From Sea to Shining Sea (34 page)

“Company, halt.”

“Halt.”

“Halt.”

The command went back into the fog.

Johnny stood looking at his troops with weariness and pity. Half of the men were barefooted; some had wound their feet with strips of strouding. Some had footless stockings clinging to their calves. One tall boy wore a sleeveless uniform coat from which both long, bare arms protruded, and his hat perched atop a filthy mass of head bandages, brown with old blood. Many of the men had no coats or hats. The garments of some still showed the rips and rents that they had sustained weeks ago in the hand-to-hand battle at Brandywine. There seemed to be no such thing as a quartermaster in Washington’s army this fall.

Someone had fashioned a new regimental flag from a piece of buff trouser cloth and inked the words
VIII VIRGA
. on it. It now hung on an ash pole, and he gazed at it. The original probably still was lying there in the battlefield at Brandywine, stained by British and American blood, and the thought haunted him like a poem of pathos.

The invisible commotion ahead went on unabated. Vaguely, through the fog and smoke, Johnny thought he could discern the rectangular form of a large building. So much shooting and shouting was coming from there that he presumed it must be a fortified house, under attack.

A musketball hummed past his nose, and a dozen shots flashed in the fog ten yards away. Before Johnny could move, a body of men came charging out of the fog from that direction with their bayonets leveled, bellowing murder, and the two companies were but twenty feet from clashing before the attackers saw that these were Americans like themselves, and hauled up.

“By heaven, forgive me,” their lieutenant implored, coming ashen-faced toward Johnny. “I saw those red coats,” he explained, nodding toward the prisoners.

This turned out to be a company of Marylanders, and was, like everybody else, it seemed, lost. “I saw a damned crow fly by upside down, he was so lost,” the Marylander tried to joke. “I …” The lieutenant was looking over Johnny’s shoulder. His eyes bulged. “Oh, thunder,” he muttered. Johnny turned to look.

The entire fog bank behind him seemed to be turning pink, then deepening to scarlet. It was a line of advancing British infantry, looking as long as a regiment, treading out of the haze with bayonets at the ready. Johnny looked to the other side of the road, as a way to retreat; his men were babbling excitedly. From that side of the road came the sounds of horse, and a long line of British cavalry materialized, just then seeing the ragged Continentals and their prisoners in the road and turning guns on them. The prisoners cheered and laughed.

There was nowhere to go. A youthful British officer, handsome but for his sleep-puffy eyes, walked close to the two American lieutenants and stopped, clicking his heels once.

“I presume,” he said, “you’re discreet enough to give me your swords, gentlemen, and order your men to ground their arms?”

It was such a strange, absurd moment. Here Johnny Clark stood, in a hazy world no more than thirty yards around, while cannon and musketry roared unseen somewhere outside its misty horizons, and he was being addressed politely in cultivated English by a most agreeable young man who was his enemy. Somehow the whole matter of war seemed revealed as a game, and he was almost stupefied by a great sense of relief. Johnny had felt this way only once before: once when a young lady he’d loved, but disliked, had said she was tired of him. He told his men to lay down their muskets.

He turned his saber in his hand and presented it hilt-first to the smooth-cheeked Briton, who smiled.

“Thank you. And you.” The Englishman took the Marylander’s sword, too, bowed slightly, straightened up, and sighed, then rose on his toes two times. “Ehmm! I say. It’s rather good to be alive, what?”

“So my mother always tells me,” Johnny replied, “but then, ’twas she that put me into this lunatic world.”

T
HE OTHER THREE AUGUST CONSPIRATORS WERE ALREADY IN
Governor Henry’s library when Thomas Jefferson arrived. In the years since George had seen him, Jefferson had acquired some markings of maturity: a few gray hairs among his crisp waves of red, and tired bluish swellings under his eyes. But at thirty-four he had not lost that vaguely distracted look of boyish wonderment. There’s still a thousand things at once a-workin’ in that head of his, George thought.

Jefferson walked to him, smiling, his woolen clothes as always a bit ill-fitting, his stride purposeful but a little ungainly, and George was so happy to see him that he had an impulse to give him a genuine frontier bear-hug. But not wanting to startle him out of his celestial wits, he instead just extended his hand.

