Alice of Old Vincennes Part 41

Hamilton frowned. The mention of Clark was disturbing. Ever since the strange disappearance of Lieutenant Barlow he had nursed the fear that possibly Clark's scouts had captured him and that the American forces might be much nearer than Kaskaskia. Besides, his nerves were unruly, as they had been ever since the encounter with Father Beret; and his vision persisted in turning back upon the accusing cold face of Alice, lying in the moonlight. One little detail of that scene almost maddened him at times; it was a sheeny, crinkled wisp of warm looking hair looped across the cheek in which he had often seen a saucy dimple dance when Alice spoke or smiled. He was bad enough, but not wholly bad, and the thought of having darkened those merry eyes and stilled those sweet dimples tore through him with a cold, rasping pang.

"Just as soon as this toddy is properly mixed and tempered," said Helm, with a magnetic jocosity beaming from his genial face, "I'm going to propose a toast to the banner of Alice Roussillon, which a whole garrison of British braves has been unable to take!"

"If you do I'll blow a hole through you as big as the south door of h.e.l.l," said Hamilton, in a voice fairly shaken to a husky quaver with rage. "You may do a great many insulting things; but not that."

Helm was in a half stooping att.i.tude with a ladle in one hand, a cup in the other. He had met Hamilton's glowering look with a peculiarly innocent smile, as if to say: "What in the world is the matter now? I never felt in a better humor in all my life. Can't you take a joke, I wonder?" He did not speak, however, for a rattling volley of musket and rifle shots. .h.i.t the top of the clay-daubed chimney, sending down into the toddy a shower of soot and dirt.

In a wink every man was on his feet and staring.

"Gentlemen," said Helm, with an impressive oath, "that is Clark's soldiers, and they will take your fort; but they ought not to have spoiled this apple toddy!"

"Oh, the devil!" said Hamilton, forcibly resuming a calm countenance, "it is only a squad of drunken Indians coming in. We'll forego excitement; there's no battle on hand, gentlemen."

"I'm glad you think so, Governor Hamilton," Helm responded, "but I should imagine that I ought to know the crack of a Kentucky rifle. I've heard one occasionally in my life. Besides, I got a whiff of freedom just now."

"Captain Helm is right," observed Farnsworth. "That is an attack."

Another volley, this time nearer and more concentrated, convinced Hamilton that he was, indeed, at the opening of a fight. Even while he was giving some hurried orders to his officers, a man was wounded at one of the port-holes. Then came a series of yells, answered by a ripple of sympathetic French shouting that ran throughout the town. The patrol guards came straggling in, breathless with excitement. They swore to having seen a thousand men marching across the water-covered meadows.

Hamilton was brave. The approach of danger stirred him like a trumpet-strain. His fighting blood rose to full tide, and he gave his orders with the steadiness and commanding force of a born soldier. The officers hastened to their respective positions. On all sides sounds indicative of rapid preparations for the fight mingled into a confused strain of military energy. Men marched to their places; cannon were wheeled into position, and soon enough the firing began in good earnest.

Late in the afternoon a rumor of Clark's approach had gone abroad through the village; but not a French lip breathed it to a friend of the British. The creoles were loyal to the cause of freedom; moreover, they cordially hated Hamilton, and their hearts beat high at the prospect of a change in masters at the fort. Every cabin had its hidden gun and supply of ammunition, despite the order to disarm issued by Hamilton. There was a hustling to bring these forth, which was accompanied with a guarded yet irrepressible chattering, delightfully French and infinitely volatile.

"Tiens! je vais frotter mon fusil. J'ai vu un singe!" said Jaques Bourcier to his daughter, the pretty Adrienne, who was coming out of the room in which Alice lay.

"I saw a monkey just now; I must rub up my gun!" He could not be solemn; not he. The thought of an opportunity to get even with Hamilton was like wine in his blood.

If you had seen those hardy and sinewy Frenchmen gliding in the dusk of evening from cottage to cottage, pa.s.sing the word that the Americans had arrived, saying airy things and pinching one another as they met and hurried on, you would have thought something very amusing and wholly jocund was in preparation for the people of Vincennes.

There was a current belief in the town that Gaspard Roussillon never missed a good thing and always somehow got the lion's share. He went out with the ebb to return on the flood. n.o.body was surprised, therefore, when he suddenly appeared in the midst of his friends, armed to the teeth and emotionally warlike to suit the occasion. Of course he took charge of everybody and everything. You could have heard him whisper a bowshot away.

