The Silver Bullet

Chapter Three

The Indians who lived in the areas near Albany were predominantly Iroquoian and had long had contact, for better or worse, with the white man. The predominant group was the Six Nations, a strong confederation whose main tribe near Albany was called by the English "Mohawks," a name which also applied to the river and the valley that ended at the falls Jake had so recently admired.

"Mohawk" was a somewhat unfortunate though accurate appellation, applied not by the tribe itself but by Algonquin peoples nearby with whom they had warred for many years. Loosely translated, it meant "man eaters." The term was literal, and while it failed to capture the nuances of the religious ceremonies that involved the act, it was nonetheless an appropriate indication of the ferocity of the Mohawk world. Their universe was different than the whites'; dreams and nightmares were still literally true, and the dead stepped seamlessly from one life to another, status in the next determined largely by bravery and stoic fortitude in this one.

Jake was looking at one of their nightmares now. A small farmstead, set in a small hollow amid no more than twenty cleared acres a good mile from the main road, had been ambushed and set ablaze by raiders within the past day. Little more than a cottage, the house had only one hearth and chimney; its stones towered now above the caved-in roof timbers. The front and far side wall were both tumbled down and burnt. A jagged edge of the back wall remained, three-quarters the height it had stood until yesterday. A quilt still hung at one end, and next to it, a sideboard with a set of earthen dishes untouched by the flames. A broom was propped on one side, its straw head barely singed, as if waiting for the owner to set about the daily chores.

This had been a very poor farm, with no outbuildings to speak of, a lean-to a few yards from the house apparently serving as the barn. That too had been destroyed, pulled down and flattened by fire. The settlers' well stood between the two structures. Jake eased his horse gently toward it, knowing what he would find there.

The hole was narrow, with an irregular wooden wall at the top. An arm of the dead man's body had caught on a side board, hanging the body in a pose that made it seem as if he were trying to climb up. His face gazed toward heaven, frozen in the shape of his dying thought — Why?

Jake led his horse back to the house and dismounted, tying it to a board. The beast protested loudly and shook its head, as if warning Jake away from the ghosts that surely inhabited the site. Its cries were so adamant he feared it would harm itself; Jake undid the rein and brought it over to the remains of the lean-to, where the animal consented to wait more calmly, commenting on the scene with sad, soft nickers.

The dead man was not quite middle aged. He had been robbed of his shoes, but otherwise his clothing was so poor and tattered that it had obviously been left by the raiders as worthless. Nor had he been well-fed — Jake had no trouble lifting him and carrying him to the front of the house.

Several large stains of blood marked his chest. He had been scalped; a piece of skin flapped back on his skull as he was set down. Jake had to tilt the head to get the skin to stay in place. He closed the man's eyes, and said a short, simple prayer he'd been taught as a youngster.

Prudence dictated that he leave the house immediately, since it was possible whoever had attacked it was watching it still. But Jake wasn't listening to prudence at the moment. Though grimly alert, he was concerned with giving the dead man a decent burial. He was also aware, as he scanned the remains of the homestead that the man had lived here with his wife — a soiled bonnet was among the ruins.

He found her three or four yards into the woods, the back of her simple dress decorated with large blood stains. Jake was surprised to see her long black hair still intact; he would have thought it quite a prize.

He was even more surprised to see the body move.

At first it seemed an optical illusion. Jake looked quickly around the field, half-expecting a trap, as if the warriors had some way of poking the body from afar to distract him.

Seeing nobody, he looked back down. The body moved again, ever so slightly. The woman was alive.

Jake turned her over gently. A gurgle of blood passed from her lips. He brushed the caked dirt and mud away gently from her face. The skin was soft but brittle, death already stealing in. There could be no hope for her.

Looking more carefully at the woods around her, he realized that she had crawled here from several yards away, apparently having hid after she was shot. But her survival meant only that she had delayed death by an hour or two.

"Who did this?" he asked.

To his great surprise, she murmured something in response. Jake pulled her up closer to hear. The light, under-nourished body belonged more to the next life than this; he felt as if he were intruding in heaven.

"Can you tell me who attacked you? Were they Mohawks?"

But the dying woman had other priorities. "My baby," she said, "in the cellar."

The effort to voice these small words wore on her severely; she slumped in his arms. Jake realized she didn't have enough strength even to be moved; she might last another minute or two at most. Gently he picked her head off his lap and, with his coat as a pillow, placed it on the ground.

He ran to the cabin quickly, resolved to show her lingering soul that her baby was still alive. All other thoughts temporarily abandoned, he flew to the ruins like a mythological bird of prey, possessed by an unworldly power. Though the embers were still hot, he tossed them aside, feeling nothing.

It was not easy to find the opening, especially with the ruins of the house on top of it. Jake pulled and poked at the floorboards, trying a good three quarters of them before finally discovering the one that led to the subterranean chamber.

