PART II.
Chapter I.
Buff and Blue.
Dear, faithful old colors! They never appeared more brave and trusty than in Major Skerrett’s coat, — a coat of 1777.
“White at the seams of the blue, soiled at the edges of the buff,” said the Major, inspecting himself in a triangular bit of looking-glass. “I must have a new one, if I can find a tailor who will take an order on the Goddess of Liberty in pay. Good morning, Mrs. Birdsell.”
This salutation he gave as he passed out of the little house in Fishkill where he had been quartered last night.
“Good mornin’, Sir,” returned Mrs. Birdsell, rushing out of her kitchen, with a rolling-pin in hand, and leaving her pie-crust flat on its back, all dotted with dabs of butter, as an ermine cape is with little black tails.
She looked after him, as he stepped out into the village street. Her first emotion was feminine admiration, — her second, feminine curiosity.
“What a beautiful young man!” she said to her respectable self. “Sech legs! Sech hair, — jest the color of ripe chesnut burrs, — only I don’t like that streak of it on his upper lip. I’ve olluz understood from Deacons that the baird of a man cum in with Adam’s fall and waz to be shaved off. Naow I’d give a hul pie to know what Gineral Washington’s sent him on here for. It’s the greatest kind of a pity he didn’t come a few days before. That old granny, Gineral Putnam, wouldn’t hev let Sirr Henery Clinton grab them forts down to the Highlands, if he’d hed sech a young man as this to look arter him and spry him up.”
Before he continued his walk, Major Skerrett paused a moment for a long hearty draught of new October, — new American, a finer tipple than old English October.
Finer and cheaper! In fact it was on free tap.
No cask to bore. No spigot to turn. No pewter pot to fill. Major Skerrett had but to open his mouth and breathe. He inhaled, and he had swallowed Science knows how many quarts of that mellow golden nectar, the air of an American October morning. It was the perfection of potables, — as much so then in 1777, as it is now in 1860.
“I have seen the lands of many men, and drained their taps,” soliloquized the Major, parodying the Odyssey; “but never, in the bottle or out of the bottle, tasted I such divine stuff as this. O lilies and roses, what a bouquet! O peaches and pippins, what a flavor! O hickory-nuts and chinkapins, what an aroma! More, Hebe, more! Let me swig! — forgive the word! But one drinks pints; and I want gallons, puncheons.”
While he is indulging in this harmless debauch, let Mrs. Birdsell’s question, “What did General Washington send him on for?” be answered.
“Peter,” said Washington familiarly to Major Skerrett, his aide-de-camp, “I have written peremptorily several times to General Putnam to send me reinforcements. They do not come.”
The chief was evidently somewhat in the dumps there at his camp, near Pennibecker’s Mill, on the Perkiomy Creek, twenty miles from Philadelphia, at the end of September, 1777.
“I suppose,” the Major suggested, “that Putnam cannot get out of his head his idle scheme for the recapture of New York, — that ‘suicidal parade’ as Aleck Hamilton calls it.”
“I must have the men. Our miserable business of the Brandywine must be done over.”
“Yes; Sir William Howe is bored enough in Philadelphia by this time. Everybody always is there. It would be only the courtesy of war to challenge him out, and then beat him away to jollier quarters.”
“I do not like to challenge him unless I have a couple of thousand more men. You must take a little ride, Major, up to Old Put at Peekskill, and see that they start.”
“The soldier obeys. But he sighs that he may miss a battle or an adventure.”
“Adventures sprout under the heels of knights-errant like you, Peter. Peekskill is not many miles away from the spot of one of my young romances.”
The noble old boy paused an instant, sentimental with the recollection of handsome Mary Phillipse and nineteen years ago.
“The men will come like drawing teeth,” he resumed. “Old Put is — what was that Latin phrase you used about him to Lafayette the other day?”
“Tenax propositi,” Skerrett replied.
“Anglice, obstinate as a mule. Ah, Skerrett! we poor land-surveyors, that had to lug levels and compasses through the woods, know little Latin and less Greek. But there was more of your quotation, to express the valuable side of Putnam’s character.”
“Nec vultus instantis tyranni, Mente quatit solida,” quoted the Major; and then translated impromptu, “Never a scowl, o’er tyrant’s jowl, His stiff old heart can shake.”