“George. By Jove, you’re fit. I’ve not felt so hard a hand since my father’s.”

“And I take the hand that penned our independence, and I’m honored, sir.”

Governor Henry came close and took Jefferson’s hand, and tilted his head toward George. “Our young friend here’s been doing some headwork on a scale reminds me o’ yours, Tom. He’s about convinced me he can do what all the western commanders haven’t been able to do: shut our back door on the British.”

“He can,” piped in George Mason from where he sat, gout-ridden, in a hearthside chair.

“I’ll not be surprised,” Jefferson said. “I know this fellow.”

“What I know,” said Henry, “is that he traipses in from the hinterland every fall, all covered with burrs and bear sweat, with a list of wondrous outrageous demands to embarrass the Assembly and the Executive with. You can count on him, like the leaves turning red.” George glanced aside at Henry from under an arched eyebrow and was glad to see that he was smiling as he said this. “I really believe he can do it, the way he’s worked it up,” Henry went on. “I mean to say, it’ll strike you as a strategy of the absurd on first hearing, but there’s not a detail I can see he’s left to chance. His biggest obstacle I reckon on is not the enemy at all, but getting it past the short thinkers in the Assembly. It calls for a lot of authority granted on the sly, seems to me.”

“I’m intrigued already,” said Jefferson, going toward a chair and pulling George after him by a wrist. “Enlighten me, neighbor.” They sat down next to Dr. Mason, George’s old mentor.

George told him what his spies Linn and Moore had learned. He quickly outlined the military stores and advantages existing at Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Vincennes, and Rocheblave’s role in the incitement of Indian atrocities. And then he unveiled, in a tight, swift, positive narrative, his audacious proposal.

“I declare with no doubt,” George began, jabbing a stiff forefinger into his palm, “that I can secure that whole territory north of the Ohio, stop the Indian raids coming from there, block up the Western Rivers against British traffic, and, in fact, sir, foil the entire British design on our western frontier, inside of
three months
—with but one regiment of Virginians.” Jefferson’s red eyebrows lifted and his eyes gleamed. George Mason nudged the governor with his elbow. “One regiment,” George went on, still jabbing with that long, hard forefinger, “and militia, I mean; I’m quite aware no Regular Army can be spared.” He was heading
off all possible objections, having heard them already in his long, private sessions with Governor Henry. “I would intend to float my regiment down the Ohio to Kentuck. Discipline ’em there. Boat on down to Illinois where Fort Massac used to be, and, to avoid patrols on the Mississip, go over the prairie to Kaskaskia. Surprise that place by night and get into the fort. They scarcely bother to guard it. Then gain Cahokia right after, the same way. Then … well, sir, then I should start to council with the savages—who would by then damn well listen to the Rebels, wouldn’t they?—and get them neutral. Then I’d build a strong fort at the Ohio’s mouth, and arm it with the cannon from Kaskaskia. D’you see a flaw thus far, Tom? Surprise! That’s the trick! The advantage o’ surprise is worth a regiment. D’ye see? A coup like this is a bargain! Not to do it will mean a fortune for western defense next season—
if
it could be defended at all, by then.”

Jefferson was trying to frown, to pose any possible objection to this thousand-mile foray into the wilderness. “What if … what if something failed? It sounds workable—nay, bedazzling—but—”

“We could take refuge on the Spanish side of the Mississippi, if we got outnumbered or something. Spain’s neutral, o’ course, but not at all kindly disposed to the British. A main thing I’d do is gain the loyalty of the French who inhabit those places, once I’m among ’em. They’re just plain galled by the British rule.”

Jefferson sat sipping a glass of port and pondering, gazing into the fireplace, and George remembered that night by the firelight in Harrod’s Town eight months ago when this plan had first blossomed in his own solitary head.

“Cost,” Jefferson began. “The state’s purse is flat.”

“Such men as I’ll use cost but a fraction of what regular troops cost. They bring their own clothes and weapons and can range for weeks with what they carry on their backs. Hunt off the land and fight in the Indian mode. As special pay for the special hazards, I recommend we’d offer ’em what Kentuck’s got aplenty: land.”

Jefferson nodded over these persuasions. But then he said, “There’s something bothers the lawyer in me, and likewise would bother the other lawyers in the Assembly: taking state militia out of the state. And the county lieutenants where you recruit, they’re not going to like that either.”

