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In the Valley
By
Harold Frederic
Copyright 1890
Dedication.
_When, after years of preparation, the pleasant task of writing this tale
was begun, I had my chief delight in the hope that the completed book
would gratify a venerable friend, to whose inspiration my first idea of
the work was due, and that I might be allowed to place his honored name
upon this page. The ambition was at once lofty and intelligible. While he
was the foremost citizen of New York State, we of the Mohawk Valley
thought of him as peculiarly our own. Although born elsewhere, his whole
adult life was spent among us, and he led all others in his love for the
Valley, his pride in its noble history, and his broad aspirations for the
welfare and progress in wise and good ways of its people. His approval ef
this book would have been the highest honor it could possibly have won.
Long before it was finished, he had been laid in his last sleep upon the
bosom of the hills that watch over our beautiful river. With reverent
affection the volume is brought now to lay as a wreath upon his
grave--dedicated to the memory of Horatio Seymour._
London, _September 11_, 1890
Contents.
Chapter I. "The French Are in the Valley!"
Chapter II. Setting Forth How the Girl Child Was Brought to Us.
Chapter III. Master Philip Makes His Bow--And Behaves Badly
Chapter IV. In Which I Become the Son of the House.
Chapter V. How a Stately Name Was Shortened and Sweetened.
Chapter VI. Within Sound of the Shouting Waters.
Chapter VII. Through Happy Youth to Man's Estate.
Chapter VIII. Enter My Lady Berenicia Cross.
Chapter IX. I See My Sweet Sister Dressed in Strange Attire.
Chapter X. The Masquerade Brings Me Nothing but Pain.
Chapter XI. As I Make My Adieux Mr. Philip Comes In.
Chapter XII. Old-Time Politics Pondered under the Starlight.
Chapter XIII. To the Far Lake Country and Home Again.
Chapter XIV. How I Seem to Feel a Wanting Note in the Chorus of Welcome.
Chapter XV. The Rude Awakening from My Dream.
Chapter XVI. Tulp Gets a Broken Head to Match My Heart.
Chapter XVII. I Perforce Say Farewell to My Old Home.
Chapter XVIII. The Fair Beginning of a New Life in Ancient Albany.
Chapter XIX. I Go to a Famous Gathering at the Patroon's Manor House.
Chapter XX. A Foolish and Vexatious Quarrel Is Thrust upon Me.
Chapter XXI. Containing Other News Besides that from Bunker Hill.
Chapter XXII. The Master and Mistress of Cairncross.
Chapter XXIII. How Philip in Wrath, Daisy in Anguish, Fly Their Home.
Chapter XXIV. The Night Attack Upon Quebec--And My Share in It.
Chapter XXV. A Crestfallen Return to Albany.
Chapter XXVI. I See Daisy and the Old Home Once More.
Chapter XXVII. The Arrest of Poor Lady Johnson.
Chapter XXVIII. An Old Acquaintance Turns Up in Manacles.
Chapter XXIX. The Message Sent Ahead from the Invading Army.
Chapter XXX. From the Scythe and Reaper to the Musket.
Chapter XXXI. The Rendezvous of Fighting Men at Fort Dayton.
Chapter XXXII. "The Blood Be on Your Heads."
Chapter XXXIII. The Fearsome Death-Struggle in the Forest.
Chapter XXXIV. Alone at Last with My Enemy.
Chapter XXXV. The Strange Uses to Which Revenge May Be Put.
Chapter XXXVI. A Final Scene in the Gulf which My Eyes Are Mercifully
Spared.
Chapter XXXVII. The Peaceful Ending of It All.
In The Valley
Chapter I.
"The French Are in the Valley!"
It may easily be that, during the many years which have come and gone
since the eventful time of my childhood, Memory has played tricks upon me
to the prejudice of Truth. I am indeed admonished of this by study of my
son, for whose children in turn this tale is indited, and who is now able
to remember many incidents of his youth--chiefly beatings and like
parental cruelties--which I know very well never happened at all. He is
good enough to forgive me these mythical stripes and bufferings, but he
nurses their memory with ostentatious and increasingly succinct
recollection, whereas for my own part, and for his mother's, our enduring
fear was lest we had spoiled him through weak fondness. By good fortune
the reverse has been true. He is grown into a man of whom any parents
might be proud--tall, well-featured, strong, tolerably learned, honorable,
and of influence among his fellows. His affection for us, too, is very
great. Yet in the fashion of this new generation, which speaks without
waiting to be addressed, and does not scruple to instruct on all subjects
its elders, he will have it that he feared me when a lad--and with cause!
If fancy can so distort impressions within such short span, it does not
become me to be too set about events which come back slowly through the
mist and darkness of nearly threescore years.
Yet they return to me so full of color, and cut in such precision and
keenness of outline, that at no point can I bring myself to say, "Perhaps
I am in error concerning this," or to ask, "Has this perchance been
confused with other matters?" Moreover, there are few now remaining who of
their own memory could controvert or correct me. And if they essay to do
so, why should not my word be at least as weighty as theirs? And so to
the story:
* * * * *
I was in my eighth year, and there was snow on the ground.
The day is recorded in history as November 13, A.D. 1757, but I am afraid
that I did not know much about years then, and certainly the month seems
now to have been one of midwinter. The Mohawk, a larger stream then by far
than in these days, was not yet frozen over, but its frothy flood ran very
dark and chill between the white banks, and the muskrats and the beavers
were all snug in their winter holes. Although no big fragments of ice
floated on the current, there had already been a prodigious scattering of
the bateaux and canoes which through all the open season made a thriving
thoroughfare of the river. This meant that the trading was over, and that
the trappers and hunters, white and red, were either getting ready to go
or had gone northward into the wilderness, where might be had during the
winter the skins of dangerous animals--bears, wolves, catamounts, and
lynx--and where moose and deer could be chased and yarded over the crust,
not to refer to smaller furred beasts to be taken in traps.
