From Sea to Shining Sea (76 page)

Elizabeth had come up to sleep a few hours after her watch over George, and had slept deeply. Now her racing heart was trying to pump the somnolent numbness out of her extremities. “Mama!” she cried out. “Mama! What’s happening?”

Someone was running up the stairs. The door flew inward, and Lucy came running in, carrying George’s long, slender fowling gun, her face set with a fighting firmness such as Elizabeth had not seen since Lucy had tried to stop being a tomboy. Lucy ran to the dormer window with the gun. Downstairs now, their mother’s voice was commanding, “Pull all those shutters to! Move, York, MOVE!”

“Yes’m! Oooooh!”

“Lucy! What’s wrong?” Elizabeth cried, at last getting her feet out of the bedclothes and onto the floor.

Lucy was pulling open a casement of the dormer window. “Indians,” she said. “Slaves come a-runnin’ in, said they saw a passel of ’em in the woods yonder.” Lucy was peering out and down now toward those woods. From the next room came Fanny’s voice:

“See any yet?” Apparently she was at her window too.

“Lucy! Betty! Fanny!” Mrs. Clark’s voice came up the stairs. “Where are you all?”

“Eeeeeeeee! Eeeeeee!” Mary Elliot was screaming, and then she was sobbing, “God have mercy! Oh, God have mercy!” And her daughter Sally was wailing.

“We’re up here, Mama!” Fanny’s voice called down.

“Get down here!”

Lucy’s lips were drawn back and her white teeth were clenched, and she was peering into the gray-brown woods beyond the white fence, trying to penetrate the delicate screen of new green leaf-buds, the shotgun poking out the open window. “I don’t see any.”

“We’d better go down,” Elizabeth gasped beside her. Her heart was thudding so hard she could scarcely hear her own words.

“Not yet,” Lucy said. “Ye can’t see a thing from down there, shutters all closed. Better stand back, case I get a shot.”

“There!” Fanny’s voice shrieked from the next room. “Oh, Heaven save us! It really is! Oh! Oh!”

Elizabeth could scarcely believe this most dreaded of all things was finally happening. It was like something out of George’s old stories about Harrod’s Town and Boonesboro, and it was just too terribly unthinkable that she herself could be in the midst of real mortal danger. But she could not keep from looking now. It was a bright, clear morning out there. She stood behind Lucy, looking over her shoulders toward the woods. And then she saw them.

Moving between two huge oaks, coming toward the fence in a swift, crouching run, was an Indian with blue paint on his face, and a gun in his hand, and behind him came another, and then there were more. The first one reached the fence, paused, then put his left hand on top of a fence post and one foot up on a plank. At that moment Lucy cocked the hammer of the fowling gun with a
click.
She had never fired a gun in her life, but had watched her brothers do it, and she had drawn a bead on many an imaginary Indian with unloaded guns, back in her peashooter days.

The blue-faced Indian was pulling himself to the top of the fence now, his hideous face looking toward the downstairs of the house. Lucy pulled the trigger.

The gun’s crashing recoil spun her backward against Elizabeth and they both fell to the floor, the gun on top of them. They had not seen whether she had hit the Indian. Lucy was groaning in
pain, her eyes squeezed shut. But Fanny’s voice was crying from the next room:

“They’re hiding! They’re hiding! Shoot again!”

“Oh! I can’t! I think my shoulder’s broke!” In a tangle of skirts, she and Elizabeth were trying to get up. “Oh! Damnation! I forgot to bring up more powder and—”

Suddenly there were sounds like axes whacking a tree trunk, and gunshots from outside and below. The sounds were of musketballs hitting the mulberry logs. There was a sound of tinkling glass somewhere. “Oh!” Fanny’s voice cried. “They’re shooting at our house!”

Now they could hear more footsteps mounting the stairs, and their mother’s voice calling to them. “Lucy! Fanny! Get down here! Elizabeth Clark! You come down!” Another gunshot reverberated in the house.

They went down with her. Another gun boomed below as they went down the stairs, the four of them, Lucy holding her right shoulder with her left hand while Elizabeth carried the shotgun. She could smell the burnt powder.

