3stalwarts by Unknown Page A

think about me once all day,” she thought.
    He had reached the Kingsroad by now. Christian Reall was waiting for him there on the edge of the underbrush. They saluted each other stiff as two dogs meeting at the corner of the fence. Then they moved off side by side into the woods.
    On muster day, Christian Reall was a different man from the meaching Bible reader his wife professed to admire. Gil had never been able to understand why in his family he should pretend to such devoutness if he wished to be such a rip hell once he got loose from them. His very walk was different. He cocked on his toes at each step, instead of flat-footedly shuffling the dust, and as soon as they were safely in the woods he clapped Gil on the shoulder and told him he looked like a God-damned gentleman.
    “You don’t look so bad yourself,” Gil said good-humoredly.
    Walking with a swing of his outthrust elbows, Reall preened himself like a jay bird.
    “Not too bad,” he admitted, “but by Jesus it takes more than clothes to get the girls to look at you. You got to have something. Like a gentleman. Not just lace around your neck or a handkerchief to blow your nose in. You know.”
    “I can’t say I do.”
    “Well, you could. You’ve got it. Look at the girl you got to marry you! Lana’s prettier than the nigh side of a peach. But that ain’t what I mean. Who actually wants to marry? Gentry do and gentry don’t, but they al-ways have a trot with the girls notwithstanding.” He shouldered his rust-pitted Spanish musket and jerked his flopping hat brim over his eyes. “The stories I used to hear when I was down in Caughnawaga was a caution. The way the young gentry went around the country. Just like a bunch of stallions. Why, a girl of fourteen couldn’t hardly dast get up a sweat without fearing one of those gentry would be tagging on her heels like a breed bull. Young Sir John, and they say young Walter Butler. And Claus and Guy Johnson. And young Cosby. The whole lot. They rutted the year round. Mostly they hung around the Indian camps or went up into the Sacandaga bush clearings.”
    “I’ve heard some of those stories,” Gil said. “But I don’t believe the half of them.”
    “You don’t? You’re a fool then. Everybody knows Sir John had Clare Putnam living in sin in the Fort with him when he got married to Miss Watts. Even Sir William Johnson kind of dabbled in such things. He didn’t marry the Weisenberg woman till she was ready to die. He bought her for his bed the way a man would buy new sheeting. Then he had two Indians. One afore Brant’s sister. And God knows how many he happened against. All you’ve got to do is look at all the Jacksons there was in the Lower Castle. It was a joke he had. He let all the papooses born in the house get called Johnson. All outside he called Jackson. Otherwise, he said he’d be feeding half the Mohawk nation. By God, he ought to know, too.”
    “Well, he was a great man,” said Gil. “I’ll bet if he was alive he wouldn’t have run off to Canada.”
    “Well, maybe he was. But he surely could rip hell around.”
    “It’s just the fashion with gentry.”
    “Fashion, that’s the word I tried to remember.” Christian Reall licked his lips. “Wish to God I had some of it myself.”
    Gil laughed out loud.
    They passed Cosby’s Manor about when Wolff and his wife must have been having breakfast in the store, for smoke was still trailing out of the chimney. There was no sign of the storekeeper or the woman, but a couple of Indians, like two sleepy cats, sat in the woodshed in a patch of sunlight.
    “What’s them?” whispered Reall.
    “I don’t know,” Gil answered. “I never seen them.”
    “They’ve shaved fresh, look at their heads.”
    “Yes.”
    “Do you expect they’re painted?”
    “I don’t know. Not on their faces anyways.”
    Gil took a good look at them. They didn’t seem as stocky as the Mohawks he had seen. But they weren’t Oneidas. They were too