3stalwarts (7 page)

Weaver took his tobacco from his mouth and cradled it behind him in his hand while with the other he held a paper before his eyes and rattled off the names.

“Adam Hartman.”

“Here.”

“Jeams MacNod.”

“Here.”

On down the list. Now and then a man answered, “He can’t come. He’s gone to the Flats getting flour.” … “Perry’s home. Doc Petry told him his wife might most likely freshen this morning.” … “He cut his foot grubbing brush in the stump lot.”

Obedient to the prescribed ritual, Weaver turned round to face the absent captain.

“All present or accounted for.”

It brought the plug in his hand into view. He recovered too late. Restor-ing it to his mouth, he roared thickly, “Shoulder arms.”

The line raggedly shouldered their guns, some to the right, some to the left. They faced Weaver with the gravity of cornstooks. No two of them were dressed alike. Some had coats, of homespun or black cloth; some, like Gil, wore hunting shirts.

Weaver stared at them as if he were hypnotized. Without the captain he couldn’t think what should be done next.

Someone said, “Can’t we have the inspection and get it over with? It’s damned hot standing here.”

“Sure,” said Weaver.

He went down the line. Now and then he took a rifle and looked it over closely. Once he made a man lift his shoes.

“You got to get new soles on them. I ought to fine you, Marcy.”

“I got paper in their inside,” said Marcy.

“Law says shoes equipped for a month’s march.”

“I couldn’t walk that far if I had the shoes.”

“It’s law.” He came to Reall. He looked at him for a long minute.

“Give me your gun.”

Reall handed it over.

“It’s clean, sergeant,” he said. “I cleaned it yesterday myself.”

“Give me your ramrod.”

“It’s in the gun,” said Reall, with a wink.

“No it ain’t.”

“God, one of the kids had it, I guess.”

“Give me yours, Martin.”

He took Gil’s ramrod and dropped it down the barrel. It sank less than halfway. Weaver took it out, then tipped the gun nose down and whacked the stock with the palm of his hand. An assortment of bean seeds dropped out. Somebody started laughing. Reall stared.

“Them boys been playing bean game,” he said. “I couldn’t find the seeds. They said they threw them out. Ain’t that a place to hide them!”

Weaver handed back the gun.

“Private Reall, dirty gun, one shilling.”

The inspection was finished.

“Fall out.”

The men drifted apart.

“Say,” said someone. “How about eating early? Then we can go home. I got my two-acre patch to finish tonight.”

“That’s a good idea.”

“Maybe it ain’t legal,” said George.

“We ought to do something.”

“Let’s eat first.”

They had a meal cooked for them by Mrs. Kast. She and her two daughters scurried and finished the cooking of it and brought it out with six jugs of beer. The men lay around on the stubble of the hayfield and drank and ate and got up a company pool on the time of arrival of the expected Perry baby. Sixpence a ticket. Reall took two. That made twelve shilling. Two for the baby and ten for the winner.

After the beer was finished some of the more serious-minded thought they ought to try keeping step once around the field. Everybody thought that was a good idea. They wrestled up and got their guns. They formed threes and did their best. They were all blown when they got back to the barn. It was the best muster they had had in a long while. They felt like celebrating.

Jeams MacNod said seriously, “I bet we could lick the whole British army, marching that good.”

Weaver admitted they had done well. He had seen them coming round the corner. They were all in step but Reall, but he was the odd man at the rear and didn’t count.

Reall came up now, briskly, his eyes a little bloodshot, saying, “How about them Seneca Indians up to Wolff’s? Why don’t we march up there and see what they’re a-doing?”

Weaver thought they might as well. They could dismiss at Wolff’s and he and Reall and Gil wouldn’t have to walk home so far. He gave the order.

As they marched past Mrs. Kast they took off their hats to her.

The company went up the Kingsroad in two ragged files, each taking a rut. There was a good bit of laughing, and some talk. They hadn’t much idea of what they were going to do when they got to Wolff’s store; it seemed like a kind of joke. Most of them had been there only one or two times in their lives. “Does he keep any likker?” they wanted to know.

“I don’t think so,” Weaver said. “Cosby didn’t like him having too much on hand, with the Indians coming round all the time. Only in spring when they brought in their peltry.”

