The Proud and the Free by Howard Fast

Author:Howard Fast
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media

PART EIGHT

Wherein I tell of the fate of the two spies, and certain details concerning the Philadelphia Light Horse Troop and the New Jersey Line.

WHAT WAYNE THOUGHT, I did not care, for I had no desire to be an honest or loyal man according to his lights. Later that morning, he wrote a note to the Committee, in which he used a good deal of fulsome language and said that his heart had been warmed and reassured by this deed of honor, and he also pledged, in the name of the Congress, an award of fifty gold guineas to each of the sergeants involved in the capture of Ogden and Mason. There was a price on the blood of two miserable wretches, and fifty gold guineas, which made more thousands of Continental dollars than you could count, was the kind of money that no soldier of the Line ever hoped to have, even in his wildest dreams. There I was, a rich man, and Benny Clapper too – but we talked it over and threw the offer back in Wayne’s face; and there’s the answer for those scholarly historians who have been so hard-pressed to comprehend how two such dirty and mean articles as ourselves could turn away a fortune in terms of gentlemen’s honor. Well, we were not gentlemen and it was not gentlemen’s honor, and nothing is paid for but something is bought. We didn’t like that kind of deal, and when Benny Clapper and I had talked about it for fifteen minutes, we agreed that Bowzar should tell Wayne and the rest of them to take their dirty blood money and use it elsewhere. For myself, Jamie Stuart, this was not so hard, because I had neither kith nor kin and no lien on tomorrow, but was a wild and headstrong lad; but Benny Clapper had three kids and a wife in Bristol, and when the gentry boasted to Congress over the hundred guineas they had saved, they were by no means able to comprehend what it meant to a family man to give away security and free land and beasts and tools. But the devil with that, for Benny Clapper was subsequently slain at Yorktown, and no one except myself, an old and feeble man, knows his name today or remembers anything about him; and let the dead sleep, for they will not be awakened or honored in this time.

Mason and Ogden were hanged, but that was later, and I tell it now only so as not to dwell on it. We come to the end of things, and I must get on with my story.…

It was Friday, around noon, that the Philadelphia Light Horse arrived, with Lafayette and St. Clair. With them was Laurens, one of the brigade officers of the Line; and altogether there were forty cavalry prancing up the road from Philadelphia. There were building up by now a thousand rumors, the two main ones being firstly that Sir Henry Clinton had moved

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