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[Illustration: Elsin Grey.]



_The_

RECKONING



BY

ROBERT W. CHAMBERS

AUTHOR OF "CARDIGAN," "THE MAID-AT-ARMS," "THE KING IN YELLOW," ETC.



NEW YORK
A. WESSELS COMPANY
1907


Copyright, 1905, by
ROBERT W. CHAMBERS

_Published September, 1905_

PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS
BROOKLYN, N.Y.




PREFACE


The author's intention is to treat, in a series of four or five
romances, that part of the war for independence which particularly
affected the great landed families of northern New York: the Johnsons,
represented by Sir William, Sir John, Guy Johnson, and Colonel Claus;
the notorious Butlers, father and son; the Schuylers, Van Rensselaers,
and others.

The first romance of the series, Cardigan, was followed by the second,
The Maid-at-Arms. The third in order is not completed. The fourth is the
present volume.

As Cardigan pretended to portray life on the baronial estate of Sir
William Johnson, the first uneasiness concerning the coming trouble, the
first discordant note struck in the harmonious councils of the Long
House, so, in The Maid-at-Arms, which followed in order, the author
attempted to paint a patroon family disturbed by the approaching rumble
of battle. That romance dealt with the first serious split in the
Iroquois Confederacy; it showed the Long House shattered though not
fallen; the demoralization and final flight of the great landed families
who remained loyal to the British Crown; and it struck the key-note to
the future attitude of the Iroquois toward the patriots of the
frontier--revenge for their losses at the battle of Oriskany--and ended
with the march of the militia and Continental troops on Saratoga.

The third romance, as yet incomplete and unpublished, deals with the
war-path and those who followed it, led by the landed gentry of Tryon
County, and ends with the first solid blow delivered at the Long House,
and the terrible punishment of the Great Confederacy.

The present romance, the fourth in chronological order, picks up the
thread at that point.

The author is not conscious of having taken any liberties with history
in preparing a framework of facts for a mantle of romance.

ROBERT W. CHAMBERS.

NEW YORK, _May 26, 1904_.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER                                                PAGE

   I.--THE SPY                                            1

  II.--THE HOUSEHOLD                                     24

 III.--THE COQ D'OR                                      44

  IV.--SUNSET AND DARK                                   67

   V.--THE ARTILLERY BALL                                97

  VI.--A NIGHT AND A MORNING                            127

 VII.--THE BLUE FOX                                     164

VIII.--DESTINY                                          188

  IX.--INTO THE NORTH                                   212

   X.--SERMONS IN STONES                                239

  XI.--THE TEST                                         266

 XII.--THENDARA                                         289

XIII.--THENDARA NO MORE                                 313

 XIV.--THE BATTLE OF JOHNSTOWN                          336

  XV.--BUTLER'S FORD                                    366




TO MY FRIEND

J. HAMBLEN SEARS

WHOSE UNSELFISH FRIENDSHIP AND SOUND ADVICE

I ACKNOWLEDGE IN THIS

DEDICATION




    I

    _His muscle to the ax and plow,
    His calm eye to the rifle sight,
    Or at his country's beck and bow,
    Setting the fiery cross alight,
    Or, in the city's pageantry,
    Serving the Cause in secrecy,--
    Behold him now, haranguing kings
    While through the shallow court there rings
    The light laugh of the courtezan;
    This the New Yorker, this the Man!_


    II

    _Standing upon his blackened land,
    He saw the flames mount up to God,
    He saw the death tracks in the sand,
    And the dead children on the sod,
    He saw the half-charred door, unbarred,
    The dying hound he left on guard,
    And that still thing he once had wed
    Sprawled on the threshold dripping red:
    Dry-eyed he primed his rifle pan;
    This the New Yorker, this the Man!_


    III

    He plowed the graveyard of his dead
    And sowed the grain to feed a host;
    In silent lands untenanted
    Save by the Sachems' painted ghost
    He set the ensign of the sun;
    A thousand axes rang as one
    In the black forest's falling roar,
    And through the glade the plowshare tore
    Like God's own blade in Freedom's van;
    This the New Yorker, and the Man!

R. W. C.




PROLOGUE

ECHOES OF YESTERDAY


His Excellency's system of intelligence in the City of New York I never
pretended to comprehend. That I was one of many agents I could have no
doubt; yet as long as I remained there I never knew but three or four
established spies with residence in town. Although I had no illusions
concerning Mr. Gaine and his "Gazette," at intervals I violently
suspected Mr. Rivington of friendliness to us, and this in spite of his
Tory newspaper and the fierce broadsides he fired at rebels and
rebellion. But I must confess that in my long and amiable acquaintance
with the gentleman he never, by word or hint or inference, so much as
by the quiver of an eyelash, corroborated my suspicion, and to this day
I do not know whether or not Mr. Rivington furnished secret information
to his Excellency while publicly in print he raged and sneered.