Washington laughed. Skerrett laughed louder. He was at that ebullient age when life is letting off its overcharge of laughter. Young fellows at that period are a bore or an exhilaration; — a bore, to say the least, if their animal spirits are brutal spirits, — no bore, even if not quite the ripest company, provided their glee does not degenerate into uproar.
“I don’t know what I should do, Peter, in these dark times, without your irrepressible good spirits,” said the chief. “My boys — you and Hamilton and Lafayette and Harry Lee — keep me up. I get tired to death of the despondencies and prejudices and jealousies of some of these old women in breeches who wear swords or cast votes.”
“Perhaps you cannot spare me then to go to Peekskill,” the Major said, slyly.
His Country’s Father smiled. “Be off, my boy; but don’t stay too long. Your head will be worth more to Old Put than a regiment. He’s growing old. He shows the effects of tough campaigning in his youth. Besides, keeping a tavern was not the best business for a man of his convivial habits.”
“We youngsters found that out at the siege of Boston, when you, General, were keeping your head cool on baked apples and milk.”
“I ate ’em because I liked ’em, my boy. My head keeps itself cool. By the way, you will be able to help General Putnam with that hot-tempered La Radière. The old gentleman never can forget how the Frenchmen and their Indians mangled him in Canada in ’58.”
“He never can let anybody else forget it. I would give odds that he’ll offer to tell that story before I’ve been with him fifteen minutes.”
“Well, good bye! Hurry on the regulars! Let him call in the militia in their places! Tell him he must hold the Highlands! If he cannot keep Sir Henry Clinton back until Gates takes Jack Burgoyne, you and I, Peter, will have to paint ourselves vermilion and join the Tuscaroras.”
After such a talk with our chief, — who was not the stilted prig that modern muffs have made him, — Major Skerrett departed on his mission. He left head-quarters a few days before that hit-and-miss battle of Germantown.
Skerrett was young and a hard rider. He lamed his horse the first day. He lost time in getting another. It was the evening of October eighth, when, as he approached the North River to cross to Peekskill, the country people warned him back with the news that on the sixth Sir Henry Clinton had taken the Highland forts, and Putnam had run away to Fishkill.
“Black news!” thought Skerrett. “General Washington will turn Tuscarora now, if ever.”
Skerrett made a circuit northward, crossed the Hudson at Newburgh, and reported to General Putnam, October 9, sunset, at the Van Wyck farm-house, on the plain, half a mile north of the Fishkill Mountains. The heights rose in front, a rampart a thousand feet high.
Old Put limped out to meet Washington’s aide-de-camp. He was a battered veteran, lame with a fractured thigh, stiff with coming paralysis and now despondent after recent blunders.
“Dusky times, Skerrett,” says he, forlornly. “I suppose the Chief sent you for men. He’s a cannibal after human flesh. But don’t worry me to-night. To-morrow we’re to have a Council of War, and I’ll see what can be done. I suppose you know what’s happened.”
“Yes, — generally.”
“Well; it’s all clear for Clinton to go up and join that mountebank, Jack Burgoyne. I might just as well go home, and set up tahvern again to Pomfret for anything I can do here. God save the King is going to make Yankee Doodle sing small from yesterday on. It was all the fault of that cursed fog, — we had a fog, thick as mush, all day on the sixth. I believe them British ships brought it with ’em in bags, from the Channel. They chocked up the river with their fog, and while I was waitin’ for ’em over to Peekskill, they crep across and took the forts. Darn it all!”
Putnam paused to take an indignant breath. Skerrett smiled at the old hero’s manner. When he was excited, the Yankeeisms of his youth came back to him. His lisp also grew more decided. Nobody knows whether the lisp was natural, or artificial, and caused by a jaw-breaker with the butt of a musket he got from an uncivil Gaul at Fort Ti in ’58. His Yankeeisms, his lisp, his drollery, his muddy schemes, made the jolly old boy the chief comic character of our early Revolutionary days.
“How Jack Burgoyne will stick out that great under-lip of his, — the ugly pelican!” continued old Put, “when he hears of this. He’ll stop fightin’, while he goes at his proper trade, and writes a farce with a Yankee in it, who’ll never say anything but, ‘I veouw! By dollars, we’re chawed up!’”
