Читать книгу Listen, the Drum!: A Novel of Washington's First Command - Robert Edmond Alter - Страница 5

Matt Burnett eased his leggings out behind him. He squirmed his chest and stomach into a comfortable position on the shocking-white snow and froze his body into a waiting statue. Only the eyes in his youthful face moved as he peered through the pine branches at the quiet, secluded Indian path. His long musket lay at his side, under the light pressure of his tanned hand.

It was late winter, the fag end of the year 1753, and the chill December sun inched slowly over the still Pennsylvania forest. Matt could feel the sharp bite of the cold snap working its way through his deerskin garments, but because of his nervousness and anticipation he could also feel icy sweat gathering on his hide.

His eyes narrowed in annoyance suddenly as he sensed the old Indian, Chief, moving in the scrub on his right.

Matt’s thin lips made a tight smile. He knew what was bothering the Seneca: Chief was afraid he wouldn’t get the first shot at the Abenaki that was trailing the path of the two unknown white men. And if he didn’t he couldn’t morally claim the scalp.

But he can have it for all of me, Matt thought with a repressed shudder. He cocked an ear, trying to pick up a movement from Shad Holly who was hidden further up the trail. There wasn’t a stir of sound from that quarter. Shad had probably fallen asleep.

Matt canted his eyes downward for a moment, peering again at the strange footprints that stepped before him in the Indian path. Shad and Chief had both agreed that the prints were made by two white men shod in worn boots: a tall man with a long stride, and a squat man with a quick choppy walk.

The three hunters had come upon the trail three hours ago, at the place where Slippery Rock Creek forks, and had further found the telltale tracks of an Abenaki following the two strange white men. They had hurried south quickly, cutting away from the trail, and at the close of three hours running had knifed back into the path in the hope of intercepting the Abenaki. The double boot prints in the path now showed them that they had been successful.

But the presence of the two lone white men in the vast wilderness bothered Matt. What were they doing there? What did they want? They weren’t trappers, like he and Shad, because trappers didn’t wear boots. Nor, Chief had said, were they French soldiers from Venango or Fort le Boeuf, because the boots were American-made. What then?

A bird on the far side of the path began a throaty warble, then changed its mind in the middle of a trembling note and shut up. Matt’s hand tightened on the musket. His thumb eased the lock back.

Thirty paces down the path a pine branch whipped silently aside and a tall Abenaki with crimson war paint on his face stepped into the trail. His obsidian eyes flashed to the snow beneath his moccasins and his narrow bullet-shaped head moved from right to left as he studied the tracks.

Suddenly his head lifted high and he seemed to sniff the crisp air.

He’s on to us, Matt thought urgently, but he isn’t quite sure yet. He edged the musket up slowly to cover the hollow pit in the Indian’s chest where it showed through his open blanket.

The Abenaki started to move, then stopped. His hooded eyes shadowed with suspicion as he stood there like a listening image in the middle of the trail. Matt’s finger curled about the cold trigger.

All at once the Abenaki’s head snapped to the left, his eyes blazed, and he stared at Matt’s pine-needle shelter. Instantly his right hand swung up, showing a glinting tomahawk, and he took an oblique leap into a crouch, and right then Chief’s musket went KA-PLAM! and you could see the bark and snow fly off a pine a foot above the Abenaki’s hunkered head. You never could teach Chief not to jerk the trigger.

That Abenaki hadn’t known about Chief, and you had to say this for him: no near miss was going to distract him from his purpose. He cocked the tomahawk over his shoulder and let out a Eee-yu! and came leaping for Matt, and his intentions couldn’t be any clearer.

Matt swiveled his body in the snow and swung the barrel of the musket and squeezed back on the trigger. A ball of white smoke bloomed as the second shot shattered into the sullen wilderness and, blinking his eyes against the haze, he saw the tattered feather in the Indian’s scalp lock sweep forward as the brave doubled into the mushy snow.

Matt reloaded, keeping one eye on the trail, as he counted up to one hundred. Nothing happened; no second Abenaki appeared. So he stood up and stepped out of his shelter.

He heard Chief give a grunt of admiration—but it was only from politeness. Deep disappointment lay heavy on Chief’s weather-grained face as he moved his stodgy body over to the side of the dead Abenaki.

“Fine,” he muttered; but Matt thought the word lacked conviction. He knew Chief was still thinking about the scalp.

Shad Holly lumbered suddenly through the brush and stood yawning and blinking at the dead Indian. Holly was twenty-one, having three years on Matt, though his great height and rotundity gave him the appearance of being ten years older. He wiped at his beefy red face with a thick square hand, and smiled.

“I knew you was gonna get him, Matty,” he confided. “I didn’t have no worry about that a-tall.”

“That’s why you decided to take a cat nap, eh?” Matt winked at Chief.

Instantly Shad’s pouchy features twisted into a lump of righteous indignation. “It ain’t true that I fell asleep!” he bawled angrily. “You expect a man of my size to run through the woods for three hours like a durn fawn and then not even get to close his eyes for a minute? That’s all I done—just closed ’em for a second while we was waitin’ on this redstick. I didn’t even doze, not even for a minute!”

