IT is September, brilliant and golden. Newburyport is brave with
warlike excitement. Drums roll, fifes shriek, armed men fill the single
village street. These latter are not seasoned troops, as one may see
by their careless array and the want of uniformity in their homespun,
homemade garbs. No two are armed alike, for each has brought his own
weapon. These are rifles--long, eight-square flintlocks. Also every
rifleman wears a powderhorn and bullet pouch of buckskin, while most of
them carry knives and hatchets in their rawhide belts.
As our rude soldiery stand at ease in the village street, cheering
crowds line the sidewalk. The shouts rise above the screaming fifes and
rumbling drums. The soldiers are the force which Colonel Arnold will
lead against Quebec. Young, athletic--to the last man they have been
drawn from the farms. Resenting discipline, untaught of drill, their
disorder has in it more of the mob than the military. However, their
eyes like their hopes are bright, and one may read in the healthy,
cheerful faces that each holds himself privily to be of the raw
materials from which generals are made.
Down in the harbor eleven smallish vessels ride at anchor. They are of
brigantine rig, each equal to transporting one hundred men. These will
carry Colonel Arnold and his eleven hundred militant young rustics to
the mouth of the Kennebec. In the waist of every vessel, packed one
inside the other as a housewife arranges teacups on her shelves, are
twenty bateaux. They are wide, shallow craft, blunt at bow and stern,
and will be used to convey the expedition up the Kennebec. Each is large
enough to hold five men, and so light that the five, at portages or
rapids, can shoulder it with the dunnage which belongs to them and carry
it across to the better water beyond.
The word of command runs along the unpolished ranks; the column begins
to move toward the water front, taking its step from the incessant drums
and fifes. Once at the water, the embarkation goes briskly forward. As
the troops march away, the crowds follow; for the day in Newburyport is
a gala occasion and partakes of the character of a celebration. No one
considers the possibility of defeat. Everywhere one finds optimism, as
though Quebec is already a captured city.
Now when the throngs have departed with the soldiery, the street shows
comparatively deserted. This brings to view the Eagle Inn, a hostelry of
the village. In the doorway of the Eagle a man and woman are standing.
The woman is dashingly handsome, with cheek full of color and a bold
eye. The man is about thirty-five in years. He swaggers with a forward,
bragging, gamecock air, which--the basis being a coarse, berserk
courage--is not altogether affectation. His features are vain, sensual,
turbulent; his expression shows him to be proud in a crude way, and is
noticeable because of an absence of any slightest glint of principle.
There is, too, an extravagance of gold braid on his coat, which goes
well with the superfluous feather in the three-cornered hat, and those
russet boots of stamped Spanish leather. These swashbuckley excesses
of costume bear out the vulgar promise of his face, and guarantee that
intimated lack of fineness.
The pair are Colonel Arnold and Madam
Arnold. She has come to see the last of her husband as he sails away.
While they stand in the door, the coach in which she will make the
homeward journey to Norwich pulls up in front of the Eagle.
As Colonel Arnold leads his wife to the coach, he is saying: “No; I
shall be aboard within the hour. After that we start at once. I want a
word with a certain Captain Burr before I embark. I’ve offended him, it
seems; for he is of your proud, high-stomached full-pursed aristocrats
who look for softer treatment than does a commoner clay. I’ve ordered
a bottle of wine. As we drink, I shall make shift to smooth down his
ruffled plumage.”
“Captain Burr,” repeats Madam Arnold, not without a sniff of scorn. “And
you are a colonel! How long is it since colonels have found it necessary
to truckle to captains, and, when they pout, placate them into good
humor?”
“My dear madam,” returns Colonel Arnold as he helps her into the clumsy
vehicle, “permit me to know my own affairs. I tell you this thin-skinned
boy is rich, and what is better was born with his hands open. He parts
with money like a royal prince. One has but to drop a hint, and presto!
his hand is in his purse. The gold I gave you I had from him.”
As the coach with Madam Arnold drives away, young Aaron is observed
coming up from the water front. His costume, while as rough as that of
the soldiers, has a fit and a finish to it which accents the graceful
gentility of his manner beyond what satins and silks might do. Madam
Arnold’s bold eyes cover him. He takes off his hat with a gravely
accurate flourish, whereat the bold eyes glance their pleasure at the
polite attention.
