Rabble in Arms, page 45
“Ellen,” I said, “I hope you’ll waste no time getting away from people who see no wrong in turning Indians loose on helpless settlements. As for me, I’ll take no favors from her.”
Ellen rolled up her knitting and thrust it in a pocket of her gray dress. “But you would from me?” she whispered.
“Yes,” I said. “I can take anything from you—anything!”
She turned and ran lightly up the path to the tents.
XLIII
FROM the manner in which the seven Sacs and Foxes pulled at the tent flap and peeped through the slits, I feared they might drag the canvas and poles down on us. “For God’s sake” I told Verrieul, “speak to them! Tell them Doc’s making magic. Say anything that’ll keep ’em quiet! It’s enough to drive a body crazy, the way they peep and pry.”
Not a word had we been able to get from our surly French Canadian guards; and when I had tried to push past them and go to the other tents to look for Lanaudiere, or Nathaniel, they threatened me with their bayonets. It was easy to see they would have taken pleasure in shooting all of us, and there was nothing to do but sit in Lanaudiere’s tent, waiting.
What Verrieul said to the Indians, I didn’t know, being too engrossed in my own thoughts to ask; but when I drew aside the tent flap in half an hour, hoping to see Lanaudiere, the red men sat in a half-circle, staring fixedly at the entrance, as though they expected something wonderful to burst from it.
When Lanaudiere came to us an hour later, he was diplomatically evasive. “You’ve had a taste of war,” he said, “so you’ll understand that a man’s time is not his own in the heat of a campaign. It’s been unavoidable, all this delay; but well have no more of it.” He sighed, as a man sighs over work well done. “I’ll warrant you’ll be glad to leave this camp, too.”
“You mean you’re going to send us to be exchanged?”
He nodded benevolently. “Of course, there’ll be a few formalities, but we’ll see you’re well looked after while they’re being arranged.” His thin brown face, surmounted and softened by his neatly clubbed white hair, had the benignity of a clergyman’s.
“Well looked after?” I asked. “Who’ll look after us? Where shall we be looked after?”
“These things are difficult to arrange satisfactorily,” he said. “I thought of sending you to Isle aux Noix, but that’s damp and unhealthy, and the place will be in a tumult, day and night, with troops and bateaux passing. You’d be ill, I fear! Then St. John’s occurred to me; but really, you know, St. John’s is no better. When all is said and done, Montreal’s the place.” He repeated “Montreal” contemplatively.
“Montreal! You’re sending us to Montreal? How do you expect to exchange for us if we’re in Montreal? The river’ll be frozen in less than a month! Don’t for God’s sake send us as far as Montreal!”
“My dear Captain Merrill,” Lanaudiere protested. “You speak as though Montreal were at the ends of the earth! It’s a charming city, I assure you! In your place I’d consider myself fortunate to be sent to Montreal. It was only last winter that my poor father-in-law was taken prisoner: you’ve heard of him, no doubt? Monsieur de St. Luc?”
He raised his eyebrows politely when I shook my head, speechless.
“No? Ah, well! You’ll be more familiar with his name eventually, I have no doubt. He’s the greatest of our Indian commanders. Yes. Well, do you know, he was sent to Esopus! There truly is an abomination of miserableness in the heart of nothing! Why should you complain at the prospect of Montreal!”
“But my brother! He’s in no condition to travel to Montreal—to be carried around Chambly rapids and over those miles of corduroy roads!”
“Poor fellow!” Lanaudiere said. “He’ll have the best of care. Make your mind entirely at ease about him.”
“For God’s sake,” I said, unwilling to believe my ears, “you’re never going to separate us!”
“Military necessity,” Lanaudiere reminded me, “obliges us to do things we’d prefer not to do. You can depend upon it, your brother will be as well nursed as in his own home.”
I took a deep breath and held it, knowing I would only harm all of us by speaking frankly to this gentle-appearing soldier.
“If we have to go to Montreal,” I said, “I’d like a few minutes with Nathaniel. When would we have to go?”
