CHAPTER IV
Itwas the fashion of the time and place to be zealous in flattering the Indian’s sense of importance, and the hospitality of the fort was constantly asserted in plying the delegation with small presents. Shortly after nightfall the quarter-master-sergeant went out to the Indian huts with some tobacco and pipes, and tafia, and the compliments of the commandant. He returned with the somewhat significant information that they needed no tafia. A few, he stated, were sober, but saturnine and grave. Others were blind drunk. The most troublesome had reached the jovial stage. From where they lay recumbent they had caught the soldier by one leg and then by the other, tumbled him on the floor, and tripped him again and again as he sought to rise; finally, he made his way by scrambling on all fours out into the snow, and running for the gate with two or three of the staggering braves at his heels.
“Faix, if the commandant has any more complimints to waste on thim Injun gossoons,” he remarked, as he stood, panting and puffing, under the archway while the guard clustered at gaze in the big door of the guard-house, “by the howly poker, he may pursint them in person! For the divil be inivery fut I’ve got if I go a-nigh them cu’rus bogies agin! They ain’t human. Wait, me b’ye, till I git me breath, an’ I’ll give ye the countersign, if I haven’t forgot ut. I’m constructively on the outside yit, seein’ ye cannot let me in till I gives ye the countersign.”
There was a low-toned murmur.
“Pass, friend,” said the sentinel.
“Thankin’ ye fur nothin’,” the quarter-master-sergeant rejoined as he paused under the archway to gaze back over the snow.
“If Robin Dorn ain’t a frog or a tadpole to grow a new laig if one is pulled off,” he remarked, “he’ll hardly make the fort to-night.”
The sentinel, left alone at the gate, peered out into the bleak dark waste. All suggestion of light had faded from the sky, and that the ground was white showed only where the yellow gleams from the doors and windows of the fort fell upon the limited space of the snowy parade. Soon these dwindled to a lantern in front of the silent barracks and a vague glimmer from the officers’ mess-hall, where the great fire was left all solitary to burn itself out. A light still shone through the windows of the commandant’s quarters, where he was entertaining company at cards. But otherwise the fort was lapsing to quiescence and slumber.
A wind began to stir in the woods. More than once the sentinel heard the dull thud of falling masses of snow and the clashing together of bare boughs. Then the direction of the current of theair changed; it wavered and gradually its force failed, a deep stillness ensued and absolute darkness prevailed. The sound of crunching, as wolves or dogs gnawed, snarling, the bones of the deer that the vagrant savages had killed beyond the abattis, was distinct to his ear. It was a cold night and a dreary. The vigilance of watching with naught in expectation is a strain upon the attention which a definite menace does not exert. There was now no thought of danger from the Indians, who were fast declining from the character of warriors and marauders to that of mendicants and aimless intruders and harmless pests. The soldier knew his duty and was prepared to do it, but to maintain a close guard in these circumstances was a vexatious necessity. He paced briskly up and down to keep his blood astir.
A break in the dull monotony can never be so welcome as to a dreary night-watch. He experienced a sense of absolute pleasure in the regulation appearance of the officer of the day, crossing the parade and challenged by the sentinel before the guard-house door. The brisk turning out of the guard was like a reassurance of the continued value and cheer of life. The flare from the guard-house door showed the lines of red uniforms, the glitter of the bayonets, the muskets carried at “shoulder arms!” the officer of the guard, Raymond, at his post, and the sergeant advancing to the stationary figure, waiting in the snow. He watched the familiar scene, on which in the day-time he would not have bestowed a glance, as if it had some new and eager significance—sodo trifles of scant interest fill the void of mental inactivity.
The crisp young voices were musical to his ear as they rang out in the night with the stereotyped phrases. “Advance, officer of the day, and give the countersign!” cried the sergeant. Then as Mervyn advanced and a whispered colloquy ensued, the dapper sergeant whirled briskly, smartly saluting the officer of the guard with the cry—as of discovery—“The countersign is right!”
“Advance officer of the day,” said Raymond.
