The Reckoning

"I had hoped one day to do a service which his Excellency could openly acknowledge—a service which might, one day, permit him to receive me. I have never seen him. I think, now, I never shall. But, as you say, sir, ambitions like these are selfish, therefore they are petty and unworthy. He does know best."

The Colonel nodded gravely, watching me, his unlighted pipe drooping in his hand.

"There is one thing—before I go," I said. "My betrothed wife is with me. May I leave her in your care, sir?"

"Yes, Carus."

"She is asleep in that room above—" I looked up at the closed shutters, scarcely seeing them for the blinding rush of tears; yet stared steadily till my eyes were dry and hot again, and my choked and tense throat relaxed.

"I think," said the Colonel, "that she is safer in Johnstown Fort than anywhere else just now. I promise you, Carus, to guard and cherish her as though she were my own child. I may be called away—you understand that!—but I mean to hold Johnstown Fort, and shall never be too far from Johnstown to relieve it in event of siege. What can be done I will do on my honor as a soldier. Are you content?"

"Yes."

He lowered his voice: "Is it best to see her before you start?"

I shook my head.

"Then pick your Oneida," he muttered. "Which one?"

"Little Otter. Send for him."

The Colonel leaned back on the bench and tapped at the outside of the tavern window. An aide came clanking out, and presently hurried away with a message to Little Otter to meet me at Butlersbury within the hour, carrying parched corn and salt for three days' rations.

For a while we sat there, going over personal matters. Our sea-chests were to be taken to the fort; my financial affairs I explained, telling him where he might find my papers in case of accident to me. Then I turned over to him my watch, what money I had of Elsin's, and my own.

"If I do not return," I said, "and if this frontier can not hold out, send Miss Grey with a flag to New York. Sir Peter Coleville is kin to her; and when he understands what danger menaces her he will defend her to the last ditch o' the law. Do you understand, Colonel?"

"No, Carus, but I can obey."

"Then remember this: She must never be at the mercy of Walter Butler."

"Oh, I can remember that," he said drily.

For a few moments I sat brooding, head between my hands; then, of a sudden impulse, I swung around and laid my heart bare to him—told him everything in a breath—trembling, as a thousand new-born fears seized me, chilling my blood.

"Good God!" I stammered, "it is not for myself I care now, Colonel! But the thought of him—of her—together—I can not endure. I tell you, the dread of this man has entered my very soul; there is terror at a hint of him. Can I not stay, Colonel? Is there no way for me to stay? She is so young, so alone–"

Hope died as I met his eye. I set my teeth and crushed speech into silence.

"The welfare of a nation comes first," he said slowly.

"I know—I know—but–"

"All must sacrifice to that principle, Carus. Have not the men of New York stood for it? Have not the men of Tryon given their all? I tell you, the army shall eat, but the bread they munch is made from blood-wet grain; and for every loaf they bake a life has been offered. Where is the New Yorker who has not faced what you are facing? At the crack of the ambushed rifle our people drop at the plow, and their dying eyes look upon wife and children falling under knife and hatchet. It must be so if the army is to eat and liberty live in this country we dare call our own. And when the call sounds, we New Yorkers must go, Carus. Our women know it, even our toddling children know it, God bless them!—and they proudly take their chances—nay, they demand the chances of a war that spares neither the aged nor the weak, neither mother nor cradled babe, nor the hound at the door, nor the cattle, nor any living thing in this red fury of destruction!"

He had risen, eyes glittering, face hardened into stone. "Go to your betrothed and say good-by. You do not know her yet, I think."

"She is Canadienne," I said.

"She is what the man she loves is—if she honors him. His cause is hers, his country hers, his God is her God!"

"Her heart is with neither side–"

"Her heart is with you! Shame to doubt her—if I read her eyes! Read them, Carus!"

I wheeled, speechless; Elsin Grey stood before me, deadly pale.

After a moment she moved forward, laying her hand on my shoulder and facing Colonel Willett with a smile. All color had fled from her face, but neither lip nor voice quivered as she spoke:

"I think you do understand, sir. We Canadiennes yield nothing in devotion to the women of New York. Where we love, we honor. What matters it where the alarm sounds? We understand our lovers; we can give them to the cause of freedom as well here in Tryon County as on the plains of Abraham—can we not, my betrothed?" she said, looking into my face; but her smile was heart-breaking.

"Child, child," said Willett, taking her free hand in both of his, "you speak a silent language with your eyes that no man can fail to understand."