Or hole. The space below was barely the size of a chest, which explained, perhaps, why the woman had not tried to hide there herself.

It was empty, except for a small, soiled blanket where the baby had lain.

Technically speaking, Lt. Col. Gibbs was guilty of a great dereliction of duty. Considering the weight Schuyler, through his deputy Colonel Flanagan, had placed on the mission to Canada, Jake's decision to pursue the child's abductors was nearly a direct betrayal of his oath as an officer.

From the point of prudence, it was lunacy. Assuming he was correct and the raiders were a Mohawk scouting party headed or motivated by British troops, they would be well armed and would outnumber him at least six or eight to one. Even if he could somehow overwhelm them, little of military value would be gained; complete and utter victory would only delay him from his more important goal.

Yet Jake could not help himself. As a professional spy and soldier, he was not supposed to be motivated by anger. Indeed, if you had stopped him now, as he pushed his horse ever deeper through the woods after burying the husband and wife in a shallow grave, he could have cited many instances when he had postponed revenge for the good of the Cause, when he had let slights and injustices, cold murder among them, pass so that Freedom might be achieved in the end.

But had you been able to stop him — had you been able to draw near enough to see his face — you would have realized here was a man possessed. Here was a man who wanted nothing except the return of that small baby, and would not be stopped, not even by the direct command of His Excellency George Washington himself, until he rescued it.

The path the raiders had taken was obvious enough, if you knew what to look for. A trail jutted out of the woods at the west end of the clearing; Jake noticed some gunpowder among the broken branches. A few yards deep into the forest he came upon some loose dirt and footprints which the murderers had not bothered to erase.

Though Jake had many talents, he was not in the true sense a woodsman. Had he been, he would have read volumes from this sign of prints. For a pure Mohawk war party would never have been so careless. The Indians who were along on the raid did indeed include Iroquois speakers, but they were a collection of individual and vastly different warriors under the direction of white men. This could have been read in the tracks themselves, from the shoe and moccasin markings. But it would have made small difference in any event.

The trail crossed a small brook and then opened up, becoming a highway in comparison to its start by the cabin; Jake galloped along for nearly three miles until a sixth sense told him to slow down. The sun was already sliding low toward the treetops; something tickled his nose and he flew off his horse, pistol in hand.

The scent was another fire, but this was fresher and more carefully planned — the raiding party must be making camp nearby. Jake proceeded up the trail a ways further, walking his horse slowly and as stealthily as possible.

He'd gone only a few hundred yards further along when he heard voices in heated exchange ahead. Quickly and as silently as possible he retreated, looking for a place where he could secure his horse. The nearest spot, a small copse thirty yards from the path, was back two twists along the trail; Jake tied the horse and took his guns from the saddle holsters. Each was primed and half-cocked, ready to be fired, as was the Segallas pocket pistol in his jacket.

The ground rose slightly, and Jake walked in a semi-circle toward the crown, realizing this would be a perfect vantage to post a guard.

He did not see the man until he was almost upon him. Fortunately for Jake, the guard's attention was directed wholly toward the trail below. The man crouched forward, one hand against a tree, a musket wedged in the fold between his stomach and thigh. His head was shaven Indian-style, with a shock of black hair feathered up in the middle of the scalp, but from twenty yards Jake could not quite tell if he were truly an Indian or a white man made up as one.

The problem was the same no matter his ancestry: the sentry must be taken down silently, before he could alert whomever he was protecting. Jake had a potion secreted in a pouch in his belt designed for just such a job — its main ingredient was distilled from scorpion poison, and it could silently paralyze a man with one breath.

But the guard knew his business. Dry leaves had been gathered in shallow piles to make a stealthy approach difficult. He couldn't count on sneaking close enough to use the powder, which would have to be clamped over the man's nose from behind.

Jake put two of his guns on the ground where they would be safe and drew his long knife and held it in his right hand. He kept his best flintlock pistol, the Styan, in his other hand, to be used if the man turned around before he was close enough for the knife.

Two steps, three; Jake sucked his breath into his chest, moving cautiously between the shrubs and leaf piles until a mere ten feet separated them. The brook he had crossed closer to the house flowed several hundred feet away, but it wasn't quite loud enough to cover a last dash. He stopped and stood like a statue, debating what to do.

Shoot and the whole company would descend. Remain stationary, and sooner or later the guard would turn around.

Providence weighed the odds and decided to nudge its brother Wind, which in turn rustled the leaves. Jake launched himself, hitting the lookout even as he started to turn. He held his knife extended in front of him like the prow of a Viking ship, battering an enemy vessel. They rolled together briefly, the Indian's gun flying aside as Jake drove the knife home. Surprise kept the man from yelling out, that and the barrel of Jake's gun, slammed severely and repeatedly against his chin. The knife finished the job with a quiet but deep slice upwards that dissected the sentry's heart.

