Читать книгу Tomahawk Rights - Hal G. Evarts - Страница 5

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Standing Bear, a tall young warrior, paced thoughtfully along the forest trail. He halted as another towering savage, taller and more powerfully built than himself, stepped forth in his path. The face of the Shawnee lighted with recognition.

"It is good to look upon Talk-with-birds again," he said in greeting. "This is but the third time in five years that my brother has come to visit in the lodge of his mother Winnebanca."

"But I am come not to visit," Buckner said. "I come with words that will bring heaviness to my heart and to that of my brother."

"I feared it," said Standing Bear.

"It is written that Talk-with-birds must fight in the camps of the Long-knives," Buckner stated.

"A walnut and a white birch, springing from different seeds, sprouted so close together that as they grew their bodies became as one. No longer than two nights ago, I placed a log of this double tree upon my campfire. Instead of burning to an ash as one, the wood of the walnut and the birch separated as the blaze ate into them and they burned to an ash separately, as they had sprouted. Therefore, I am prepared," the Shawnee stated. "But even so, the heart of Standing Bear is on the ground to know that his brother lifts his knife against the Shawnees."

"It is because the white men now fight among themselves and the Shawnees are about to lift the hatchet with those who seek our scalps," Buckner explained.

"The Redcoats promised to sweep the Long-knives from the land and return it to the Shawnees for so long as the sun shall rise in the East," the Shawnee said.

"The Shawnees have listened to the false hooting of the grouse," Buckner prophesied.

"It may be," Standing Bear conceded. "Our great chief, Cornstalk, believes that the promises of all white nations are no more enduring than marks made upon the water of the Ohio. Cornstalk says the red peoples have exhausted themselves fighting against each other in white man's quarrels. He now counsels the Shawnees to stand back and let the white men fight it out among themselves. Then whoever wins, there will be fewer to fight the Shawnees, who will meanwhile grow strong. With that in mind, our chief, Cornstalk, with Red Hawk and others, has gone to the Long-knives to try and arrange for peace."

"He is a wise chief," Buckner said. "Let us hope that the Great Spirit guides the tongue of Cornstalk."

"But the Shawnees believe that even though they like the Redcoats little, fighting is our only chance. Whether we fight or not, the Long-knives will try to drive us into the setting sun and the Shawnees will vanish from the earth," the Shawnee predicted.

"And if the Long-knives do not fight they will become the slaves of the Redcoats, which is worse than vanishing from the earth," Buckner pointed out.

"I can see it," Standing Bear said logically. "As brothers, our eyes can follow the flight of the bird and the tracks of the bear at the same time and know that each of them pursues the course ordained for it by Manitou. We are warriors, Brother, and we know that sometimes these things are written."

"It is so," Buckner agreed. "But Talk-with-birds could not find it in his heart to lift the hatchet against the Shawnees without telling his brother. Until the sun shall rise and set twice again, we are brothers. Then you must tell the Shawnees that henceforth we are enemies."

"It is done," Standing Bear said sadly. "Winnebanca and the little White Fawn will wish to see you for this last time. I will send them to you here when the moon is an hour high. We shall meet again in the lodge of our mother when peace shall come again and we can once more greet as brothers, unless it is written that before that time our scalps shall hang in the wigwams of our enemies."

On the same year that Daniel Boone and a few companions first invaded the wilderness of Kentucky, a lone adventurer, Ebenezer Zane, pressed on into the wilds of Western Virginia, erected a cabin and remained to hunt, trap and dodge the savages of the Ohio. Upon his return to the settlements his tales of the country of his lone-wolf wanderings induced his three brothers and a number of friends to return with him to that fair region.

When the intrepid little band had arrived within a short distance of Ebenezer Zane's trapping cabin, one of the men, looking about him, suddenly drew his tomahawk and blazed the bark from a huge tree.

"Tomahawk Rights," he said to Ebenezer. "It's the best piece of land I ever saw."

Thus did he announce his intention of settling there. This was the accepted method by which settlers who penetrated unsurveyed wilderness took possession of the land. Four corner trees were blazed and the name or mark of the claimant carved thereon, the boundary lines blazed out and the settler built his cabin.

The three remaining Zane brothers elected to take up adjacent land. The other members of the party also filed tomahawk rights in the vicinity and Ebenezer Zane took up residence in the cabin from which he had hunted in '69 and '70. This decision was destined to result in the founding of Wheeling, West Virginia, as Boone's wanderings beyond the Cumberlands were to result in the ultimate settlement of Kentucky.