"I failed," I said bitterly, as Willett kissed her hand, placed it in mine, and, turning, entered the open door.

"And what blame, Carus?" she whispered. "What have I been to you but a symbol of unbridled selfishness, asking all, giving nothing? How could you know I loved you so dearly that I could stand aside to let you pass? First I loved you selfishly, shamelessly; then I begged your guilty love, offering mine in the passion of my ignorance and bewilderment."

Her arm fell from my shoulder and nestled in mine, and we turned away together under the brilliant autumn glory of the trees.

"That storm that tore me—ah, Carus—I had been wrecked without your strong arm to bear me up!"

"It was you who bore me up, Elsin. How can I leave you now!"

"Why, Carus, our honor is involved."

"Our honor!"

"Yes, dear, ours."

"You—you bid me go, Elsin?"

"If I bid you stay, what would avail except to prove me faithless to you? How could I truly love you and counsel dishonor?"

White as a flower, the fixed smile never left her lips, nor did her steady pace beside me falter, or knee tremble, or a finger quiver of the little hand that lay within my own.

And then we fell silent, walking to and fro under the painted maple-trees in Johnstown streets, seeing no one, heeding no one, until the bell at the fort struck the hour. It meant the end.

We kissed each other once. I could not speak. My horse, led by Jack Mount, appeared from the tavern stables; and we walked back to the inn together.

Once more I took her in my arms; then she gently drew away and entered the open door, hands outstretched as though blinded, feeling her way—that was the last I saw of her, feeling her dark way alone into the house.

Senses swimming, dumb, deafened by the raging, beating pulses hammering in my brain, I reeled at a gallop into the sunny street, north, then west, then north once more, tearing out into the Butlersbury road. A gate halted me; I dismounted and dragged it open, then to horse again, then another gate, then on again, hailed and halted by riflemen at the cross-roads, which necessitated the summoning of my wits at last before they would let me go.

Now riding through the grassy cart-road, my shoulders swept by the fringing willows, I came at length to the Danascara, shining in the sunlight, and followed its banks—the same banks from which so often in happier days I had fished. At times I traveled the Tribes Hill road, at times used shorter cuts, knowing every forest-trail as I did, and presently entered the wood-road that leads from Caughnawaga church to Johnstown. I was in Butlersbury; there was the slope, there the Tribes Hill trail, there the stony road leading to that accursed house from which the Butlers, father and son, some five years since, had gone forth to eternal infamy.

And now, set in a circle of cleared land and ringed by the ancient forests of the north, I saw the gray, weather-beaten walls of the house. The lawns were overgrown; the great well-sweep shattered; the locust-trees covered with grapevines—the cherry- and apple-trees to the south broken and neglected. Weeds smothered the flower-gardens, where here and there a dull-red poppy peered at me through withering tangles; lilac and locust had already shed foliage too early blighted, but the huge and forbidding maples were all aflame in their blood-red autumn robes. Here the year had already begun to die; in the clear air a faint whiff of decay came from the rotting heaps of leaves—decay, ruin, and the taint of death; and, in the sad autumn stillness, something ominous, something secret and sly—something of malice.

Seeing no sign of my Oneida, I walked my horse across the lawn and up to the desolate row of windows. The shutters had been ripped off their hinges; all within was bare and dark; dimly I made out the shadowy walls of a hallway which divided the house into halves. By the light which filtered through the soiled windows I examined room after room from the outside, then, noiselessly, tried the door, but found it bolted from within as well as locked from without. Either the Butlers or the commissioners of sequestration must have crawled through a window to do this. I prowled on, looking for the window they had used as exit, examining the old house with a fascinated repugnance. The clapboards were a foot wide, evidently fashioned with care and beaded on the edges. The outside doors all opened outward; and I noted, with a shudder of contempt, the "witch's half-moon," or lunette, in the bottom of each door, which betrays the cowardly superstition of the man who lived there. Such cat-holes are fashioned for haunted houses; the specter is believed to crawl out through these openings, and then to be kept out with a tarred rag stuffed into the hole—ghosts being unable to endure tar. Faugh! If specters walk, the accursed house must be alive with them—ghosts of the victims of old John Butler, wraiths dripping red from Cherry Valley—children with throats cut; women with bleeding heads and butchered bodies, stabbed through and through—and perhaps the awful specter of Lieutenant Boyd, with eyes and nails plucked out, and tongue cut off, bound to the stake and slowly roasting to death, while Walter Butler watched the agony curiously, interested and surprised to see a disemboweled man live so long!