But Matt was looking at the dead Abenaki again. He had no regrets over the shooting. After all, the Indian had been on the warpath. But it was the first time he had been caught up in the gut-grabbing shock of a life-and-death struggle, and now he felt awed.

Chief, however, seemed to feel nothing at all. He pushed at the dead man with the toe of his moccasin and grunted. Then he hunkered down to peer at the brave’s still features.

“St. Francis Abenaki,” he muttered, with a touch of disdain.

Shad pawed at his beefy face again and sniffed. “Well, that means he was workin’ for the French, and it’s dead certain he wasn’t trailing no frog-eaters.” He eyed the boot prints reflectively.

“They ain’t redcoats, so my guess is they belong to Americans—say scouts, or maybe messengers. Now why would two Americans be coming hotfoot from Canada?”

Matt looked off at the grim wilderness, draped weirdly with sullen gray mist, all crisscrossed with the reaching black stick-arms of leafless branches, and said:

“Only sure way to find out is to catch up with them. They can’t be far ahead . . . probably holed up right now wondering who fired.”

“I’m sick a playing hide’n seek with a bunch of strangers,” Shad grumbled. “We was gonna go home. Don’t you forget that our traps and hides is clear back on the Susquehanna.”

“Yes, but we think these men are Americans,” Matt appealed. “And I think they’re in trouble. And if they are—we can’t leave ’em out here in Mingo and Delaware country alone.”

Shad rolled his eyes and blew out his breath and pawed at his face. Then he threw his fat hands into the air and sighed resignedly.

“All right, Matty, all right. If you ain’t gonna sleep nights without first gettin’ yourself into Injun trouble—we’ll go run ’em down. But I’m agin it.” And, in an undertone, he added, “Hoofin’ and snortin’ about ever’which way . . . pure foolishness!”

The two young trappers shouldered their muskets and turned to go. Then they paused and looked back at Chief.

The old Seneca was still standing over the dead brave wistfully gazing at the prime scalp lock. Shad cocked his head slightly, watching his old friend with amused understanding.

“All right, Chief?” he asked. “Ready to get on?”

The three men came together again and moved quickly off into the white silence.

Moving hurriedly through the gray pall of winter, through the frost-crackling woods, across half-frozen bogs, ice- and refuse-clogged streams, up-down serrated hills, Matt, bringing up the rear, watched his two friends with a warm sense of thankfulness. He couldn’t ask for better companions in the woods. He smiled, seeing old Chief’s head bob down, spying out the track across a stretch of glassy marsh.

No one, not even Chief himself, seemed to know his correct age. Shad figured the old warrior was nearing seventy, but, from Chief’s endless endurance and agility, Matt doubted that he was really that old. They saw very little of Chief during the spring and summer; yet each fall when Shad and Matt set out for a winter of trapping they were sure to find the old Seneca waiting for them somewhere along the banks of the Susquehanna.

Shad said that when he first went into the woods as a boy he had met Chief and had saved his life. Chief, it seemed, had lost his musket in a running battle with a bear, and when Shad came upon them Chief was trying to stand up to the bear with only his hunting knife. So Shad had dropped the bear with one shot.

Chief had made a great to-do over the incident, had exchanged blood with Shad—each pricking his index finger and placing a drop of blood on the other’s tongue, making them blood brothers for life.

Matt grinned to himself, picturing a young, fat Shad and old tattered Chief standing alone in a great forest over the body of a dead bear, solemnly performing the sacred ceremony of brotherhood.

Shad was a curious enigma of frontier life; a great footloose carefree Hercules caught between armed civilization and savage wilderness. He had no idea, and not much interest, in who his parents had been. He had been brought up by a frontier trader who claimed that he had found Shad as a little child in the hands of two Senecas. No one knew whether the story was true or not. Shad had always claimed that the trader merely wanted a boy bound to him to help in his business, because from the day that he was big enough to be useful the trader had worked him ruthlessly and had beaten him at the slightest sign of rebellion.

When Shad turned twelve (and already as big as a horse), he had slapped the trader over the head with one of his own skillets and had run off on his own. Since that time he had lived his life between the forests and the fringes of the frontier towns. Trapping, hunting, doing odd jobs, he had prospered in size and wit.

Wherever Matt traveled he discovered that white and red men alike knew and accepted Shad; though it was true that the Indians seemed to hold Shad in higher regard than did his own white brothers. Matt always believed that this was due to the fact that white men refused to try to understand an enigma, and not because Shad was naturally savage.

It was also true that he had heard slurring remarks made about Shad’s character regarding a certain knack of his for wandering off with anything that wasn’t nailed down, and a few things that were. But Matt had never found this to be true. Shad was just naturally lucky at finding odd things. Shad admitted it himself.

Now, watching Shad scramble over a litter of storm-felled timber, huffing along in Chief’s nimble wake, Matt smiled and thought that regardless of what others thought of him, he would rather trust himself in the woods with Shad than any other man he knew.

