THE CAPTURE OF THE HENNEPIN GUN[J]

THE CAPTURE OF THE HENNEPIN GUN[J]

By Margaret Emma Ditto

The Fourth of July pranks of a young Ethan Allen and his friends—descendants of the Green Mountain Boys of Revolutionary days.

ON THE evening of the third of July, somewhat more than fifty years ago, a number of boys were gathered in secret council at a deserted house on Otter Creek. The boys had come one by one in the gathering gloom of the early darkness, creeping along from bush to copse or hugging the shady side of the stone fences. They had come silently—no lilt of merry whistle or song, no wanton hoot or random stone-fling, had betrayed their presence on the road.

“There are nine of us already,” whispered a tall boy of fifteen as he shoved aside the hingeless door and peered out. “That is Seneca Goodyear coming across the meadow. He is strong if he does limp. Come in, Senk, and shut the door quick, hang your coat over the crack, and I’ll stand against the lower part. Now, Martin, let out your lantern—just a narrow slit of light and throw it on the floor—not in our faces. Go on, Ethan, and tell them about it.”

A heavy-shouldered boy with Saxon hair and eyes straightened himself up from the cobwebby wall against which he had been leaning and settled himself stolidly on his feet. This boy’s name was Ethan Allen and he was a descendant of the Revolutionary hero of the same name.

“There isn’t much to tell,” he began. “The Ogden County boys have stolen our cannon—old ‘Ticonderoga’ that belongs to Hennepin County, that we have fired off every Fourth of July, or our folks have, ever since there was a Fourth of July. It has been stolen and carried across the county line, and in less than four hours they will be banging it in our faces from the top of Horncliffe. And we’ve got to get that gun between this and midnight.”

“How are we going to do it?” asked Seneca Goodyear.

“That is what we have got to find out,” said Ethan.

“Why don’t the men do something about it?” asked a conservative boy. “I should think it ought to be settled by law; the gun was given to the county by Eth’s grandfather, and it is county property the same as everything else on the court-house grounds.”

“Yes, it is county property,” said Seneca Goodyear. “And that is where the point lies. I’ve heard father talk about it. It is some kind of claim they set up on account of the new boundary line that has sliced off miles and miles of our county, and now they have got the ground they want everything that ever stood on the ground—their proportion of county property they call it, and they have begun by helping themselves to that gun. But there’s no right in their claim.”

“Of course there’s not!” said one indignantly.

“Ogden County is the meanest lot that live on top of the State of Vermont anyway!” said another.

“Well, the Ogden boys were smart enough to steal that gun,” said Ethan Allen, “and if Hennepin boys are any smarter we’d better show our stuff by getting it away from them.”

“I don’t take it to be any question of smartness,” answered the conservative boy. “It is quite as smart to keep out of a hornet’s nest as it is to get into it, and then fight out stung half to death. The question is, what are our chances for doing it? I’m not going on a fool’s errand. To begin with, who took the gun? Where did they take it to? Where is it now? And how do you know anything about it, anyway?”

“We have got all that straight enough, and here is the boy that will speak for himself. Come up here, Eph,” said Allen.

Thus conjured, a boy arose from a dark corner and with a quick cat-like motion came to the front. He looked to be an artless little fellow of ten years, with his quiet eyes and his limp white locks hanging about his small face. But in truth he was fourteen years old, and the discipline of his life had made him shrewd and courageous. He showed very thin and imp-like as the ray of the lantern fell upon him. It seemed as if that sliver of light would go through him like a bayonet and come out on the other side.

There was a murmur of voices. “Oh, him!”

“Eph Stearns—much he knows about it.”

“Dodge down, you little white top, nobody wants to hear you!”

But burly Ethan Allen shouldered up to the little fellow. “Go ahead, Eph,” he said, “tell it to ’em just as you told it to me. Don’t be scared.”

“I wa’n’t scared last night, and I ain’t likely to be now,” said Eph with a grin up at Ethan’s broad face.

“That’s so. Shake hands. After all there is nothing little about you, Eph—except yourself.”

The little fellow looked bigger after this grip of good fellowship and he piped up and began his story.

“I was out last night,” he said. “It was near midnight I reckon. Most all the lights was out in the village and everything was quiet. I was out—out looking for something——”

“He was out looking for his drunken old father,” whispered one of the boys, nudging his neighbor. “That’s Eph’s regular beat nights. He is afraid the old man will get run over, or get sunstruck by moonlight.”

