The Reckoning Part 39

"Does a chief answer as squirrels answer one to another?--as crow replies to crow?" I asked sternly. "Go teach the Canienga how to listen and how to wait!"

His glowing eyes, fastened on mine, were lowered to the symbol on my breast, then his shaved head bent, and he folded his powerful arms.

"Onehda has spoken," he said respectfully. "Even a Delaware may claim his day of grace. My ears are open, O my younger brother."

"Then bear this message to the council: I accept the belt; my answer shall be the answer of the Oneida nation; and with my reply shall go three strings. Depart in peace, Bearer of Belts!"

Lightly, gracefully as a tree-lynx, he stooped and seized his rifle, wheeled, pa.s.sed noiselessly across the road, turned, and buried himself in the tufted bushes. For an instant the green tops swayed, then not a ripple of the foliage, not a sound marked the swift course of the naked belt-bearer through the uncharted sea of trees.

Mounting my roan, I wheeled him north at a slow walk, preoccupied, morose, sadly absorbed in this new order of things where an Oneida now must needs answer a Mohawk as an Iroquois should once have answered an Erie or an Algonquin. Alas for the great League! alas for the mighty dead! Hiawatha! Atotarho! Where were they? Where now was our own Odasete; and Kanyadario, and the mighty wisdom of Dekanawidah? The end of the Red League was already in sight; the Great Peace was broken; the downfall of the Confederacy was at hand.

At that northern tryst at Thendara, the nine sachems allotted to the Canienga, the fourteen sachems of the Onondaga, the eight Senecas, the Cayuga ten must look in vain for nine Oneidas. And without them the Great Peace breaks like a rotten arrow where the war-head drops and the feathers fall from the unbound nock.

Strange, strange, that I, a white man of blood untainted, must answer for this final tragic catastrophe! Without me, perhaps, the sachems of the three clans might submit to the will of the League, for even the surly Onondagas had now heeded the League-Call--yes, even the Tuscaroras, too. And as for those Delaware dogs, they had come, belly-dragging, cringing to the lash of the stricken Confederacy, though now was their one chance in a hundred years to disobey and defy.

But the Lenape were ever women.

Strange, strange, that I, a white man of unmixed blood, should stand in League-Council for the n.o.blest clan of the Oneida nation!

That I had been adopted satisfied the hereditary law of chieftains.h.i.+p; that I had been selected satisfied the elective law of the sachems.

Rank follows the female line; the son of a chief never succeeded to rank. It is the matron--the chief woman of the family--who chooses a dead chief's successor from the female line in descent; and thus Cloud on the Sun chose me, her adopted; and, dying, heard the loud, imperious challenge from the council-fire as the solemn rite ended with:

"_Now show me the man!_"

And so, knowing that the antlers were lifted and the quiver slung across my thigh, she died contented, and I, a lad, stood a chief of the Oneida nation. Never since time began, since the Caniengas adopted Hiawatha, had a white councilor been chosen who had been accepted by family, clan, and national council, and ratified by the federal senate, excepting only Sir William Johnson and myself. That Algonquin word "sachem," so seldom used, so difficult of p.r.o.nunciation by the Iroquois, was never employed to designate a councilor in council; there they used the t.i.tle, Roy-a-neh, and to that t.i.tle had I answered the belt of the Iroquois, in the name of Kayanehenh-Kowa, the Great Peace.

For what Magna Charta is to the Englishman, what the Const.i.tution is to us, is the Great Peace to an Iroquois; and their grat.i.tude, their intense reverence and love for its founder, Hiawatha, is like no sentiment we have conceived even for the beloved name of Was.h.i.+ngton.

Now that the Revolution had split the Great Peace, which is the Iroquois League, the larger portion of the nation had followed Brant to Canada--all the Caniengas, the greater part of the Onondaga nation, all the Cayugas, the one hundred and fifty of our own Oneidas. And though the Senecas did not desert their western post as keepers of the shattered gate in a house divided against itself, they acted with the Mohawks; the Onondagas had brought their wampum from Onondaga, and a new council-fire was kindled in Canada as rallying-place of a great people in process of final disintegration.

It was sad to me who loved them, who knew them first as firm allies of New York province, who understood them, their true character, their history and tradition, their intimate social and family life.

And though I stood with those whom they struck heavily, and who in turn struck them hip and thigh, I bear witness before G.o.d that they were not by nature the fiends and demons our historians have painted, not by instinct the violent and ferocious scourges that the painted Tories made of these children of the forest, who for five hundred years had formed a confederacy whose sole object was peace.

I speak not of the brutal and degraded _gens de prairie_--the horse-riding savages of the West, whose primal instincts are to torture the helpless and to violate women--a crime no Iroquois, no Huron, no Algonquin, no Lenni-Lenape can be charged with. But I speak for the _gens de bois_--the forest Indians of the East, and of those who maintained the Great League, which was but a powerful tribunal imposing peace upon half a continent.

Left alone to themselves, unhara.s.sed by men of my blood and color, they are a kindly and affectionate people, full of sympathy for their friends in distress, considerate of their women, tender to their children, generous to strangers, anxious for peace, and profoundly reverent where their League or its founders were concerned.

Centuries of warfare for self-preservation have made them efficient in the arts of war. Ferocity, craft, and deception, practised on them by French, Dutch, and English, have taught them to reply in kind. Yet these somber, engrafted qualities which we have recorded as their distinguis.h.i.+ng traits, no more indicate their genuine character than war-paint and shaven head display the customary costume they appear in among their own people. The cruelties of war are not peculiar to any one people; and G.o.d knows that in all the Iroquois confederacy no savage could be found to match the British Provost, Cunningham, or Major Bromfield--no atrocities could obscure the atrocities in the prisons and prison-s.h.i.+ps of New York, the deeds of the Butlers, of Crysler, of Beacraft, and of Bettys.

