The Hidden Children by Robert W. Chambers (books to improve english .TXT) 📗

Captain Carbury and myself, then the Oneidas.

Behind us in the dusk we saw the Light Troops falling in, who always lead the army. All marched without packs, blankets, horses, or any impedimenta. And, though the distance was not very great, so hilly, rocky, and rough was the path through the hot, dark night, and so narrow and difficult were the mountain passes, that we were often obliged to rest the men. Also there were many swamps to pass, and as the men carried the cohorn by hand, our progress was slow. Besides these difficulties and trials, a fog came up, thickening toward dawn, which added to the hazards of our march.

So the dawn came and found us still marching through the mist, and it was not until six o'clock that we of the guides heard a Seneca dog barking far ahead, and so knew that Chemung was near.

Back sped Tahoontowhee to hasten the troops; I ran forward with Captain Carbury and the Sagamore, passing several outlying huts, then some barns and houses which loomed huge as medieval castles in the fog, but were really very small.

"Look out!" cried Carbury. "There is their town right ahead!"

It lay straight ahead of us, a fine town of over a hundred houses built on both sides of the pretty river. The casements of some of these houses were glazed and the roofs shingled; smoke drifted lazily from the chimneys; and all around were great open fields of grain, maize, and hay, orchards and gardens, in which were ripening peas, beans, squashes, pumpkins, watermelons, muskmelons.

"Good God!" said I. "This is a fine place, Carbury!"

"It's like a dozen others we have laid in ashes," said he, "and like scores more that we shall treat in a like manner. Look sharp! Here some our light troops."

The light infantry of Hand arrived on a smart run—a torrent of red-faced, sweating, excited fellows, pouring headlong into the town, cheering as they ran.

General Hand, catching sight of me, signalled with his sword and shouted to know what had become of the enemy.

"They're gone off!" I shouted back. "My Indians are on their heels and we'll soon have news of their whereabouts."

Then the soldiery began smashing in doors and windows right and left, laughing and swearing, and dragging out of the houses everything they contained.

So precipitate had been the enemy's flight that they had left everything—food still cooking, all their household and personal utensils; and I saw in the road great piles of kettles, plates, knives, deerskins, beaver-pelts, bearhides, packs of furs, and bolts of striped linen, to which heaps our soldiers were adding every minute.

Others came to fire the town; and it was sad to see these humble homes puff up in a cloud of smoke and sparks, then burst into vivid flame. In the orchards our men were plying their axes or girdling the heavily-fruited trees; field after field of grain was fired, and the flames swept like tides across them.

The corn was in the milk, and what our men could not burn, using the houses for kilns, they trampled and cut with their hangers—whole regiments marching through these fields, destroying the most noble corn I ever saw, for it was so high that it topped the head of a man on horseback.

So high, also, stood the hay, and it was sad to see it burn.

And now, all around in this forest paradise, our army was gathered, destroying, raging, devastating the fairest land that I had seen in many a day. All the country was aflame; smoke rolled up, fouling the blue sky, burying woodlands, blotting out the fields and streams.

From the knoll to which I had moved to watch the progress of my scouts, I could see an entire New Jersey regiment chasing horses and cattle; another regiment piling up canoes, fish-weirs, and the hewn logs of bridges, to make a mighty fire; still other regiments trampling out the last vestige of green stuff in the pretty gardens.

Not a shot had yet been fired; there was no sound save the excited and terrifying roar of a vast armed mob obliterating in its fury the very well-springs that enabled its enemies to exist.

Cattle, sheep, horses were being driven off down the trail by which we had come; men everywhere were stuffing their empty sacks with green vegetables and household plunder; the town fairly whistled with flame, and the smoke rose in a great cloud-shape very high, and hung above us, tenting us from the sun.

In the midst of this uproar the Grey-Feather came speeding to me with news that the enemy was a little way upstream and seemed inclined to make a stand. I immediately informed the General; and soon the bugle-horns of the light infantry sounded, and away we raced ahead of them.

I remember seeing an entire company marching with muskmelons pinned on their bayonets, all laughing and excited; and I heard General Sullivan bawl at them:

"You damned unmilitary rascals, do you mean to open fire on 'em with vegetables?"

Everybody was laughing, and the General grinned as Hand's bugle-horns played us in.

But it was another matter when the Seneca rifles cracked, and a sergeant and a drummer lad of the 11th Pennsylvania fell. The smooth-bores cracked again, and four more soldiers tumbled forward sprawling, the melons on their bayonets rolling off into the bushes.

Carbury, marching forward beside me, dropped across my path; and as I stooped over him gave me a ghastly look.

"Don't let them scalp me," he said—but his own men came running and picked him up, and I ran forward with the others toward a wooded hill where puffs of smoke spotted the bushes.

Then the long, rippling volleys of Hand's men crashed out, one after another, and after a little of this their bugle-horns sounded the charge.

But the Senecas did not wait; and it was like chasing weasels in a stone wall, for even my Indians could not come up with them.

However, about two o'clock, returning to that part of the town across the river, which Colonel Dearborn's men were now setting afire, we received a smart volley from some ambushed Senecas, and Adjutant Huston and a guide fell.

It was here that the Sagamore made his kill—just beyond the first house, in some alders; and he came back with a Seneca scalp at his girdle, as did the Grey-Feather also.

"Hiokatoo's warriors," remarked the Oneida briefly, wringing out his scalp and tying it to his belt.