“Hush up, you,” said the boy addressed. “Eph isn’t to blame.”

“I had been down by the cross-roads,” Eph went on. “You know where that is.”

“I think it’s likely we do—there is where General Stark buried a traitor and staked him down with a crowbar,” said one.

“For some time I didn’t hear anything,” Eph went on. “Then I heard something coming along slow and still on the old turnpike. It didn’t seem like a wagon at first, nothing about it rattled and squeaked natural-like for a wagon. There must have been lots of axle grease onto them wheels and that harness was oiled up and strapped up, I tell you, and if them horses had a had smart-weed drafts onto their hoofs they couldn’t have set ’em down more soft and quiet-like. When I saw that it was a wagon and that there wa’n’t no signs of a driver to it—for whatever was driving of it was flat on the bottom—then it came over me that they was a-bringing home somebody dead in that wagon——”

“And the Remains was driving itself home, quiet and respectable-like, and conducting its own funeral—that’s accommodating now—I like that, go on,” interrupted Martin.

“Of course,” Eph admitted, looking a little “sheepish.” “Of course there wa’n’t no sense in that—not by daylight. But that’s what I thought of then, and I was hot and cold all to onct, I tell you, and I streaked after that wagon, for I meant to get home to mother ahead of it. I got up to the court house and lay down flat in that clump of pines by the horse block, ’cause all the roads branch off from there and I could see which way it went next. There wa’n’t no moon last night, and precious few stars.

“On come the wagon, slow and steady—just as if a chunk of the dark had got loose from the rest of the dark and was moving on by itself. It come close to the horse block and I could see it wa’n’t going down any of the roads. Then I heard a clattering sound, and I knew they were going over the round stones of the gutter, and the off horse struck out a spark with his hoof. When I saw ’em a-following me up so close I thought certain it was me they was after. But I had a good place for dodging—out by the meeting-house sheds, or down the court-house steps into the cellar, or round the wood pile—good places all of them, and I thought I would chance it. But there wa’n’t no call for dodging. The wagon just rolled quietly on a few steps and then stood stockstill and six black shadows rose up one by one and got out on to the ground, and when I saw that, why I could have squealed right out a-laughing.

“I meant to see what they were after, so I dragged myself along like a worm in the shadow of that bad-smelling green stuff that edges the driveway, and I found out they were boys from over the line and they had come for our gun. Phil Basset was bossing around—same as he tried to when he came to the academy before Ethan settled him. He was wheezing away like the croup, talking in big whispers full of wind, telling everybody else to keep still, and where to put the crowbars and how to lift all together when he give the word, one, two, three! But just as he got to ‘three,’ there was a pin pointing toward the calf of his leg, and I braced myself against that pin and it naturally sent me off down the knoll, quiet-like and out of the way, and it left him hollering and kicking. Then everybody dropped flat till they see whether any one in the village heard the noise. When they went to work again Phil said he’d been taken with cramp and couldn’t lift. But they got the gun onto the wagon and started for home. Phil drove ’cause his leg was lame and they was his father’s horses. The other five boys had gone on ahead.

“Well, when I saw that gun moving off, and I thought how that was ours for sure, and we’d got it from the English and how we’d got ourselves from the English—Fourth of July and all, so that they couldn’t ever boss us again, and so that everybody was his own boss in this country—why something rose up in my throat and choked me. Then I thought about Eth, ’cause he’d had charge of the gun, and he’d been awful good and let me help clean her up, and how we’d dug the rust out of her and greased her and polished her, and he’d showed me the powder and things for to-morrow and said I might touch her off the first bang—then I nearly busted, only I saw that it wasn’t any time for busting. I just got myself together pretty quick and jumped for the tailboard of that wagon. I hung on—I thought I’d stick to that gun, and if I died a sticking there, well then I’d die.

“The boys had told Phil to take the new road to Tadman’s Ferry, ’cause the hills were so steep on the old one, and the fellows were to go cross-lots and meet him on the other side, and then they were going to set the gun up as high as they could get it on Horncliffe. But Phil said he reckoned he knew what the horses could haul, and as soon as he was left to himself he struck off onto the old road. He was up high on the seat and I’d crawled in and was laying on the bottom, flatter than flat—froze on to the gun. We buzzed along lively at first. The down-hills were rather shaky work you guess, but the up-hills were worse, and they kept getting more so till we got to that awful steep pitch near the top of Smith’s hill. You know where that is?”