The Zane colony flourished from the very start. Other land-hungry souls followed in the wake of the hardy founders of the settlement. Other colonies sprang up for miles around. Virginia rose with her sister colonies against the tyranny of England. News of the war drifted to these settlements of the far frontier, together with rumors that the British were outfitting expeditions to capture them. Then the border woodsmen began to return from the Indian country, falling back upon the settlements. Those hardy souls, hardly less wild than the animals they hunted, living their lives beyond even the most isolated settlers' cabins, knew intimately the savage and his ways. Ominous activities in the wilderness of the Ohio, they said, presaged a widespread uprising, though where the blow would fall none could predict.

Then two horsemen arrived at Ebenezer Zane's—a border woodsman named Gilpin and a middle-aged Virginia gentleman, Colonel John Buckner.

"Well, Buckner," Zane greeted, wondering why his visitor should have left the vast Buckner estates of Great Oaks and traveled to this farthest frontier post, "aren't you a few hundred miles from your usual haunts?"

"I am, sir," Buckner agreed. "Zane, by any chance has my nephew, Rodney Buckner, been seen here recently?"

"Rodney? No. What would he be doing here? Isn't he at Great Oaks?"

Pacing the floor, Buckner shook his head. "Five years ago Gilpin, here, accompanied me to a Shawnee town to ransom him. Since then he has been schooled in the pursuits of a Virginia gentleman. He is powerful as a young stallion, rides to hounds like a demon, sir, and his skill with a musket, sword and duelling pistol is nothing short of uncanny."

"To say nothing of his aptitude with scalping knife and tomahawk," Gilpin added, "at which I've seldom laid an eye on his equal."

"That is exactly the difficulty," Buckner said. "For all the fact that he has acquired to an amazing degree the graces that are fitting to a Buckner of Virginia, his long years among the savages have left their indelible mark. He still refers to some Shawnee as his brother. On two occasions in the past he has simply disappeared, to return months later to report that he had made a pilgrimage to the lodge of his foster mother. I am at a loss to account for it."

"Nothing difficult to understand about that, Cunnel," Gilpin said. "Whites take easy to redskin ways after a taste of it. I was thar with Boquet's army at the close of the Pontiac War, when the varmints agreed by treaty to deliver all white captives. Scores of them fled west toward the Illinois country to avoid being delivered. Thar was upwards of three hundred brought to camp. Many a touching reunion amongst friends took place thar, and many a tearful parting when captives was pried loose from redskin families. Many a one made a run for it back to the Injun towns—men to their squaws, women to rejoin their bucks and babies, children to the lodges of their foster parents. It seems to come natural, Cunnel, to them as has had a taste of free an' easy life in the redskin towns."

"No doubt," the colonel assented impatiently. "But this boy has Buckner blood in his veins."

"It don't take but a mite of rovin' wild in the forest to l'arn the blue-bloodedest colt that was ever foaled to jump the pasture fence after he's been captured and confined ag'in," Gilpin pointed out. "Some of the best blood in all the colonies has gone Injun and is living out thar among the reds. And speaking of blood, don't forget Izaak Zane."

It was common knowledge that the fifth Zane brother, Izaak, having been captured by Indians at an early age, thereafter had refused to return to civilization. Married to the daughter of a famous Wyandotte chief, he had risen to be a power in the Indian confederacy of the Ohio wilderness.

"It would seem, Buckner, that your nephew's restlessness would have found an outlet in taking up arms for the colonies, in common with other young men his age from the first families of Virginia," Zane suggested.

"Just so," Colonel Buckner agreed. "He listened attentively to all of the arguments advanced by soldiers and statesmen who gathered at Great Oaks to discuss the wrongs of the colonies. Then came the news that the first shot had been fired. Queer how black men know when there's something in the wind. I noticed that every field hand, some of them wild African blacks not five years from the jungles, threw up their heads like startled deer and rolled their eyes till they could have been seen at midnight. I returned to the house to see what was up and there was Rodney out on the lawn, circling about a tree with a peculiar dipping shuffle and voicing a low-pitched, singsong chant. Then he struck the tree with his tomahawk."

Both Zane and Gilpin shook with laughter.

"He'd set in at all the councils, Cunnel," Gilpin chuckled. "And when it comes to the issue he socked his tomahawk into the war post and dedicated his feet to the bloody trail. 'Twarn't but what any Shawnee brave might do."

"So I learned," Colonel Buckner agreed. "But when I returned to Great Oaks with a commission for him direct from Governor Patrick Henry, Rodney was gone. He did not intend to join the eastern armies. From the first, he has declared that the entire Indian confederacy would rise in support of the British and that there would be war on the western frontier. My own idea was that the savages who had fought with the French against the British for so many years had small love for the Redcoats."