I was not at all saddened by the departure of these rude, foul men, of
whom those of Caucasian race were not always the least savage, for they
did not fail to lay hands upon traps or nets left by the heedless within
their reach, and even were not beyond making off with our boats, cursing
and beating children who came unprotected in their path, and putting the
women in terror of their very lives. The cold weather was welcome not only
for clearing us of these pests, but for driving off the black flies,
mosquitoes, and gnats which at that time, with the great forests so close
behind us, often rendered existence a burden, particularly just
after rains.
Other changes were less grateful to the mind. It was true I would no
longer be held near the house by the task of keeping alight the smoking
kettles of dried fungus, designed to ward off the insects, but at the same
time had disappeared many of the enticements which in summer oft made this
duty irksome. The partridges were almost the sole birds remaining in the
bleak woods, and, much as their curious ways of hiding in the snow, and
the resounding thunder of their strange drumming, mystified and attracted
me, I was not alert enough to catch them. All my devices of horse-hair
and deer-hide snares were foolishness in their sharp eyes. The water-fowl,
too--the geese, ducks, cranes, pokes, fish-hawks, and others--had flown,
sometimes darkening the sky over our clearing by the density of their
flocks, and filling the air with clamor. The owls, indeed, remained, but I
hated them.
The very night before the day of which I speak, I was awakened by one of
these stupid, perverse birds, which must have been in the cedars on the
knoll close behind the house, and which disturbed my very soul by his
ceaseless and melancholy hooting. For some reason it affected me more than
commonly, and I lay for a long time nearly on the point of tears with
vexation--and, it is likely, some of that terror with which uncanny noises
inspire children in the darkness. I was warm enough under my fox-robe,
snuggled into the husks, but I was very wretched. I could hear, between
the intervals of the owl's sinister cries, the distant yelping of the
timber wolves, first from the Schoharie side of the river, and then from
our own woods. Once there rose, awfully near the log wall against which I
nestled, a panther's shrill scream, followed by a long silence, as if the
lesser wild things outside shared for the time my fright. I remember that
I held my breath.
It was during this hush, and while I lay striving, poor little fellow, to
dispel my alarm by fixing my thoughts resolutely on a rabbit-trap I had
set under some running hemlock out on the side hill, that there rose the
noise of a horse being ridden swiftly down the frosty highway outside. The
hoofbeats came pounding up close to our gate. A moment later there was a
great hammering on the oak door, as with a cudgel or pistol handle, and I
heard a voice call out in German (its echoes ring still in my old ears):
"The French are in the Valley!"
I drew my head down under the fox-skin as if it had been smitten sharply,
and quaked in solitude. I desired to hear no more.
Although so very young a boy, I knew quite well who the French were, and
what their visitations portended. Even at that age one has recollections.
I could recall my father, peaceful man of God though he was, taking down
his gun some years before at the rumor of a French approach, and my mother
clinging to his coat as he stood in the doorway, successfully pleading
with him not to go forth. I had more than once seen Mrs. Markell of
Minden, with her black knit cap worn to conceal the absence of her scalp,
which had been taken only the previous summer by the Indians, who sold it
to the French for ten livres, along with the scalps of her murdered
husband and babe. So it seemed that adults sometimes parted with this
portion of their heads without losing also their lives. I wondered if
small boys were ever equally fortunate. I felt softly of my hair and wept.
How the crowding thoughts of that dismal hour return to me! I recall
considering in my mind the idea of bequeathing my tame squirrel to
Hendrick Getman, and the works of an old clock, with their delightful
mystery of wooden cogs and turned wheels, which was my chief treasure, to
my negro friend Tulp--and then reflecting that they too would share my
fate, and would thus be precluded from enjoying my legacies. The whimsical
aspect of the task of getting hold upon Tulp's close, woolly scalp was
momentarily apparent to me, but I did not laugh. Instead, the very
suggestion of humor converted my tears into vehement sobbings.
When at last I ventured to lift my head and listen again, it was to hear
another voice, an English-speaking voice which I knew very well, saying
gravely from within the door:
"It is well to warn, but not to terrify. There are many leagues between us
and danger, and many good fighting men. When you have told your tidings to
Sir William, add that I have heard it all and have gone back to bed."
Then the door was closed and barred, and the hoofbeats died away down the
Valley.
These few words had sufficed to shame me heartily of my cowardice. I ought
to have remembered that we were almost within hail of Fort Johnson and its
great owner the General; that there was a long Ulineof forts between us and
the usual point of invasion with many soldiers; and--most important of
all--that I was in the house of Mr. Stewart.
If these seem over-mature reflections for one of my age, it should be
explained, that, while a veritable child in matters of heart and impulse,
I was in education and association much advanced beyond my years. The
master of the house, Mr. Thomas Stewart, whose kind favor had provided me
with a home after my father's sad demise, had diverted his leisure with
my instruction, and given me the great advantage of daily conversation
both in English and Dutch with him. I was known to Sir William and to Mr.
Butler and other gentlemen, and was often privileged to listen when they
conversed with Mr. Stewart. Thus I had grown wise in certain respects,
while remaining extremely childish in others. Thus it was that I trembled
first at the common hooting of an owl, and then cried as if to die at
hearing the French were coming, and lastly recovered all my spirits at the
reassuring sound of Mr. Stewart's voice, and the knowledge that he was
content to return to his sleep.
I went soundly to sleep myself, presently, and cannot remember to have
dreamed at all.