“Oh, yes,” said Martin. “There is where you have to lean backward to keep from bumping your forehead when you go up. I suppose you rose to the occasion, Eph—it must have stood you and the gun right up on end.”

“I got out,” Eph went on, “for the horses stood stockstill and couldn’t go an inch farther and then the wagon began to slip back, and Phil put stones back of the wheels. Then he went at his horses again, whipping and coaxing them. But it was no use. The road is slaty along there and the horses had no grip for their feet. He had to give it up at last and he left everything standing and went for the boys to get them to boost. As soon as I knew I was alone I hid the crowbars in a hollow tree, and I cut the traces and let the horses loose, and I took the linchpin out of one of the wheels—it wasn’t in very tight, and I took the ramrod of the gun, and I wrapped them traces around it and I dropped ’em into the brook at the foot of the hill. Then I put for home, and I waked up Ethan Allen and went to bed myself.”

“I reckon you were in bed all the time, and saw all this with your eyes shut in the dark,” said a derisive voice.

“Sure you didn’t dream it, Eph?” asked Seneca kindly.

“It is a good yarn, anyway,” said Martin who had a taste for fancy sketches. “And it hangs together as well as most. I believe it is as true as any of us could make up unless we had facts or some little conveniences of that kind to go upon.”

The little boy straightened up and leveled a look of indignant protest at the scoffers. Then, turning to Ethan Allen, he said, “You go on—you know about the rest of it.”

“No chaffing about this not being true,” said Ethan, “we haven’t the time for it. Eph wakened me up at two o’clock this morning with a handful of gravel on my window, and I was over at Smith’s hill before daylight, and I found the crowbars rammed up a hollow tree just as he told me, and the gun is there by the roadside, tipped over in a kind of gully, and there is some gravel on top of it, and a pile of dry brushwood, so that any one driving along the road would not notice it, and I fished the ramrod and old Basset’s traces out of the brook. I reckon the Ogden boys are coming over for the gun to-night, and we want to get in ahead of them. I can go, for one. Who else?”

“Me, too,” piped in little Eph.

“Oh, of course,” said Ethan.

“Me, three—that makes six,” said Martin.

“I will go,” said Seneca Goodyear in his slow, heavy way, “and I reckon that father will let me have a team—our horses won’t have to work to-morrow.”

“Will your father make you tell what you are going to do with it?” asked the conservative boy.

“Well, no—not if I had rather not,” said Seneca. “He’ll trust me—and that is the tightest tether I want to be fastened with. Sometimes I wish he didn’t. I wouldn’t like to get home minus the traces and linchpin and crowbars as Phil Basset did.”

“Well, if Seneca goes, that takes me,” said Mark Hemingway, the tall doorkeeper. “My folks said I might stay all night with Seneca and I shall stick like a tick.”

“I’ll go, and I, and I,” chorused the rest—conservative boy and all.

Then Seneca Goodyear moved that Ethan Allan be captain of the expedition. This was carried by acclaim.

“All right,” said Ethan in terse acceptance of the appointment. “Now we’ve got to be quicker than lightning and darker than thunder. We don’t want the Ogden boys to get there ahead of us, and have to fight them. No more we don’t want our folks stopping us nor helping us out as if we were babies. We want the glory of this ourselves. Quick and quiet is the word. All scatter and get ready and we’ll meet at the cross-roads and start when the town clock strikes nine.”

The company at the cross-roads organized as follows:

Ethan Allen, captain.

Eph Stearns, with the court-house mule, mounted scout.

Martin Fox, with a dark lantern, spy and light skirmisher.

Mark Hemingway, with an old triggerless flintlock of 1812, high private.

The rank and file consisted of two boys with pistols and no cartridges, and three boys with doughnuts and sweet apples, while the conservative boy with a pocket-compass, a lead pencil, some string, and a chunk of shoemaker’s wax, put in a bid as topographer, correspondent, and surgeon. But Seneca Goodyear, with his stout team and wagon, well equipped with ropes, crowbars, skids, and other lifting apparatus, was the mainstay of the expedition.

Little Eph Stearns was, for the nonce, a glorified being. Hitherto the heroisms of his life had been of the obscure and pathetic kind. Angels had inspired them, and a cloud of witnesses beheld them, but here the chance had come for a heroism brilliant and jubilant. Ethan Allen told him to go ahead and the big boys would see him do it. No wonder that he wrought marvels. Besides lassoing the mule, he had got a bag of shavings larger than himself, and a stout clothes line; the last two were for some secret service of his own suggestion, though approved by the captain. But the mule seemed to be a purely ornamental feature of the occasion. He had been half-shoved, half-carried to the place of rendezvous; here he seemed unwilling to go any farther. He was hitched ignominiously to the tailboard of the wagon, and being pulled in front, and poked in the rear by his doughty rider who walked behind for this purpose, he moved off in spite of himself.