“Don’t you remember, General,” says Skerrett, “how Bunker Hill interrupted the acting of a farce of his? Perhaps Gates will make him pout his lip, as he did when he saw you pointing the old mortar Congress at him and Boston from Prospect Hill. Don’t you recollect? We saw him with a spy-glass, and you said he looked like a pelican with a mullet in his pouch. By the way, where did you ever see pelicans?”
“When I was down to take Cuba in ’62, and we didn’t take it. I’ll tell you the story when I feel brighter. We were wrecked, and had not a thing but pelicans to eat for two days, — and fishy grub they are!”
“Well, we must not despair,” says Skerrett, cheerily, seeing that the old brave began to brighten.
“Dethpair?” lisped Putnam, “who’s a goin’ to despair? I tell you, my boy, you’ll eat a Connecticut punkin-pie with me, yet, in peace and Pomfret. I wish we had one now, for supper.”
“There’s raw material enough about,” Skerrett said, glancing at the piles of that pomaceous berry which wallowed among the corn shocks and smiled at the sugary sunset.
“Yes; but this is York State, and punkin-pies off their native Connecticut soil are always a mushy mess, or else tough as buckskin. Never mind, my boy, we’ll sit every man under his own corn-stalk, on his own squash, and whistle Yankee Doodle and call it macaroni, yet. It don’t look half so dark to me now as it did in the Ticonderogy times. Did I ever tell you the story how the Frenchmen and their cussed Indians mauled me there?”
“It’s coming. I knew it would,” thought Peter, at the beginning of this sentence, “and I did not bring any cotton to plug my ears!”
“Well,” continued Put, without waiting for his companion’s answer, “I shall have to tell my tale another time, for here comes my orderly, with papers to sign. You remember Sergeant Lincoln, don’t you, Skerrett?”
“I should not remember much in this world, if he had not saved my life and my memory for me. Shall I tell you my story, short? Scene I. Bunker Hill. A British beggar with a baggonet makes a point at Peter Skerrett’s rebel buttons on his left breast. Rebel Sergeant Lincoln twigs, describes a circle with a musket’s butt. Scene II. Bunker Hill. A British beggar on his back sees stars and points upward with his baggonet at those brass buttons on the blue sky. In the distance two pairs of heels are seen, — these,” says Peter, lifting his own, “and yours, Sergeant Lincoln. And that’s what I call a model story.”
“Ne quid nimis, certainly. Not a word to spare, Sir,” says the Sergeant, taking Peter’s proffered hand.
He was a slender, quiet, elderly man. Perhaps prematurely aged by care or campaigning or a wound, rather than old. He handed his papers to the General, and withdrew.
“I guess I’ve got the only orderly in the Continental Army that can talk Latin,” says Put, proud as if this possession made a Julius Caesar of himself. “Lincoln must have been a school-master before he ’listed.”
“There’s no flavor of birch about him,” Skerrett rejoined. “Perhaps he stepped out of a pulpit to take the sword.”
“He don’t handle the sword very kindly. He’s brave enough.”
“But not bloody,” interjected Peter.
“No. There’s men enough that can squint along a barrel, and drop a redcoat, and sing out, ‘Hooray! another bully gone!’ — but not many, like my orderly, that can tell you why a redcoat has got to be a bully, and why we’re doing our duty to God and man by a droppin’ on ’em. I tell you, he in the ranks to keep up the men’s sperits is wuth more than generals I could name with big appleettes on their backs.”
“Is that the reason why he stays in the ranks, and does not ask for epaulettes?”
“He might have had them long ago; but he’s shy of standing up for himself. I guess he’s some time or other ben wownded in his mind, and all the impudence has run out at the wownd.”
“Liberty, preserve me from such phlebotomy!” devoutly ejaculated Peter. “But has the Sergeant been with you all this time?”
“With my division. But I did not have him with me in Westchester. I stationed him here to look after the stores, and put recruits through the motions. Now, Major, I must look at these papers. Come to the Council of War to-morrow, and give us a good word. We shall want all we can get. The news gets worse and worse. This very morning General Tryon — spiteful dog — has been marauding this side of Peekskill, and burning up a poor devil of a village at the lower edge of the Highlands.”
“Arson is shabby warfare,” said Peter, taking leave.