“By a stroke of good fortune,” Lanaudiere said, “we’re able to send you in great comfort, and quickly, too. It just happens that seven of my men feel they must start home to do their autumn hunting; and they’ve consented to carry you as far as Montreal. You’ll find it an interesting experience, traveling in a North canoe.”
“North canoe! Autumn hunting! Seven of your men! Do you mean you’re sending us to Montreal with the seven Indians who captured us?”
Lanaudiere’s face was indulgent. “I envy you the trip! They’re like friendly children—gay and generous.”
“You’ll send an English officer with us, I suppose,” I said.
Lanaudiere sighed. “I’m afraid we can’t spare any of our officers at the moment. Besides, it would be entirely unnecessary! Entirely!”
“Look here!” I protested. “You can’t turn us loose with those—with those-”
Our tall, white-haired host was patient with me. “My dear Captain, you mustn’t take this attitude! We’ve done what we could to make things easy for you, and in return you seem to imply there has been something shameful about our efforts.”
“You know mighty well,” I said, “that there’s nothing those red devils won’t do if they take a notion.”
“Devils?” Lanaudiere asked courteously. “Devils? They’re a part of our army, just as other Indians are a part of your army. Your Congress authorized the employment of some thousand Indians, not three months ago. Surely your Congress would never solicit the help of ‘devils.’ No, no, Captain Merrill! You’d never speak so harshly if you knew them.”
I knew that further protest was a waste of breath.
“I’m asking no favors,” I said, nevertheless, “but I think we’re entitled to be treated as other prisoners of war are treated. What’s become of the men that were captured when the Washington galley struck her colors? She must have had a hundred aboard, at least. They haven’t been brought back here, so they must have been taken to Crown Point. I demand that you let us join them.”
Lanaudiere’s voice was regretful. “I’m sorry. I know nothing about the prisoners made by the fleet. I’m obliged to follow the course that seems wisest to me—the course that seems safest for you.”
A suspicion that had been forming in my mind became more definite. I began to believe that Marie de Sabrevois, in spite of what Ellen had told me, had resolved to rid herself, once and for all, of a person who might some day interfere dangerously with her plans.
“I hope you’re not forgetting,” I reminded Lanaudiere, “that we made you free of our house in Arundel only six months ago. Because of that, if for no other reason, I think I’m entitled to make a reasonable request and have it granted.”
“You are, indeed! You may be quite, quite certain that I shall immediately grant any request you make, if it’s within my power.”
“It’s not much that I’m asking. I’d like to write two letters, and give them to Nathaniel to forward for me, in case we’re held in Montreal all winter.”
His distress seemed sincere. “I cannot tell you how sorry I am. Your brother’s condition was such that we felt he should have medical attention, so we sent him to the encampment on the mainland.”
“So I can’t see him?”
“To my great regret—”
“Yes,” I said. “Can I see Ellen Phipps?”
Lanaudiere shook his head. “Nothing would please me more, my dear Captain, than to say ‘Yes’ to everything you ask me; but Ellen, you see, is here no longer. She’s kind, and a good nurse; so when she offered to go with your brother to the mainland—”
“I see,” I said. “You sent her away because you knew she’d spoken to me, didn’t you?”
“My dear Captain Merrill! She was kind enough to go because she’s a good nurse.”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s completely clear.”
Lanaudiere smiled faintly, rose from his table, lifted the rear tent-flap and went out. As he went, I saw him motion to someone near at hand.
On the instant the opening was filled with the black faces of Sponge-belly and his six Indians. Their vermilion crests seemed bristling with savage eagerness.
They crowded through the opening, and the tent was filled with the sweetish, oily, furry odor of their bodies. One caught me by the wrist. I felt my other arm seized.
When they hurried me from the tent, Lanaudiere had already disappeared.
Two of the Indians held Verrieul by the arms, as I was held; but on Doc, lurching along between Sponge-belly and another red man, there was no restraint. Because of the bundles in the back of his smock, he looked like a pale and ancient bear humped over in fretful contemplation. Above his head his two guards exchanged triumphant glances, and from time to time Sponge-belly’s hand reached out, almost timidly, to touch the misshapen lumps Doc carried.
