To lie the night on adamant, pierced by the needles of the frost; to awake shivering and famished, until the meaning of an inch of ice on the backwater comes to your mind,--these are not calculated to put a man into an equable mood to listen to oratory.Nevertheless there was a kind of oratory to fit the case.To picture the misery of these men is well-nigh impossible.They stood sluggishly in groups, dazed by suffering, and their faces were drawn and their eyes ringed, their beards and hair matted.And many found it in their hearts to curse Clark and that government for which he fought.
When the red fire of the sun glowed through the bare branches that morning, it seemed as if the campaign had spent itself like an arrow which drops at the foot of the mark.Could life and interest and enthusiasm be infused again in such as these? I have ceased to marvel how it was done.A man no less haggard than the rest, but with a compelling force in his eyes, pointed with a blade to the hills across the river.They must get to them, he said, and their troubles would be ended.He said more, and they cheered him.These are the bare facts.He picked a man here, and another there, and these went silently to a grim duty behind the regiment.
``If any try to go back, shoot them down!'' he cried.
Then with a gun-butt he shattered the ice and was the first to leap into the water under it.They followed, some with a cheer that was most pitiful of all.They followed him blindly, as men go to torture, but they followed him, and the splashing and crushing of the ice were sounds to freeze my body.I was put in a canoe.In my day I have beheld great suffering and hardship, and none of it compared to this.Torn with pity, I saw them reeling through the water, now grasping trees and bushes to try to keep their feet, the strongest breaking the way ahead and supporting the weak between them.More than once Clark himself tottered where he beat the ice at the apex of the line.Some swooned and would have drowned had they not been dragged across the canoe and chafed back to consciousness.By inches the water shallowed.Clark reached the high ground, and then Bill Cowan, with a man on each shoulder.Then others endured to the shallows to fall heavily in the crumbled ice and be dragged out before they died.But at length, by God's grace, the whole regiment was on the land.Fires would not revive some, but Clark himself seized a fainting man by the arms and walked him up and down in the sunlight until his blood ran again.
It was a glorious day, a day when the sap ran in the maples, and the sun soared upwards in a sky of the palest blue.All this we saw through the tracery of the leafless branches,--a mirthless, shivering crowd, crept through a hell of weather into the Hair Buyer's very lair.Had he neither heard nor seen?
Down the steel-blue lane of water between the ice came a canoe.Our stunted senses perceived it, unresponsive.
A man cried out (it was Tom McChesney); now some of them had leaped into the pirogue, now they were returning.
In the towed canoe two fat and stolid squaws and a pappoose were huddled, and beside them--God be praised!
--food.A piece of buffalo on its way to town, and in the end compartment of the boat tallow and bear's grease lay revealed by two blows of the tomahawk.The kettles--long disused--were fetched, and broth made and fed in sips to the weakest, while the strongest looked on and smiled in an agony of self-restraint.It was a fearful thing to see men whose legs had refused service struggle to their feet when they had drunk the steaming, greasy mixture.And the Colonel, standing by the river's edge, turned his face away--down-stream.And then, as often, I saw the other side of the man.Suddenly he looked at me, standing wistful at his side.
``They have cursed me,'' said he, by way of a question, ``they have cursed me every day.'' And seeing me silent, he insisted, ``Tell me, is it not so, Davy?''
``It is so,'' I said, wondering that he should pry, ``but it was while they suffered.And--and some refrained.''
``And you?'' he asked queerly.
``I--I could not, sir.For I asked leave to come.''
``If they have condemned me to a thousand hells,'' said he, dispassionately, ``I should not blame them.'' Again he looked at me.``Do you understand what you have done?'' he asked.
``No, sir,'' I said uneasily.
``And yet there are some human qualities in you, Davy.You have been worth more to me than another regiment.''
I stared.
``When you grow older, if you ever do, tell your children that once upon a time you put a hundred men to shame.It is no small thing.''
Seeing him relapse into silence, I did not speak.For the space of half an hour he stared down the river, and Iknew that he was looking vainly for the Willing.
At noon we crossed, piecemeal, a deep lake in the canoes, and marching awhile came to a timber-covered rise which our French prisoners named as the Warriors' Island.And from the shelter of its trees we saw the steely lines of a score of low ponds, and over the tops of as many ridges a huddle of brown houses on the higher ground.
And this was the place we had all but sold our lives to behold! This was Vincennes at last! We were on the heights behind the town,--we were at the back door, as it were.At the far side, on the Wabash River, was the front door, or Fort Sackville, where the banner of England snapped in the February breeze.
We stood there, looking, as the afternoon light flooded the plain.Suddenly the silence was broken.
``Hooray for Clark!'' cried a man at the edge of the copse.
``Hooray for Clark!''--it was the whole regiment this time.From execration to exaltation was but a step, after all.And the Creoles fell to scoffing at their sufferings and even forgot their hunger in staring at the goal.The backwoodsmen took matters more stolidly, having acquired long since the art of waiting.They lounged about, cleaning their guns, watching the myriad flocks of wild ducks and geese casting blue-black shadows on the ponds.