"Taisons!" he hissed, whenever he met an acquaintance. "We will surprise the fort and scalp the whole garrison. Aux armes! les Americains viennent d'arriver!"

At his own house he knocked and called in vain. He shook the door violently; for he was thinking of the stores under the floor, of the grimy bottles, of the fragrant Bordeaux--ah, his throat, how it throbbed! But where was Madame Roussillon? Where was Alice? "Jean!

Jean!" he cried, forgetting all precaution, "come here, you scamp, and let me in this minute!"

A profoundly impressive silence gave him to understand that his home was deserted.

"Chiff! frightened and gone to stay with Madame G.o.dere, I suppose--and I so thirsty! Bah! hum, hum, apres le vin la bataille, ziff!"

He kicked in the door and groped his way to the liquors. While he hastily swigged and smacked he heard the firing begin with a crackling, desultory volley. He laughed jovially, there in the dark, between draughts and deep sighs of enjoyment.

"Et moi aussi," he murmured, like the vast murmur of the sea, "I want to be in that dance! Pardonnez, messieurs. Moi, je veux danser, s'il vous plait."

And when he had filled himself he plunged out and rushed away, wrought up to the extreme fighting pitch of temper. Diable! if he could but come across that Lieutenant Barlow, how he would smash him and mangle him! In magnifying his prowess with the lens of imagination he swelled and puffed as he lumbered along.

The firing sounded as if it were between the fort and the river; but presently when one of Hamilton's cannon spoke, M. Roussillon saw the yellow spike of flame from its muzzle leap directly toward the church, and he thought it best to make a wide detour to avoid going between the firing lines. Once or twice he heard the whine of a stray bullet high overhead. Before he had gone very far he met a man hurrying toward the fort. It was Captain Francis Maisonville, one of Hamilton's chief scouts, who had been out on a reconnoissance and, cut off from his party by some of Clark's forces, was trying to make his way to the main gate of the stockade.

M. Roussillon knew Maisonville as a somewhat desperate character, a leader of Indian forays and a trader in human scalps. Surely the fellow was legitimate prey.

"Ziff! diable de gredin!" he snarled, and leaping upon him choked him to the ground, "Je vais vous scalper immediatement!"

Clark's plan of approach showed masterly strategy. Lieutenant Bailey, with fourteen regulars, made a show of attack on the east, while Major Bowman led a company through the town, on a line near where Main street in Vincennes is now located, to a point north of the stockade.

Charleville, a brave creole, who was at the head of some daring fellows, by a brilliant dash got position under cover of a natural terrace at the edge of the prairie, opposite the fort's southwestern angle. Lieutenant Beverley, in whom the commander placed highest confidence, was sent to look for a supply of ammunition, and to gather up all the Frenchmen in the town who wished to join in the attack.

Oncle Jazon and ten other available men went with him.

They all made a great noise when they felt that the place was completely invested. Nor can we deny, much as we would like to, the strong desire for vengeance which raised those shouting voices and nerved those steady hearts to do or die in an undertaking which certainly had a desperate look. Patriotism of the purest strain those men had, and that alone would have borne them up; but the recollection of smouldering cabin homes in Kentucky, of women and children murdered and scalped, of men brave and true burned at the stake, and of all the indescribable outrages of Indian warfare incited and rewarded by the commander of the fort yonder, added to patriotism the terrible urge of that dark pa.s.sion which clamors for blood to quench the fire of wrath.

Not a few of those wet, half-frozen, emaciated soldiers of freedom had experienced the soul rending shock of returning from a day's hunting in the forest to find home in ashes and loved ones brutally murdered and scalped, or dragged away to unspeakable outrage under circ.u.mstances too harrowing for description, the bare thought of which turns our blood cold, even at this distance. Now the opportunity had arrived for a stroke of retaliation. The thought was tremendously stimulating.

Beverley, with the aid of Oncle Jazon, was able to lead his little company as far as the church before the enemy saw him. Here a volley from the nearest angle of the stockade had to be answered, and pretty soon a cannon began to play upon the position.

"We kin do better some'rs else," was Oncle Jazon's laconic remark flung back over his shoulder, as he moved briskly away from the spot just swept by a six-pounder. "Come this yer way, Lieutenant. I hyer some o'

the fellers a talkin' loud jes' beyant Legrace's place. They ain't no sort o' sense a tryin' to hit anything a shootin' in the dark nohow."

