Edwin Brothertoft/Part II Chapter II

Chapter II.
It was in the Skerrett blood to come out red at a pinch.

“Things do look a little dusky for the good cause,” thought Skerrett, as, wearing his buff and blue coat, — far too dull a coat for so bright a fellow, — he stood drinking October next morning, as we have seen him, before Mrs. Birdsell’s cottage.

“The Liberty-tree is a little nipped,” he continued. “I suppose all the worm-eaten people will drop off now. Let ’em go! and be food for pigs! We sound chestnuts will stick to the boughs, and wear our burrs till Thanksgiving.

“Fine figure that! quite poetic! Who wouldn’t be a poet in such a poem of a morning? O Lucullus, you base old glutton, with your feasts and your emetics! see here, how I breathe and blow, breathe and blow, — that’s a dodge you were not up to!

“Hooray! now I’m full of gold air and go-ahead spirits.”

He marched off, — the gallant, buoyant young brave. No finer figure of a Rebel walked the Continental soil unhung. On his nut-brown face his blonde moustache lay lovingly curling.

The Marquis de Chastellux, the chief, if not the only, authority on the Revolutionary moustache, does not specify Skerrett’s in his “Travels in America.” The distinction might have been invidious. But it was understood that, take it “by and large,” color and curl, Skerrett’s was the Moustache (with a big M) of its era. Many brother officers shaved in despair when they beheld it. Hence, perhaps, the number of shorn lips in the portraits of our heroes of that time.

“Something is going to happen to-day,” thought the Major. “I bubble. I shall boil over, and make a fool of myself before night. I am in that ridiculous mood when a man loves his neighbor as himself, believes in success, wants to tilt at windmills. O October! you have intoxicated me! I challenge the world. Hold me, somebody, or I shall jump over the Highlands and take Sir Henry Clinton by the hair, then up to Saratoga and pick up Jack Burgoyne, knock their pates together, and fling them over the Atlantic.”

A man’s legs gallop when his blood and spirits are boiling after such a fashion. It did not take the Major any considerable portion of eternity to measure off the furlongs of cultivated plain between Fishkill village and Putnam’s head-quarters. In fact, he had need to despatch. He had slept late after his journey. The Council would be assembled, and already muddling their brains over the situation.

The Van Wyck farm-house stood, and still stands, with its flank to the road and its front to the Highlands.

“Not much clank and pomp and pageantry in this army of Israel Putnam,” thought Skerrett. “No tents! Men are barracked in barns, I suppose, or sleep under corn-stalks, with pumpkins for pillows. No sentinels! But probably every man keeps his eyes peeled and his ears pricked up for the tramp of British brogans or Hessian boots on the soil.”

There was, however, a sentry standing at the unhinged gate in the decimated paling of the farm-yard.

He turned his back, and paced to the end of his beat, as Major Skerrett approached.

“Aha!” thought the latter, “Jierck Dewitt is as quick-sighted as ever. He wants to dodge me. Poor fellow! Bottle has got him again, I fear. Why can’t man be satisfied with atmosphere, and cut alcohol?”

Skerrett entered the gate, and hailed, “Jierck!”

The sentinel turned and saluted.

A clear case of Bottle! The Colony of Jamaica was a more important ally to Great Britain in the Revolution than is generally known. Ah! if people would only take their rum latent in its molasses, and pour out their undistilled toddies on their buckwheat cakes!

“Jierck,” said the Major kindly, “you promised me you would not touch it.”

“So I did,” says the man, inflicting on himself the capital punishment of hanging his head; “and I kep stiff as the Lord Chancellor, till I got back home to Peekskill below here. There I found my wife had gone wrong.”

The poor fellow choked. A bad wife is a black dose.

“We grew up together, sir, on the Brothertoft Manor lands. She was a Bilsby, one of the old families, — as brisk and bright a gal as ever stepped. We were married, and travelled just right, she alongside of me, and I alongside of her, pullin’ well and keepin’ everything drawin’. Well, when I shouldered arms, Lady Brothertoft — that’s the Patroon’s widow — got my wife to go down to York and be her maid. It was lettin’ down for Squire Dewitt’s son’s wife to eat in anybody’s kitchen. But that’s nothing. The harm is that Lady Brothertoft’s house is unlucky. Women don’t go into it and stay straight. There’s too much red in the parlors, — too many redcoats round. They say that’s why the Patroon cleared out, and got himself killed, if he is killed. That’s what spoilt my wife.”