He was truly an Indian, though he did not wear the typical Mohawk markings on his face. Jake pulled him down the hill some distance and wedged his body in a rocky crevice, covering it with leaves. He quickly wiped the blood from his hand as if it were poison, and went to look for the camp.

There were about a dozen Indians, including a few women. Two white men dressed in rough clothes were among them. These two seemed to be in charge, or at least thought they were; a rebellion was obviously afoot.

Stepping forward to listen, Jake's boot caught against something. At first he thought it was a log, but realized as he brought his leg back that though solid, it was soft, not hard. Looking down, he saw a dull yellow piece of cloth on the ground.

A child's rag doll.

He leaned down to pick it up, some vague hope of using it to calm the child on the ride to safety forming in a corner of his brain. In the next moment, that hope was shattered into revulsion and horror, and he felt a sharp spear of pain in his chest — he was holding not a doll but a dead child in his hand.

One of the white men, a tall-skinny man with a pockmarked face, had ordered it killed. That was what the argument was about, as Jake realized as he held the baby's still-warm body to his chest.

There was a certain quality his brain had, when nearly overwhelmed with danger, to proceed to some higher plane and make ready, preparing to strike with the calm detachment of a rattlesnake. His mind was there now, observing, mapping strategy. Not even his mentor General Greene could have sized up an enemy with such placid intelligence, while every muscle in his body boiled with anger.

The man directing the Indians yelled in resentment that they could all leave and go to hell as far as he was concerned. The other white stood silently and with bent shoulders. Jake guessed he was a British officer; had he cared to make further surmises, he might have hypothesized from his pallid manner that he was appalled by what he had just witnessed.

Such theories would have been correct, but they were irrelevant as far as Jake was concerned. More to the point was his theory, gathered from the different gestures and the Englishman's words, that the Indians had not wanted the baby killed. Indeed, though Jake's scant ability with the Iroquoian tongue prevented him from knowing this, the boy had been intended for one of the women now standing in dismay at the edge of the group. It was to have been a surrogate for one she had lost this past winter.

It seemed he stood there listening forever, the poor child's body growing cold. Finally, the argument ended and the group cleaved in two, Indians and whites, the latter joined by a single native.

Jake, figuring he would trail the whites until they were far enough from the others to strike, began to move silently back toward his horse. The patriot quickened his pace when he heard one of the Indians heading in the same direction, calling to the lookout he had earlier relieved of his duties on a permanent basis.

But when he arrived at his horse with the dead child, the animal wanted no part of it, rearing and whining as soon as he brought the dead body near. Jake had to leave either the child or the horse; the decision was unfortunate but obvious.

He ran a few feet into the woods, back toward the stream. With his boot he rolled a log to the side, then took a long, thick stick and dug quickly into the sandy dirt. Covering the poor child's body, he pulled the log back on top, marking a grave that even in his haste he realized would provide small comfort for the baby's soul. But there was little else he could do; the Indian was now shouting for the slain lookout and running directly toward him in the woods.

Jake slid down behind a tree and surprised the man as he ran past. The branch he had just used as a burial shovel was now changed to a death lance. Jake caught the Indian just below the waist. The man's momentum carried him nearly to Jake's fist, the stick plunging deep into his abdomen. In a quick, unconscious rage, he finished him off, crushing his skull savagely with the butt end of his pistol before the man could utter even a syllable of surprise.

He left the body where it fell and ran to his horse.

It is barely believable but Jake's fury increased with every yard covered. He mounted the horse, intending to circle around and head off the whites if possible. Urging the beast through the thick bramble, over fallen trees and past the shallow creek, he had no care for the noise he made. For a long while, Jake had no care for himself, only for revenge.

But they had too good a lead on him. When he finally reached the main trail again with no trace, his horse slowed practically to a walk; its deep pants warned Jake not to push it faster.

The trail soon took him across a main road. One way was west, quite probably the way the men had gone. The other was northeastward, most likely back toward the river.

Back toward his mission.

Jake paused there, listening, but all he could hear was the faint rush of the water slipping through the rocks in the nearby creek.

His anger had delayed his mission several hours, perhaps half a day — precious time that could help save many lives, and perhaps the entire war. He'd have to make up for this by riding through the night, pushing himself still further. Revenge was a luxury that he could not indulge in.

There had been many such deaths in the war; every loss was a tragedy to someone, every death senseless until the final goal of Freedom was achieved. That was the only way of revenge; individual retribution was but pyrrhic pleasure.

Sadly, but with a firm resolve, Jake turned the horse's head up the road and placed his boots against its sides. The animal caught its second wind, and seemed relieved to run in this direction once more.