For, among the Iroquois, I can remember only two who were the peers in cruelty of Walter Butler and the Tory Beacraft, and these were the Indian called Seth Henry, and the half-breed hag, Catrine Montour.

Pondering on these things, perplexed and greatly depressed, I presently emerged from the forest-belt through which I had been riding, and found our little column halted in the open country, within a few minutes'

march of the Schenectady highway.

The rangers looked up at me curiously as I pa.s.sed, doubtless having an inkling of what had been going on from questioning the Oneida scouts, for Murphy broke out impulsively, "Sure, Captain, we was that onaisy, alanna, that Elerson an' me matched apple-pipps f'r to inthrojuce wan another to that powwow forninst the big pine."

"Had you appeared yonder while I was talking to that belt-bearer it might have gone hard with me, Tim," I said gravely.

Riding on past the spot where Jack Mount stood, his brief authority ended, I heard him grumbling about the rashness of officers and the market value of a good scalp in Quebec; and I only said: "Scold as much as you like, Jack, only obey." And so cantered forward to where Elsin sat her black mare, watching my approach. Her steady eyes welcomed, mine responded; in silence we wheeled our horses north once more, riding stirrup to stirrup through the dust. On either side stretched abandoned fields, growing up in weeds and thistles, for now we were almost on the Mohawk River, the great highway of the border war down which the tides of destruction and death had rolled for four terrible years.

There was nothing to show for it save meadows abandoned to willow scrub, fallow fields deep in milk-weed, goldenrod, and asters; and here and there a charred rail or two of some gate or fence long since destroyed.

Far away across the sand-flats we could see a ruined barn outlined against the sunset sky, but no house remained standing to the westward far as the eye could reach. However, as we entered the highway, which I knew well, because now we were approaching a country familiar to me, I, leading, caught sight of a few Dutch roofs to the east, and presently came into plain view of the stockade and blockhouses of Schenectady, above which rose the lovely St. George's church and the heavy walls and four demi-bastions of the citadel which is called the Queen's Fort.

As we approached in full view of the ramparts there was a flash, a ball of white smoke; and no doubt a sentry had fired his musket, such was evidently their present state of alarm, for I saw the Stars and Stripes run up on the citadel, and, far away, I heard the conch-horn blowing, and the startled music of the light-infantry horns. Evidently the sight of our Oneidas, spread far forward in a semicircle, aroused distrust. I sent Murphy forward with a flag, then advanced very deliberately, recalling the Oneidas by whistle-signal.

And, as we rode under the red rays of the westering sun, I pointed out St. George's to Elsin and the Queen's Fort, and where were formerly the town gates by which the French and Indians had entered on that dreadful winter night when they burned Schenectady, leaving but four or five houses, and the snowy streets all wet and crimsoned with the blood of women and children.

"But that was many, many years ago, sweetheart," I added, already sorry that I had spoken of such things. "It was in 1690 that Monsieur De Mantet and his Frenchmen and Praying Indians did this."

"But people do such things now, Carus," she said, serious eyes raised to mine.

"Oh, no----"

"They did at Wyoming, at Cherry Valley, at Minnisink. You told me so in New York--before you ever dreamed that you and I would be here together."

"Ah, Elsin, but things have changed now that Colonel Willett is in the Valley. His Excellency has sent here the one man capable of holding the frontier; and he will do it, dear, and there will be no more Cherry Valleys, no more Minnisinks, no more Wyomings now."

"Why were they moving out of the houses in Albany, Carus?"

I did not reply.

Presently up the road I saw Murphy wave his white flag; and, a moment later, the Orange Gate, which was built like a drawbridge, fell with a m.u.f.fled report, raising a cloud of dust. Over it, presently, our horses' feet drummed hollow as we spurred forward.

"Pa.s.s, you Tryon County men!" shouted the sentinels; and the dusty column entered. We were in Schenectady at last.

As we wheeled up the main street of the town, marching in close column between double lines of anxious townsfolk, a staff-officer, wearing the uniform of the New York line, came clattering down the street from the Queen's Fort, and drew bridle in front of me with a sharp, precise salute.

"Captain Renault?" he asked.

I nodded, returning his salute.

"Colonel Gansvoort's compliments, and you are directed to report to Colonel Willett at Butlersbury without losing an hour."

"That means an all-night march," I said bluntly.

"Yes, sir." He lowered his voice: "The enemy are on the Sacandaga."

I stiffened in my stirrups. "Tell Colonel Gansvoort it shall be done, sir." And I wheeled my horse, raising my rifle: "Attention!--to the left--dress! Right about face! By sections of four--to the right--wheel--March! ... Halt! Front--dress! Trail--arms! March!"

The veterans of Morgan, like trained troop-horses, had executed the maneuvers before they realized what was happening. They were the first formal orders I had given. I myself did not know how the orders might be obeyed until all was over and we were marching out of the Orange Gate once more, and swinging northward, wagons, bat-horses, and men in splendid alignment, and the Oneidas trotting ahead like a pack of foxhounds under master and whip. But I had to do with irregulars; I understood that. Already astonished and inquiring glances shot upward at me as I rode with Elsin; already I heard a low whispering among the men. But I waited. Then, as we turned the hill, a cannon on the Queen's Fort boomed good-by and G.o.dspeed!--and our conch-horn sounded a long, melancholy farewell.

It was then that I halted the column, facing them, rifle resting across my saddle-bow.

"Men of New York," I said, "the enemy are on the Sacandaga."

Intense silence fell over the ranks.