head clerk. He’s a great one for passwords and secret signs and all that hocus-pocus.”
The door swung open, and they stepped into tomblike darkness. Nat jumped when he suddenly heard the hoarse voice right at his shoulder.
“The Committee is waiting for you in the cellar, Shadrach.”
“Shadrach?” Nat repeated. He heard Shad clear his throat.
“Ed, if I could just see you, I’d take you by the ears and ankles and pull you inside out and see how you looked hoppin’ about on your nose!” The disembodied Ed chuckled at Nat’s side, and gave Nat a nudge in the ribs.
“That’s why I ain’t about to strike a light, Shad,” he said.
“Is Shadrach really your name?” Nat asked.
“Well, what did you think it was—Shadow?” Shad fumed.
Mutely they stumbled along a narrow blind corridor to a door which opened to the pale glow of a slush lamp on a shelf. Ed—seventy years old if he was a day, as bald as a new-born baby, with a hooked, red-veined nose which suggested that it was his habit to sample every keg of wine received by the establishment—picked up the lamp and led them down a flight of breakneck stairs to a cellar so dank and malodorous that Nat wanted to turn around and go upstairs again.
You couldn’t see the walls for the barrels barrels barrels of spirits. French wines, Spanish wines, Italian wines, rum from the Caribbean, brandy from New Orleans, African Madeira . . . you could get befuddled just from looking at it, let alone smelling it.
A cluster of men were sitting around a small table bearing a burning whale-oil lantern. They were pawing through a clutter of maps, and a blue-gray smoke coiled voluptuously over their heads as they puff-puffed contemplatively at their clay pipes.
“Paul,” Shad called. “This here’s Nat Towne I tolt you about.”
A stocky, pouchy man of about Shad’s age, with a greasy smile and excitable eyes, stood up and welcomed Nat with his hand.
“Hi, Nat. Shad says you ran into some trouble last night. But here, meet the boys. This is Billy Dawes, an express rider.”
Nat shook hands with a well-setup young fellow who winked at him gaily. Then he met Jessie Greene, the owner of the warehouse: a short, blocky man with a squarelike figure; his head too. He had a bland face and a mild smile and a firm handgrip.
Then there was a dour, lemon-faced man called John Boyd, who handed Nat a damp hand like a limp fish; and Mathew Commings, who right off the bat told Nat he’d been a participant in the Boston Massacre; and Harvey Allen, who wore a thick red beard and who had deserted from His Majesty’s navy five years before; and finally, at the head of the table, Doctor Joseph Warren.
He was a moody, handsome man in his early thirties. He had a quiet smile and quiet ways. Lord Rawdon had publicly called him the greatest incendiary in all America, and Nat, frankly, had expected to meet a much more bombastic man.
“What’s yer tale, myte?” Allen asked abruptly. “ ’Oo was the cove what got done in in the alley last night?”
“I don’t know,” Nat told them. “He was in deerskins, I know that. And he had this powder horn Shad’s told you about.”
“And you never saw the assailant?” Warren asked.
“No, sir. Not to be able to recognize him again. He was just a shape in the dark.”
“May I see the roll of birchbark now?” Jessie Greene suggested.
Nat removed it from his neck and handed it over. Anticipatively, the Patriots—except Warren, who remained seated and calmly smoking—gathered around Jessie Greene as he unrolled the strip of bark and placed it under the lantern-light.
“It’s Abenaki, right enough. Unfortunately, I’m not as well versed in the language as I am with the Western dialects. Let’s see . . . as near as I can make out it is a message from some of the important sachems of the Androscoggin and Kennebec tribes, intended for the Seneca Nation.”
“Then it must be from Paul Higgins,” Warren suggested.
Jessie nodded, muttering to himself as he traced his finger down the bark strip. Nat looked at Shad. “Who’s Higgins?” he whispered.
“Chief of the Androscoggins. White boy the Abenakis stole and raised. Some call him a renegade.”
Jessie looked up and tapped the strip. “I gather that this is an answer to a Seneca question. I believe that the Senecas must’ve asked the Abenakis which side they would fight on in the event of a war between the British and the Americans.”
Warren removed his pipe from his mouth and leaned forward.
“And the answer?”
Jessie shook his head. “As I say, I’m a little vague—but it looks as though the Abenakis think they’ll fight for the British.”
The men around Jessie straightened up slowly. No one said anything for a moment. Then Billy Dawes yawned and stretched and said: “Which probably means we’ll have both Seneca and Abenaki against us if we have to fight the redcoats.” It didn’t seem to bother him much.
But the possibility obviously bothered the rest of them a great deal; especially Shad, who had fought Indians all his life.
Jessie looked at Nat. “Perhaps we’d better take charge of this message,” he suggested. And Warren roused himself, saying:
“Yes. It wouldn’t be advantageous for us if that message were to fall into the wrong hands.”
“I don’t understand, sir,” Nat said.
Warren tapped at his lower teeth with the stem of his pipe.
“Simply this: it would jeopardize our cause if the Senecas were to learn that the Abenakis were ready and willing to fight us. It would probably influence the Senecas into taking the same step.”
“But they’re bound to learn sooner or later.”
Warren smiled a small reticent smile. “As you say, Nat—later, in this case, will suit us far better than sooner.”
Nat hesitated, conscious of their eyes upon him. Then he tucked in his mouth and reached for the birchbark.
“I’ll see that it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. But—I think I’d better keep it. You see, I gave my promise I would.”
They seemed to understand that. A promise to a dying man was considered a sacred thing.
“Just be very, very careful with it, Nat,” Jessie warned.
“Don’t worry, Jess,” Shad said heavily. “If anybody tries to get it away from him, I’ll bust their arm for ’em.”
The meeting seemed to have reached its conclusion. The Committeemen were knocking out their pipes and arising from the table, and Ed Norton went for the slush lamp to light their way upstairs.
“By