The two officers approached each other and the sentinel, losing interest in their unheard, whispered conference as Mervyn gave the parole, turned his eyes to the wild waste without. He was startled to see vaguely, dubiously, in some vagrant, far glimmer of the flare from the guard-house door or the swinging flicker of the lantern carried by one of the two men who, with a non-commissioned officer, was preparing to accompany the officer of the day on his rounds, a strange illusion, as close as the parapet of the covered way. There were dark figures against the snow, crouching dog-like or wolf-like—and yet he knew them to be Indians. They were gazing at the illuminated military manœuvre set in the flare of yellow light in the midst of the dark night. The sentinel could not be sure of their number, their distance. He cried out harshly—“Who goes there! The guard! The guard!”
In one moment the guard, put to double-quick, was under the archway of the gate. A detail was sentout in swift reconnaissance with the corporal’s lantern and returned without result. There was naught to be found. The barren wintry expanse of the glacis was vacant. Nothing stirred save a wind blowing in infrequent, freakish gusts that struck the snow with sudden flaws and sent a shower of stinging icy particles upward into the chill red faces as the men rushed hither and thither. The huts of the Indians were silent, dark, the inmates apparently locked in slumber. Bethinking himself of the untoward possibilities of a sudden tumult among the Indians in the confusion and darkness,—whether they might interpret the demonstration from the fort as aggression or consternation,—Raymond on this account ordered the party to return silently to Fort Prince George through the sally-port. The same idea had occurred to Mervyn, for when the ensign rejoined him at the main gate he was administering a sharp rebuke to the sentry for raising a false alarm. It seemed, however, to Raymond that it left much to the discretion of an ordinary soldier to permit him to discriminate between inaction and the reference to his officer’s judgment of such a demonstration as he had described.
“You saw nothing,” Mervyn said, severely. “You are either demented, or drunk, or dreaming.”
He turned away, then suddenly stepped back to admonish the sentry to raise no such disturbance when Robin Dorn should return from the trader’s.
“Don’t mistake the drummer-boy for an army with banners!” he said, scornfully. And havingconcluded his visit to the guard he once more flung off and disappeared in the darkness of the parade. Raymond lingered after ordering the guard within. Perhaps it was a bit of meddlesome jealousy, perhaps a resentment of Mervyn’s manner, which seemed unwontedly high-handed to-night, although there had been naught but the official business between them, perhaps he thought it dangerous to curb so severely the zeal of a sentry under these peculiar circumstances, but he plied the soldier with questions and considerately weighed his contradictory statements and seemed sympathetically aware that these inconsistencies were not intentional perversions of fact, but the impossibility of being sure of aught when all was invested with mystery. Raymond’s mind bent to the conviction that there was no admixture of fancy in the sentry’s story. Whatever was the intent of the demonstration on the part of the Indians,—whether to rush the gate and overpower the guard, or merely the malicious joy in creating an alarm and a fierce relish of being an object of terror, or even, simpler still, a childish curiosity in the military routine of going the rounds—it was certainly a genuine fact and no vision, drowsy or drunken.
It had latterly been the habit to leave the gates open for the sheer sake of convenience, after the foolhardy fashion of the frontier. Strange as it may seem in view of the universal distrust of the good faith of the Indians, the universal conviction of their inherent racial treachery, the repeated demonstration of their repudiation of the sanctitiesof all pledges, many a massacre found its opportunity in the heedless disregard of the commonest precautions. Raymond now ordered the gates to be closed and barred, and instructed the sentinel to send Robin Dorn for admittance to the sally-port beneath the rampart. He repaired to the guard-house, and, still doubtful, he ordered the corporal with two men to attend him, stating to the sergeant, as next in rank, his intention to reconnoitre from the northern ramparts and the slope of the abattis, to discover if the curious birds of ill-omen still crouched at gaze or whither they had betaken themselves and with what intent. It was understood that he would return in a quarter of an hour, and quiet settled down on the precincts of the guard-room.
