Cardigan Part 111

"What day?"

"The day we both are thinking on: when you met me in the hall with your fish-rod like a guilty dunce--"

"You wore a skirt o' buckskin and tiny moccasins and stockings with scarlet thrums; and you were a-nibbling a cone of maple-sugar," said I.

"And you strove to trip me up!"

"And you pushed me!"

"And you thrust Vix at me!"

"And you kicked my legs and ran up-stairs like a wild-cat thing."

There was a silence; she looked up into my face from my shoulder.

"This, for a belt of peace betwixt those two children who live in memory," said I, and kissed her.

"Oonah! All is lost," she said; "he does with me as he will!" and she rendered me my kiss, saying, "Bearer of belts, thy peace-belt is returned."

So was perfect peace established, not only for the shadowy children of that unforgotten past, but for us, and for all time betwixt us; and our belts were offered and returned, and the sign was the touching of her lips and mine.

For Shemuel's sake, and because we would not desert him, we continued in Albany until near the end of April.

Taking counsel together, we had determined to build a mansion, when the times permitted, midway on the road 'twixt Johnstown and Fonda's Bush, our lands joining at that place. But I feared much that the war which now flamed through Ma.s.sachusetts Bay might soon creep northward into our forest fastness and set the border ablaze from the Ohio to Saint Sacrement. Much, too, I feared that the men of the woods whose skin was red would league with the men whose coats were red. All his later days Sir William had striven to avert this awful pact; Dunmore played against him, Butler betrayed him, Cresap was tricked, and Sir William lost. Now, into his high place sneaked a pygmy, slow, uncertain, sullen, treacherous--his own son, who would undo the last knot which bound the Indians to a fair neutrality. Perhaps he himself would even lead them on to the dreadful devastation all men dreaded; and, if he, men must also count on the Butlers, father and son, to carry terror through our forests and hunt to death without mercy all who stood for freedom and the rights of man.

One of these I had held in my hand and released. Yet still that old certainty haunted me, the belief that one day I was to meet and kill him, not in honourable encounter, now, for he had lost the right to ask such a death from me; but in the dark forest, somewhere among the corridors of silent pines, I would slay him as sachems slay ferocious beasts that track men through ghost-trails down to h.e.l.l.

Then should we be free at last of this fierce, misshapen soul, we People of the Morning, Tierhansaga, and the shrinking forest should straighten, and Oya should be Oyabanh, and the red witch-flower should wither to a stalk, to a seed, and sprout a fair white blossom for all time, Ahwehhah.

That night, as I stood on the steps of Peter Weaver's red brick house, turning to look once more into the coals of the setting sun ere I entered the door, a hand twitched at my coat-skirt, and, looking down, I saw below me on the pavement an Indian dressed in the buckskins of a forest-runner.

"Peter!" I cried, for it was he, my dusky kinsman on the left hand; then my eyes fell on his companion, a short, squat savage, clad in red, and painted hideous with strange signs I could not read.

"Red Jacket," said Peter, calmly.

I looked hard at Peter; he had grown big and swart and fat like a bear-cub in November; Red Jacket raised his sullen eyes, then dropped them.

Suddenly, as I stood there, at a loss what next to say, came a heavy man, richly clothed, flabby face bent on the ground. Nor would he have discovered me, so immersed in brooding reverie was he, had not Peter touched his elbow.

A bright flush stained his face; he looked up at me where I stood.

Then I descended the steps, shoving Peter from between us, and Sir John Johnson, for it was he, moved back a pace and laid his heavy hand on his sword-belt as I came close to him, looking into his cold eyes.

"Liar!" I said; "liar! liar!" And that was all, for he gave ground, and his hand fell limply from his dishonoured hilt.

So I left him, there in the darkening street, the Indians watching him with steady, kindling eyes.

We started next day at dawn, Silver Heels riding Warlock in her new kirtle and little French three-cornered hat with its gilt fringe, to which she had a right, as she was now My Lady Cardigan, if she chose.

I rode a bay mare, bought in Albany, yet a beauty, and doubtless the only decent horseflesh in all that town of rusty rackers and patroons'

sorry hacks. Mount and the Weasel, leather-clad, and gay with quilled moccasins and brilliant thrums, journeyed afoot, on either side o'

Shemuel, who bestrode a little docile a.s.s.

His noddle, neatly mended and still bound up, he had surmounted with a Quaker hat so large that it rested on his large flaring ears; peddlers' panniers swung on either flank, crammed deep with gewgaws; he let his bridle fall on the patient a.s.s's neck, and, thumbs in his armpits, joined l.u.s.tily the chorus raised by Mount and Renard:

"Come, all ye Tryon County men, And never be dismayed; But trust in the Lord, And He will be your aid!"

Roaring the rude chorus, Jack Mount marched in the lead, his swinging strides measured to our horses' steady pacing; beside him trotted the little Weasel, his hand holding tightly to the giant's arm; and sometimes he took three steps to Mount's one, and sometimes he toddled, his little, leather-bound legs twinkling like spokes in a wheel, but ever he chanted manfully as he marched:

"O trust in the Lord, And He will be your aid!"

And Shemuel's fervent whine from his lowly saddle rounded out the old route-song.

An hour later I summoned Jack Mount, and he fell back to my stirrups, resting his huge hand on my saddle as he walked beside me.

"Jack," I said, "is poor Cade cured o' fancy and his mad imaginings?"

"Ay, lad, for the time."

"For the time?"

"A year, two years, three, perhaps. This is not the first mad flight o' fancy Cade has taken on his aged wings."

"You never told me that," I said, sharply.

"No, lad."

"Why not?"

"Do you spread abroad the sorry secrets of your kin, Mr. Cardigan?"

"He is not your kin!"

"He is more," said Mount, simply.

After a silence I asked him on what previous occasion the little Weasel had gone moon-mad.

"On many--every third or fourth year since I first knew him," said Mount, soberly. "But never before did he leave me to follow his poor mad phantoms--always the phantom of his wife, lad, in divers guises.

He saw her in a silvery bush o' moonlight nights, and talked with her till my goose-flesh rose and crawled on me; he saw her mirrored in cold, deep pools at dawn, looking up at him from the golden-ribbed sands, and I have laid in the canoe to watch the trouts' quick shadows moving on the bottom, and he a-talking sweet to his dear wife as though she hid under the lily-pads like a blossom."

He glanced up at me pitifully as he walked beside my stirrup; I laid my hand on his leather-tufted shoulder.

"Sir, it is sad," he muttered; "a fair mind n.o.bly wrecked. But grief cannot deform the soul, Mr. Cardigan."

"He knows you now?"

"Ay, and knows that he has dwelt for months in madness."