Arundel (62 page)

There was a bright light when we woke, reflected into the wigwam from snow that had fallen in the night, and in the brightest of it sat Natanis, gazing into his hand mirror and making himself beautiful with paint: vermilion, yellow, black, and white.

“Two of your friends have come,” he said.

“Not Hook!”

“No,” Natanis said, running a line of white down the center of his nose, “older friends: Eneas and Sabatis.”

“I thought we’d never see them again. What messages did they bring back for Arnold?”

“That’s a queer business,” Natanis said, coloring his mouth and chin vermilion. “They say they were captured when they entered Quebec, and Arnold’s letters taken from them.”

“Then it’s known we’re coming!”

“That’s not the main thing,” Natanis said. “The main thing is that our people have always come and gone in Quebec as they pleased. Our help is too valuable to be thrown away by seizing us and searching us, and so angering us. There are a thousand ways our people can enter and leave Quebec unnoticed, provided they wish to do so. Therefore I doubt Eneas and Sabatis were captured.”

I pondered while I honed my razor. If they hadn’t been captured, they had freely given the letters to some man of importance. If we were friendly with them and didn’t arouse their suspicions, and heaped favors on them, we might come to learn something of those with whom they had trafficked in Quebec. We might catch Hook, somehow, through them! To catch Hook, I would have gone without food for another week.

Thus minded of food, I ate half a loaf of bread sopped in broth, and longed for the day when my stomach would let me start the day properly with a cut from a fat cow and half a pie, preferably pumpkin.

Natanis had gone to work filling in the upper sections of his face with yellow, a task requiring dexterity because yellow paint soaks into black hair if allowed to come in contact with it. “There’s another thing,” he said, in the far-away tones of one absorbed in delicate manual labor. “Arnold shouldn’t show anger toward them. If he accuses them of doing what we think they’ve done, they may fly into a rage and leave us when we
most
need
their
help.”

“He knows that,” I said, preparing to scrape off my beard. “He’s a wise man.”

“He’s a bold man, given to speaking his mind. He was not wise enough to know we weren’t spies.”

“He can’t be blamed for that! He was scurvily treated by those he considered friends. It’s natural for him to be suspicious. What could he do but suspect us of being spies if he was told we
were
spies?”

Natanis shrugged his shoulders and painted a black tortoise in the middle of his forehead. His face was so covered that there was no way of telling what his expression might be beneath the paint. “None the less, he must be told to show no anger; for it’s my plan to know more about the persons who called me spy.”

“It’s my plan to find Hook,” I said.

“Then warn him,” he said. “Let him know Eneas and Sabatis are our brothers.” He made a snoot at me, a horrible snoot, so that I nicked my ear with the razor. Natanis was pleased: his painting had been successful.

While I studied my hunting shirt, not knowing where first to thrust my needle, Phoebe came to the door with a bundle. Such was her elegance that I clean forgot I had on no shirt, until she said that she’d mend it, unless I was planning to boil it and eat it. With that Natanis said he had a new shirt for me, and he fished it out from the rear of the wigwam, a stout one of buckskin, without fringes or ornaments.

Phoebe wore a gray blanket coat, belted around her middle with a red worsted sash, and long gray breeches stuck into the top of moccasins. Her string of cat’s eyes dangled at her throat. Cap sat up and rubbed his eyes at sight of her, swearing that if she had a queue down to her waist and a pipe in her mouth, and stunk of garlic enough to crack the wigwam apart, no one would be able to tell her from a Frenchy.

She gave me her bundle: blanket breeches and worsted stockings for Cap and myself. Cap declared he was disappointed at being given breeches, since he had planned to get the loan of a pair from the young Frenchman who had charged us so handsomely for provisions. In fact, he said, he had planned to borrow those the young man had on, if he could catch him in a dark, quiet place.

While Phoebe cut my hair we warned Cap to keep his hands off all Frenchmen, since they were our friends and we would often stand in need of their help.

“Stevie,” Cap said, “you always gravel me in an argument, but these Frenchies aren’t real Frenchies: they only think they are. You never saw a real Frenchy with a queue like these Frenchies. These Frenchies are more like folks from China that have tails on their heads a rod long.”

“Well, what of it? They’re our friends, tails or no tails, so let ’em alone.”

Cap whined that he merely wanted one of the tails to take home with him: that I whistled a different tune when it came to my own pet Frenchy, Guerlac; that these Frenchies were robbers, anyway, charging double what they should for the necessities of life. Weary of his clack, I pushed Phoebe out, scrambled into my new breeches and shirt, and fled the place, reminding him that when it came to robbing, our own honest citizens on the Kennebec had been quick to sell us sour beef at four hundred per cent profit. He managed to have the last word, bawling after me that people ought to expect that when they come to Maine, whereas it should be different elsewhere.

There was a fleet of twenty canoes on the river bank, brought there by forty braves, all decked out in wampum necklets and armlets, and silver wrist guards. They had fur robes, and their heads were shaved.