Robin Dorn was of that unclassified species, too tall, too long of limb, too stalwart of build for a boy, and yet too young, too raw, too inconsequent and unreasoning for a man. The simple phrase, “hobble-de-hoy,” might adequately describe his estate in life. His errand had been to secure from the trading-house the drum-sticks of a new drum to replace one with a burst cylinder, which the commandant had ordered in Charlestown, through the trader. The instrument had been duly delivered, but the drum-sticks had been overlooked. Upon this discovery the drummer had requested leave to repair to the trader’s in the hope that the sticks were among the smaller commodities of the cargo, just arrived by pack-train, the convoy, indeed, under whose protection the ladies of the captain’s household and he himselfhad travelled. The confusion incident upon opening a variety of goods which had been packed with the sole effort to compress as much as possible in the smallest compass was not a concomitant of speed. Robin’s efforts to tousle and tumble through the whole stock in his search were sternly repressed by the trader’s assistants, and even the merchant now and then admonished him with—“Wow, pig, take your foot out the trough!” He was fain at last to sit on a keg of gun-powder, and watch the unrolling of every bit of merchandise, solemnly disposed in its place on the shelf before the next article was handled. Now and again a cheerful,—“Heigh, sirs! Here they are!” called out in the unrolling of a piece of stroud cloth, wherein was folded wooden spoons, or a dozen table-knives, or a long pistol, heralded a disappointment which Robin manifested so dolorously that the trader was fain to mutter—“Bide a wee, Robbie, bide a wee—” and offer a sup of liquid consolation. So long the search continued that the new goods were all sorted and fairly ranged upon the shelves before the drum-sticks revealed themselves, stuffed separately in a pair of leggings which they inadequately filled out, and the night had long ago descended upon the snowy environs of the little fort.
“If the sentry winna pass me ye’ll hae to gie me a bit sup o’ parritch an’ my bed the nicht,” he stipulated, modestly, in reply to the profuse apologies and commiseration of his host. “I kenna the countersign, an’ ye wad na hae me shake down wi’ themInjuns in the huts yon. I mis-doubt they hae fleas, though ’tis winter.”
“Dinna ye gae nigh ’em, bairn,” the kindly trader seriously admonished him. “Fleas is not the way thae dour savages will let your blood. Gif the sentry winna let ye come ben e’en turn back, callant;—but if ye are thinkin’ they winna sort ye for it, ye are welcome to stay the nicht here, without seeking to win the fort.”
“Na—na—I’m fair fain to hear how these birkies will march to the tune of ‘Dumbarton’s Drums’!”
Robin caught up the sticks between his practised fingers, and in dumb show beat a spirited measure on the empty air. His red uniform, his cocked hat, showing his flaxen curls, his frank sun-burned face, and his laughing blue eyes, all combined to make up an appealing picture to the elder men, and despite a qualm of reluctance the trader could not refrain from saying, “Take a horn, callant, before you gae out in the air—you’ve a sair hoast now.”
With this reinforcement to his earlier potations,—still he was not what a Scotchman would call drunk,—Robin set out with swift strides in the black night, a drum-stick in either hand, in the direction of the fort. He might only know where it lay by a vague suffusion in a certain quarter of unappeasable bleak darkness—a sort of halo, as it were, the joint effect, he was aware, of the occasional opening of the guard-room door, the feeble glimmer of the lanterns hanging in the barrack galleries and outside the officers’ quarters, and the light that dully burnedall night in the hospital, gleaming from the windows.