Away into the darkness of that quiet summer night the expedition passed on. The sleepy lights twinkled in the distant farmhouses, the dewy winds came over the meadows and grain fields, and the stars looked down from their solemn depths. The boys were rather quiet, for boys. The secrecy of the affair, the chances for a fight which might prove dangerous, the honorable and important character of the undertaking all conspired to give a sombre coloring to the occasion. These were veritable Green Mountain Boys, too, with the legends of heroic ancestry all aglow in their young hearts and the strength of their own hills in their sturdy purpose.

After a half-hour’s ride the boys reached the place and found everything all quiet. The gun was in bad shape, dislodged from the carriage and pitched into the gully. Nobody knew how to go at it and the darkness of the night added confusion to the situation. Now the Secret Service blazoned itself splendidly forth. Eph emptied his shavings on the ground in two piles, one or each side of the gun; upon these he heaped the brushwood and in less than two minutes he had two grand bonfires for the boys to work by. Then the little scout, with mule and clothes line, disappeared over the brow of the hill. A few rods below this point of vantage he stretched the clothes line across the road; it was about a foot from the ground and fastened on either side to the trunk of a tree. He then reported to his chief and received reinforcements: one boy and munitions of war—an empty bag, in which he gathered stones.

Meanwhile at the gun the skids had been well adjusted by the firelight, and the lifting went sturdily on. Upon the height of the hill Eph awaited the onslaught of the enemy. The deploying force made a brave line of battle: Eph on the right flank with a pile of stones, his aide on the left, and the mule in the centre. They had not long to wait. A heavy team was heard laboring up. Moving shadows soon were seen in advance of it.

“Now don’t waste your stones,” Eph orders his command. “Don’t fire one of them till you see them Ogdens keel over the rope and hear them holler. Then pelt away like Jehu, and whoop like an Indian, and they’ll think it’s the regular army.”

The enemy came on en masse, they tripped over the rope so beautifully that Eph Stearns, boy and man, has laughed at the thought of it ever since, they fell kicking and struggling and tangled up as to legs and arms. Rattle and whiz came the stones in showers upon them, and, to crown all, the mule cavorted right down into the thickest of the scrimmage as if he had been Job’s war-horse smelling the battle afar.

It was full ten minutes before the Ogden boys got themselves together again, and during that ten minutes the last long pull and strong pull had been given to the cannon and the iron giant was rolling comfortably homeward in Seneca’s wagon.

Then the boys hot, exultant, shouting, made a wild break for the enemy as they came pelting over the brow of the hill.

“Sneaks!” calls one, with a stone.

“Thieves!” yells another.

“At ’em—fight ’em!” shouts another, brandishing a big stick.

“Let’s lay ’em out! thrash ’em!”

“Hold on! Halt!” cries Captain Ethan with the voice of a trumpet and he springs to the front of his little troop and faces them, his arms aloft with a kind of impassioned dominance of voice and mien that hustles back the pell-mell advance.

“Halt! Form in line!” he calls, and the wild crowd sway into a kind of half-circle about their captain.

“Three cheers for Hennepin County and the Gun!” orders the captain.

Shout, shout, shout. Oh, how they shouted! That wild hurrah rifted the clouds and shook the mountains. Then as the echoes died away, in the sharp interval of silence that followed, Captain Ethan faced around to the enemy:

“Now, gentlemen, what will you have?”

“Three cheers for Ogden County!” returned the leader.

“Ogden County—without the Gun, amen!” piped up Eph like a fife.

But the three cheers were lustily given. The old Vermont hills echoed and re-echoed again, and a vast deal of spleen spent itself in those six cheers.

“Now, all hands!” commanded Captain Ethan Allen in ringing tones. “Now, both sides and everybody, give three cheers for the Green Mountain Boys and the Fourth of July!”

Again, and doubly loud, roared out the great shouts. Again the mountains heard and the echoes reverberated around the sky. The stars listened, in their far heights, and knew that America was a stronger nation for the throb of patriotic feeling that pulsed through those hot young hearts and voiced itself in those fine huzzas.