which was to hide in the words with the weapons and create a commotion at Jake’s signal. For Jake had concocted a stratagem that would have made the great Elizabethan playwrights proud — the Americans were once more attacking Fort Independence and the nearby bridges.
Illusion is mostly a matter of timing. Two men can appear to be two hundred or even two thousand, if the circumstances are right. Jake dashed down the road in his stolen uniform, happening upon the two British privates who formed their troop’s advance party. He shouted and screamed, his horse wheeling, dust flying.
“ Take cover!” he screamed. “The damned patriots are attacking King’s Bridge disguised as Indians! Dyckman’s is already cut off!”
The two soldiers shouldered their weapons, but were not sufficiently impressed by Jake’s warning. Their attitude began to change, however, when he wheeled and fired off his pistol — only to be answered by two shots in the woods.
The soldiers dropped to their knees and fired back down the road. Jake slipped quickly from his horse, holding it by its tether.
“ Where are your troops, where are your troops?” he demanded as the soldiers tried to reload in the dust.
“ Down the road,” said one of the men, ducking as the rebels in the woods fired again.
“ How many?”
“ Twenty. We are escorting a messenger to New York.”
“ Twenty, is that all? There are two thousand damned rebels down from Connecticut, half of them with Pennsylvania rifles!”
At this the British soldiers nearly lost their weapons as they dropped to the dirt. Every since the British column marching back from Lexington had been picked off by snipers from the woods, any patriot with a rifle and a halfway decent hunting coat was assumed to be both a marksman and superhuman, able to shoot around trees and at vast distances.
Jake found it necessary to join them as a new volley sounded, a bullet whizzing uncomfortably close to his head.
“ Take him by another route!” Jake warned the men as he struggled to reload his pistol. “Double back to the intersection a half mile east and then head south to a Dutch path in the hills. There is a ferry owned by a man named Roelff. He is a Royalist and dependable. All the officers know him. The path on the other side leads to the Bouwerie Road.
Jake steadied his horse as another bullet whizzed past. Van Clynne’s part in the play was proving a little too realistic for comfort.
“ Go quickly. I’ll try and hold them off.” He took aim and fired at the imagined rebel horde. His fellow redcoats were marveling at his bravery, undoubtedly impressed that a man who was dressed as a foot soldier spoke like an officers — and was mounted, to boot.
Their desire to linger in the vicinity, much less to ask questions regarding Jake’s own circumstances, were quickly dispatched by a bomb that exploded a few yards away with a great whoosh. Careful examination of the weapon and its trajectory would have shown that it was formerly a powder horn, that it had been very crudely constructed in a manner producing much spark but little damage, and that its trajectory originated not from the rebel position but from Jake’s own hand. However, in the smoke and dust, careful examination was not a viable option. The soldiers ran for their lives back toward their troop, shouting the alarm.
Chapter Twenty-four
Jake thought it prudent to shadow the task force’s movements for a distance, occasionally sounding muffled alarms and firing a few guns to make sure they proceeded in the proper direction. Fortunately, van Clynne’s estimation of Roelff’s loyalties proved correct, though the cost threatened to become a sticking point when the man said he would take only “real” money, real in this case being coins. Jake, having only American paper money left, managed to persuade van Clynne to advance the sum and even, after many threats, veiled and unveiled, to cease off haggling. The whole procedure consumed a large portion of time, and they were just running down the small path at the rear of the inn to take possession of Roelff’s flat-bottomed skiff when the patrol’s advance guard made an appearance at the front door.
The waters were too rough to chance having their horses swim with them. But Roelff’s pole-driven skiff barely fit both animals and it was nearly as difficult to persuade them to come aboard in the waning light as it had been to get van Clynne to part with his money. Finally the small party pushed off, Jake levering the pole with all his might. Van Clynne put an equal amount of exertion into holding his eyes closed.
“ Hallo there!” called one of the redcoats, arriving at the slip.
Jake, who’d doffed his redcoat uniform and was back in brown breeches and white shirt, waved at the man, pretending to misunderstand his order to return.
Van Clynne’s horse had the same sentiments toward the water as its master. Once it sensed the shore nearby, it bolted from the small craft with such force that the boat overturned.
“ I’m drowning! I’m drowning!” screamed van Clynne in the water.
“ Stand up,” said Jake, busy grabbing their things from the water. Fortunately, he had taken the precaution of placing his knives, gun, powder, and bullets in the water-tight bladder inside his saddlebag. But everything else, including Jake himself, was soaked.
“ I was testing your reflexes,” protested van Clynne as he waded ashore.
“ Do you need help?” called one of the soldiers.
Jake shook his head, but then pointed at the bottom of the boat. “A rock has come through,” he shouted, pushing the long craft ashore.
“ It looks all right from here,” shouted the soldier.
“ No, look,” replied Jake, picking up a boulder from the riverbed. He smashed it through the boat’s bottom. “See what I mean?”
“ I will never, ever, go back upon the water. Never!” Van Clynne’s teeth tapped out a staccato death march. “Noah himself could grab me by both legs and I would not yield.”
“ Isn’t that Noah up ahead?”
“ Your jests are not appreciated, sir. Not appreciated at all. What’s more, they are not funny. Perhaps you should try some other target for your little comedies.”
“ Claus, you’re taking things much too seriously,” said Jake. He’d wrung his clothes out as best he could, but they were still damp. “Relax now. Tell me about Bouwerie Village.”
“ I will not, sir: there is nothing to tell.”
Van Clynne’s face turned white and he began hyperventilating. Jake feared a heart attack.
Not at all. The good squire was merely about to sneeze.
The resulting explosion trumpeted through the hills with the force of an eighteen-pounder, scattering birds and small animals in its wake. Not even the famed proboscis of Antony van Corlear, Henry Hudson’s trumpeter for whom Anthony’s Nose farther north is named, could have made such a stupendous honk. This sneeze was followed in rapid succession by two smaller ones. Smaller only in proportion to the first; by themselves they were most impressive, and had Jake not witnessed their predecessor, he would have run for cover.
“ God bless you.”
“ And now I have a cold, and it will be on me all summer. Infernal water.”
“ I’m surprised you’re not bragging about Manhattan,” said Jake, trying to put his companion in the more optimistic frame their success required by changing the subject. “I’ve heard its purchase described as the greatest land deal of the century. And it was executed by a Dutchman.”
“ Minuit was a phony and a crook. He didn’t even deal with the proper Indians.”