Skerrett’s supernatural spirits sank a little at this. There was an undeveloped true lover in the young man, — developed enough to show him what misery may come from such a wrong as Jierck’s.

“That’s why I took to rum,” continued the man, dismally. “When my company was ordered to join Old Put at Peekskill, and I saw all the old places where my wife and I used to do our courtin’, and saw my sister Kate smilin’ at her sweetheart and makin’ comforters for him, I couldn’t stand it. They all told me to keep away from the woman. But I didn’t quite believe it, you know. So I went down to the Manor-House and saw her. She didn’t dare to look me in the face. That had to be drownded somehow. I drownded it in rum. I can’t get drunk like a beast, — that isn’t into me, — but I haven’t been sober one hour since until we came up here to Fishkill.”

“Stop it now, Jierck, and try to forget.”

“What’s the use?”

“The use is this. We were all proud of you, as a crack man. We cannot spare you. You know as well as I do what we are fighting for. The Cause cannot spare you. Stand to your guns now, like a man, against King George and Old Jamaica.”

The sentinel was manned by these hearty words and tones.

“I’ll try,” said he, “to please you, Major Skerrett.”

Up went his head and his courage.

“That’s right,” says the Major; “and we’ll have a fling at the enemy together before I go, and spike a gun for him.”

“I must take another sip of October, after that,” thought Skerrett, as he walked on toward the farm-house.

He halted on the steps, and inspected the scene.

October was quite as gorgeous to see, as it was glorious to tipple. It was in the Skerrett blood to love color.

“Color! O blazes, what a conflagration of a landscape!” thought the Major; “O rainbows, what delicious blending! V.I.B.G.Y.0.R. Violet hills far away, indigo zenith, blue sky on the hill-tops, green pastures, yellow elms, chestnuts, and ashes, orange pumpkins, red maples! Flames! Rainbows! Splendors! Take my blood, O my dear country! and cheap, too, for such a pageant!”

There were two parts to the scene he was regarding with this exhilaration, — a flat part and an upright part. All around was a great scope of fertile plain, gerrymandered into farms. Half a mile away in front, the sudden mountains set up their backs to show their many-colored gaberdines, crimson, purple, and gold at the bottom flounce, belted with different shades of the same in regular gradation above, and sprigged all over with pines and cedars, green as May.

The morning sun winked at the Major over the summits, saying, as plain as a wink can speak, “Beat this, my Skerrett, in any clime, on any continent, if you can!”

The Major, with both his eyes, blinked back ecstatically, “It can’t be beat! O Sol! It can’t be beat!”

When he opened his dazzled eyes, and glanced again about him, he seemed to see thousands of little suns rollicking over the fields, and congeries of suns piling themselves like golden bombs here and there. They were not suns, but pumpkins, rollicking in the furrows, and every congeries was a heap of the same, putting their plump cheeks together and playing “sugar my neighbor.”

“We must keep war out of this,” thought the Major. “Nerve my good right arm, Liberty, to protect this pie-patch!”

His earnest prayer was disturbed by the sound of voices close at hand.

Immediately Sergeant Lincoln appeared at the corner of the house. A wondrously wiggy negro accompanied him.

“Make way for the Lord Chancellor!” says Skerrett to himself, as this gray-headed, dusky dignitary loomed up. “If I am ever elected Judge, I shall take that old fellow’s scalp for a wig. And his manners, too! He seems to be laying down the law to the Sergeant, so flat that it will never stir again. Mysterious fellow, this orderly who quotes Latin! I’d like to solve him, and offer him sympathy, if he has had the ‘wownd’ old Put talks of. I owe him a cure for saving me from a kill.”

The two passed by, in eager conversation. Skerrett turned, and entered the farm-house, where the officers of Putnam’s army were sighing over blunders past, and elaborating schemes for the future.

Peter’s seedy coat was freshness and elegance compared to the scarecrow uniforms it now encountered. Our Revolutionary officers were braves at heart, but mostly Guys in costume.