The Hidden Children | Page 8

frankly. "Why, look you, Loskiel,
even in the wilderness somehow I always have contrived to discover a
sweetheart of some sort or other-- yes, even in the Iroquois country,
cleared or bush, somehow or other, sooner or later, I stumble on some
pretty maid who flutters up in the very wilderness like a partridge from
under my feet!"
"That is your reputation," I remarked.
"Oh, damme, no!" he protested. "Don't say it is my reputation!"
But he had that reputation, whether he realised it or not; though as far
as I had seen there was no real harm in the man-- only a willingness to
make love to any petticoat, if its wearer were pretty. But my own
notions had ever inclined me toward quality. Which is not strange, I

myself being of unknown parentage and birth, high or low, nobody
knew; nor had anybody ever told me how I came by my strange name,
Euan Loskiel, save that they found the same stitched in silk upon my
shift.
For it is best, perhaps, that I say now how it was with me from the
beginning, which, until this memoir is read, only one man knew-- and
one other. For I was discovered sleeping beside a stranded St. Regis
canoe, where the Mohawk River washes Guy Park gardens. And my
dead mother lay beside me.
He who cared for me, reared me and educated me, was no other than
Guy Johnson of Guy Park. Why he did so I learned only after many
days; and at the proper time and place I will tell you who I am and why
he was kind to me. For his was not a warm and kindly character, nor a
gentle nature, nor was he an educated man himself, nor perhaps even a
gentleman, though of that landed gentry which Tryon County knew so
well, and also a nephew of the great Sir William, and became his
son-in-law.
I say he was not liked in Tryon County, though many feared him more
than they feared young Walter Butler later; yet he was always and
invariably kind to me. And when with the Butlers, and Sir John, and
Colonel Claus, and the other Tories he fled to Canada, there to hatch
most hellish reprisals upon the people of Tryon who had driven him
forth, he wrote to me where I was at Harvard College in Cambridge to
bid me farewell.
He said to me in that letter that he did not ask me to declare for the
King in the struggle already beginning; he merely requested, if I could
not conscientiously so declare, at least that I remain passive, and attend
quietly to my studies at Cambridge until the war blew over, as it
quickly must, and these insolent people were taught their lesson.
The lesson, after three years and more, was still in progress; Guy Park
had fallen into the hands of the Committee of Sequestration and was
already sold; Guy Johnson roamed a refugee in Canada, and I, since the
first crack of a British musket, had learned how matters stood between

my heart and conscience, and had carried a rifle and at times my
regiment's standard ever since.
I had no home except my regiment, no friends except Guy Johnson's,
and those I had made at College and in the regiment; and the former
would likely now have greeted me with rifle or hatchet, whichever
came easier to hand.
So to me my rifle regiment and my company had become my only
home; the officers my parents; my comrades the only friends I had.
I wrote to Guy Johnson, acquainting him of my intention before I
enlisted, and the letter went to him with other correspondence under a
flag.
In time I had a reply from him, and he wrote as though something
stronger than hatred for the cause I had embraced was forcing him to
speak to me gently.
God knows it was a strange, sad letter, full of bitterness under which
smouldered something more terrible, which, as he wrote, he strangled.
And so he ended, saying that, through him, no harm should ever
menace me; and that in the fullness of time, when this vile rebellion
had been ended, he would vouch for the mercy of His Most Christian
Majesty as far as I was concerned, even though all others hung in
chains.
Thus I had left it all-- not then knowing who I was or why Guy Johnson
had been kind to me; nor ever expecting to hear from him again.
Thinking of these things as I rode beside Lieutenant Boyd through the
calm Westchester sunshine, all that part of my life-- which indeed was
all of my life except these last three battle years-- seemed already so far
sway, so