“Aye. That’s another reason for secrecy.”

“Ah. What?”

“The governor suggests I’d have a public set of orders, authorizing
me to recruit just ‘for the defense of Kentuck County.’ That would forestall such objections, and hide our aims as well.”

“Very shrewd indeed. But how do you explain it to these rangers of yours when you lead ’em off the edge of the world?” He smiled with raised eyebrows, sitting back and steepling his hands.

“However best I can when the time comes. By that time I reckon we’ll all be pretty much of one mind and they’ll be willing.”

Mason actually gasped aloud in admiration of that statement. “Lord,” he said, “give us
generals
who think that way!”

George’s plan was convincing them all; he could see that. Patrick Henry winked at him once or twice to assure him how well he was doing.

George and Governor Henry shared a secret that they had not yet revealed even to these other conspirators. It was a part of George’s plan—the ultimate end of it—and it was so audacious that George had hesitated to reveal it even to Patrick Henry in their first few meetings. George had feared that the mere mention of it would have killed the whole scheme because Henry would have thought him deluded. But in their last previous conference, George had revealed it to him: after taking the Illinois and Wabash forts, winning the alliance of the French, and neutralizing the Indians, George intended to sweep on up the Wabash, down the Maumee to Lake Erie, and seize the British western headquarters at Detroit, with General Henry Hamilton in it. He was sure he could do it, with his five hundred men, although conventional military opinion was that it would require an army of thousands to do that.

So he had at last broken it gently to Governor Henry, who had come to believe it could be done—if done in the guerrilla mode George had in mind. But neither of them had mentioned it to the others. Because now both of them wanted not to be thought daft.

G
EORGE
R
OGERS’ EYES WERE GLIMMERING WITH TEARS
, and his clenched jaw muscles worked. George could barely see this, because his own vision was blurred with tears too. He said:

“If Joe’d only been able to keep up. But … Aah, what-ifs don’t do any good.”

“Never mind. You only guaranteed for him while he was in your sight. And ’twas he who wanted to go. I promised you I wouldn’t grudge you.” His hands came up, palms upward, and he shrugged, out of words, raising his eyebrows and looking
down aside at the rug. George could not bear to look at his face. After an excruciating silence—even the Rogers children outside the room were being still—George Rogers said, “Tell me frankly: Is there any use o’ hoping?”

“Frankly, there isn’t. We can pray, though, as I’ve done a-plenty.”

“You know the savages. What likely might they do to my boy?”

“If ye really want to hear it …”

“Aye.”

“They take prisoners for two reasons. One, to adopt. Two, lately, to take to Detroit for bounty. The British buy prisoners from ’em.” He didn’t mention that they were also buying scalps.

“I’ve heard of … They … torture …”

“Don’t think o’ that.” George had already thought of that enough. “If a Shawnee family’s had a son killed—it’s a pity how many sons they lose, their lives being what they are—the tribe’s chief will give ’em a prisoner to replace him. Usually he has to run the gauntlet first. If he makes it, then the family can either adopt him or put him at the stake to revenge their loss.” He thought momentarily of another Rogers who had burned at the stake, and wondered if his uncle was thinking that too. “Most usually, they’ll adopt him, if he’s brave.”

“In that case, they would Joe.”

“Aye. They sure would Joe.”

“Now,” George Rogers said, firming himself up, and George knew they were coming to the other difficult part. “Now, about Johnny.” He clenched his teeth and took a deep breath, and said, “This seems like that same day all over, to me, does’t to you?”

“It does.”

“He wants to go out with you now.” Johnny Rogers’ enlistment in the Continental Army was up. He had spent a year tramping up and down the coast of Virginia and sitting in wait for British fleets that never came, and had been disillusioned by the futility of it, and now he was inflamed by George’s new mission.

“Even more than Joe, I hoped you’d refuse to let ’im,” George said.

“And I’d hoped
you
would.”

But both knew Johnny Rogers would be an asset. Though they did not say this, Johnny was wiser and more able than Joe had been; if the family of George Rogers had a shining star in it, Johnny was it. And now
he
wanted to follow his Cousin George
into that same hazardous wilderness that had swallowed Joe up so swiftly.