After a time a dim red spot toward the left showed him where lay the Indian camp. Now it became invisible as some undulation of the ground interposed, or some drift heavily submerged one of the myriad stumps of the cleared-away forest. Sometimes he ran into these in the blinding night, and once he stumbled, floundering so deep that he thought he had fallen into some pit sunk there in the days of the war to entrap an enemy—the remnants of an exploded mine, perhaps, ortrous-de-loup. But he came upon hard ground with no mishap, save the loss of one of his drum-sticks, found after much groping. As he regained the perpendicular he noted that the red glow, indicating the Indian camp, seemed, now that he was nearer, but the light from embers. It was odd that their fires should die down. Ordinarily the flames were kept flaring high throughout the night, to scare away wolves and panthers. When this thought struck him he drew a long knife from his belt and passed his fingers gingerly along its keen edge, then thrust it anew into its sheath. But if the Indians were not there, whither had they vanished? The unfriendly, veiled night, with a suggestion as of an implacable enmity in its unresponsive silence, its bitter chill, its sinister, impenetrable obscurity, was appalling in the possibility that its vast invisibilities harbored these strange, savage beings, wandering, who knew where and with what ferocious intent. Robin Dorn suddenly began to run impetuously,stumbling where he could not heed, falling if he needs must, with his right arm advanced, as if the night were a palpable thing and he shouldered through obstacles in the obscurity. He met naught. He crossed the glacis, ran along the covered way, reached the brink of the counterscarp, and wavered at the little bridge above the ditch as the warder from the lookout tower challenged him with a stern—“Halt! Who goes there?”
“Robin Dorn. An’ I hinna the countersign. There’s a wheen Injuns flittering around yon. Let me come ben. What for have ye got the great yett steekit?”
“Come around to the little gate, Sawney!” said the sentinel below, after a word to his comrade aloft. “The sally-port is big enough for the likes of you.”
“I’m fair froze,” Robin whimpered, as the smaller postern at last opened to admit him. “Ohone! You’ve kep’ me jiggling an’ dauncing till my ears are fair frosted!”—he touched them smartly with his drum-sticks—“an’ me out on the business of the post! I did na think ye’d have served me sic a ill turn, Benjie! Steek the yett agin me!”
“Oh, stow your tongue!” retorted the sentinel. “I had nothing todowith closing the gate—the guard closed it. Get along with you.”
Robin shuffled along through the snow, bent half double and feeling pierced with the chill which he had sustained while waiting at the gate, over-heated as he was from running. He paused as he passed in front of the guard-house.
“What for did the guard steek the yett agin me?” he demanded of the sentinel on the step. “I’ll complain to the officer of the guard!”
“Go to bed, you zany!” returned the sentinel, “the officer of the guard is not here.”
“Heigh, sirs,” cried the harum-scarum boy. “Say ye sae! I’ll e’en tak a keek at the guard-room fire!” He sprang past the sentinel and was in the room in a moment.
The great fire flared tumultuously in the deep chimney-place; the white-washed room, despite its ample proportions, was warm, and snug, and clean. The light glittered on the arms stacked in the centre of the floor in readiness at a moment’s warning. On the broad hearth of stone flagging, the soldiers, all fully accoutred and arrayed, despite the hour, in their scarlet uniforms, were ranged; several sat on each of the high-backed settles on either side of the chimney. All looked up as the door opened and the drummer shot in, the sentinel protesting behind him. The door of the prison beyond was half ajar, the sergeant having stepped in to examine an inmate, confined for some military misdemeanor, who was complaining of sudden illness.
“Why, Robin,” one of the guard called out, jocosely. “Avaunt! Depart! This is no place for you!”
He was a big, clumsy, red-faced young Briton, and he rose and came with a lurching gait toward the drummer, who stood, smiling, a mischievous glint in his blue eyes, his cocked hat set back on his flaxen curls, his face flushed with the nipping chill without,and his red coat and leggings covered with a frosting of snow, evidently relishing the freak of his intrusion here in the absence of the officers, and full of animal spirits and fun.
“Wha’s gaun to mak me gae, the noo?” he demanded, capering on his long legs.
