Natanis crawled into our lean-to that night and lay with us, the air being bitter cold with a feel of snow in it. Because he was a better hand with a paddle than Hobomok or myself, I determined to take him with us for speed and safety, both in going and returning. This, I felt, I could safely do because his face was known only to Eneas and Sabatis; and those two had gone to Quebec with messages from Arnold.
In the gray of the dawn, therefore, Natanis left us silently and circled behind the camp so we could pick him up unseen.
When Hobomok and I slid our canoe into the water, the sick men were coming down to the bateaux, so they could be sent back: men so weak from the flux they couldn’t walk, but must be dragged to the river side; men so swollen and lamed from rheumatism that the sweat poured from them in the biting morning air when they were picked up and carried. There was one, a Pennsylvania rifleman with bones near sticking through his skin from the flux, who made such an uproar that men came from all over the encampment.
“Leave be!” he shouted, his voice shrill as a woman’s from rage and weakness, “leave be! I ain’t going back! There ain’t nothing wrong with me that a day won’t fix! I ain’t going back, I tell ye!” Yet he was so weak he could not struggle with those who dragged him. “There’s sicker men than I be!” he cried, “hiding and pretending to be well! I ain’t going back! Leave me lay in the woods alone! I’ll catch up!”
Daniel Morgan, hearing the commotion, came striding down among the ragged, bearded riflemen and looked into the face of the sick man.
“Stand him up on his feet,” he said to those who had him under the arms.
They lifted him up until his feet were flat on the ground; then released their holds. He slumped down in a heap, making a panting noise, like a tired dog.
“Put him in the bateau,” Morgan said. He glanced at the riflemen, glowering at their impassive stares. “Don’t any of the rest of you get sick! That’s an order! You men keep well long enough, and England won’t know whether she’s standing on her head or her fat behind!”
There may have been twenty to twenty-five sick men in all, not more. I looked for James Dunn among them, but couldn’t find him, nor could I say whether I was fearful or hopeful of seeing him.
We picked up Natanis, who took the stern paddle while Hobomok moved to the bow. Thus driven we went down the swollen waters faster than I thought possible.
On both sides of the stream were sad reminders of the flood—tent canvases caught against tree trunks and draggling mournfully in the current; tangles of setting-poles and ropes jammed into the tops of bushes; boards of bateaux broken apart on the falls; chunks of salt pork turning slowly in the eddies at the base of rocks; burst barrels tilted among half-submerged trees.
By noon we came up with Greene’s division, camped a few miles below the spot where the flood had hit us. Sending Natanis and Hobomok down the stream, I went in search of Greene and found him with his officers, Major Bigelow, Captain Thayer, Captain Topham, and Captain Hubbard, all talking about food; and I have found that when there is a shortage of provisions folk will talk about eatables to the exclusion of all else.
Colonel Greene tore open the message, signaling me to wait, and read it aloud. He asked in his mild voice, a voice that seemed abashed at its boldness, how we had stood the deluge, and what was the state of our food. Those who served under Colonel Greene esteemed him highly, for he was gentle, always; thoughtful of those with him; more eager to know what other folk were thinking than to air his own thoughts. There were times when all of us would have been better pleased if he had raged and roared, like Morgan; for in armies, in time of war, the noisy man is listened to first, and then the quiet man; and since wars are noisy and violent, it may take long for the ability of quiet men to be recognized, or for their voices to be heard above the bellowing of incompetents.
I told him how near we had come to drowning, and how the officers and men were set on going to Quebec, even though they must eat their breeches.
Greene smiled gently, as though someone had said the morrow would be pleasant; but Captain Thayer, a maker of perukes before he came within a whisker’s width of losing his life at Fort William Henry, and the most harmless-seeming dare-devil that ever was, said mildly that the idea was all right so long as everyone ate his own breeches.
I asked where to find Colonel Enos, at which they looked at each other with the look men have when they hold someone in disregard, but feel a reluctance to speak their minds before a stranger.