Coach gone, Colonel Arnold seizes young Aaron’s arm, with a familiarity
which fails of its purpose by being overdone, and draws him into
the inn. He carries him to a room where a table is spread. The stout
landlady by way of topping out the feast is adding thereunto an apple
pie, moonlike as her face and its sister for size and roundness. This,
and the roast fowl which adorns the center, together with a bottle
of burgundy to keep all in countenance, invest the situation with an
atmosphere of hope.
“Be seated, Captain Burr,” exclaims the hearty Colonel Arnold, as
the two draw up to the table. “A roast pullet, a pie, and a bottle of
burgundy, let me tell you, should make no mean beginning to what is like
to prove a hard campaign. I warrant you, sir, we see worse fare in
the pine wilderness of upper Maine. Let me help you to wine, sir,” he
continues, after carving for himself and young Aaron. The latter, as
cold and imperturbable as when, in Dr. Bellamy’s study, he shattered the
designs of that excellent preacher by preferring law to theology and war
to either, responds to this hospitable politeness with a bow. “Take your
glass, Captain Burr. I desire to drink down all irritations. Yes, sir,”
replacing the drained glass, “I may say, without lowering myself as
a gentleman in your esteem, that, in giving you the order to see the
troops aboard, I had no thought of affronting you.”
“It was not your orders to which I objected; it was to your manner. If
I may say so, sir, it was a manner of intolerable arrogance, one which I
shall brook from no man.”
“Tush, sir, tush! In war we must thicken our hides. We are not to be
sensitive. We should not look in the camps for the manners of a king’s
court. What you mistook for arrogance was no more than just a tone of
command.”
Colonel Arnold’s delivery of this is meant to be conciliating. Through
it, however, runs an exasperating vein of patronage, due, doubtless, to
his superior rank, and those extra fifteen years wherein he overlooks
young Aaron.
“Let us be plain, colonel,” observes young Aaron, studying his wine
between eye and windowpane. “I hope for nothing better than concord
between us. Also, every order you give me I shall obey. None the less I
ask you to observe that I have no purpose of lowering my self-respect in
coming to this war. As your subordinate I shall take your commands; as a
gentleman, the equal of any, I must be treated as such.”
Colonel Arnold’s brow is red; but he fills his mouth with chicken which
he drenches down with wine, and so restrains every fretful expression.
After a moment filled of wine and chicken, he observes carelessly:
“Say no more! Say no more, Captain Burr! We understand one another!”
“There is no more to say,” returns young Aaron steadily. “And I beg you
to remember that the subject is one which you, yourself, proposed. I am
through when I state that, while I object to no man’s vanity, no man’s
arrogance, I shall never permit him to transact them at the expense of
my self-respect.”
Colonel Arnold turns the talk to what, in a wilderness as well as a
fighting way, lies ahead. They linger over pullet and burgundy for the
better part of an hour, and get on as well as should gentlemen who
have no mighty mutual liking. As they prepare to go aboard, the stout
landlady meets them in the hall. Her modest’ charges are to be met with
a handful of shillings. Colonel Arnold rummages his pockets, wearing the
while a baffled angry air; then he falls to cursing in a spirit truly
military.
“May the black fiend seize me!” says he, “if my purse has not gone
aboard with my baggage!”
Young Aaron pays the score with an indifference which does not betray
a conviction that the pocket-rummaging is a pretence, and the native
money-meanness of his coarse-faced colonel designed such finale from the
first. Score settled, they repair to the water front. As the two depart,
the stout landlady of the Eagle follows the retreating Colonel Arnold
with shocked, insulted glance. She is a religious woman, and those
curses have moved her soul.
“Blaspheming upstart!” she mutters. “And the airs he takes on! As though
folk have forgotten that within the year he stood behind his Norwich
counter selling pills and plasters!”
The eleven little ships voyage to the mouth of the Kennebec without
event. The bateaux are launched, and the eleven hundred highhearted
youngsters proceed to pole and paddle their way up the river. Where the
currents are overswift they tow with lines from the banks. Finally they
abandon the Kennebec, and shoulder the bateaux for a scrambling tramp
across the pine-sown watershed. It takes days, but in the end they find
themselves again afloat on the Dead River. This stream leads them to
the St. Lawrence. It is the march of the century! These buoyant young
rustics through the untraced wilderness have come six hundred miles in
fifty days.