All of them were painted, even Paul Higgins, so there was no way of telling one from the other. Natanis said this was why Indians paint when preparing for war: so that if one of them comes close and strikes a foe, the stricken man cannot tell his assailant from any other painted Indian, and so may later be unable to take his vengeance. This may be true; but if you ask me, I think they paint their faces because they like to do it. They spend hours daubing themselves, and fly into terrible rages if their hands slip and spoil the symmetry of their designs.

Natanis, while I knew him, wore paint on his face this once, and never again; yet he enjoyed painting himself on this occasion as much as a woman enjoys putting on half a dozen petticoats and a dress that sticks out behind her big enough to make a hiding place for a pair of owls. I think they are two customs of a piece. Many Indians I know are as handsome men as you could find in a month of Sundays, whereas when they paint themselves they look like something you dream about when overly free with pie and hot buttered rum. In the same way there are women as straight and sweetly rounded as can be; though when hung with silken saddle bags and wire lobster pots underneath, they might as well have spavins and broken hocks for all anyone knows.

Hobomok greeted me at the canoes, and Natawammet, and the braves who had been with us among the swamps of Finger Lake; also Paul Higgins, whose face was yellow with a jagged black line across his forehead like the tops of pine trees against the sky.

“We left a camp full of men at the head of the Chaudière,” Paul said. “Food was scarce, so we stole a horse from the French and sent it back to them. What do you think? Is it all right to steal a horse?”

“Probably they’d have given it, if you’d asked,” I told him.

“Not the French,” Paul said. “You don’t know ’em!” I thought that if I didn’t keep Paul and Cap Huff apart there might not be a French queue left on the Chaudière by the time we reached Quebec.

The trackless forests had ended at Sartigan; and the river ran between level fields, snow-covered and sprinkled with whitewashed farmhouses. Here we saw the first of many chapels, surmounted by the papist cross. These farms and chapels surprised me, since I had thought that Canada, being papist, was a heathen and barbarous country. Yet I found it neater than our own province of Maine, and the houses snugger and better than most of those in Arundel.

We went rapidly down the six miles of quick water that lay between Sartigan and Arnold’s headquarters, and put in at a point where there were two whitewashed farmhouses with barns and sheds.

A number of men emerged from one of the farmhouses as we came up to it, among them Lieutenant Church and Lieutenant Steele and Captain Ogden, all of whom eyed me coldly. Lieutenant Church, staring at his moccasins with his usual gloom, asked abruptly, “Where’s Cap Huff?” This was the only greeting I had from any of them.

“We picked him up,” I said. “He was lost. We took care of him. He’ll be down to-morrow.”

Church nodded and scanned the sky, as though looking for more snow. “I cal’late!” he said. Like so many of our Maine people, he didn’t explain what he calculated. I interpreted it to mean that there had been no serious doubts in his mind concerning either of us at any time.

Arnold’s room was sizeable, and heated with an iron stove, so that I felt my first real warmth in a month. It sent such a wave of weakness through me that I had to hold to the wall.

Arnold was talking with his commissary when we filed in, and though I thought he might, like the rest of us, be worn and weary from the march, his face was as florid, his shoulders as broad, his hair as crinkly and jetty black as ever, albeit his hair curled a little about his ears and neck, and his uniform was stained and wrinkled from soakings.

He dropped his head to stare at me from rounded, light-colored eyes. I went to his table of loose plank and placed a piece of bark on it. On it I’d written: “Wait before rebuking Eneas and Sabatis.” He looked at it sourly, his face dark and bulbous. Then he went to the Indians, shaking hands with each one. Finally he shook hands with me.

“What are you doing with these—these gentlemen?” he asked.

“Sir,” I said, “my friend Natanis asked me to interpret.”

Arnold nodded. “Which one is Natanis?”

Natanis stepped forward, as straight as the mast of a sloop, and I wished his face could have been free of its mask of yellow and vermilion, to let the colonel see the wisdom and kindliness in it.

They eyed each other, the rest of the Abenakis standing silent behind us. “Truly,” Natanis said, “I am your friend.”

Arnold smiled when I interpreted. As I have said before, there was something so reckless and straightforward about his smile that the person on whom it was turned would follow him, with little persuasion, wherever he led.

“Why,” he said, “I’ve been sadly misinformed. I’m his friend as well, and the friend of all these brave men.”

“That is
good,”
said Natanis. “There are matters we must discuss with the white chief; matters that must remain between him and us, and discussed alone.” He glanced at the commissary, an officer from Matthew Smith’s riflemen, and a hater of Indians, as could be told when he glowered, from time to time, at the men behind me.

The commissary went out, red as an August sunset, and hotter, unless I greatly mistook, and I knew we must keep an eye on him to make sure we got something besides briskets and rump when beef was butchered.

Paul Higgins spoke first, gloomy and grand with his black lightning-streak across his bright yellow face; for it had been agreed that he, being sachem of the Assagunticooks, should speak for all.

“Brother,” Paul said, dropping his bearskin on the floor and sitting on it, so that Colonel Arnold might sit as well, “you are on your way to fight for the country in which you live. This you are proud to do. We, too, would be proud to do this, for it is as much our country as yours. But when we went to see the great chief in Cambridge, offering to fight behind him, he thanked us and let us come away. He had no need of our help.”