"So they have, but they hate the settlers of Western Pennsylvania and Virginia worse," Gilpin said. "Laying aside prejudice, Cunnel, we must confess they've reason enough. The Presbyterian settlers murdered the civilized Mingoes at Connestoga and at Lancaster to the last sucking babe, then almost went to war against the Quakers because they wouldn't permit the massacre of the Moravian Delawares as well: and they did succeed in exiling the Delawares west of the Ohio. Then right here on the Ohio, Cresap's men at one point and Daniel Greathouse's at another, set on various parties of friendly Injuns during peace times and murdered the lot of them, including the hull family of Logan, the great Mingo chief who'd never been anything but a fast friend to the whites. That set Logan's feet on the warpath with all the weight of the allied tribes behind him. The sounds of that ain't scassly died off the air yet when we declar' war against England. Regardless of what provocation the settlers was laborin' under, and they was great, you could hardly expect the savages to take up the tomahawk on the side of the colonists. Rod knowed that, Cunnel, as does Zane, here, and every woodsman on the border."

"Yes, it is bound to come," Zane agreed. "After Pennsylvania placed a bounty on Indian scalps, regardless of age or sex, ten years or more ago, white scalp hunters neglected to be very particular as to what hair they lifted. The settlers had suffered ample provocation; but when they began to retaliate for Indian outrages by the wholesale murder of harmless Christianized Indians, at the very best it showed damned poor judgment and has cost the lives of five settlers for every savage that has gone down in resulting wars. And Rodney was correct in declaring that there would be war on the frontier."

"Probably," Buckner assented. "He left word that he had gone to the Indian country—that he did not wish to take up arms against the Shawnees without first informing his brother. A piece of romantic folly! There is such a thing as carrying chivalrous practice too far! One cannot employ the code of a Virginia gentleman in dealing with savages! I make no doubt that his precious Indian brother has already scalped him."

"Much as you've soldiered, Cunnel," Gilpin said, "you've learned mighty little about the nature of the savages. About as much as the average army officer knows about redskins," he added reflectively.

"The business of an army officer is to fight the savages, not to understand them," Buckner retorted stiffly.

"Which is why the best of regular troops has always proved so easy for the redskins to cut down like sheep when fighting in the Injun country," Gilpin insisted. "Say what you please, Cunnel, and stick up with what false pride you will for the superiority of the white soldier, cold fact proves that an Injun campaigning the yellow-hides is more than a match, man for man, for the best-trained European soldiers. Because why? Well, the idea of war is to defeat the enemy and take his life while keepin' your own hair on your head. Correct?"

"Certainly," Buckner assented.

"Well, the redskin lives up to the principle instead of the theory. He takes cover behind log, rock or tree, with no more than his topknot showing, from which p'int of vantage he picks off his enemy as if he's potting turkeys. The white soldier is trained to stand in line and fire volleys, breast high, at the general landscape. Mighty effective, maybe, when poured into massed troops, but as aimless as throwing sand at a mark when used against scattering foes, each of which has no more than an eyeball and his trigger finger showing. Meanwhile, the reds pot the soldiers like shooting down deer at a salt lick."

"Well! Well! What would you?" the Colonel demanded testily.

"I'd larn the soldiers to take cover instead of insisting that it's cowardly to do it. I once heered an Ottawa chief exhorting his braves. 'When the soldiers take cover,' he says, 'reload your guns and wait. The officers will stride up and down and prod each hiding soldier with his sword and tell him to stand in the open and fight like a man. As they step forth to fight like men, we will shoot them down as fat turkeys fall from the roost. Give the officers time and they will drive all the men forth to be killed.' Yes, Cunnel, I've heared many a wily red chief address his braves in similar fashion."

"Stuff and nonsense!" Colonel Buckner snorted scornfully.

"He is absolutely right, Buckner," Zane declared. "It has been demonstrated often enough, before Braddock's time and since."

"Is a Virginian to skulk behind a tree?" Buckner demanded, still unconvinced.

"Why not?" Gilpin queried. "We build forts to fight from behind their shelter. Why, then, in the open, should a man not use a tree? After all, a stout tree is no more than an individual fort and serves the same purpose. After building a blockhouse, Cunnel, you sartinly wouldn't drive your men outside to fight before the walls instead of from behind them. Why, then, do you drive a soldier out to fight with his back to a tree instead of with his belly pressed close behind it? 'Tis an amazing inconsistent scheme, to my way of reasoning. But the redskins approve of it."

