Free Drums Along the Mohawk by Walter D. Edmonds Page A

drank and ate and got up a company pool on the time of arrival of the expected Perry baby. Sixpence a ticket. Reall took two. That made twelve shilling. Two for the baby and ten for the winner.
    After the beer was finished some of the more serious-minded thought they ought to try keeping step once around the field. Everybody thought that was a good idea. They wrestled up and got their guns. They formed threes and did their best. They were all blown when they got back to the barn. It was the best muster they had had in a long while. They felt like celebrating.
    Jeams MacNod said seriously, “I bet we could lick the whole British army, marching that good.”
    Weaver admitted they had done well. He had seen them coming round the corner. They were all in step but Reall, but he was the odd man at the rear and didn’t count.
    Reall came up now, briskly, his eyes a little bloodshot, saying, “How about them Seneca Indians up to Wolff’s? Why don’t we march up there and see what they’re a-doing?”
    Weaver thought they might as well. They could dismiss at Wolff’s and he and Reall and Gil wouldn’t have to walk home so far. He gave the order.
    As they marched past Mrs. Kast they took off their hats to her.
5

Arrest
    The company went up the Kingsroad in two ragged files, each taking a rut. There was a good bit of laughing, and some talk. They hadn’t much idea of what they were going to do when theygot to Wolff’s store; it seemed like a kind of joke. Most of them had been there only one or two times in their lives. “Does he keep any likker?” they wanted to know.
    “I don’t think so,” Weaver said. “Cosby didn’t like him having too much on hand, with the Indians coming round all the time. Only in spring when they brought in their peltry.”
    He plodded along, hunched forward, as if he had a plough in front of him. By nature he was an abstemious man and the beer had gone to his head, what with the heat, and the responsibilities of running the muster; and nearly all the way he kept trying to think what he ought to do when they got to Cosby’s. As it turned out, it was Jeams MacNod, the school-teacher, who had the great idea.
    He said, “If them Indians ain’t there, what are we going to do?”
    Nobody had thought of that. Jeams said, “Suppose Thompson has some men around, he might get nasty.”
    “Thompson cleared out a month ago,” Reall said.
    A kind of deliberate sunrise of intelligence dawned in the school-teacher’s narrow, befuddled face. He was a poor man, and he led a hard and thankless life. He wiped the sweat out of his eyes with the cuff of his coat sleeve and said, “Why don’t we take a look around the manor then?”
    “Ain’t that thieving?” asked Gil.
    MacNod shook his head. “No, it ain’t. Not when there’s war. That’s what they’re a-doing down the valley. They done it in Johnson Hall when Sir John cleared out. There was some of the Flats people in Colonel Dayton’s regiment. They went right over the place. They didn’t steal nothing. Captain Ross, he said it was confiscated property and he went around with them showing what he wanted retained for himself. Retaining ain’t like robbery.”
    The suggestion gave them the feeling of being on military service. They were doing what regular army troops had donein command of a regular army officer, and they were doing it of their own initiative. By the time they came to Cosby’s they were, as Kast said afterwards, looking sober enough to eat hay. They wouldn’t have seen the British army, perhaps, if it had been drawn up in squares round the big house, but they saw Mrs. Wolff all right. She was just coming in from the corn patch with a squash in her arms, like a baby.
    When her eyes first fell on them, entering the clearing, she started instinctively to run. A woman of forty-five or fifty, her bleached hair half fallen to her shoulders, the bone pins clinging here and there, loosely, like oversized white lice.
    Then she caught