Alone at Last with My Enemy.
My stricken foe looked steadily into my face; once his lips parted to
speak, but no sound came from them.
For my part I did not know what to say to him. A score of thoughts pressed
upon my tongue for utterance, but none of them seemed suited to this
strange occasion. Everything that occurred to me was either weak or
over-violent. Two distinct ideas of this momentary irresolution I
remember--one was to leave him in silence for my Oneidas to tomahawk and
scalp; the other was to curse him where he lay.
There was nothing in his whitening face to help me to a decision. The look
in his eyes was both sad and savage--an expression I could not fathom. For
all it said to me, he might be thinking wholly of his wound, or of nothing
whatever. The speechless fixity of this gaze embarrassed me. For relief I
turned to Enoch, and said sharply:
"You haven't told me yet what you were doing here."
The trapper kept his chin still on its rest, and only for a second turned
his shrewd gray eyes from the wounded quarry to me.
"You can see for yourself, can't ye?" he said. "What do people mostly do
when there's shooting going on, and they've got a gun?"
"But how came you here at all? I thought you were to stay at--at the place
where I put you."
"That was likely, wasn't it! Me loafing around the house like a tame cat
among the niggers while good fighting was going on up here!"
"If you wanted to come, why not have marched with us? I asked you."
"I don't march much myself. It suits me to get around on my own legs in my
own way. I told you I wouldn't go into any ranks, or tote my gun on my
shoulder when it was handier to carry it on my arm. But I didn't tell you
I wouldn't come up and see this thing on my own hook."
"Have you been here all day?"
"If you come to that, it's none of your business, young man. I got here
about the right time of day to save _your_ bacon, anyway. That's enough
for _you_, ain't it?"
The rebuke was just, and I put no further questions.
A great stillness had fallen upon the forest behind us. In the distance,
from the scrub-oak thickets on the lowlands by the river, there sounded
from time to time the echo of a stray shot, and faint Mohawk cries of
"Oonah! Oonah!" The battle was over.
"They were beginning to run away before I came down," said Enoch, in
comment upon some of these dying-away yells of defeat which came to us.
"They got handled too rough. If their white officers had showed themselves
more, and took bigger risks, they'd have stood their ground. But these
Tory fine gentlemen are a pack of cowards. They let the Injuns get killed,
but they kept darned well hid themselves."
The man on the ground broke silence here.
"You lie!" he said, fiercely.
"Oh! you can talk, can you?" said Enoch. "No, I don't lie, Mr. Cross. I'm
talking gospel truth. Herkimer's officers came out like men, and fought
like men, and got shot by dozens; but till we struck you, I never laid
eyes on one of you fellows all day long, and my eyesight's pretty good,
too. Don't you think it is? I nailed you right under the nipple, there,
within a hair of the button I sighted on. I leave it to you if that ain't
pretty fair shooting."
The cool brutality of this talk revolted me. I had it on my tongue to
interpose, when the wounded man spoke again, with a new accent of gloom
in his tone.
"What have I ever done to you?" he said, with his hand upon his breast.
"Why, nothing at all, Mr. Cross," answered Enoch, amiably. "There wasn't
any feeling about it, at least on my part. I'd have potted you just as
carefully if we'd been perfect strangers."
"Will you leave us here together for a little while, Enoch?" I broke in.
"Come back in a few minutes; find out what the news is in the gulf--how
the fight has gone. I desire some words with this--this gentleman."
The trapper nodded at this, and started off with his cat-like, springing
walk, loading his rifle as he went. "I'll turn up in about a quarter of
an hour," he said.
I watched his lithe, leather-clad figure disappear among the trees, and
then wheeled around to my prostrate foe.
"I do not know what to say to you," I said, hesitatingly, looking down
upon him.
He had taken his hand away from his breast, and was fumbling with it on
the grass behind him. Suddenly he raised it, with a sharp cry of--
"I know what to say to you!"
There was a pistol in the air confronting me, and I, taken all aback,
looked full into the black circle of its barrel as he pulled the trigger.
The flint struck out a spark of flame, but it fell upon priming dampened
by the wet grass.
The momentary gleam of eagerness in the pallid face before me died
piteously away when no report came. If he had had the strength he would
have thrown the useless weapon at me. As it was, it dropped from his
nerveless fingers. He closed his eyes under the knit brows, upon which
cold sweat stood out, and groaned aloud.
"I do not know what to say to you," I went on, the episode of the pistol
seeming, strangely enough, to have cleared my thoughts. "For two
years--yes, for five years--I have been picturing to myself some such
scene as this, where you should lie overthrown before me, and I should
crush the life out of your hateful body with my heel, as one does with
snakes. But now that it has come about, I am at a strange loss for words."