Woodmen born and bred, this long push through the forests is no
surprising feat to these who perform it. They scarcely discuss the
matter as they crouch about their camp fires. The big topic among
them is their hatred of Colonel Arnold. From that September day in
Newbury-port his tyranny has been in hourly expression. Also, it seems
to grow with time. He hectors, raves, vituperates, until there isn’t
a trigger finger in the command which does not itch to shoot him down.
Disdaining to aid the march by carrying so much as a pound’s weight--as
being work beneath his exalted rank--this Caesar of the apothecaries
must needs have his special cooking kit along. Also his tent must be
pitched with the coming down of every night. Men hungry and unsheltered
all around him, he sees no reason why he should not sleep warmly soft,
and breakfast and dine and sup like a wilderness Lucullus. Thereat the
farmer youth grumble, and console themselves with slighting remarks and
looks of contumely.
To these remarks and looks, Colonel Arnold is driven to deafen his
ears and offer his back. It would be inconvenient to hear and see these
things; since, for all his bullying attitude, he dare not crowd his
followers too far. Their unbroken mouths are but new to the military
bit; a too cruel pressure on the bridle reins might mean the unhorsing
of our vanity-eaten apothecary. As it is, by twos and tens and twenties,
the command dwindles away. Every roll call discloses fresh desertions.
Wroth with their commander, resolved against the mean tyranny of his
rule, when the party reaches the St. Lawrence, half have gone to a
right-about and are on their way home. The feather-headed Colonel Arnold
finds himself with a muster of five hundred and fifty where he should
have had eleven hundred. And the five hundred and fifty with him are on
the darkling edge of revolt.
“Think on such cur hearts!” cries Colonel Arnold, as he speaks with
young Aaron of those desertions which have cut his force in two. “Half
have already turned tail, and the other half are of a coward mind to
follow their mongrel example. I would sooner command a brigade of dogs!”
“Believe me,” observes young Aaron, icily acquiescent, “I shall not
contradict your peculiar fitness for the command you describe.”
Being thus happily delivered, young Aaron goes round on his
imperturbable heel and strolls away, leaving the angry Colonel Arnold
glaring with rage-congested eye.
“Insolent puppy!” the latter grits between his teeth.
He is heedful, however, to avoid the epithet in the presence of young
Aaron; for, in spite of that rude courage which, when all is said,
lies at the root of his nature, the ex-apothecary dreads the “gentleman
volunteer,” with his black ophidian glance--so balanced, so hard, so
vacant of fear!
It is toward the last of November; the valley of the St. Lawrence seems
the home of snow. Colonel Arnold grows afraid of the temper of his
people. As they push slowly through the drifts, their angry wrath
against the Caligula who leads them is only too thinly veiled. At
this, the insolent oppressions of our ex-apothecary cease; he seeks to
conciliate, but the time is overlate.
Colonel Arnold goes into camp, and considers the situation. Even if his
followers do not wheel suddenly southward for home, he fears that on
some final battle day they will refuse to fight at his command.
With despair gnawing at his heart, he decides to get word to General
Montgomery, who has conquered and is holding Montreal. The giant
Irishman is the idol of the army. Once he appears, the grumblings and
mutinous murmurings will abate. The rebellious ones will go wherever he
points, fight like lions at his merest word.
True, the coming of Montgomery will mean his own loss of command, and
that is a bitter pill. Still, since he may do no better, he resolves
to gulp it. Thus resolving, he calls young Aaron into conference. The
uneasy tyrant hates young Aaron--hates him for the gold he has borrowed
from him, hates him for his scarcely concealed contempt of himself. None
the less he calls him into council. It is wisdom not friendship his case
requires, and he early learned to value the long head of our “gentleman
volunteer.”
“It is this,” explains Colonel Arnold, desperately. “We have not
the force demanded for the capture of Quebec. We must get word to
Montgomery. He is one hundred and twenty miles away in Montreal.
The puzzle is to find some one, whom we can trust among these
French-speaking native Canadians, who will carry my message.”
Young Aaron knots his brows. Colonel Arnold watches him anxiously, for
he is at the end of his resources. Finally young Aaron consults his
watch.
“It is now ten o’clock,” he says. “Nothing can be done to-night. And
yet I think I know the man for your occasion. By daybreak I’ll have him
before you.”