XVI
THE detachment of Highlanders that Lieutenant Everard left to reinforce Fort Prince George proved of no great interest to the troops already stationed there pining in the weariness of long inaction. The natural expectation of the revival of zest in life incident to new companionship, fresh experiences, stories still untold, and songs as yet unsung all fell flat in the reality; for few of the newcomers could speak aught but the Gaelic, and they clung together with a pertinacity and a suspiciousness of the “Sassenach sidier,” with whom they were thus unequally yoked, that threatened faction in the little garrison. Hence, to accustom them to their new comrades and break up the clique whenever it was possible, the Highlanders were separately detailed to duty among the English, although on parade, at roll call, and at drill they were segregated and kept within their own ranks.
Callum MacIlvesty was one of the few who could speak English; but although, being a “gentleman ranker,” his lowly station involved association with his military equals, he seemed hardly likely to contribute notably to the mirth of nations. He was preoccupied, gravely brooding much of the time, and even when roused showed a temperament averse to the familiar horseplay of the jocund Britisher. Among his Scotch comrades he was little subject to the irksome constraints of his position as a common soldier. They could gauge and realize his claims to a higher station, and, more than conceding them, showed him a consideration and respect to which he had been accustomed from his earliest youth. He returned their kindness, which thus manifested a touch of the magnanimous, with earnest fellow feeling, and his relations with them were affectionate and even fraternal. To the English contingent at the fort, however, he was merely “a bare-kneed Sawney who held his head stiff and stepped high,” with no justification that they could discriminate, for he, like them, shouldered a musket for pay.
Even in this humble station it seemed to him that fortune was singularly adverse, and that his enforced absence from his regiment had cost him the signal opportunity of his life to achieve distinction or aught of value. Recovering from a wound, but yet unfit for duty, he had been granted a furlough early in the year, which he had spent at Jock Lesly’s trading-house, and afterward, at the moment of eager expectation of sailing to join the Forty-Second in the West Indies, he had been ordered with the small detachment of Highlanders in Charlestown to reinforce the commissioners’ escort because of previous familiarity with the Cherokee country. While he was engaged in this distasteful pacific duty, Moro Castle had been carried by storm and the city of Havanna had capitulated, and the Forty-Second, returning to America, was flushed with victory and elated with glory. There was to be no more fighting, it seemed, and in this tame inaction the winter at Fort Prince George was but a dreary prospect.
The inglorious return of the commissioners’ force from the Cherokee country, and the futile arrest which Everard had attempted, were matters of great moment to the garrison, lying as it did within the borders of the Cherokee possessions; but since the event had been all bloodless, the defeat had been esteemed something of a farce. The English soldiers of the escort, who could understand the fun poked at them, one of the essential constituents of mirthful ridicule, had been mercilessly guyed before their departure for Charlestown; and one memorable night the subject came up anew in the guardroom, when, in pursuance of the plan of detailing the Highlanders to duty separately among the English, Callum chanced to be one of the main-guard.
The firelight from the great stone chimney place flashed on the whitewashed walls and with a metallic glitter was reflected from the stack of arms, in the centre of the puncheon floor, ready for instant use, although the cry “Guard, turn out!” seemed many hours distant down the watches of the night, unless indeed some unforeseen chance should betide. There were several bunks against the wall, which were somewhat superfluous at this hour, for at night the guard were not permitted to seek repose thereon, although not a vigilant eye should be closed. A large door led without to the parade, and a smaller one gave upon an inner apartment which bore the huge lock common to that day and a curiosity in this. The key was evidently turned upon some wight who had found liberty joyous while it lasted, and who now and again sent forth drunken snatches of song, occasionally varied with vociferous affectations of woe, weeping and sniffing and groaning by merry turns, till a freshened joyous impulse would set the catch trolling once more.
The group about the guardroom fire took slight note of these aberrations from the regulation deportment appropriate to the rôle of melancholy prisoner. They were all used to these frequent incarcerations of their jolly comrade, and realized that the rigor of his punishment would befall him when he should be sober enough to profit by it.
A heavy rain beating tumultuously against the walls and splashing from the eaves added zest to the luxury of the great blazing logs and the talk of the group ranged around on the broad hearth of flagstones.
“An’ d’ ye mean to say, Callum,” began a leathern-visaged, weather-beaten soldier, the corporal of the guard, leaning his elbows on his knees as he sat on a great billet of wood, “that as soon as old Moy Toy sneezed three times your Lieutenant Everard give the word ‘Double-quick while ye can! For’ard, by the rear!’ and the whole command faced right about and footed it out of the Cherokee country?”
He winked jovially at the others as the big Highlander, half reclining on the floor at one side of the hearth, turned his head slowly and came gradually to a realization of his surroundings.