"That you were not formerly," said the wounded man. "Since I have known
you, you have fought always exceedingly well with your mouth. It was only
in deeds that you were slow."
He made this retort with a contemptuous coolness of tone which was belied
by his white face and drawn brows, and by the troubled, clinging gaze in
his eyes. I found myself looking with a curious impersonal interest upon
this heavy, large-featured countenance, always heretofore so deeply
flushed with color, and now coarsely blotched with varying depths
of pallor.
"Doubtless it would be best to leave you here. None of your party will
straggle this way. They have all fled. You can lie here and think of your
misdeeds until-----"
"Until the wolves come, you mean. Yes, go away. I prefer them to you."
The sky to the west was one great lurid, brassy glare, overhung with banks
of sinister clouds, a leaden purple above, fiery crimson below. The
unnatural light fell strongly upon us both. A big shadow passed for an
instant across the sunset, and we, looking instinctively up, saw the
circling bulk of some huge bird of prey. I shuddered at the sight.
"Yes, leave me to _them_!" he said, bitterly. "Go back and seize my lands,
my house. While the beasts and the birds tear me to bits here in the
forest, do you fatten upon my substance at home. You and they are of
a kidney."
"You know I would touch nothing of yours."
"No--not even my wife!"
The thrust went home. There was a world of sardonic disdain in his voice
as he spoke, but in truth I thought little of his tone. The words
themselves seemed to open a gulf before my feet. Was it indeed true, in
welcoming this man's death, that I was thinking of the woman it would set
free--for me?
It seemed a long, long time before I found tongue again. I walked up and
down among the small cedars, fighting out in my own mind the issue of
honor which had been with such brutal frankness raised. I could not make
it seem wholly untrue--this charge he so contemptuously flung at me. There
was no softening of my heart toward him: he was still the repellent, evil
ruffian I had for years held him to be. I felt that I hated him the more
because he had put me in the wrong. I went back to him, ashamed for the
source of the increase of temper I trembled under, yet powerless to
dissemble it.
"Why should I not kill you where you lie?" I shouted at him.
He made an effort at shrugging his shoulders, but vouchsafed no other
reply.
"You"--I went on, in a whirl of rage at myself, at him, at the entire
universe--"you have made my whole manhood bitter. I fought you the first
time I saw you, when we were little boys. Even then you insulted, injured
me. I have always hated you. You have always given me reason to hate you.
It was you who poisoned Mr. Stewart's mind against me. It was you who
stole my sweet sister away from me. Did this content you? No. You must
drive the good old gentleman into paralysis and illness unto death--out of
his mind--and you must overwhelm the poor, gentle girl with drunken
brutality and cruelty, and to cap all, with desertion. And this is not
enough--my God! think of it! _this_ is not enough!--but you must come with
the others to force Indian war upon our Valley, upon your old neighbors!
There are hundreds lying dead here to-day in these woods--honest men whose
wives, parents, little children, are waiting for them at home. They will
never lay eyes on them again. Why? Because of you and your scoundrel
friends. You have done too much mischief already. It is high time to put
an end to you."
The wounded man had listened to me wearily, with his free hand clutched
tight over his wound, and the other tearing spasmodically at the grass
beside him.
"I am bleeding to death," he said, with a voice obviously weakened since
his last preceding words. "So much the better for you. You would like it
so. You are not bold enough to knock me on the head, or merciful enough to
go about your business and leave me in peace. I ought to be above bandying
words with you; nor would I if it did not take my mind from my hurt. You
are right--you have always been my enemy. You were jealous of me as a
little boy. You had an apron, and you envied me my coat. When, like a
fool, I came again to this cursed wilderness, your sour face rose up in
front of me like an ugly dream. It was my first disagreeable thing. Still
you were jealous of me, for I was a gentleman; you were a skin-pedler. I
married a maiden who had beauty and wit enough to grace my station, even
though she had not been born to it. It was you who turned her mind against
me, and incited her to unhappiness in the home I had given her. It was you
who made a damned rebel out of her, and drove me into going to Canada. She
has ever been more your friend than mine. You are of her sort. An English
gentleman could rightly have had no part or lot with either of you. Go
back to her now--tell her you left me here waiting for the wolves--and
that my dying message was--"
He followed with some painfully bitter and malignant words which I have
not the heart to set down here in cold blood against him.
"Let me see your wound," I said, when he had finished and sank back,
exhausted.
I knelt beside him and opened his green coat, and the fine, ruffled shirt
beneath it. Both were soaked with blood on the whole right side, but the
soft cambric had, in a measure, checked the flow. He made no resistance,
and I spread over the ugly aperture some of the plaster with which my
mother had fitted me out, and bound it fast, with some difficulty, by
passing my sash under his body and winding it about his chest.