When they had us at the water’s edge, the seven Indians stripped off their shirts, swung their North canoe into the lake and neatly stowed their fur robes, muskets, mats of woven rushes and other belongings amidships.
“Well,” I said to Doc and Verrieul, “God knows how this happened to us, but I feel somehow it’s my fault for having known Lanaudiere in the past.”
“To be frank with you,” Verrieul said, “I felt it was my fault for bragging concerning our abilities.”
Doc eyed us pathetically. “No, it ain’t nobody’s fault, only England’s. If she hadn’t hired these red weasels to fight us, we’d be all right.” He hitched his bundle-filled smock into an easier position, and looked appraisingly at Sponge-belly. “I dunno but what I could get along with these people all right, if only they didn’t smell. They got a way of smelling I can’t seem to like.”
“For our sakes,” Verrieul warned him, “I hope you’ll try to like it. They’re gentle with you now, because you, too, have a powerful smell, and they think you’re as powerful as your smell. Have you never seen a dog proud of himself because he has rolled in a long-dead fish, and respectful of another dog that has rolled in a fish even longer dead? That is how they look upon you; but they’re quick to change their minds if you displease them, and you’re sure to displease them if you talk so much.”
“I don’t believe it,” Doc said. “Don’t they do a lot of talking themselves?”
“Well,” I said, “we’ll be in Montreal in three days, and I don’t believe they’ll lose interest in Doc in such a short time.”
Sponge-belly urged us toward the canoe. At Verrieul’s suggestion we wiped our feet carefully before we stepped in to seat ourselves on the bottom between the padlers on their little seats.
Sponge-belly pushed us off with his steering-paddle. The six pad-dlers grunted—”Heh! Heh! Heh! Heh!” Their paddles rose and fell in time to their grunting, and so swiftly did the canoe slide northward that I told myself we might reach Montreal in less than three days.
… We never saw Montreal, except as a jumble of houses on the far side of the St. Lawrence.
I hadn’t thought, when I talked with Lanaudiere, that the day would soon come when Montreal would seem a desirable town, close to my friends and everything I held dear; yet that was how it seemed when our canoe, skirting the southern bank of the river, drove all too swiftly past the high island on which the town is built.
It was bad enough to travel all the way down the Richelieu, past Isle aux Noix, St. John’s and Chambly, past British encampments, British provision-boats, canoes and bateaux carrying British officers and men; disheartening to turn to the west against the tremendous roiled St. Lawrence. But when the arms of our paddlers never faltered as we drew abreast of Mount Royal, we were in despair.
“It’s no use,” Verrieul said, when I told him to remind Sponge-belly that Lanaudiere had promised we’d be taken to Montreal. “It would do us more harm than good. They hate to be talked to while they’re paddling. They say a person who talks in a canoe is an old woman. That’s the worst thing they can say of anyone. It’s worse than accusing a man of getting lost in the woods. I’ll speak when they go ashore for the night, but it won’t help us.”
Verrieul was right.
When he told them what Lanaudiere had said, and asked them to deliver us to the British in Montreal, according to Lanaudiere’s promise, Sponge-belly seemed faintly amused. His reply was terse; and when Verrieul heard it, he turned to us with such a pleased, contented look that for a moment I thought his plea had been successful.
“Pretend you’re hearing good news,” Verrieul said. “And maybe it is. We re none of us wounded or sick, and we have Doc to look out for us. If we re careful, we’ll be well treated, probably. By great good fortune, I can make myself understood to them, and they can speak to us, so they’ll never have to kill us for disobeying orders. Now you must make noises such as you’ve heard them make, showing you’re satisfied.”
We made yowping sounds—”How! Howl Howl” The making of them gave Doc the hiccups.
“Then Lanaudiere lied to us?” I asked.
“Yes, he lied,” Verrieul said. “He never so much as mentioned Montreal to any of these seven. He just gave us to them. We’re theirs. What’s more, I don’t believe he expected us ever to get away—as long as we five.”
