say she’s a born disturber of quiet men’s minds, and mistress of a very mischievous and deadly art!”

  “What art?” I laughed.

  “The art o’ love!” he bawled as he rode off, slapping his thighs and setting the moonlit woods all a-ringing with his laughter.

  CHAPTER VII

  BEFORE THE STORM

  Johnny Silver had ridden my mare to Varick’s to be shod, the evening previous, and was to remain the night and return by noon to Fonda’s Bush.

  It was the first sunny May day of the year, murmurous with bees, and a sweet, warm smell from woods and cleared lands.

  Already bluebirds were drifting from stump to stump, and robins, which had arrived in April before the snow melted, chirped in the furrows of last autumn’s plowing.

  Also were flying those frail little grass-green moths, earliest harbingers of vernal weather, so that observing folk, versed in the pretty signals which nature displays to acquaint us of her designs, might safely prophes
y soft skies.

  I was standing in my glebe just after sunrise, gazing across my great cleared field — I had but one then, all else being woods — and I was thinking about my crops, how that here should be sown buckwheat to break and mellow last year’s sod; and here I should plant corn and Indian squashes, and yonder, God willing, potatoes and beans.

  And I remember, now, that I presently fell to whistling the air of “The Little Red Foot,” while I considered my future harvest; and was even planning to hire of Andrew Bowman his fine span of white oxen for my spring plowing; when, of a sudden, through the May woods there grew upon the air a trembling sound, distant and sad. Now it sounded louder as the breeze stirred; now fainter when it shifted, so that a mournful echo only throbbed in my ears.

  It was the sound of the iron bell ringing on the new Block House at Mayfield.

  The carelessly whistled tune died upon my lips; my heart almost ceased for a moment, then violently beat the alarm.

  I ran to a hemlock stump in the field, where my loaded rifle rested, and took it up and looked at the priming powder, finding it dry and bright.

  A strange stillness had fallen upon the forest; there was no sound save that creeping and melancholy quaver of the bell. The birds had become quiet; the breeze, too, died away; and it was as though each huge tree stood listening, and that no leaf dared stir.

  As a dark cloud gliding between earth and sun quenches the sky’s calm brightness, so the bell’s tolling seemed to transform the scene about me to a sunless waste, through which the dread sound surged in waves, like the complaint of trees before a storm.

  Standing where my potatoes had been hoed the year before, I listened a moment longer to the dreary mourning of the bell, my eyes roving along the edges of the forest which, like a high, green rampart, enclosed my cleared land on every side.

  Then I turned and went swiftly to my house, snatched blanket from bed, spread it on the puncheon floor, laid upon it a sack of new bullets, a new canister of powder, a heap of buckskin scraps for wadding, a bag of salt, another of parched corn, a dozen strips of smoked venison.

  Separately on the blanket beside these I placed two pair of woollen hose, two pair of new ankle moccasins, an extra pair of deer-skin leggins, two cotton shirts, a hunting shirt of doe-skin, and a fishing line and hooks. These things I rolled within my blanket, making of everything a strapped pack.

  Then I pulled on my District Militia regimentals, which same was a hunting shirt of tow-cloth, spatter-dashes of the same, and a felt hat, cocked.

  Across the breast of my tow-cloth hunting-shirt I slung a bullet-pouch, a powder-horn and a leather haversack; seized my light hatchet and hung it to my belt, hoisted the blanket pack to my shoulders and strapped it there; and, picking up rifle and hunting knife, I passed swiftly out of the house, fastening the heavy oaken door behind me and wondering whether I should ever return to open it again.

  The trodden forest trail, wide enough for a team to pass, lay straight before me due west, through heavy woods, to Andrew Bowman’s farm.

  When I came into the cleared land, I perceived Mrs. Bowman washing clothing in a spring near the door of her log house, and the wash a-bleaching in the early sun. When she saw me she called to me across the clearing:

  “Have you news for me, John Drogue?”

  “None,” said I. “Where is your man, Martha?”

  “Gone away to Stoner’s with pack and rifle. He is but just departed. Is it only a drill call, or are the Indians out at the Lower Castle?”

  “I know nothing,” said I. “Are you alone in the house?”

  “A young kinswoman, Penelope Grant, servant to old Douw Fonda, arrived late last night with my man from Caughnawaga, and is still asleep in the loft.”

  As she spoke a girl, clothed only in her shift, came to the open door of the log house. Her naked feet were snow-white; her hair, yellow as October-corn, seemed very thick and tangled.

  She stood blinking as though dazzled, the glory of the rising sun in her face; then the tolling of the tocsin swam to her sleepy ears, and she started like a wild thing when a shot is fired very far away.

  And, “What is that sound?” she exclaimed, staring about her; and I had never seen a woman’s eyes so brown under such yellow hair.

  She stepped out into the fresh grass and stood in the dew listening, now gazing at the woods, now at Martha Bowman, and now upon me.

  Speech came to me with an odd sort of anger. I said to Mrs. Bowman, who stood gaping in the sunshine:

  “Where are your wits? Take that child into the house and bar your shutters and draw water for your tubs. And keep your door bolted until some of the militia can return from Stoner’s.”

