The Seekers Read Online Free

one hand while he crooked the index finger of the other.
    On his blond head the young man wore one of the shaggy fur caps designed at Wayne’s request by the tailors at Legionville. The cap in this case was decorated with a plume of the Third sublegion’s particular color—yellow.
    The lieutenant kept beckoning with his finger. “Come here, dragoon. We’ve a present for you.”
    “Not now, Meriwether—they’re beating assembly.”
    But Lieutenant Meriwether Lewis, whom Abraham had frequently engaged at cards in winter quarters back at Greenville, set his spontoon aside and practically dragged the junior officer to the tent entrance.
    “I hear. But you’re outranked, Cornet. You’re not permitted to reject a gift from a couple of Virginians who’ve taken so much of your pay.”
    “Stolen would be a better word,” Abraham said with a grin not completely genuine.
    Lewis spoke to someone inside the tent. “This horse soldier’s questioning our integrity, William. Suggesting we deal with sharp’s cards—”
    “Didn’t know New Englanders were that astute,” came the laconic reply of another lieutenant, a tall, red-haired fellow some four or five years older than the other two. Abraham was pushed bodily into the tent.
    “Shut the damn flap before we’re all cashiered!” the red-haired officer whispered. As he rummaged through the folds of his blankets, he added, “Don’t tell me you’re going to refuse a tot of prime Kaintuck whiskey.” Abraham’s grin looked less forced. “I didn’t realize that was the gift you had in mind, William.”
    Lieutenant William Clark, youngest brother of the famous frontiersman George Rogers Clark, displayed his jug. “Most carefully smuggled in—at a cost of five new dollars per gallon.”
    Clark walked toward Abraham, stepping over the pile of sketch pads he was using to develop his natural aptitude for drawing and map-making. Clark’s intelligence reports, illustrated with small charcoal scenes, were well known in the Legion—and reputedly brought General Wayne diversion while increasing his regard for the junior officer.
    Clark propped a boot on one of two brass-latched wooden cases in which his friend Lewis, almost his match in height, collected mineral and botanical samples. Clark waggled the jug at Abraham again, his eyes losing a little of their mirth.
    “If you can’t use a couple of swallows on a morning like this,” he said, “I’ll be happy to down your share.”
    “Or I,” Meriwether Lewis said.
    Touched by the gesture of friendship on the eve of battle, Abraham looked at the two officers from Virginia—men with whom he’d spent many an enjoyable, if unprofitable, hour over the past twelve months. A shiver chased down his backbone as he thought of the massed might of the tribes awaiting the Legion to the northeast. He grabbed the jug.
    “Yes, I can use it—on a morning like this,” he said.
    Somber-eyed, he drank while the Legionary drums beat steadily louder in the dawn heat.

Chapter II
The Charge
i
    S HORTLY AFTER SEVEN, WITH the sun spearing oblique shafts of light through the mist on the Maumee, the Legion of the United States assembled for the attack.
    The Legion itself, four sublegions of foot preceded by a small mounted patrol, formed in columns of fours on the right flank, close by the shore of the river. Scott’s Kentucky mounted militia would advance along a parallel route on the left flank, through the cornfields that stretched northeast between the river on one side and thick woods on the other.
    Mounted on Sprite, whose restlessness seemed to match his own, Abraham gathered with the rest of MisCampbell’s dragoon officers at the rear of the Legion columns. The commanding officer explained their orders in a few words.
    “We’ll be held in reserve, behind the fines, and ordered forward if they need us.”
    On hearing that, Abraham gave voice to the annoyance most of the officers expressed with scowls and grumbles. “Sir, if the