He bustled out to fetch us a dish of pink clingstone peaches, grown in the gardens planted by the great Sir William. Truly, Sir John had lost much when he lost Johnson Hall; and now, like a restless ghost drawn back to familiar places, he haunted the spot that his great father had made to bloom like a rose in the wilderness. He was out there now, in the sunshine and morning haze, somewhere, beyond the blue autumn mist in the north--out there, disgraced, disinherited, shelterless, sullenly brooding, and plotting murder with his motley mob of Cayugas and painted renegades.
Colonel Willett rose and we all stood up, but he signaled those who had not finished eating to resume their places, and laying a familiar hand on my arm led me to the sunny bench outside the door where, at his nod, I seated myself beside him. He drew a map from his breast-pocket and studied in silence; I waited his pleasure.
The veteran seemed to have grown no older since I had last seen him four years since--indeed, he had changed little as I remembered him first, sipping his toddy at my father's house, and smiling his shrewd, kindly, whimsical smile while I teased him to tell me of the French war, and how he had captured Frontenac.
I was but seventeen years old when he headed that revolt in New York City, and, single-handed, halted the British troops on Broad Street and took away their baggage. I was nineteen when he led the sortie from Stanwix. I had already taken my post in New York when he was serving with his Excellency in the Jerseys and with Sullivan in the west.
Of all the officers who served on the frontier, Marinus Willett was the only man who had ever held the enemy at check. Even Sullivan, returning from his annihilation of Indian civilization, was followed by a cloud of maddened savages and renegades that settled in his tracks, enveloping the very frontier which, by his famous campaign, he had properly expected to leave unharassed.
And now Marinus Willett was in command, with meager resources, indeed, yet his personal presence on the Tryon frontier restored something of confidence to those who still clung to the devastated region, sowing, growing, garnering, and grinding the grain that the half-starved army of the United States required to keep life within the gaunt rank and file. West Point, Albany, Saratoga called for bread; and the men of Tryon plowed and sowed and reaped, leaving their dead in every furrow--swung their scythes under the Iroquois bullets, cut their blood-wet hay in the face of ambush after ambush, stacked their scorched corn and defended it from barn, shack, and window. With torch and hatchet renegade and Iroquois decimated them; their houses kindled into flame; their women and children, scalped and throats cut, were hung over fences like dead game; twelve thousand farms lay tenantless; by thousands the widows and orphans gathered at the blockhouses, naked, bewildered, penniless. There remained in all Tryon County but eight hundred militia capable of responding to a summons--eight hundred desperate men to leave scythe and flail and grist-mill for their rifles at the dread call to arms. Two dozen or more blockhouses, holding from ten to half a hundred families each, were strung out between Stanwix Fort and Schenectady; these, except for a few forts, formed the outer line of the United States' bulwarks in the north; and this line Willett was here to hold with the scattered handful of farmers and Rangers.