“I said naething o’ the sort, an’ ye ken it full weel,” Callum replied gruffly.
“That’s not the way to answer your s’perior officer,” the jolly corporal admonished him, with a leer.
“Ye never asked no sic a fule question as my superior officer,” Callum deigned to respond after a pause. “Ask me now if my firelock is clean an’ my cartouch box is ready, an’ I’se gie ye a ceevil answer; but my superior officer hae naught to do wi’ Moy Toy’s sneeshin’.”
“There!” exclaimed the corporal with the affectation of delighted triumph and discovery. “He have said it! He said that Moy Toy sneezed and fairly frighted Lieutenant Everard out of the Cherokee country!”
A roar of laughter rewarded this pleasantry, and hearing the gay sound, the incarcerated soldier struck up with rather a dreary quaver, “‘I’ll ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross!’”
“You will ride a wooden horse as soon as you are sober enough to mount one!” called out the corporal.
A great whining and wheezing and affectations of lamentation ensued on the other side of the door, at which all the guard laughed uproariously.
One of the English contingent, a short, stocky fellow, who had been carefully greasing a pair of feet always kept in the prime order for marching essential to the regular infantry-man, now presented those members glistening and perfect on the edge of the hearth, that the unguents might take full effect by aid of the heat of the fire. He had just been admonished by the corporal of that regulation which forbids the guard to lay aside any of their clothing or accoutrements. He first argued that stockings were neither arms nor garments, then pleaded with the corporal for a momentary respite that the grease might soak into the flesh instead of the fabric of his hose. To take full advantage of the official clemency he sought to create a diversion by resuming with animation the previous subject.
“I wonder,” he said, “if that furriner up there in the Cherokee country is French or a Spaniard. When I was stationed at Gibraltar I learned a deal o’ the lingo of that country.”
A long silence ensued. No surprise was intimated at the extent of the soldier’s service, for so often had he recounted the details of his experiences at Gibraltar and the observations he had collated from Spain that they had grown a burden and had earned for him the sobriquet of “the Señor,”—appropriately, perhaps, mispronounced “the Sinner.”
The recent hostilities between England and Spain gave additional and phenomenal interest to his prelections now.
“The Spaniards are a great people for all that’s come an’ gone,” he resumed presently. “’Twas them strengthened the fortifications at Gibraltar so they are now what they be,” he added significantly.
“They did so! An’ they done it well, begorra!” retorted a big Irishman. “An’,” with a rollicking laugh from his full red lips, “bedad, by the same token we tuk it away from ’um.”
“The Sinner” took no notice of this pertinent corollary of his proposition. He was looking reflectively at his feet, stretched out straight before him as he sat flat on the hearth. His hair stood up straight from his brow and was tied in a thin queue behind. He had small bright eyes, heavy-lidded and downcast now. His face was clear and youthful, with a large jowl, that narrowed toward the mouth, and a short blunt nose. He was a good soldier by line and rule, and of a particularly clean aspect. In fact he had so fresh, scraped, washed an appearance that with his porcine resemblance he suggested, as he sat with his plump pink and white feet and shins bare of hose to the knee, some punctual pig that had accommodatingly cleaned and scalded himself—if such a process were ever possible in the lifetime of swine.
The flames flared furiously up the chimney. Outside the roar of water that intimated the swift flow of the Keowee River could be differentiated from the sound of the rain in a fusillade on the roof and its splashing sweep from the eaves. A roll of thunder far away shook the earth, unseasonable, seemingly irrelevant to the occasion, hardly appurtenant to this steady torrent of wintry rain.
“If that furriner is one of them Dons,” said “the Sinner,” resuming his speculations, his eyes critically on the contour of his great toe, “he knows what’s what. He ain’t there among them Injuns for nothin’. They are the strategists—them Spaniards.”
“Arrah,” exclaimed the Irishman, blowing out his contempt with a cloud of strong tobacco as he smoked his little cutty pipe, “it is just as well, thin, that they have got nothin’ I want. Cubia will contint me—that is, for the presint,” he added, with a bland air of moderation.
For this was before the treaty restoring “the Havannah” to Spain.
“I’m talkin’ about the hold they are takin’ on this country,” argued “the Sinner.” “They are surrounding us”—an apprehension at that time entertained by wiser men than he—“amongst all these wildernesses an’ with no defenses but two or three flimsy mud forts. They will retaliate for the Havannah an’ Manilla on the frontier of the British colonies in Ameriky. Diablo! I tell you now, if that man in the Cherokee country is one o’ them caballeros, what between the Spaniard an’ the French an’ the Injuns the southern colonies is crushed.”
He brought his two shining feet together with a clap, the smart impact denoting the small chance that aught intervening would have of escape.