I looked up at the hills in sickened silence. Doubtless Butler's men were watching us in our work of destruction, not daring to interfere until the regulars arrived from Fort Niagara. But when they did arrive, it meant a battle. We all knew that. And knew, too, that a battle lost in the heart of that dark wilderness meant the destruction of every living soul among us.

About two o'clock, having eaten nothing except what green and uncooked stuff we had picked up in field and garden, our marching signal sounded and we moved off; driving our captured stock, every soldier laden with green food and other plunder, and taking with us our dead and wounded.

Chemung had been, but was no longer. And if, like Thendara, it was ever again to be I do not know, only that such a horrid and pitiful desolation I had never witnessed in all my life before. For it was not the enemy, but the innocent earth we had mutilated, stamping an armed heel into its smiling and upturned face. And what we had done sickened me.

Yet, this was scarcely the beginning of that terrible punishment which was to pass through the Long House in flame and smoke, from the Eastern Door to the Door of the West, scouring it fiercely from one end to the other, and leaving no living thing within—only a few dead men prone among its blood-soaked ashes.

*Etho ni-ya-wenonh!

[*Thus it befell!]

By six that evening the army was back in its camp at Tioga Point. All the fever and excitement of the swift foray had passed, and the inevitable reaction had set in. The men were haggard, weary, sombre, and harassed. There was no elation after success either among officers or privates; only a sullen grimness, the sullenness of repletion after an orgy—the grimness of disgust for an unwelcome duty only yet begun.

Because this sturdy soldiery was largely composed of tillers of the soil, of pioneer farmers who understood good land, good husbandry, good crops, and the stern privations necessary to wrest a single rod of land from the iron jaws of the wilderness.

To stamp upon, burn, girdle, destroy, annihilate, give back to the forest what human courage and self-denial had wrested from it, was to them in their souls abhorrent.

Save for the excitement of the chase, the peril ever present, the certainty that failure meant death in its most dreadful forms, it might have been impossible for these men to destroy the fruits of the earth, even though produced by their mortal enemies, and designed, ultimately, to nourish them.

Even my Indians sat silent and morose, stretching, braiding, and hooping their Seneca scalps. And I heard them conversing among themselves, mentioning frequently the Three Sisters* they had destroyed; and they spoke ever with a hint of tenderness and regret in their tones which left me silent and unhappy.

[*Corn, squash, and bean were so spoken of affectionately, as they always were planted together by the Iroquois.]

To slay in the heat and fury of combat is one matter; to scar and cripple the tender features of humanity's common mother is a different affair. And I make no doubt that every blow that bit into the laden fruit trees of Chemung stabbed more deeply the men who so mercilessly swung the axes.

Well might the great Cayuga chieftain repeat the terrible prophecy of Toga-na-etah the Beautiful:

"When the White Throats shall come, then, if ye be divided, ye will pull down the Long House, fell the tall Tree of Peace, and quench the Onondaga Fire forever."

As I stood by the rushing current of the Thiohero,* on the profaned and desolate threshold of the Dark Empire, I thought of O-cau-nee, the Enchantress, and of Na-wenu the Blessed, and of Hiawatha floating in his white canoe into the far haven where the Master of Life stood waiting.

[*Seneca River.]

And now, for these doomed people of the Kannonsi, but one rite remained to be accomplished. And the solemn thunder of the last drum-roll must summon them to the great Festival of the Dead.

CHAPTER XV BLOCK-HOUSE NO. 2

On the 14th the army lay supine. There was no news from Otsego. One man fell dead in camp of heart disease. The cattle-guard was fired on. On the 15th a corporal and four privates, while herding our cattle, were fired on, the Senecas killing and scalping one and wounding another. On the 16th came a runner from Clinton with news that the Otsego army was on the march and not very far distant from the Ouleout; and a detachment of eight hundred men, under Brigadier General Poor, was sent forward to meet our Right Wing and escort it back to this camp.

By one of the escort, a drummer lad, I sent a letter directed to Lois, hoping it might be relayed to Otsego and from thence by batteau to Albany. The Oneida runner had brought no letters, much to the disgust of the army, and no despatches except the brief line to our General commanding. The Brigadiers were furious. So also was I that no letters came for me.

On the 17th our soldier-herdsmen were again fired on, and, as before, one poor fellow was killed and partly scalped, and one wounded. The Yellow Moth, Tahoontowhee, and the Grey-Feather went out at night on retaliation bent, but returned with neither trophies nor news, save what we all knew, that the Seneca scouts were now swarming like hornets all around us ready to sting to death anyone who strayed out of bounds.

On the 18th the entire camp lay dull, patiently expectant of Clinton. He did not come. It rained all night.

On Thursday, the 19th, it still rained steadily, but with no violence—a fine, sweet, refreshing summer shower, made golden and beautiful at intervals by the momentary prophecy of the sun; yet he did not wholly reveal himself, though he smiled through the mist at us in friendly fashion.

I had been out fishing for trouts very early, the rain making it favourable for such pleasant sport, and my Indians and I had finished a breakfast of corn porridge and the sweet-fleshed fishes that I took from the brook where it falls into the Susquehanna.

It was still very early—near to five o'clock, I think—for the morning gun had not yet bellowed, and the camp lay very still in the gentle and fragrant rain.

A few moments before five I saw a company of Jersey troops march silently down to the river, hang their cartouche-boxes on their bayonets, and ford