Deerslayer (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (82 page)

The scene that followed is not easily described. It was one in which wild confusion, despair, and frenzied efforts were so blended as to destroy the unity and distinctness of the action. A general yell burst from the inclosed Hurons; it was succeeded by the hearty cheers of England. Still, not a musket or rifle was fired, though that steady, measured tramp continued, and the bayonet was seen gleaming in advance of a line that counted nearly sixty men. The Hurons were taken at a fearful disadvantage. On three sides was the water, while their formidable and trained foes cut them off from flight on the fourth. Each warrior rushed for his arms, and then all on the point, man, woman, and child, eagerly sought the covers. In this scene of confusion and dismay, however, nothing could surpass the discretion and coolness of Deerslayer. His first care was to place Judith and Hist behind trees, and he looked for Hetty; but she had been hurried away in the crowd of Huron women. This effected, he threw himself on a flank of the retiring Hurons, who were inclining off towards the southern margin of the point, in the hope of escaping through the water. Deerslayer watched his opportunity, and finding two of his recent tormentors in a range, his rifle first broke the silence of the terrific scene. The bullet brought down both at one discharge. This drew a general fire from the Hurons, and the rifle and war cry of the Serpent were heard in the clamor. Still, the trained men returned no answering volley, the whoop and piece of Hurry alone being heard on their side, if we except the short, prompt word of authority, and that heavy, measured, and menacing tread. Presently, however, the shrieks, groans, and denunciations that usually accompany the use of the bayonet, followed. That terrible and deadly weapon was glutted in vengeance. The scene that succeeded was one of those, of which so many have occurred in our own times, in which neither age nor sex forms an exemption to the lot of a savage warfare.
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“The flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow dies;
All that we wish to stay,
Tempts and then flies:
What is this world’s delight?
Lightning that mocks the night,
Brief even as bright.”

Shelley

 

THE PICTURE NEXT PRESENTED by the point of land that the unfortunate Hurons had selected for their last place of encampment, need scarcely be laid before the eyes of the reader. Happily for the more tender-minded and the more timid, the trunks of the trees, the leaves, and the smoke, had concealed much of that which passed; and night shortly after drew its veil over the lake, and the whole of that seemingly interminable wilderness, which may be said to have then stretched, with few and immaterial interruptions, from the banks of the Hudson to the shores of the Pacific Ocean. Our business carries us into the following day, when light returned upon the earth, as sunny and as smiling as if nothing extraordinary had occurred.

When the sun rose on the following morning, every sign of hostility and alarm had vanished from the basin of the Glimmerglass.
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The frightful event of the preceding evening had left no impression on the placid sheet, and the untiring hours pursued their course in the placid order prescribed by the powerful Hand that set them in motion. The birds were again skimming the water, or were seen poised on the wing high above the tops of the tallest pines of the mountains, ready to make their swoops in obedience to the irresistible laws of their nature. In a word, nothing was changed but the air of movement and life that prevailed in and around the castle. Here, indeed, was an alteration that must have struck the least observant eye. A sentinel, who wore the light infantry uniform of a royal regiment, paced the platform with measured tread, and some twenty men of the same corps lounged about the place, or were seated in the ark. Their arms were stacked under the eye of their comrade on post. Two officers stood examining the shore with the ship’s glass so often mentioned. Their looks were directed to that fatal point, where scarlet coats were still to be seen gliding among the trees, and where the magnifying power of the instrument also showed spades at work, and the sad duty of interment going on. Several of the common men bore proof on their persons that their enemies had not been overcome entirely without resistance; and the youngest of the two officers on the platform wore an arm in a sling. His companion, who commanded the party, had been more fortunate. He it was that used the glass, in making the reconnoissances in which the two were engaged.

A sergeant approached to make a report. He addressed the senior of these officers as Captain Warley, while the other was alluded to as Mr.———, which was equivalent to Ensign———Thornton. The former, it will at once be seen, was the officer who had been named with so much feeling in the parting dialogue between Judith and Hurry. He was, in truth, the very individual with whom the scandal of the garrisons had most freely connected the name of this beautiful but indiscreet girl. He was a hard-featured, red-faced man, of about five-and-thirty, but of a military carriage, and with an air of fashion that might easily impose on the imagination of one as ignorant of the world as Judith.