When they reached the thick of the town there was a strange stir in the dusky streets. Men were slipping from house to house, arming themselves and joining their neighbors. Clark had sent an order earlier in the evening forbidding any street demonstration by the inhabitants; but he might as well have ordered the wind not to blow or the river to stand still. Oncle Jazon knew every man whose outlines he could see or whose voice he heard. He called each one by name:

"Here, Roger, fall in!--Come Louis, Alphonse, Victor, Octave--venez ici, here's the American army, come with me!" His rapid French phrases leaped forth as if shot from a pistol, and his shrill voice, familiar to every ear in Vincennes, drew the creole militiamen to him, and soon Beverley's company had doubled its numbers, while at the same time its enthusiasm and ability to make a noise had increased in a far greater proportion. In accordance with an order from Clark they now took position near the northeast corner of the stockade and began firing, although in the darkness there was but little opportunity for marksmans.h.i.+p.

Oncle Jazon had found citizens Legrace and Bosseron, and through them Clark's men were supplied with ammunition, of which they stood greatly in need, their powder having got wet during their long, watery march.

By nine o'clock the fort was completely surrounded, and from every direction the riflemen and musketeers were pouring in volley after volley. Beverley with his men took the cover of a fence and some houses sixty yards from the stockade. Here to their surprise they found themselves below the line of Hamilton's cannon, which, being planted on the second floor of the fort, could not be sufficiently depressed to bear upon them. A well directed musket fire, however, fell from the loopholes of the blockhouses, the bullets rattling merrily against the cover behind which the attacking forces lay.

Beverley was thinking of Alice during every moment of all this stir and tumult He feared that she might still be a prisoner in the fort exposed to the very bullets that his men were discharging at every crack and cranny of those loosely constructed buildings. Should he ever see her again? Would she care for him? What would be the end of all this terrible suspense? Those remote forebodings of evils, formless, shadowy, ineffable, which have harried the lover's heart since time began, crowded all pleasant antic.i.p.ations out of his mind.

Clark, in pa.s.sing hurriedly from company to company around the line, stopped for a little while when he found Beverley.

"Have you plenty of ammunition?" was his first inquiry.

"A mighty sight more'n we kin see to shoot with," spoke up Oncle Jazon.

"It's a right smart o' dad burn foolishness to be wastin' it on nothin'; seems like to me 'at we'd better set the dasted fort afire an'

smoke the skunks out!"

"Speak when you are spoken to, my man," said the Colonel a trifle hotly, and trying by a sharp scrutiny to make him out in the gloom where he crouched.

"Ventrebleu! I'm not askin' YOU, Colonel Clark, nor no other man, when I s.h.i.+ll speak. I talks whenever I gits ready, an' I shoots jes' the same way. So ye'd better go on 'bout yer business like a white man!

Close up yer own whopper jawed mouth, ef ye want anything shet up!"

"Oho! is that you, Jazon? You're so little I didn't know you!

Certainly, talk your whole d.a.m.ned under jaw off, for all I care," Clark replied, a.s.suming a jocose tone. Then turning again to Beverley: "Keep up the firing and the noise; the fort will be ours in the morning."

"What's the use of waiting till morning?" Beverley demanded with impatience. "We can tear that stockade to pieces with our hands in half an hour."

"I don't think so, Lieutenant. It is better to play for the sure thing.

Keep up the racket, and be ready for 'em if they rush out. We must not fail to capture the hair-buyer General."

He pa.s.sed on, with something cheerful to say whenever he found a squad of his devoted men. He knew how to humor and manage those independent and undisciplined yet heroically brave fellows. What to see and hear, what to turn aside as a joke, what to insist upon with inflexible mastery, he knew by the fine instantaneous sense of genius. There were many men of Oncle Jazon's cast, true as steel, but refractory as flint, who could not be dominated by any person, no matter of what stamp or office. To them an order was an insult; but a suggestion pleased and captured them. Strange as it may seem, theirs was the conquering spirit of America--the spirit which has survived every turn of progress and built up the great body of our independence.

Beverley submitted to Clark's plan with what patience he could, and all night long fired shot for shot with the best riflemen in his squad. It was a fatiguing performance, with apparently little result beyond forcing the garrison now and again to close the embrasures, thus periodically silencing the cannon. Toward the close of the night a relaxation showed itself in the shouting and firing all round the line.

Beverley's men, especially the creoles, held out bravely in the matter of noise; but even they flagged at length, their volatility simmering down to desultory bubbling and half sleepy chattering and chaffing.