The downstairs was full of slave women, lying on the floor praying and moaning. Mary Elliot and her daughter were sitting on a mammy bench outside the library, hugging each other and sobbing. In the library, York, the only male in the house except the unconscious George, was loading a rifle, tamping powder down with a ramrod. Billy had taught him to shoot and he was a fairly good marksman when shooting at game. But now he was trembling so violently that he was spilling powder as he primed the rifle. Now he poked it quickly out through the saucer-sized rifle port in the shutter and pulled the trigger with his eyes closed, then jerked the rifle back in and crouched behind the window sill to reload it.

“Oh, York! You craven!” Lucy screamed at him. “Y’ have to
aim
! D’ye think they’re scared o’ mere
noise?
”

He just crouched there reloading, shaking his head and saying, “Ooooooooh! Oooooh!”

But, as if mere noise had scared the attackers, there was no more shooting from outside now. But far away, down the road, there was yelling, and the sounds of galloping horses.

A few minutes later, John and William Clark rode up from the fields, Bob Elliot and half a dozen armed field hands following them, and up to the gate thundered a squad of militia scouts, who had heard the shooting while passing on the public road below. Major Anderson was not among them, to Elizabeth’s disappointment. They rode all over the grounds, but found no trace
of the savages, except their footprints on the ground in the woods and outside the yard fence. There were some buckshot pellets in the white fence, and a few small blood spots on the fence post where Lucy had aimed the bird gun.

Maybe the Indians had been expecting a totally undefended house, with a few women easy prey in it, the militiamen speculated. Maybe they had been very edgy about coming to this house anyway, for surely they knew it was where the Long Knife Chief lived, and they had quit at the first sign of a defense. Again the militiamen implored John Clark to bring his family in to the safety of the fort, and this time he said he would think about it.

As for George himself, he had been totally unaware of the attack. All the shooting and screaming had failed to rouse him from his coma.

One thing was certain, something they had learned in a year since they had come to their new home: Kentucky was no paradise.

It looked like one, but it surely wasn’t.

“L
UCY, IT’S YOUR BEAUUUUUU
!” F
ANNY SANG OUT.

Lucy was outside and off the porch and down to the gate before Bill Croghan reached it. He swung off his horse, laughing, lifted Lucy up and swung her in circles, then set her down and kissed her on the mouth, while Fanny chanted from the dormer window: “Little Brother Lucy has a beau! Little Brother Lucy! Ho, ho, ho!”

Lucy raised a fist at her, then winced.

“Lucy! You hurt?” Bill Croghan exclaimed.

“Just an achy shoulder. I’ll tell you later.” They were walking up toward the house now, and other members of the family were coming out on the porch to greet him. The leaves of May were full out on the trees now, fresh light green, and the yard was edged with wildflowers transplanted from the woods.

“How about George?” he said.

“I swear you ask o’ him ’fore you think o’ me!”

“Not so, not so!” he laughed. “I just want ’im to get well so I won’t always have to be away from you doing
all
the surveying! I take it then that he’s better?”

“Some better. We have to sit on ’im to keep him abed.”

“Ha! Good news! Hello! Hello!” He tethered his horse at the post and went up onto the porch, hugging everybody. “So the old Long Knife’s getting his edge back, eh?”

“Aye, and raring to talk to you,” said John Clark. “We worried
so much about you. Did ye hear that four-five hundred savages struck Louisville last month?”

“I heard.”

“A band of ’em struck our house,” Elizabeth said. “This very house. But Lucy fought them off!”

“Ha, ha! No doubt!”

“No! Really truly! See the bullet holes in the logs?”

Bill Croghan paled. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Yes. And she really did, too,” said William, who had just come out. They embraced and thumped each other on the back. “George’s in there bellowin’ for you, can y’ hear ’im?”

“Hey? What do you say? I can’t hear you for that bellowing in there. Ha, ha! Let’s go see him. I’m running over with intelligence from upriver, and I’m sure he’s got plenty on his mind too. Hey! Pipe down, General! I hear you! I hear you! Ha, ha! Come on, everybody, let’s swarm on him!”

“I
T SEEMS TO BE A CONFEDERATION OF TRIBES
,” B
ILL
Croghan said, “mostly of the Wabash area. Weas, Piankeshaws, Miamis. Depending on who’s talking, there’s fifteen hundred on up to five thousand of them.”

George nodded. His face was very pale and thin, but the old keenness was back in his eyes. “That’s about what I hear. Their base is Ouiatanon, isn’t that so?”

“Ouiatanon. Correct.”

“That’s awful close to Vincennes. I bet our friends up there are in a state of nerves.”

