For the first half-mile our road lay over that same golden, hilly
country, and through the same splendid forests which I had traversed on
my way to the manor. Then we galloped past cultivated land, where
clustered spears of Indian corn sprouted above the reddish golden soil,
and sheep fed in stony pastures.
Around the cabins of the tenantry, fields of oats and barley glimmered,
thin blades pricking the loam, brilliant as splintered emeralds.
A few dropping blossoms still starred the apple-trees, pears showed in
tiny bunches, and once I saw a late peach-tree in full pink bloom and an
old man hoeing the earth around it. He looked up as we galloped past,
saluted sullenly, and leaned on his hoe, looking after us.
Dorothy said he was a Palatine refugee and a rebel, like the majority of
Sir Lupus's tenants; and I gazed curiously at these fields and cabins
where gaunt men and gaunter women, laboring among their sprouting
vegetables, turned sun-dazzled eyes to watch us as we clattered by;
where ragged children, climbing on the stockades, called out to us in
little, shrill voices; where feeding cattle lifted sober heads to stare;
where lank, yellow dogs rushed out barking and snapping till a cut of
the whip sent them scurrying back.
Once a woman came to her gate and hailed us, asking if it was true that
the troops had been withdrawn from Johnstown and Kingsborough.
"Which troops?" I asked.
"Ours," began the woman, then checked herself, and shot a suspicious
glance at me.
"The Provincials are still at Johnstown and Kingsborough," said Dorothy,
gently.
A gleam of relief softened the woman's haggard features. Then her face
darkened again and she pointed at two barefooted children shrinking
against the fence.
"If my man and I were alone we would not be afraid of the Mohawks; but
these--"
She made a desperate gesture, and stood staring at the blue Mayfield
hills where, perhaps at that moment, painted Mohawk scouts were watching
the Sacandaga.
"If your men remain quiet, Mrs. Schell, you need fear neither rebel,
savage, nor Tory," said Dorothy. "The patroon will see that you have
ample protection."
Mrs. Schell gave her a helpless glance. "Did you not know that the
district scout-call has gone out?" she asked.
"Yes; but if the tenants of Sir Lupus obey it they do so at their
peril," replied Dorothy, gravely. "The militia scouts of this district
must not act hastily. Your husband would be mad to answer a call and
leave you here alone."
"What would you have him do?" muttered the woman.
"Do?" repeated Dorothy. "He can do one thing or the other--join his
regiment and take his family to the district fort, or stay at home and
care for you and the farm. These alarms are all wrong--your men are
either soldiers or farmers; they cannot be both unless they live close
enough to the forts. Tell Mr. Schell that Francy McCraw and his riders
are in the forest, and that the Brandt-Meester of Balston saw a Mohawk
smoke-signal on the mountain behind Mayfield."
The woman folded her bony arms in her apron, cast one tragic glance at
her children, then faced us again, hollow-eyed but undaunted.
"My man is with Stoner's scout," she said, with dull pride.
"Then you must go to the block-house," began Dorothy, but the woman
pointed to the fields, shaking her head.
"We shall build a block-house here," she said, stubbornly. "We cannot
leave our corn. We must eat, Mistress Varick. My man is too poor to be a
Provincial soldier, too brave to refuse a militia call--"
She choked, rubbed her eyes, and bent her stern gaze on the hills once
more. Presently we rode on, and, turning in my saddle, I saw her
standing as we had left her, gaunt, rigid, staring steadily at the
dreaded heights in the northwest.
As we galloped, cultivated fields and orchards became rarer; here and
there, it is true, some cabin stood on a half-cleared hill-side, and we
even passed one or two substantial houses on the flat ridge to the east,
but long, solid stretches of forest intervened, and presently we left
the highway and wheeled into a cool wood-road bordered on either side by
the forest.
"Here we find our first landmark," said Dorothy, drawing bridle.
A white triangle glimmered, cut in the bark of an enormous pine; and my
cousin rode up to the tree and patted the bark with her little hand. On
the triangle somebody had cut a V and painted it black.
"This is a boundary mark," said Dorothy. "The Mohawks claim the forest
to the east; ride around and you will see their sign."
I guided my horse around the huge, straight trunk. An oval blaze scarred
it and on the wood was painted a red wolf.
"It's the wolf-clan, Brant's own clan of the Mohawk nation," she called
out to me. "Follow me, cousin." And she dashed off down the wood-road, I
galloping behind, leaping windfalls, gullies, and the shallow forest
brooks that crossed our way. The road narrowed to a trodden trail; the
trail faded, marked at first by cut undergrowth, then only by the white
scars on the tree-trunks.
These my cousin followed, her horse at a canter, and I followed her,
halting now and again to verify the white triangle on the solid flank of
some forest giant, passing a sugar-bush with the shack still standing
and the black embers of the fire scattered, until we came to a
logging-road and turned into it, side by side. A well-defined path
crossed this road at right angles, and Dorothy pointed it out. "The
Iroquois trail," she said. "See how deeply it is worn--nearly ten inches
deep--where the Five Nations have trodden it for centuries. Over it
their hunting-parties pass, their scouts, their war-parties. It runs
from the Kennyetto to the Sacandaga and north over the hills to
the Canadas."
We halted and looked down the empty, trodden trail, stretching away
through the forest. Thousands and thousands of light, moccasined feet
had worn it deep and patted it hard as a sheep-path. On what mission
would the next Mohawk feet be speeding on that trail?
"Those people at Fonda's Bush had best move to Johnstown," said Dorothy.