He plodded along, hunched forward, as if he had a plough in front of him. By nature he was an abstemious man and the beer had gone to his head, what with the heat, and the responsibilities of running the muster; and nearly all the way he kept trying to think what he ought to do when they got to Cosby’s. As it turned out, it was Jeams MacNod, the school-teacher, who had the great idea.

He said, “If them Indians ain’t there, what are we going to do?”

Nobody had thought of that. Jeams said, “Suppose Thompson has some men around, he might get nasty.”

“Thompson cleared out a month ago,” Reall said.

A kind of deliberate sunrise of intelligence dawned in the school-teacher’s narrow, befuddled face. He was a poor man, and he led a hard and thankless life. He wiped the sweat out of his eyes with the cuff of his coat sleeve and said, “Why don’t we take a look around the manor then?”

“Ain’t that thieving?” asked Gil.

MacNod shook his head. “No, it ain’t. Not when there’s war. That’s what they’re a-doing down the valley. They done it in Johnson Hall when Sir John cleared out. There was some of the Flats people in Colonel Day-ton’s regiment. They went right over the place. They didn’t steal nothing. Captain Ross, he said it was confiscated property and he went around with them showing what he wanted retained for himself. Retaining ain’t like robbery.”

The suggestion gave them the feeling of being on military service. They were doing what regular army troops had done in command of a regular army officer, and they were doing it of their own initiative. By the time they came to Cosby’s they were, as Kast said afterwards, looking sober enough to eat hay. They wouldn’t have seen the British army, perhaps, if it had been drawn up in squares round the big house, but they saw Mrs. Wolff all right. She was just coming in from the corn patch with a squash in her arms, like a baby.

When her eyes first fell on them, entering the clearing, she started instinctively to run. A woman of forty-five or fifty, her bleached hair half fallen to her shoulders, the bone pins clinging here and there, loosely, like oversized white lice.

Then she caught hold of herself and stood still.

“Mrs. Wolff,” said Weaver, when the company had drawn up behind him, “where’s your husband?”

“What do you want with John?”

Weaver said heavily, “We’re militia on duty. Where’s John?”

“We hain’t done nothing,” she said in her dull voice. “John, he’s out in the lot.”

“You call him in,” said Weaver.

She stared at them for a moment more. When her eyes met his, Gil felt vaguely ashamed. But she didn’t say anything as she turned for the log store. She went onto the porch ahead of them and took a small hand bell and swung it slowly.

They all waited for John Wolff.

He came in a moment with a dead pipe in his hand. A little charred corn silk sticking over the bowl showed that he must be out of tobacco. He was a year or so older than his wife, but he had a healthier color, and a set stubborn jaw.

“What do you want?” he demanded. He didn’t try being friendly. Everybody knew which way he stood. He thought they were damned fools.

“Where’s them two Seneca Indians was around here this morning?”

“There wasn’t any Senecas around here.”

Reali’s voice piped up from the back of the line.

“Yes there was. Me and Gil saw them. Setting in the woodshed.”

“Oh, them. They wasn’t Senecas. I don’t know who they was.”

“What were they doing here?”

“They come in last night. Hungry. I let them bed in the barn and give them something to eat. I never saw them before.”

“You admit they wasn’t Oneidas or Fort Hunter Mohawks.”

“I don’t admit anything. I gave them something to eat. What the hell business is it of yours, Weaver?”

“John.” His wife breathlessly touched his arm. “Don’t get angry, John.”

“Shut up,” he said. “What right have these Dutch punks got coming onto my land?”

“We’re on duty. We got to keep track of people without business in these parts.”

“Why don’t you ask them what their business was, then? I don’t know.”

“Where are they?”

“Go and find out. They left here at nine o’clock.”

Weaver stood uncertainly on the porch. Jeams MacNod went up to him and whispered. Weaver put his finger in his ear.

“Yes,” he said. “You stay in the store. Both of you. We’ve got to in-vestigate the grounds.”

Wolff said, “Suit yourself. But you can’t do anything to me.”

“I’ll just go through your place first,” said Weaver. He called for Gil and MacNod and Kast to come with him. The rest were to surround the store and wait till he came out.