“They well might be,” Croghan said. “Do you have a name of their main chief? I’ve heard a name something like ‘Mishyginny-something.’ Do you know of him?”

“It’s Michi-kini-qua. Little Turtle. I remember him, a Miami. A good face. He’s something to be reckoned with. I’d say he has more shrewdness and dignity than all of Congress put together. Though that’s not saying much, is it? What I hear is, some of the Shawnee are keen to join his confederation. If they do, this country’s as forlorn as it was any time in the war.”

In the year since William had been in Kentucky with George, he had come to understand that one of his chief advantages was his unofficial network of spies. They were not really spies, but they were a set of friends so diverse and wide-ranging and observant, and so eager to keep him informed, that even here in his sickbed he probably knew more of what prevailed in the territory than any other man. These friends were French bushlopers and merchants, American scouts and Indian fighters, rivermen, militia
officers, long hunters, innkeepers, surveyors, county clerks, old comrades-in-arms, explorers, even some of the Indians he had known in the war, both as friends and as enemies. These people brought him news and talk, some of it rumor and some of it gossip and some of it reliable truth. He absorbed it all and assimilated it and fit things together in his mind until he was very certain he had the specific truth about any one thing, and a general picture of how all the little things fit together. William by and by had come to realize that it was knowledge, as well as courage and endurance, that had made his brother the most successful leader in the West. Now as William sat with George and Croghan and listened to them talk by the hour, he understood a little better how it worked. George had a voracious appetite for facts and his attention never flagged. Although he was lying back on pillows, he seemed to lean forward.

“… some of the savages they killed up at Limestone had new British muskets,” Croghan was saying.

“Aye,” George replied. “I …” He was rubbing his hands together and he looked down at them. “These empty paws o’ mine are giving me the jimjams,” he said. “I need a pipe in one and a glass in the other when I’m listenin’. Billy, will you go fetch me those? Medicinal,” he said with a wink.

And when William came back with them, George was talking about Detroit. “The place is still full o’ Tories,” he said. “It’s ours by the Treaty but it’s theirs because they occupy it. If I’d got the help I needed in the war, we’d be there now and there’d be no Hair-Buyers there to keep pumping up the savages. That would be some help. Thank’ee, Billy. Ah. Well, I learned how to run up and butt the mountain. I’m glad I’m not a general anymore. Especially now, by God. Serving Virginia was perplexity enough to put boils on a man’s brain, but now a body has to satisfy Congress too, and that’s like trying to braid a comet’s tail. No, I sure don’t want to be anybody’s general again.”

“They want you to, you know,” Croghan said.

George took a sip of his “medicine” and smacked his lips. It made his eyes water. “D’you know, Bill, the first sight to greet my eyes when I gathered my faculties was, in place of the Angels of Heaven, a delegation of gents standin’ round the foot o’ this bed asking me to go up and thrash the Wabash tribes. Never mind that I resigned my commission three years ago. Never mind that I can’t handle a pen yet, let alone a sword. Never mind I still haven’t been paid yet for my last war. They told me I was the only one could stop the Wabash Confederation.

“But I’ve learned a thing or two about people who flatter to get
you to do things for ’em. They’ll get you to commit your whole body and soul, and then they won’t give any help. That’s been done to me by every governor Virginia’s ever had. And the County Lieutenants are worse at it. No, siree. Those tribes are in Federal lands, but Congress won’t bear the expense o’ controllin’ ’em, so they’re free to carry their torches into Kentucky, and now gents gather round my sickbed and beg me, ‘Go do what Congress can’t.’ Ha!”

“Then you won’t, I take it.”

“I didn’t say that. I just say I’d be a fool to. Listen, Here’s what I’d be getting myself into: I’ve studied the Invasion Law. It says a state can wage a campaign against any Indian nation that invades it, but it can’t take the militia out o’ the state without their consent. That’s the Invasion Law, and here’s why it worries me: Lincoln and Fayette County don’t see this as their war, but as Jefferson County’s. To them the only Indians are the Shawnees directly across the river from ’em. I learned long ago they’ll raise troops in a hurry to go kill Shawnees, but try to do something worthwhile, like going to Detroit, and they balk. They’ll know it’s not legal for me to take ’em against Ouiatanon without their consent, and if they get balky, I fail. And I don’t mean to fail, Bill. My whole name’s what it is because I’ve never failed. And my name’s all I’ve got.”