We contrived, somehow, to keep our faces cheerful; but that night I lay long awake—not because of the penetrating cold that bit into knees and shoulders, but because of my fears that Lanaudiere’s expectations might be realized: that we might be fated to wander in the wilderness, like beasts, for the remainder of our days.
XLIV
THE next day we went on, and the day after that we went on, and the day after that, and the day after that. We went on endlessly: always on: always on and on, and still on. It seemed to me our western journey was perpetual; that we were doomed to hurry eternally up rivers and across lakes; past meadows, swamps, islands, mountains, forests, cliffs, cataracts, landslides, blowdowns, forts, settlements.
We pressed onward from dawn to dark, in rain that drenched us, hail that hammered our bowed heads, snow-flurries that left our faces hot and smarting: in blinding sun, and in wind that cracked our lips.
The seven red men toiled incessantly, like animals driven by an unresting instinct; dragging their long canoe from the water to crawl with it over weary miles of trails: embarking on inland oceans whose further shores were below the horizon.
My mind was staggered at the vastness of the country we traversed, and at the numbers of people who had pushed so far west into what I had always thought an empty wilderness. It was no more a wilderness than our Province of Maine. Daily, almost, we sighted the cabins of settlers, or trading stations; and the route we followed, Verrieul said, was yearly traversed by hundreds of traders, to say nothing of Indians, who moved constantly along these waterways during warm weather, going to trade or visit friendly nations, or merely traveling for pleasure.
When we passed canoes or skirted trading posts, we lay flat in the canoe, at Sponge-belly’s orders, so that we became almost hopeless in our realization that our captors were determined to keep our whereabouts a secret. I’m bound to say these Indians were kind to us from the first, but my feelings won’t be hurt if I never again see an Indian, or smell one.
We met travelers aplenty; voyageurs, carrying supplies; hunters and trappers, hard-faced men who never took their eyes from our Indians; but we were warned not to speak to them under pain of death.
Verrieul urged Doc to make wise-sounding speeches to the Indians now and then, so that our lot might be improved. At first Doc said helplessly that wise speeches were beyond his powers, since he knew none, though he could say a great deal about how we had nothing to cover us at night, whereas our seven captors had a bearskin apiece, and how it would be a wonder, now that the nights were getting colder, if all of us didn’t die of pneumonia before we got wherever we were going.
“You’ll find it easy,” Verrieul insisted, “if you remember that Indians are less impressed by the things we consider valuable, than by what seems commonplace to us. Money, to their way of thinking, is nothing by comparison with a long memory. Fine clothes, or a high position in society, are of no importance in the sight of an Indian; whereas one who has unusual knowledge, or has traveled to far countries, is a person of distinction, worthy of respect and consideration.”
All that day Doc meditated, contemplating the ducks and geese that rose continuously before us and circled over us, with the sound of enormous whisperings. These wild-fowl were as numerous as the blueberries on our cut-over lands in Maine. There were times when their passage above our heads cast heavy shadows, as if clouds moved between us and the sun: other times when the splatter of their rising, on our approach, was like the rushing of quick water in an angry river. Their monotonous movement seemed to stimulate him, and his lips moved spasmodically.
He rid himself of his first speech after we had finished our dinner by the campfire that night.
He got out his Venesection Mannekin, as we had told him to do, and studied it with an air of profundity. He consulted his Culpeper’s Herbal and drew designs on the ground with a twig, muttering what must have sounded to the Indians like incantations. This, Verrieul said, was the way to impress Indians, though you had to be sensible about it, as well as mysterious, or in time they would become suspicious. But the most important thing, Verrieul said, was for Doc to sound wise, yet be sufficiently enigmatic to make the Indians scratch their heads a little.
Verrieul sat quiet until Doc’s mutterings grew outrageous. Then he announced to Sponge-belly that Doc wished to make an oration. Sponge-belly nodded, and the Indians, sucking at their pipes, fastened eager eyes on Doc. It was not what Doc said, however, that benefited us most, but what he did.