The other men looked reflectively at the fire. They were as brave as soldiers need to be, but the conditions of the frontier were of various adverse interpretations. While they could march against an open enemy readily enough, the chances of traps and massacres, of torture and slavery in captivity, supplemented by the wiles of a civilized power coalescing with the savages, and the ever recurrent doubt of the ability of distant superior officers to cope with these untoward circumstances so far removed from their observation, all combined to give the soldiery many a more serious thought than appertained to their humble functions as the hands that execute rather than the brain that devises.
The corporal eyed “the Sinner” rancorously.
“Ye must be gittin’ them feet ready to gallopade up an’ down on extra drill,” he said. “I’ll report you for spreading discontent among the troops with your tomfool talk about them Dons.”
“Why,” said “the Sinner,” with a look of innocent surprise, “I was just thinkin’ about all this talk o’ silk wums in Carolina an’ Georgia—when in Spain—why you ought jus’ to see the wum farms amongst the mulberries on the”—
“No—no—ye were talkin’ about that fellow up in the Cherokee country!” persisted the corporal.
“Oh, yes,” admitted the wily “Sinner,” perceiving the evasion was useless. “I was wonderin’ if the lad was a Spaniard to be stirrin’ up such a commotion. There’s a deal too many o’ them on the continent now to make it surprisin’ if he is one too!”
“I’ll tell ye, thin, me bye! ’tis Oirish he is,” declared the Hibernian genially. “One o’ me own pattern. Whenever ye meet a distinguished compatriot an’ don’t know wher he comes from, set him down for an’ Oirishman, bein’ a man o’ ganius!”
“He is a Scotchman I’ll wager,” said a native South Carolinian, for already the leaven of disaffection against that nationality that had helped to make the province strong and thrifty was beginning to work. “A Scotchman, and not just one too many, either. A Scotch trader, I’ll be bound, turned Cherokee. Some o’ the French get regularly adopted into the tribes. I know some Scotch fellows among the Chickasaws that are trying it, to trade the more handily, and I dare be sworn that this makebate among the Cherokees is another Injun Sawney!”
This stirred Callum’s patriotism, the master key of a Scotchman’s heart.
“The man’s a Frenchman,” he said curtly.
“Did he sneeze in French?” demanded the jocose corporal.
Callum did not laugh. His eyes were fixed on the masses of red coals beneath the flames of the fire that cast their continual flicker over his dreamy retrospective face.
“I wad hae thought mysel’ he had been an Englishman, that is, a Firginian,” he said reflectively, as if speaking to himself. “But no, the man is French!”
The corporal scarce drew a breath. “Hey, Callum lad,” he contrived to say with a casual intonation, “had ye ever seen him afore that day?”
“Ou, ay, many a time,” replied Callum, intent on his memories.
“Where, lad? where?”
Callum roused himself in returning consciousness.
“In the Cherokee country, man! At Ioco Town, at Jock Lesly’s trading-house. We a’ took him for a Firginian.”
“And why do you think now he is French? Lieutenant Everard gave that p’int up, they tell me.”
Callum hesitated. “I hae my ain reasons,” he said, but with such finality of tone that the corporal pressed the matter no further.
When the guard was relieved the next morning, the officer of the day found a point of importance noted in the written report of the officer of the guard, and as a consequence Callum was surprised by a summons to the presence of the commandant of the fort, to reply to a very queer and childish question, as it seemed to him.
“How do you know that that man in the Cherokee country whom Lieutenant Everard was—about to arrest”—Captain Howard put it as euphemistically as possible, out of respect to a brother officer—“how do you know that he is French?”
“I heard him speak French, sir, to himself—when he thought he was alane.”
“But you know that an Englishman, any one who can learn the language, can speak French.”
“Not like a Frenchman, sir,” persisted Callum.
Captain Howard hesitated. Of all things he would like to secure this makebate, this formidable influence among the Cherokees, nay among all the tribes, that had rendered the costly peace which had been so difficult to secure, so long sought, but a hollow semblance, a menacing sham. Moreover, he would be very glad to succeed where Everard had failed. A very close clutch on distinction had the dapper young lieutenant let slip. And here was the man who in the first instance had afforded information.
“Have you no other reason for your belief?” Captain Howard asked anxiously.
“Aye, sir, I ken he is French frae himsel’,” Callum replied calmly. “He tauld a woman, sir, an’ she tauld me; but you will no ask me to mention her name.”
“Certainly not,” said the officer, thinking that he wished to avoid implicating others in responsibility; “a noncombatant in any event. But,” eagerly, “would you know the fellow if you should see him again?”
“I wad, sir.”
“In any disguise?” the officer persisted.
“I wad indeed, sir, fu’ weel.”
“That is all for the present,” said Captain Howard. Callum gave him an amazed stare, then saluted and withdrew, wondering at this puerile futility. Would he know the man indeed!