Read Long Knife for Free Online Page B

had the musicians out there was because if I’d had to holler, their damn screechin’ and bangin’ would ha’ drowned it out. Heh, heh!”
    And when she had kissed his forehead, blown out the candle, and left his bedroom to go and rest on the cot by the fireplace in the cabin’s main room, General George Rogers Clark lay pondering that wily question of hers, smiling at it between the onslaughts of pain.
    It was true. There were endeavors he could remember which had succeeded simply because, having once launched them so boldly, he could not afford to be seen failing at them.
    For the essential business of leading, he thought, is that you have to keep your people believing it can be done, even if your own reason concludes it’s impossible. That’s how I played it, from the very beginning, from the day I first went back East to persuade Governor Henry to let me do it …

P ART T WO
1777–1780

2
C AROLINE C OUNTY , V IRGINIA
November 1777
    T HEIR HORSES SNORTED STEAM INTO THE COLD, DRIZZLY AIR; hooves squished in the sodden ground of the meadow; saddles creaked. The two horses seemed to hang close together as if for comfort in the dankness, and now and then George’s left foot in its stirrup was pressed against his father’s right. Both then would rein the horses a few feet apart and continue along the fencerow.
    “This will be in corn,” said John Clark, with a sweep of his arm. “Over there I’ll graze army beef for General Washington. Dickie and Edmund had some of the hands out here cutting fence rails last month, as you see. We’ve not had the weather to erect ’em yet.” He fell silent and squinted ahead, absorbed in thoughts of next season.
    George glanced at his father’s profile, the long straight nose, deep-set eyes, the skin all freckles and furrows, not wrinkled much yet; he was not yet fifty. His torso and thighs were solid and compact. He seemed quieter and more thoughtful than he had been before George’s westward sojourns beyond the Alleghenies. George had no doubt that worry over his sons’ fates was largely the cause of John Clark’s gravity. Jonathan, his eldest at twenty-seven, and a captain in the Continental Army, had been nearly killed by smallpox and other sickness while serving in the Southern theater; John, barely twenty and a lieutenant, had been captured by the British at Germantown a few weeks earlier and his fate was as yet a mystery.
    They came to an angle in the fencerow and George glimpsed, through the trees, the clearing where he had grown his own first crop of tobacco at the age of fifteen. Ten years ago it was, but he could remember the weight of the sun on his back, the rank smell of the dark leaves. Ten years seemed as remote in the pastas the forest gloom beyond the mountains now seemed remote in the distance. Another world. He had crossed a threshold of his life when, poring over crude maps during lulls in the defense of Kentucky last year, he had conceived the idea that the British could be invaded in their own western outposts. Since then he had been carrying that vision with him, and it had occurred in every detail in his imagination, its possibility coloring everything he saw, directing his every action. The other settlers in the Kentucky land, brave and hardy as they were, saw only as far as the end of the day and the edge of the clearing, as if their minds were stockaded; they saw the Indian raids only as something to be endured, rather than stopped or controlled at their source. In that sense, George thought as he glanced again at his father, this stable and patient John Clark is like them. He is cautious and looks forward only from one season to the next.
    Suddenly John Clark turned to face his son, even as he was being observed so thoughtfully; there was an anxiety in his eyes. “Has Dickie spoken to you, about joining your expedition out there?”
    “No,” replied George. “Nary a word.”
    “He’s talked of little else since you came back from