Itinerant spies were always in the city in spite of the deadly watch
kept up by regular and partizan, and sometimes they bore messages for
me, the words "Pro Gloria" establishing their credentials as well as
mine. They entered the city in all guises and under all pretexts, some
as refugees, some as traitors, some wearing the uniform of Tory
partizan corps, others attired as tradesmen, farmers, fishermen, and
often bearing passes, too, though where they contrived to find passes I
never understood.

It was a time of sullenness and quick suspicion; few were free from
doubt, but of those few I made one--until that day when my enemy
arrived--but of that in its place, for now I mean to say a word about
this city that I love--that we all love, understanding how alone she
stood in seven years' chains, yet dauntless, dangerous, and defiant.

For upon New York fell the brunt of British wrath, and the judgment of
God fell, too, passing twice in fire that laid one-quarter of the town
in cinders. Nor was that enough, for His lightning smote the
powder-ship, the _Morning Star_, where she swung at her moorings off
from Burling Slip, and the very sky seemed falling in the thunder that
shook the shoreward houses into ruins.

I think that, take it all in all, New York met and withstood every
separate horror that war can bring, save actual assault and sack.
Greater hardships fell to the lot of no other city in America, for we
lost more than a half of our population, more than a fourth of the city
by the two great fires. Want, with the rich, meant famine for the poor
and sad privation for the well-to-do; smallpox and typhus swept us;
commerce by water died, and slowly our loneliness became a maddening
isolation, when his Excellency flung out his blue dragoons to the very
edges of the river there at Harlem Bridge.

I often think it strange that New York town remained so loyal to the
cause, for loyalty to the king was inherent among the better classes.
Many had vast estates, farms, acres on acres of game parks, and lived
like the landed gentry of old England. Yet, save for the DeLanceys, the
Crugers, their kinsmen, the Fannings, kin to the Tryons, Frederick
Rhinelander, the Waltons, and others too tedious to mention, the
gentlemen who had the most to lose through friendliness to the cause of
liberty, chose to espouse that cause.

As for the British residents there, they remained in blameless loyalty
to their King, and I, for one, have never said one word to cast a doubt
upon the purity of their sentiments.

But with all this, knowing what must come, no other city in America so
gaily set forth upon the road to ruin as did patriotic New York. And
from that dreadful hour when, through the cannon smoke on Brooklyn
Heights, she beheld the ghastly face of ruin leering at her across the
foggy water--from that heart-breaking hour when the British drums
rolled from the east, and the tall war-ships covered themselves with
smoke, and the last flag flying was hacked from the halyards, and the
tramp of the grenadiers awoke the silence of Broadway, she never
faltered in her allegiance, never doubted, never failed throughout
those seven years the while she lay beneath the British heel, a
rattlesnake, stunned only, but deadly still while the last spark of
life remained.

Were I to tell a tithe of all I know of what took place during the
great siege, the incidents might shame the wildest fancies of
romance--how intrigue swayed with intrigue there, struggling hilt to
hilt; how plot and plot were thwarted by the counterplot; how all trust
in man was destroyed in that dark year that Arnold died, and a fiend
took his fair shape to scandalize two hemispheres!

Yet I am living witness of those years. I heard and saw much that I
shall not now revive, as where the victims of a pest lie buried it is
not wise to dig, lest the unseen be loosened once again. Yet something
it may be well to record of that time--the curtain lifted for a
glimpse, then dropped in silence--to teach our children that the men
who stood against their King stood with hope of no reward save liberty,
but faced the tempest that they had unchained with souls self-shriven
and each heart washed free of selfishness.

So if I speak of prisons where our thousands died--hind and gentleman
piled thick as shad in the fly market--sick and well and wounded all
together--it shall not be at length, only a scene or two that sticks in
memory.

Once, in the suffocating heat of mid-July, I saw a prison where every
narrow window was filled with human heads, face above face, seeking a
portion of the external air. And from that day, for many, many weeks
the dead-carts took the corpses to the outer ditches, passing steadily
from dawn to midnight.

All day, all night, they died around us in ship and prison, some from
suffocation, some from starvation, others delivered by prison fevers
which rotted them so slowly that I think even death shrank back
reluctant to touch them with his icy finger.

So piteous their plight, these crowded thousands, crushed in putrid
masses, clinging to the filthy prison bars, that they aroused
compassion in that strange and ancient guild that once had claimed the
Magdalen in its sad sisterhood, and these aided them with food, year
after year, until deliverance.

They had no other food, no water except from polluted drains, no fire
in winter, no barriers to the blackest cold that ever seared the city
from the times that man remembers. I say they had no other food and no
fire to cook the offal flung to them. That is not all true, because we
did our best, being permitted to furnish what we had--we and the
strange sisterhood--yet they were thousands upon thousands, and we were
few.