“Faix, thin, I will, me b’ye!” cried an Irishman, springing up from the hearth, eager for even the semblance of a shindy. As he ran at the drummer, head down, Robin lifted the drum-sticks and beat a brisk rub-a-dub on his crown; then as his English comrade came to the rescue, the boy whisked about and, being the taller by a head, despite his youth, he made the drum-sticks rattle about the older man’s ears and his skull ring like the drawn membrane of the new snare drum. The others sprang up in a body and rushed gayly at the light and agile drummer, still plying his sticks on every cranium that came within his reach, whisking among them, darting from one to another, slipping under their out-stretched arms and setting many a head to ringing with a tune all its own, till finally he was surrounded, collared, caught up bodily and fairly flung outside in the deepest drift near at hand. There he wallowed futilely struggling, for a moment overcome with laughter and frantic exertion; finally, he found his feet and made off, tingling with warmth and jollity, toward the barracks. He was fairly housed there when the guard-house door opened to admit the officer of the guard, the corporal, and the two men with the lantern, and the opposite door closed by the re-entrance of thesergeant from the sick patient. Both officers stood at gaze; the men were shambling and shuffling, a trifle shame-facedly, about the room, deeply flushed, some still mechanically laughing, and breathing hard and fast, though all assumed the stiff regulation attitude of the soldier.
“What is all this, Sergeant?” demanded Raymond.
“I don’t know, sir,” answered the second in command. “I’ve been looking after Peters—he seems better now.”
“What is the matter, men?” Raymond turned to the soldiers.
“Just a bit of fun, sir,” one of them responded, puffingly, his breath still short.
“This is no time or place for wrestling and horse-play,” Raymond admonished them.
“Oh, no, sir,” another replied, “that little fool drummer stopped here as he came in the fort, and we put him out.”
“Half frozen, I dare say. I see no fun in that,” responded Raymond. Then because the night was long and monotonous, and the reconnaissance unfruitful, and the fire genial, as he stood before it, and subversive of unbending—“What was the joke?” he demanded, feeling that a flavor of joviality might season the arid and tasteless interval of time.
The men hesitated, looking doubtfully from one to the other. But Raymond was a favorite among them, and his query could not be disregarded. In view of their sentiment toward him they did not seek a subterfuge or to baffle his curiosity.
“’Twon’t be like reporting on the gossoon, Ensign?” demanded the Irishman, anxiously, and with the negative reply he burst into a spirited detail of the drum-beating episode and the freakish drum-sticks.
“We were not goin’ to put up with the loikes av that, Ensign, av course,” he concluded. “As soon as we cud lay hands on the slippery little baste, we doubled up the long legs av him an’ flung him out into a snow-drift.”
Raymond smiled indulgently as he stood before the fire, looking down thoughtfully into the bed of coals, glistening to a white heat under the flaming logs. Then he turned away.
“I think I’ll see Peters, Sergeant. If he is as bad as he was, he must be sent to the hospital.” Thus he disappeared into the inner room.
The group of soldiers resumed their places on the settle and on the hearth before the flaming fire. By slow degrees the long night wore away. Now and again the fire was replenished, but as the hours passed it was suffered to burn low, for the weather had moderated. The clouds thinned and fell apart, and when the relief went out there were stars in a chill glitter in a clear dark sky. The wind was astir; it was blowing from the south. Again and again a commotion within the forest verges told of dislodged drifts from the branches of the trees. The thaw set in before dawn, and when the sun appeared in a gorgeous emblazonment of deep red, and purplish pink, and roseate saffron on the opaline sky, its light suffused a world all adrip with moisture, and the slopesof the neighboring mountains, darkly purple, were half veiled in shimmering mists, that reached from creek and valley to the zenith and hung in the air in motionless suspension. The Keowee River was of a dull, rippled slate-color, till a sudden shaft of light struck out a steely gleam as if a blade had been suddenly unsheathed. The bugle’s stirring acclaim of the reveille rang out to far distant coverts of the mountain, where the deer, coming down to drink, paused to listen, and the marauding wolf, and catamount, and panther, cogeners of the night, slunk to their caverns and dens, as if warned by the voice of the morn to vex no more for a season the peace of harmless wildlings. The sun-rise gun smote the air with all its dull echoes booming after. The flag rose buoyantly to the tip of the staff. The Indian town of Old Keowee, on the opposite bank of the river, was all astir, and now and again the sonorous note of the conch-shell, a detail of the matutinal savage worship, blended oddly with the martial resonance of the British drums beating for roll-call as the garrison of Fort Prince George lined up in front of the barracks.