“Craig is covering us with benedictions,” observed this person to his young ensign, with an air of indifference, as he shut the glass and handed it to his servant; “to say the truth, not without reason; it is certainly more agreeable to be here in attendance on Miss Judith Hutter, than to be burying Indians on a point of the lake, however romantic the position or brilliant the victory. By the way, Wright, is Davis still living?”

“He died about ten minutes since, your honor,” returned the sergeant, to whom this question was addressed. “I knew how it would be, as soon as I found the bullet had touched the stomach. I never knew a man who could hold out long, if he had a hole in his stomach.”

“No; it is rather inconvenient for carrying away anything very nourishing,” observed Warley, gaping. “This being up two nights de suite, Arthur, plays the devil with a man’s faculties! I’m as stupid as one of those Dutch parsons on the Mohawk—I hope your arm is not painful, my dear boy?”

“It draws a few grimaces from me, sir, as I suppose you see,” answered the youth, laughing at the very moment his countenance was a little awry with pain. “But it may be borne. I suppose Graham can spare a few minutes, soon, to look at my hurt.”

“She is a lovely creature, this Judith Hutter, after all, Thornton; and it shall not be my fault, if she is not seen and admired in the parks!” resumed Warley, who thought little of his companion’s wound. “Your arm, eh! Quite true. Go into the ark, sergeant, and tell Dr. Graham I desire he would look at Mr. Thornton’s injury as soon as he has done with the poor fellow with the broken leg. A lovely creature! and she looked like a queen in that brocade dress in which we met her. I find all changed here; father and mother both gone, the sister dying, if not dead, and none of the family left but the beauty! This has been a lucky expedition all round, and promises to terminate better than Indian skirmishes in general.”

“Am I to suppose, sir, that you are about to desert your colors, in the great corps of bachelors, and close the campaign with matrimony?”

“I, Tom Warley, turn Benedict! Faith, my dear boy, you little know the corps you speak of, if you fancy any such thing. I do suppose there are women in the colonies that a captain of light-infantry need not disdain; but they are not to be found up here on a mountain lake; or even down on the Dutch river where we are posted. It is true my uncle, the general, once did me the favor to choose a wife for me, in Yorkshire; but she had no beauty—and I would not marry a princess unless she were handsome.”

“If handsome, you would marry a beggar?”

“Ay, these are the notions of an ensign! Love in a cottage—doors—and windows—the old story, for the hundredth time. The 20th———don’t marry. We are not a marrying corps, my dear boy. There’s the colonel, old Sir Edwin———, now; though a full general, he has never thought of a wife; and when a man gets as high as a lieutenant-general, without matrimony, he is pretty safe. Then the lieutenant-colonel is confirmed, as I tell my cousin, the bishop. The major is a widower, having tried matrimony for twelve months in his youth; and we look upon him, now, as one of our most certain men. Out of ten captains, but one is in the dilemma; and he, poor devil, is always kept at regimental headquarters, as a sort of memento mori to the young men as they join. As for the subalterns, not one has ever yet had the audacity to speak of introducing a wife into the regiment. But your arm is troublesome, and we’ll go ourselves and see what has become of Graham.”

The surgeon who had accompanied the party was employed very differently from what the captain supposed. When the assault was over, and the dead and wounded were collected, poor Hetty had been found among the latter. A rifle bullet had passed through her body, inflicting an injury that was known at a glance to be mortal. How this wound was received, no one knew; it was probably one of those casualties that ever accompany scenes like that related in the previous chapter. The Sumach, all the elderly women, and some of the Huron girls, had fallen by the bayonet; either in the confusion of the mêlée, or from the difficulty of distinguishing the sexes, where the dress was so simple. Much the greater portion of the warriors suffered on the spot. A few had escaped, however, and two or three had been taken unharmed. As for the wounded, the bayonet saved the surgeon much trouble. Rivenoak had escaped with life and limb; but was injured and a prisoner. As Captain Warley and his ensign went into the ark, they passed him, seated in dignified silence, in one end of the scow, his head and leg bound, but betraying no visible signs of despondency or despair. That he mourned the loss of his tribe, is certain ; still, he did it in a manner that best became a warrior and a chief.

