The Seekers Read Online Free Page A

Indians are really waiting for us upriver—”
    MisCampbell swiped at his perspiring cheek. “We believe so, Kent. But we’re not positive. They were seen there on the eighteenth. They may have pulled back to the British fort.”
    “Even so, shouldn’t the horse be going in first? If the terrain’s as rough as I hear it is, columns of foot can hardly maneuver there.”
    “To the contrary, Cornet. Only columns of foot can maneuver well on such ground. A head-on cavalry charge with all those fallen trees lying every which way would be impossible. Perhaps General Wayne will utilize us for an assault on the flank—”
    The captain’s stern eyes softened, cynically amused. “Don’t be so anxious to shed blood. I’ve done it, and it’s far from pleasant.”
    Abraham saw some of his fellow officers grinning and turned red. He was the greenest of the lot, and he’d unwittingly demonstrated it. Fortunately discussion was cut short.
    MisCampbell shouted: “Prepare your troops to advance and await the command!”
    Tugging Sprite’s rein, Abraham turned the mare back toward his men. All were dressed much as he was: shirt, trousers, boots. Sabers hung from leather belts. Pairs of primed and loaded pistols were snugged in saddle holsters. At least the Americans had learned something from the agonizing years of the Revolution. Wayne suited the army’s clothing and equipment to the country and the temperature; there was no laboring under monstrously heavy packs and blanket-rolls, as Abraham’s father said the British infantry had always done during the Rebellion.
    The foot too were lightly dressed this morning, carrying only canteens and weapons. The trappings of rank—waistcoats, epauletted outer coats—had been left in heaps behind Captain Pike’s earthwork.
    The Indians fought with even less equipment, Abraham knew. They wore only hide trousers or waist clouts, and moccasins.
    And paint.
    He’d listened to descriptions of those ugly slashes of color with which the braves decorated their faces, arms and torsos. This morning, he’d probably see war paint with his own eyes—
    Head aching from the heat and the whiskey he’d drunk with Lieutenants Lewis and Clark, he swung Sprite into line behind his troop’s senior officer, Lieutenant Stovall. Abraham didn’t care much for the chubby Marylander, reputed to be a sodomite. Stovall had made one advance, months ago, but Abraham’s gruff reply and clenched fists quickly persuaded the young officer from Baltimore to seek his pleasure elsewhere.
    Stovall occasionally bragged that his parents had hustled him out of his home city and into the army because of a scandal whose enormity remained a source of amusement to him. Abraham never learned the full nature of the scandal, but an incident a few weeks prior to the abortive seduction gave him a clue.
    One of Stovall’s treasured possessions was an expensive, rather large oval locket on a chain. A woman’s locket; a curiously effeminate souvenir for a man in the army. In a rare hour of drunken camaraderie, Stovall had opened the locket and shown Abraham a miniature which even the young Bostonian, no prude, found shocking because it represented something he had never seen before: a full-figure miniature of a dark-haired young woman reclining on a drapery, nude.
    One coy hand partially concealed a dusky triangle, which the anonymous artist had detailed with the same attention to eroticism he’d given to the young woman’s somewhat sleepy eyes, her wide mouth and her large breasts, carefully reddened at the tips.
    The young woman in the portrait:—she could be no more than sixteen or seventeen—had a voluptuous, puffy decadence that disgusted Abraham even while it aroused him. As Stovall snapped the locket shut, Abraham offered the expected ribald compliment, then asked, “Is that your mistress, Lieutenant?”
    Stovall chuckled, using his amusement as a pretext to touch the back of Abraham’s hand. “A gentleman never