 | I. Edwin Brothertoft |  |
1. 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
did n't come a few days before. That old granny,
Gineral Putnam, would n'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
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 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 Peeks-kill,
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
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 did n't take it. I 'll tell you the story when
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 punkinpies
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
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 Cæsar
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 a 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,
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.
| I. Edwin Brothertoft | |