He kept his eyes closed while I was doing this. I could not tell whether
he was conscious or not. Nor could I explain to myself why I was
concerning myself with his wound. Was it to save, if possible, his life?
Was it to lengthen out his term of torture here in the great final
solitude, helplessly facing the end, with snarling wolves and screaming
kites for his death-watch? I scarcely knew which.
I try now to retrace the courses by which my thoughts, in the confused
searchings of those few moments, reached finally a good conclusion; but
the effort is beyond my powers. I know only that all at once it became
quite clear to my mind that I must not leave my enemy to die. How much of
this was due to purely physical compassion for suffering, how much to the
higher pleadings of humanity, how much to the feeling that his taunts of
baseness must be proved untrue, I cannot say.
I was still kneeling beside him, I know, when Enoch suddenly stood in
front of me. His practised footsteps had made no sound. He glanced gravely
at me and at the white, inanimate face of Cross. Emotions did not play
lightly upon Enoch's leather-like visage; there was nothing in his look to
tell whether he was surprised or not.
"Well, what news? How has the day gone?" I asked him.
"Your people hold the gulf. The British have gone back. It seems they were
attacked in their rear from the fort. The woods are full of dead men."
"What is Herkimer going to do?"
"They were making a litter to carry him off the field. They are going home
again--down the Valley."
"So, then, we have lost the fight."
"Well, seeing that every three sound men have got to tote back one wounded
man, and that about half the people you brought here are dead to begin
with, it don't look much like a victory, does it?"
"But the British have retreated, you say, and there was a sortie from the
fort?"
"Yes, it's about six of one and half-dozen of t'other. I should say that
both sides had got their bellyful of fighting. I guess they'll both want
to rest for a spell."
I made no answer, being lost in a maze of thoughts upon the hideous
carnage of the day, and upon what was likely to come of it. Enoch went on:
"They seemed to be pretty nigh through with their litter-making. They must
be about ready to start. You'd better be spry if you want to go along
with 'em."
"Did you speak to any one of me? Did you tell them where I was?"
"I ain't quite a fool, young man," said the trapper, with a gaunt sort of
smile. "If they'd caught sight of me, I wouldn't have got much chance to
explain about myself, let alone you. It kind of occurred to me that
strangers found loafing around in the woods wouldn't get much of an
opening for polite conversation just now--especially if those strangers
were fellows who had come down from Sillinger's camp with letters only a
fortnight ago."
All this time Cross had been stretched at my knees, with his eyes closed.
He opened them here, at Enoch's last words, and broke into our
conversation with a weak, strangely altered voice:
"I know you now--damn you! I couldn't think before. You are the fellow I
gave my letters to, there on Buck's Island. I paid you your own price--in
hard gold--and now you shoot me in return. You are on the right side now.
You make a good rebel."
"Now look here, Mr. Cross," put in Enoch, with just a trace of temper in
his tone. "You paid me to carry those letters because I was going that
way, and I carried 'em straight. You didn't pay me for anything else, and
you couldn't, neither. There ain't been gold enough minted yet to hire me
to fight for your King George against Congress. Put that in your pipe and
smoke it!"
"Come, Enoch," I here interrupted, "enough of that. The man is suffering.
You must not vex him further by words."
"Suffering or not," returned the trapper, "he might keep a civil tongue in
his head.--Why, I even did something you didn't pay me for," he went on,
scowling down at the prostrate soldier. "I delivered your message here to
this man" (indicating me with a gesture of his thumb)--"all that, you
know, about cutting out his heart when you met him, and feeding it to a
Missisague dog."
Enoch's grim features relaxed into a sardonic smile as he added: "There
may be more or less heart-eating round about here presently, but it don't
look much as if it would be his, and the dogs that'll do it don't belong
to anybody--not even to a Missisague buck."
The wounded man's frame shook under a spasm of shuddering, and he glowered
at us both wildly, with a look half-wrath, half-pitiful pleading, which
helped me the better to make up my mind.
Enoch had turned to me once more:
"Come," he said, "we better hustle along. It will be all right with me so
long as I am with you, and there is no time to lose. They must be starting
from the gulf by this time. If we step along brisk, we'll soon catch them.
As for this chap here, I guess we'd better leave him. He won't last long
anyway, and your folks don't want any wounded prisoners. They've got too
many litters to carry already."
"No," I made answer, with my resolve clear now before me. "We will make
our own litter, and we will carry him to his home ourselves--by the
river--away from the others."
"The hell you say!" said Enoch.