“Broadly speaking,” Major Bigelow said, giving me the faintest suspicion of a wink, “you’ll find him in the rear.”
“Broadly speaking,” Thayer murmured, “he is the rear.”
“No, no, no,” Major Bigelow said genially, “he must stay where he can watch the provisions and make sure nobody ever has enough to give away.”
“Gentlemen! Gentlemen!” protested Colonel Greene, as though a little frightened at his temerity. To me he added: “I think you’ll find the colonel a little below us. It might be well if Colonel Arnold’s message reached him at the earliest possible moment. We’ve heard some of his men are”—he cleared his throat apologetically—“slightly disaffected.”
“I’ve heard,” Major Bigelow said carelessly, “they’re damned well scared. I’ve heard that if a twig snaps near one of ’em, he jumps like a doe that’s backed into a thorn bush.”
“Would you be so kind,” Colonel Greene added, “as to tell Colonel Enos, if he asks for us, that we’ll wait for him to come up with provisions.”
Major Bigelow and Captain Thayer burst into an indecorous laugh, and Colonel Greene wagged his head at them in mild reproof.
Misliking these tidings concerning Colonel Enos, I was on my way back to the river when I was stopped by young Burr, ragged as to shoes and breeches, but cleanly shaved, and with his dapper appearance somehow preserved.
“Here’s luck!” he exclaimed. “What’s happening up ahead? Have they got any food up there?”
“Mighty little! Probably less than you, since the flood.”
“Less than we! That’s beautiful! That’s wonderful! At last we have something smaller than nothing!”
“What are you talking about?”
“Why, bless your soul,” Burr said, “the only food I’ve had in seven days is what Jacataqua shoots for me! Food? Why, we’re on starvation rations! To-day I saw men cutting tallow candles into their gruel to give it body.”
“But Enos was ordered to send up his surplus food to you!” I protested.
“Enos!” Burr cried, his eyes malevolent. “Enos! Rot him and rat him! He said he had none for himself! Gave us only two barrels of flour! Two barrels of flour to carry two hundred men to Quebec! Why, he might as well have offered us a dozen apple cores!” He called Colonel Enos names that would have turned the stomach of his reverend father who, I had been told, was the president of Princeton College.
“But what became of his surplus?” I asked. “He carried enough to cover our retreat!”
Burr laughed unpleasantly. “I think he still has it. Why do his men hang behind, never coming up with us, unless they fear we’ll take supplies from them by main strength when we see how much they have? We would, too, God knows!”
I went to the river and signaled to Natanis and Hobomok. “Look here,” Burr said, “is there any talk up ahead of turning back?”
“Yes,” I said, “there’s talk of it. The talk is that anyone who turns back is worse than a roach. A roach likes water.”
Burr smiled and clapped me on the shoulder. Then he caught sight of Natanis bringing the canoe to the bank. “Ho! There’s a new face! Who might your new Indian be?”
“A friend. You can call him Mr. Pitt.”
“Indeed,” Burr said, “I’ll call him Benjamin Franklin if he’ll go down and relieve Enos of a few of the barrels of flour that he’s keeping from us.”
I left him cursing Enos, and meaning every word of it.
We met Enos moving slowly upstream, as
though he had a year to make the journey. Far behind him two bateaux straggled around a bend.
The bow paddle of Enos’s canoe was in the hands of John Treeworgy. He had been so often on my mind that I recognized his long, gray, glowering face as far as I could see it. An Indian paddled stern: one I couldn’t place. Hobomok flung me the information over his shoulder: “Swashan, the sachem from St. Francis: the one you bearded at Cobosseecontee.”
“Does this man know you?” I asked Natanis.
“I never saw him before,” Natanis said. I took no pleasure in seeing Swashan with Treeworgy, or the two of them together with Enos. I could feel in my bones there was something wrong about Treeworgy. I had my suspicions of Swashan as well; and I would have liked to put both of them out of the way. Yet I couldn’t shoot them in cold blood, no matter what my suspicions were; for even in war times it’s murder to kill a man unless you can prove him an enemy.