Up ahead Chief had paused in the center of a small meadow bedded down in a white blanket of snow. He cocked his head quizzically, then chased himself in a tight circle, peering at the snow at every step. Finally he raised an arm and waved his two friends on.

Shad and Matt hurried up and followed the line of Chief’s pointed finger. A set of moccasin tracks crossed the meadow and joined the double file of boot prints.

Shad lowered his great frame on one knee and inspected the tracks carefully. “Seneca,” he announced shortly. He looked at Chief.

“Friend of yours, Chief?”

Chief grunted and spoke stiffly. “Half King.”

Shad spoke over his shoulder to Matt. “I know this Half King. He’s chief of a small tribe near Chestnut Ridge. He’s a wily old hand—got more savvy than any Injun should naturally have. He sees he’s caught in a squeeze between French and English and he’s tryin’ to play both ends to the middle, hoping to save his land somehow. I ain’t never trusted him much. Too stand-offish.”

Matt saw where the Seneca’s tracks had met with the two strange white men’s, where the three of them had stood talking for a moment, and then where they had all continued on together.

“Well, it appears they didn’t have any trouble,” he said. “Maybe he’s decided to throw in with the English.”

Shad stood up heavily and looked off at the blank wall of white and black forest. “That’s the whole trouble with that Injun . . . you just can’t tell what he’s decided to do. But, Matty, something’s happening out here—something big. Maybe you was right. Maybe we better shag after these fellas and see what’s going on.”

The three friends moved on again, spearheading the lonely wilderness, jogging easier now over a wide belt of smooth rolling hills, coming ever closer to the old Indian village called Murthering Town.

Shad, glancing at the boot prints with concern, said:

“I hope them two idjuts have enough sense to steer clear of Murder Town. Them Mingoes is well named.”

Matt said nothing, though he hoped so too. Vaguely he felt a strange kinship for the two men whose tracks marked the face of the wilderness. He sensed that they were in danger and needed help—even though the help was nothing more than a warning.

Chief guided them skillfully around a long chain of icy ponds whose scummy fingers reached out like the spokes from the hub of a wheel, and once again Matt felt grateful that Chief and Shad were with him. He knew that a man without the knowledge of the land contours could spend a week trying to work his way out of the pond maze—going from the hub out to the tip of a finger creek, back down to the hub, or pond, again, then out to the next tip, and on and on until he either ended going in a circle or blundered onto the next pond.

Evidently the Seneca, Half King, was leading the two white men correctly.

They had entered a frozen wood and were padding along at a regulated pace, when Chief suddenly threw up his arm and stopped. Shad and Matt crowded against his back as the old Indian lifted his head and sniffed the air.

“What is it, Chief?”

“Wood smoke.”

They proceeded on again, only slackening their pace for the sake of caution. All at once a sharp cry cracked at them like a pistol shot and they lurched to a halt in the snow.

“Stop right there! Who are you?”

A small, heavily bundled, booted man stepped from behind a tree and leveled a musket at them. His eyes were perfectly round and steel blue. He was bearded and, somehow, Matt thought, ferocious-looking.

“It’s all right,” Matt called. “We’re friends—Americans.”

“Who’s that Mingo?” the man wanted to know. “He looks like a Laurel Ridger to me.”

“Who gives a hoot what he looks like to you?” Shad shouted peevishly. “ ’Course if he ain’t good enough for you, why then we’ll just take him away with us. I guess you don’t want to hear about the Abenaki that’s been skulkin’ your trail. No, you wouldn’t care to hear nothing about that. Come on, Matt. We’ll go mind our own business.” And, turning, he pretended to take off in a huff.

“Hold on!” the small man cried. “There’s no call to take offense. This is touchy territory. A man can’t afford to take chances with Mingoes who have a yen for scalp lifting. What’s that you say about an Abenaki on our trail?”

“A man can afford to take a moment to see if the other white men around him is still wearing their hair afore he starts calling every Injun he sees a scalper. Do I look scalped to you?” Shad demanded.

“Be quiet, Shad,” Matt said. He walked up to the small man, ignoring the pointed musket. “We’ve been on your trail ever since you crossed Slippery Rock. An Abenaki was also on your trail. We jumped him a few miles back.”

“Yes,” Shad said, coming up to them, “but it was nothin’ much. That Abenaki was only trying to run you and your friend down. He was only dolled up in his war paint and armed like a French fort. Matt here shot him dead after he’d bowled me’n Chief over like reeds in a high wind. You talk about scalpin’! That Abenaki would’ve had my scalp on his hip right now if it hadn’t been for Matt here!” He began to pound Matt’s shoulder with sledgehammer blows of admiration.

Matt dodged to one side and frowned at the big fellow.

The little man looked confused and slightly embarrassed. He tried to smile at Matt and cock a dubious eye at Shad at the same time.

“I don’t want to appear ungrateful,” he mumbled hesitantly. “I didn’t know that—”

“Gist!” a sharp voice called from somewhere beyond them; a voice that managed the difficult feat of sounding both pleasant and commanding. “Bring the gentlemen in here. I think you’ve kept them out in the cold long enough.”