"But all that is neither here nor there at the moment," Colonel Buckner declared. "It doesn't alter the fact that my nephew is out there many days' travel in the heart of the Indian country. And with rumors afloat that the whole of the Ohio wilderness is aflame with war talk."

"I wouldn't fret, Cunnel," Gilpin advised. "He knows savages and their ways down to the ground and he'll know what they're up to long before we get word of it. He'll slip through, Cunnel, safe as a snake through a briar patch."

A man appeared at the door.

"A lone savage paddled acrost the Ohio river five miles up, Colonel Zane," he said. "But he give those of us that was out for him the slip and headed this way."

There was a sudden shout and Zane left the cabin swiftly as his roving eye noted two men, their muskets trained upon a large maple that stood at the head of a shallow depression a hundred yards from the house.

"Zane," said one of the men as he reached them. "If thar ain't a cussed savage behind that tree! He must have snuck up that draw on his belly and we seed him flit behind that maple. He shouted that he's white—but I'll take my oath he ain't."

A tall, powerfully built savage stepped from behind the tree and held up one hand, palm outward, in token of his peaceful intentions, then advanced at Colonel Zane's signal. He was naked from the waist up. A tomahawk, scalping knife and bullet pouch hung at the belt of his leggings, and a powder horn was slung by a thong across his shoulders.

"Well, Rodney!" Colonel Zane said after the warrior had announced his identity. "No wonder you felt it best to make a sneak for it to get here. Any settler would have shot you down on sight for a savage. I would myself."

"Yes, Colonel Zane," Rod agreed. "While among the Shawnees I spent so much time in the sun with nothing on but a clout that my hide was tanned to the same shade as theirs. It never did quite fade out and it only requires a few days in the sun to darken it again to the proper shade; then I can pass for a savage in any Indian camp."

Colonel Zane nodded. Even the rugged features, the high and prominent cheek bones, the powerful nose and black eyes could pass for those of some savage chief.

"The whole Indian confederacy is rising," Rod informed him. "The Delawares will not go out because those on the Muskingum are steadfastly opposed to war. Cornstalk may keep the Shawnees neutral. But all the others have gone out. Already the trails are crowded with war parties pressing this way. The plan is to strike every frontier point at once in a general war. I made myself known to a certain Wyandotte chief and he urged me to hasten here to warn you. Already he had sent secret word to Fort Pitt, requesting that all settlers be warned."

"Indian he may have become and so remained for years," Colonel Zane said, "but thank God that Izaak Zane has never betrayed his own blood and people. Is it true that Governor Hamilton has offered a price for every settler's scalp?"

"So the savages declare," Rod affirmed.

The kindliness vanished from Zane's face, leaving it hard as granite as he cursed Hamilton, the Hair-buyer.

"Are Americans considered no better than vermin by this bloody scoundrel who sets these red wolves of the forest upon our women and children? He places a bounty upon our heads as if we were beasts of prey!"

He led the way to the house where Colonel Buckner still paced the floor. The latter's gaze focussed upon the features of the savage.

"By the gods!" he roared, with a mixture of anger and relief. "What the devil do you mean by such a masquerade? Naked from the waist up and your head shaved like a Mingo buck's! Nothing left but a scalp lock!"

"It was that or lose it all," the younger man smiled back.

"No doubt," the uncle conceded. "And I'm glad to have you back, savage or not. I have your commission into the colonial armies in my pocket, signed by Patrick Henry."

The young warrior shook his head.

"Thanks, Uncle John, and my regrets at the same time. I'd rather act independently and had thought of collecting a little band of border woodsmen to patrol the frontier for small war parties of savages. They will fight without pay and shift for themselves."

"Well! Well! If you prefer to fight as a savage instead of as a gentleman and an officer, I suppose it doesn't matter greatly, so long as your arm is lifted for the colonies," Colonel Buckner conceded gruffly. "Spare no expense. The Buckner purse strings are open to you."

Gilpin and the two Buckners rode on, warning settlers as they traveled. Two days later they arrived at Donaldson's farm, where a blockhouse had been erected for the protection of the three families whose cabins stood in a big meadow. Donaldson had been warned. The dozen or so families that had settled within a radius of eight or ten miles were arriving to take up quarters in the blockhouse. All along the frontier, the border woodsmen had been drawing in, falling back upon the outermost fringe of settlements. Perhaps a score of these hardy souls had collected near Donaldson's. Adept as panthers at prowling the wilderness alone for years on end, accustomed since infancy to having death dog their every footstep as persistently as a shadow, this brotherhood of the border fringe took all such matters as a part of the day's affairs.