Colonel Enos had lost none of his importance; so I was as full of politeness as a Boston hairdresser when, on coming up with him, Natanis swung our canoe alongside.
“Colonel Arnold’s compliments and a letter,” I said, handing it to him and keeping tight hold of his gunwale to see as much of Treeworgy as I could. So far as I could tell, Treeworgy took no interest in any of us after his first glum nod at me.
As the colonel read, he continually scratched at his knees and made a sucking sound with his tongue to show displeasure. He read the letter twice from beginning to end; folded it and put it in his pocket; then snatched it out and read it again. “Well!” he said. “Well!” and fell to scratching himself, his forehead all wrinkled.
At length he looked up, puzzled-like. “How do the men feel up ahead? Are they for going on, Morgan’s men and Meigs’s men?”
“Yes, sir. Even the sick we’re sending back.”
“Gah!” He made a noise in his throat, such a noise as a cleanly housewife makes on seeing a kitchen in a mess, “Gah! These sick men! If I could be rid of ’em, I might do something! Sick men! Sick men! Sick men! All to be looked after and fed like a lot of yowling babies!”
He glared at me. “How do Arnold and Morgan and Meigs have provisions for fifteen days, when all I’ve heard from ’em is calls for food? Food! Food! Food! Don’t they do anything but eat?”
“Sir,” I said, “I only know what the colonel writes. They lost a deal of supplies from the flood and overturned bateaux, so they’re on half rations; but they’d go on if they had no rations at all.”
“Morgan and Meigs and the colonel are good officers: they wouldn’t permit such a thing,” he said pompously. “The first duty of an officer is to his men.”
I thought of the tales I had heard of General Braddock at the Monongahela in the last war; how he beat our men with the flat of his sword to make them come from behind their trees and stand in line like good British soldiers, to be shot to shreds by the hidden French and Indians. There also came into my mind the many times I’d heard my father say the first duty of most British officers sent to America was always to themselves. But since I was facing a soldier who believed in discipline, I made no reply.
“I have no such supplies as Colonel Arnold speaks of,” he said querulously. “My men have barely three days’ provisions left! It’s common knowledge among ’em that if they advance another day’s march into this howling wilderness they’ll starve whatever they do: starve if they go forward; starve if they go back.”
“Up ahead,” I said, “they think that since Colonel Enos’s division had more provisions at the start than any of the others, it still must have more.”
“ ’Tain’t true!” he shouted, hammering his fist on the canoe thwart. “We’re near starvation ourselves! We lost food from rains and the damned leaky bateaux; then we fed the sick and gave flour to Greene’s division.”
“I was told,” I said, meaning to be sarcastic, “that what Greene got from you was two whole barrels of flour.”
“Yes,” said Enos petulantly, seeing no sarcasm in it, “and now I’m told to send on as many men as I can supply with fifteen days’ provisions, and send the rest back! How in God’s name can I do two things at once when I haven’t the means to do either!”
I gave him the message Greene had given me for him—that he was waiting for provisions. Enos made his housewifely noise in his throat, “Gah!” and prodded Treeworgy’s shoulder. “I’ll go ashore. Go back, Treeworgy, and tell Captain McCobb to hurry up here with the rest of the officers. I want to talk to ’em.” To me he added, “I’ll need you, too! There may be questions you’ll have to answer.”
He strode up and down the bank, rumbling to himself and making sucking sounds against the roof of his mouth, like a toothless old woman.
This, Natanis told us while we waited, was good hunting country. Not far from us, on the west side of Dead River, there was a wide brook rising in two ponds, thick with beavers. On this brook, he said, he had a burying place, as well as on the next stream above, and on the fourth pond of the Chain of Ponds and the first pond on the far side of the Height of Land.
I’d almost forgotten that spare canoes are often buried in the winter by all Northern Indians for safety and preservation; that a diligent Indian in rough country, where there are many falls and bad carries, will have several canoes scattered through his territory, either buried or, in the summer, carefully covered with branches.