The inside of the store was a long room with a fireplace at the end and a bed in the corner. There were rough shelves along one wall and storage chests along the other. There were two benches set end to end down the middle of the floor. The benches were made of split basswood logs with hickory legs let into them. Two windows allowed some sunlight to filter through the fly specks.

There wasn’t anything an Indian could hide behind. Weaver went into the woodshed. He found about a month’s supply of wood stacked sloppily, two pairs of snowshoes, an axe, a wedge, and a maul. “No one out there,” he said, and helped the other three lift aside some axe helves, a keg of lamp oil, and a couple of rum kegs. The oil keg had four inches of oil. The other kegs were empty.

They stood looking round. It was so still inside the store that they could hear the men outside talking softly through the buzzing of the flies.

Jeams MacNod tried to lift the lid of a chest.

“It’s locked,” he said.

Weaver turned on Wolff.

“Give us the keys, John.”

“Like hell I will.”

“Then we’ll have to take an axe to the chests and bust them in.”

“All right,” Wolff grinned thinly. “You’ll find it’s a hot job.”

“Get the axe, Kast. It’s in the woodshed.”

Kast returned with the axe.

Wolff said, “You spoil them chests and you’ll hear of it. I’ll make a complaint to Captain Demooth.” He drew his hand over his thin mouth. “I and Demooth had a talk. He said I could stay here as long as I didn’t do nothing. I ain’t been looking for trouble. He said he’d look out for me. You touch them chests and you look out.”

Weaver had begun to get mad.

“Go ahead, Kast. Bust the lock if you can.”

Kast swung the axe like a hammer.

“You stop that. There ain’t nothing in them,” said Mrs. Wolff. “Don’t you spoil them.”

“Let them do it,” said Wolff.

“No, I won’t. There ain’t anything in them. I’ll give them the keys.”

“You do that and there won’t be any bother,” said Weaver.

Wolff stared at his wife, but said nothing. She gave them the keys to open the chests. They found some blankets for the Indian trade. Some cheap knives. Some flour. Some salt beef. There were two bales of skins in the last. When they opened the lid a rank smell came out. “Shut it,” said Weaver. Kast started to obey, but MacNod, who was a curious man, pulled up the bales. “Look here,” he said.

Two twenty-pound bags of powder lay in the bottom of the chest.

“That’s my powder,” said Wolff. “I’ve had it a long while.”

“We’ll have to take it. I’ll give you a paper. It’s more powder than we’ve got for the company.”

“You leave me a couple of pounds, anyway.”

“What do you need it for?”

“It’ll save you wasting it on your damn muster days, anyways.”

“All storekeepers been asked to turn their powder in and make a state-ment of it.”

“That’s my business.”

“You set down,” said Kast. He leaned towards Wolff.

“Set down, John. Please.” Mrs. Wolff touched him timidly. He threw her hand off his sleeve. After a minute he sat down, though.

Mrs. Wolff turned to Gil.

“You can’t take it all. We hain’t got fresh meat. We need some.” She looked frightened. “Make them leave us a little.”

“I’m sorry,” said Gil, flushing. “George is in charge. He’s sergeant.”

A little breath went out of the woman. She sat down beside her husband.

Weaver listened to MacNod. He nodded his head.

“You stay here, Wolff. We’ve got to look over Thompson’s house.”

“That’s illegal entry,” said Wolff.

“You mind your business and we’ll mind ours.”

Probably Gil and Weaver were the only two among the company who had ever been inside of Thompson’s house, and neither of them had been beyond the little office to the right of the door. They had found Mr. Thompson a decent neighbor, but the big house had overawed them with its black slaves who seemed to feel contempt for any white man who didn’t own people like themselves, its sounds of voices from the parlor doors, and the tinkle of a spinet coming down from upstairs. To them it had been the expression of all the possessions they vaguely hoped to have come to them in their time. Weaver had been there twice to see about the loan of a yoke of oxen in the early days. Gil had come to sell a large buck he had shot once when some gentlemen had been stopping there.

Standing on the wide verandah that fronted the river, they now felt the same awe in the face of the closed shutters. Most of the men with them caught the feeling. Only Jeams MacNod, who had some education and a fanatical contempt for all success other than his own, was ready to break down the door. He threw his weight against it, but the heavy pine panels had no thought of yielding to a Scottish scholar.