  “Oh, my God,” said she, and fell to snatching her wash from the bushes and grass.

  At that, the girl Penelope turned and looked at me. And I thought she was badly frightened until she spoke.

  “Young soldier,” said she, “do you know if Sir John has fled?”

  “I know nothing,” said I, “and am like to learn less if you women do not instantly go in and bar your house.”

  “Are the Mohawks out?” she asked.

  “Have I not said I do not know?”

  “Yes, sir.... But I should have escort by the shortest route to Cayadutta — —”

  “You talk like a child,” said I, sharply. “And you seem scarcely more,” I added, turning away. But I lingered still to see them safely bolted in before I departed.

  “Soldier,” she began timidly; but I interrupted:

  “Go fill your tubs against fire-arrows,” said I. “Why do you loiter?”

  “Because I have great need to return to Caughnawaga. Will you guide me the shortest way by the woods?”

  “Do you not hear that bell?” I demanded angrily.

  “Yes, sir, I hear it. But I should go to Cayadutta — —”

  “And I should answer that militia call,” said I impatiently. “Go in and lock the house, I tell you!”

  Mrs. Bowman, her arms full of wet linen, ran into the house. The girl, Penelope, gazed at the woods.

  “I am servant to a very old man,” she said, twisting her linked fingers. “I can not abandon him! I can not let him remain all alone at Cayadutta Lodge. Will you take me to him?”

  “And if I were free of duty,” said I, “I would not take you or any other woman into those accursed woods!”

  “Why not, sir?”

  “Because I do not yet comprehend what that bell is telling me. And if it means that there is a painted war-party out between the Sacandaga and the Mohawk, I shall not take you to Caughnawaga when I return from Stoner’s, and that’s flat!”

  “I am not afraid to go,” said she. But I think I saw her shudder; and her face seemed very still and white. Then Mrs. Bowman ran out of the house and caught the girl by her homespun shift.

  “Come indoors!” she cried shrilly, “or will you have us all pulling war arrows out of our bodies while you stand blinking at the woods and gossiping with Jack Drogue?”

  The girl shook herself free, and asked me again to take her to Cayadutta Lodge.

  But I had no more time to argue, and I flung my rifle to my shoulder and started out across the cleared land.

  Once I looked back. And I saw her still standing there, the rising sun bright on her tangled hair, and her naked feet shining like silver in the dew-wet grass.

  By a spring path I hastened to the house of John Putman, and found him already gone and his family drawing water and fastening shutters.

  His wife, Deborah, called to me saying that the Salisburys should be warned, and I told her that I had already spoken to the Bowmans.

  “Your labour for your pains, John Drogue!” cried she. “The Bowmans are King’s people and need fear neither Tory nor Indian!”

  “It is unjust to say so, Deborah,” I retorted warmly. “Dries Bowman is already on his way to answer the militia call!”

  “Watch him!” she said, slamming the shutters; and fell to scolding her
children, who, poor things, were striving at the well with dripping bucket too heavy for their strength.

  So I drew the water they might need if, indeed, it should prove true that Little Abe’s Mohawks at the Lower Castle had painted themselves and were broken loose; and then I ran back along the spring path to the Salisbury’s, and found them already well bolted in, and their man gone to Stoner’s with rifle and pack.

  And now comes Johnny Silver, who had ridden my mare from Varick’s, but had no news, all being tranquil along Frenchman’s Creek, and nobody able to say what the Block House bell was telling us.

  “Did you stable Kaya?” I asked.

  “Oui, mon garce! I have bolt her in tight!”

  “Good heavens,” said I, “she can not remain bolted in to starve if I am sent on to Canada! Get you forward to Stoner’s house and say that I delay only to fetch my horse!”

  The stout little French trapper flung his piece to his shoulder and broke into a dog-trot toward the west.

  “Follow quickly, Sieur Jean!” he called gaily. “By gar, I have smell Iroquois war paint since ver’ long time already, and now I smell him strong as old dog fox!”

  I turned and started back through the woods as swiftly as I could stride.

  As I came in sight of my log house, I was astounded to see my mare out and saddled, and a woman setting foot to stirrup. As I sprang out of the edge of the woods and ran toward her, she wheeled Kaya, and I saw that it was the Caughnawaga wench in my saddle and upon my horse — her yellow hair twisted up and shining like a Turk’s gold turban above her bloodless face.

  “What do you mean!” I cried in a fury. “Dismount instantly from that mare! Do you hear me?”

  “I must ride to Caughnawaga!” she called out, and struck my mare with both heels so that the horse bounded away beyond my reach.

  Exasperated, I knew not what to do, for I could not hope to overtake the mad wench afoot; and so could only shout after her.

  However, she drew bridle and looked back; but I dared not advance from where I stood, lest she gallop out of hearing at the first step.

  “This is madness!” I called to her across the field. “You do not know why that bell is ringing at Mayfield. A week since the Mohawks were talking to one another with fires on all these hills! There may be a war party in yonder woods! There may be more than one betwixt here and Caughnawaga!”