When the bateaux of Colonel Enos’s division came up I sent Natanis and Hobomok away again, telling them to get game if possible, but to keep an eye on me in case I wished to move. There was a slow surliness about these men of Enos’s. They seemed more wretched than any of those in the other three divisions, though it was impossible that they had suffered greater hardships.
Two of them, Connecticut men, came over to me to ask whether I had come from up front. When I said I had, one asked when the front divisions were starting back.
“What makes you think they’re starting back?” I asked.
“Everybody says they’re starving to death,” he said. “Everybody says we’ll starve to death ourselves if we go beyond here. They can’t go on! They’ve got to come back.”
“I haven’t heard anybody say so,” I said. “Probably you’ve been listening to some crazy man: somebody that never left his mother before. Some cry-baby, maybe.”
“No,” the bateauman said, “all the sick from Morgan’s division are saying it.”
“Did they say it to you? Did you hear them?”
“No,” he said, “but Treeworgy was talking with them. They told him.”
Well, I thought, there it was, what I had been sure of at Fort Western: Treeworgy spreading fearsome tales!
“I’ll bet they didn’t tell him the worst of it, though,” I said, hoping they’d tell me more.
“Prob’ly not,” said the bateauman. “They told how the officers have to lick the men with whips to git ’em to carry their bateaux over the bad spots, so’s their backs are all bloody.”
“Well, well!”
“Yes,” the other bateauman said, “and how the water beyond here is poisoned by the rains so them as drinks it are all swoll up, and can’t walk.”
“Is everybody swoll up?” the first bateauman asked.
“You gosh-blamed idiots!” I said, “do I look swoll up?”
“No; that’s what Treeworgy said,” growled the first bateauman.
“What was it he said?”
“That they’d be sending back somebody as wasn’t swoll up, to say everything was all right, and git our food away from us.”
“There ain’t going to be nobody git no more of my food away from me!” the second bateauman growled.
“Me neither,” said the first.
The two guffawed. “Anybody that gits food out of us from now on,” said the second, “will have to git our muskets away from us fust.”
I turned to look at Enos, who stood on the bank, pinching his lower lip and staring down river.
“The damned old woman!” the first
bateauman said, following my glance.
“Yes,” said the second, “he’s gave away enough provisions to fellers that say they’re sick. To hell with him and to hell with them! If we don’t look out for ourselves, nobody will!”
“Well,” I said, “they don’t feel that way up front. They’d rather die than give up.”
The first bateauman snorted. “What’s the good of that? It’s like Treeworgy was saying: if it’s sure death to go some place, you’re more use to your country if you don’t go there.”
Rain had begun to fall again, a cold drizzle that might, I knew, change to snow.
“Look at this!” the second bateauman cried. “Look at this stinking country! Look at those damned mountains! I go no further!”
I heard Enos calling. Sickened by their talk, I left the bateaumen and went to him. Other bateaux had come up, and some of the officers of the Fourth Division—Williams, Scott and McCobb, captains; Lieutenant Hyde and Lieutenant Peters. A fire had been lit for them and a tent pitched, whereas I doubt there was a single tent left in all of Morgan’s and Meigs’s divisions. They sat disconsolate in the tent, looking out at the rain. I marveled how it was possible for men of the same size and muscle and upbringing to be so different. The minds of Morgan’s, Meigs’s and Greene’s officers worked swiftly, seizing on favorable and happy things; but those of Enos’s officers worked slowly and moved little, like a cow quivering the skin over her shoulder to drive away flies on a hot afternoon. They saw no ray of light or hope in anything.
“Here’s the messenger that brought the letter,” Colonel Enos said as I came up.
They glowered at me. Captain Scott, a heavy-paunched man with a thin face and a red nose on which a drop of moisture hung, asked gloomily whether I knew what lay between us and Quebec.
I said I knew from hearsay, whereupon Captain Scott asked me to tell him honestly whether I would undertake to travel the route with insufficient provisions.