Long Knife by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom Read Free Book Online Page A

father were jumped by seven-year-old William, whom they snatched up from the floor in their powerful arms and tossed back and forth between them until he was helpless with laughter, then handed over, reeling, to Lucy, a lithe ten-year-old with the long Clark nose in the middle of a delicate face. The two children went off to the kitchen, clowning self-consciously for their big brother, who, for all his affection and familiarity, seemed an awesome wild stranger from a wild land each time he returned from the west.
    Richard and Edmund were sitting before the fireplace in their stocking feet, drying their boots. Their faces were flushed from exposure and smudged with ash and soot. They had been in a field at the corner of the farm all day burning stumps and brush from recent clearing. Edmund, only fifteen, appraised George with a rather timid smile: Richard, eighteen, almost six feet tall and currently trying to break the family of calling him “Dickie,” greeted him with a look of manly complicity. George went to them and backed up to the fire. “Hallo, boys! I’ve seen men come in from Indian skirmishes looking smarter than the two of you.”
    “It’s dirty work, that’s what,” said Richard.
    “It is indeed. Now if you wish to see some really dirty work, you should come out and see folks try to clear a field of those big Kaintuck trees. Big around as a house.”
    “I do intend to, George. Say, now …” He rose and stood close beside George, dropping his voice. “I’d appreciate it if you’d put in a word with Pa to that effect. I fear he’s going to be ag’in it …”
    George put an arm over Richard’s shoulder and grinned, gazing across the room to the sideboard where their father was decanting amber whiskey into two glasses. “Oh, ’a word to that effect,’ is it? A petition to King John of the Clark kingdom? You feel I have some influence in his court, eh?” He turned and squatted on the hearth and laved his hands in the heat of the fire. Hearing his father’s footsteps approaching behind him, he continued, “That you should settle with Father. All I’ll say isthat any Clark would be a welcome addition to any party of mine.”
    “So he’s broached it t’ you, I see,” grumbled John Clark, seating himself on a wooden chair beside the hearth and giving George a glass. They touched the rims of their glasses. “To Virginia,” said Mr. Clark, glancing shrewdly aside at Richard. “Why anyone should want to leave her is beyond my ken.”
    “To Virginia,” agreed George. “Including her new county of Kentucky, where I predict all good Clarks will go.”
    “What! Not to heaven?”
    “Aye. Just the place I’m speaking of,” said George.
    “Mm-hm. Well, if it’s such a heaven, pray tell me why you must go there with an army.”
    “Ha, ha! Well said! But I’ll wager you’ll come there one day, all of you, once Henry Hamilton and his bloody scalp-takers have been smoked out.” He sipped the whiskey and winked aside to Richard.
    “It’s a wild scheme, that’s all it is,” said John Clark. “You can’t go out there a thousand miles and capture forts from the British and the savages. By heaven, give any red-haired stripling from Virginia a gun and a survey chain, and he imagines he’s George Washington all over again.”
    “Washington defended a border of near four hundred miles with seven hundred men in the French and Indian campaigns,” George said.
    “Aye, and it’s as I say, you think you can do something comparable.”
    “Well, sir, it’s a worthy example.”
    “I’m not a soldier, George, as all my boys seem to want to be. But I have read enough history to know that it takes cannon and a great number of men to storm forts.”
    “True. But surprise makes one man worth ten. Richard,” he said, turning to his brothers, who were listening in awe, “and you, Edmund, I’ll remind you not to discuss this outside the family.”
    “La, la, la,” came a woman’s voice from the