It is best that I say no more, for that proud England's sake from whose
loins we sprang--it is best that I speak not of Captain Cunningham the
Provost, nor of his deputy, O'Keefe, nor of Sproat and Loring. There
was butchers' work in my own North, and I shall not shrink from the
telling; there was massacre, and scalps taken from children too small
to lisp their prayers for mercy; that was devils' work, and may be
told. But Cunningham and those who served him were alone in their awful
trade; cruelty unspeakable and frenzied vice are terms which fall
impotent to measure the ghastly depths of an infamy in which they
crawled and squirmed, battening like maggots on hell's own pollution.

Long since, I think, we have clasped hands with England over Cherry
Valley and Wyoming, forgiving her the loosened fury of her red allies
and her Butlers and McDonalds. The scar remains, but is remembered only
as a glory.

How shall we take old England's wrinkled hand, stretched out above the
spots that mark the prisons of New York?--above the twelve thousand
unnamed graves of those who died for lack of air and water aboard the
_Jersey_? God knows; and yet all things are possible with Him--even this
miracle which I shall never live to see.

Without malice, without prejudice, judging only as one whose judgment
errs, I leave this darkened path for a free road in the open, and so
shall strive to tell as simply and sincerely as I may what only befell
myself and those with whom I had been long associated. And if the
pleasures that I now recall seem tinged with bitter, and if the gaiety
was but a phase of that greater prison fever that burnt us all in the
beleaguered city, still there was much to live for in those times
through which I, among many, passed; and by God's mercy, not my own
endeavor, passed safely, soul and body.




THE RECKONING




CHAPTER I

THE SPY


Having finished my duties in connection with Sir Peter's private estate
and his voluminous correspondence--and the door of my chamber being
doubly locked and bolted--I made free to attend to certain secret
correspondence of my own, which for four years now had continued,
without discovery, between the Military Intelligence Department of the
Continental army and myself through the medium of one John Ennis, the
tobacconist at the Sign of the Silver Box in Hanover Square.

Made confident by long immunity from the slightest shadow of suspicion,
apprehension of danger seldom troubled my sense of security. It did
sometimes, as when the awful treason at West Point became known to me;
and for weeks as I lay abed I thought to hear in every footfall on
Broadway the measured tread of a patrol come to take me. Yet the
traitor continued in New York without sinister consequence to me; and,
though my nights were none the pleasanter during that sad week which
ended in the execution of the British adjutant-general, no harm came to
me. Habit is the great sedative; at times, penning my spy's journal, I
smiled to remember how it was with me when first I came to New York in
1777, four years since, a country lad of nineteen, fresh from the
frontier, where all my life had been spent among the Oneidas and the
few neighbors nearest Broadalbin Bush--a raw youth, frightened but
resolved; and how I lived through those first months of mental terror,
now appalled by the fate of our Captain Nathan Hale, now burning with a
high purpose and buoyed up by pride that his Excellency should have
found in me a fit instrument for his designs.

I have never known whether or not I am what men call brave, for I
understand fear and I turn cold at thought of death. Often I have sat
alone in the house watching the sober folk along Broadway and Wall
Street, knowing all the while that these same good people might
to-morrow all go flocking to Catiemuts Hill near the Fresh Water, or to
that open space in the "Fields" between the jail and the Almshouse, to
see me on the gallows. If such thoughts do not assail the brave--if
restless nights, wakeful dawns, dull days are not their portion--I must
own that all these were mine, not often, perhaps, but too frequent to
flatter self-esteem. And, fight them as I might, it was useless; for
such moments came without warning--often when I had been merry with
friends, at times when, lulled by long-continued security, I had nigh
forgotten through eventless months that there was a war and that I had
become a New Yorker only because of war.

It was harder now, in one sense; four years as secretary to my kinsman,
Sir Peter Coleville, had admitted me to those social intimacies so
necessary to my secret office; and, alas! friendships had been made and
ties formed not only in the line of duty, but from impulse and out of
pure affection.

I had never found it was required of me to pose as a rabid loyalist,
and so did not, being known as disinterested and indifferent, and
perhaps for that reason not suspected. My friends were from necessity
among the best among the loyalists--from choice, too, for I liked them
for their own sakes, and it was against their cause I worked, not
against them.

It went hard with me to use them as I did--I so loathing perfidy in
others; yet if it be perfidy to continue in duty as I understood duty,
then I practised it, and at times could scarce tolerate myself, which
was a weakness, because in my own heart I knew that his Excellency could
set no man a task unworthy of his manhood. Yet it were pleasanter had my
duties thrown me with the army, or with Colonel Willett in my native
north, whence, at his request, I had come to live a life of physical
sloth and mental intrigue under the British cannon of New York--here in
the household of Sir