"If the Mohawks strike, they will strike through here at Balston or
Saratoga, or at the half-dozen families left at Fonda's Bush, which some
of them call Broadalbin."
"Have these poor wretches no one to warn them?" I asked.
"Oh, they have been warned and warned, but they cling to their cabins as
cats cling to soft cushions. The Palatines seem paralyzed with fear, the
Dutch are too lazy to move in around the forts, the Scotch and English
too obstinate. Nobody can do anything for them--you heard what that
Schell woman said when I urged her to prudence."
I bent my eyes on the ominous trail; its very emptiness fascinated me,
and I dismounted and knelt to examine it where, near a dry, rotten log,
some fresh marks showed.
Behind me I heard Dorothy dismount, dropping to the ground lightly as a
tree-lynx; the next moment she laid her hand on my shoulder and bent
over where I was kneeling.
"Can you read me that sign?" she asked, mischievously.
"Something has rolled and squatted in the dry wood-dust--some bird, I
think."
"A good guess," she said; "a cock-partridge has dusted here; see those
bits of down? I say a cock-bird because I know that log to be a
drumming-log."
She raised herself and guided her horse along the trail, bright eyes
restlessly scanning ground and fringing underbrush.
"Deer passed here--one--two--three--the third a buck--a three-year old,"
she said, sinking her voice by instinct. "Yonder a tree-cat dug for a
wood-mouse; your lynx is ever hanging about a drumming-log."
I laid my hand on her arm and pointed to a fresh, green maple leaf lying
beside the trail.
"Ay," she murmured, "but it fell naturally, cousin. See; here it parted
from the stalk, clean as a poplar twig, leaving the shiny cup unbruised.
And nothing has passed here--this spider's web tells that, with a dead
moth dangling from it, dead these three days, from its brittle shell."
"I hear water," I said, and presently we came to it, where it hurried
darkling across the trail.
There were no human signs there; here a woodcock had peppered the mud
with little holes, probing for worms; there a raccoon had picked his
way; yonder a lynx had left the great padded mark of its foot, doubtless
watching for yonder mink nosing us from the bank of the still
pool below.
Silently we mounted and rode out of the still Mohawk country; and I was
not sorry to leave, for it seemed to me that there was something
unfriendly in the intense stillness--something baleful in the silence;
and I was glad presently to see an open road and a great tree marked
with Sir Lupus's mark, the sun shining on the white triangle and the
painted V.
Entering a slashing where the logging-road passed, we moved on, side by
side, talking in low tones. And my cousin taught me how to know these
Northern trees by bark and leaf; how to know the shrubs new to me, like
that strange plant whose root is like a human body and which the Chinese
value at its weight in gold; and the aromatic root used in beer, and the
bark of the sweet-birch whose twigs are golden-black.
Now, though the birds and many of the beasts and trees were familiar to
me in this Northern forest, yet I was constantly at fault, as I have
said. Plumage and leaf and fur puzzled me; our gray rice-bird here wore
a velvet livery of black and white and sang divinely, though with us he
is mute as a mullet; many squirrels were striped with black and white;
no rosy lichen glimmered on the tree-trunks; no pink-stemmed pines
softened sombre forest depths; no great tiger-striped butterflies told
me that the wild orange was growing near at hand; no whirring,
olive-tinted moth signalled the hidden presence of the oleander. But I
saw everywhere unfamiliar winged things, I heard unfamiliar bird-notes;
new colors perplexed me, new shapes, nay, the very soil smelled foreign,
and the water tasted savorless as the mist of pine barrens in February.
Still, my Maker had set eyes in my head and given me a nose to sniff
with; and I was learning every moment, tasting, smelling, touching,
listening, asking questions unashamed; and my cousin Dorothy seemed
never to tire in aiding me, nor did her eager delight and sympathy
abate one jot.
Dressed in full deer-skin as was I, she rode her horse astride with a
grace as perfect as it was unstudied and unconscious, neither affecting
the slothful carriage of our Southern saddle-masters nor the dragoons'
rigid seat, but sat at ease, hollow-backed, loose-thighed, free-reined
and free-stirruped.
Her hair, gathered into a golden club at the nape of the neck, glittered
in the sun, her eyes deepened like the violet depths of mid-heaven.
Already the sun had lent her a delicate, creamy mask, golden on her
temples where the hair grew paler; and I thought I had never seen such
wholesome sweetness and beauty in any living being.
We now rode through a vast flat land of willows, headed due north once
more, and I saw a little river which twisted a hundred times upon itself
like a stricken snake, winding its shimmering coils out and in through
woodland, willow-flat, and reedy marsh.
"The Kennyetto," said Dorothy, "flowing out of the great Vlaie to empty
its waters close to its source after a circle of half a hundred miles.
Yonder lies the Vlaie--it is that immense flat country of lake and marsh
and forest which is wedged in just south of the mountain-gap where the
last of the Adirondacks split into the Mayfield hills and the long, low
spurs rolling away to the southeast. Sir William Johnson had a lodge
there at Summer-house Point. Since his death Sir George Covert has
leased it from Sir John. That is our trysting-place."
To hear Sir George's name now vaguely disturbed me, yet I could not
think why, for I admired and liked him. But at the bare mention of his
name a dull uneasiness came over me and I turned impatiently to my
cousin as though the irritation had come from her and she must
explain it.
"What is it?" she inquired, faintly smiling.
"I asked no question," I muttered.
"I thought you meant to speak, cousin."