The two soldiers found their surgeon in the principal room of the ark. He was just quitting the pallet of Hetty, with an expression of sorrowful regret on his hard, pockmarked, Scottish features, that it was not usual to see there. All his assiduity had been useless, and he was compelled reluctantly to abandon the expectation of seeing the girl survive many hours. Dr. Graham was accustomed to deathbed scenes, and ordinarily they produced but little impression on him. In all that relates to religion, his was one of those minds which, in consequence of reasoning much on material things, logically and consecutively, and overlooking the total want of premises which such a theory must ever possess, through its want of a primary agent, had become skeptical; leaving a vague opinion concerning the origin of things, that with high pretensions to philosophy, failed in the first of all philosophical principles, a cause. To him religious dependence appeared a weakness; but when he found one gentle and young like Hetty, with a mind beneath the level of her race, sustained at such a moment by these pious sentiments, and that, too, in a way that many a sturdy warrior and reputed hero might have looked upon with envy, he found himself affected by the sight, to a degree that he would have been ashamed to confess. Edinburgh and Aberdeen, then as now, supplied no small portion of the medical men of the British service; and Dr. Graham, as indeed his name and countenance equally indicated, was, by birth, a North Briton.

“Here is an extraordinary exhibition for a forest, and one but half-gifted with reason,” he observed, with a decided Scotch accent, as Warley and the ensign entered; “I just hope, gentlemen, that when we three shall be called on to quit the 20th—we may be found as resigned to go on the half-pay of another existence as this poor demented chiel!”

“Is there no hope that she can survive the hurt?” demanded Warley, turning his eyes towards the pallid Judith, on whose cheeks, however, two large spots of red had settled as soon as he came into the cabin.

“No more than there is for Chairlie Stuart. Approach and judge for yourselves, gentlemen; ye’ll see faith exemplified in an exceeding and wonderful manner. There is a sort of arbitrium between life and death, in actual conflict in the poor girl’s mind, that renders her an interesting study to a philosopher. Mr. Thornton, I’m at your service now; we can just look at the arm, in the next room, while we speculate as much as we please on the operations and sinuosities of the human mind.”

The surgeon and ensign retired, and Warley had an opportunity of looking about him more at leisure, and with a better understanding of the nature and feelings of the group collected in the cabin. Poor Hetty had been placed on her own simple bed, and was reclining in a half-seated attitude, with the approaches of death on her countenance, though they were singularly dimmed by the luster of an expression, in which all the intelligence of her entire being appeared to be concentrated. Judith and Hist were near her; the former seated in deep grief, the latter standing, in readiness to offer any of the gentle attentions of feminine care. Deerslayer stood at the end of the pallet, leaning on Killdeer, unharmed in person; all the fine, martial ardor that had so lately glowed in his countenance, having given place to the usual look of honesty and benevolence; qualities of which the expression was now softened by manly regret and pity. The Serpent was in the background of the picture, erect and motionless as a statue; but so observant, that not a look of the eye escaped his own keen glance. Hurry completed the group; being seated on a stool near the door, like one who felt himself out of place in such a scene, but who was ashamed to quit it unbidden.

“Who is that in scarlet?” asked Hetty, as soon as the captain’s uniform caught her eye. “Tell me, Judith, is it the friend of Hurry?”

“ ’Tis the officer who commands the troops that have rescued us all from the hands of the Hurons,” was the low answer of the sister.

“Am I rescued, too? I thought they said I was shot, and about to die. Mother is dead, and so is father; but you are living, Judith, and so is Hurry. I was afraid Hurry would be killed, when I heard him shouting among the soldiers.”

“Never mind—never mind, dear Hetty,” interrupted Judith, sensitively alive to the preservation of her sister’s secret, more, perhaps, at such a moment than at any other. “Hurry is well, Deerslayer is well, and the Delaware is well, too.”