Long Knife Read Online Free PDF Page A

What a pity, he thought. Then he swallowed hard and with a deft pulling stroke of the hot knife laid open the skin and sliced an inch deep into the stringy thigh muscle, then stepped back to give his beefy assistant room for the expected struggle.
    But the general did not lunge, or even twitch. His great frame stiffened; his back arched; then he let out a long shaking breath and lay ready again, his eye on the rafters, his thumb and middle finger still snapping in time to the solemn music. Shaken through by a strange surge of love and admiration, the doctor blinked, gulped, returned his knife to the red-welling cut, and continued his work. Lucy Croghan stood trembling at the head of the table with a clean piece of cotton cloth and wiped the sweat off her brother’s forehead and out of his eye sockets. She could not bear to watch the cutting, but gazed past the surgeon’s bent head and out the window, looking at the crowd that had gathered in the clearing.
    The people surrounded the house at a respectful distance, most of them bareheaded in the afternoon sunlight: gaunt-faced old veterans, young blue-coated militiamen, barefooted children, red-nosed pioneer women with their arms folded across their waists, slaves in ragged gray, hawk-faced Indians whose leanbrown shoulders and haunches gleamed with bear grease in the sunlight. They had materialized as if by magic from miles around at word of General Clark’s trouble. Two drummers and two fifers posted around the house kept up their grave, persistent cadences. The solemn drums and whistling fifes evoked a sense of battlefield apprehension in the sun-drenched clearing. The senior drummer, Dick Lovell, a forty-year-old farmer, small and hollow-cheeked and wiry, had the honored post at the front door. Now and then he would remember that terrible winter march of ’79, would feel the unspeakable cold in his bones, and would shudder, and tears would stream from his eyes. He loved this old soldier in a way that one loves not even his own brothers, and he tapped his drum with his heart full of prayer, as if his music were the one thing that could keep the general alive. After all, General Clark had summoned him in particular for this occasion, and for Dick Lovell it was a sacred duty.
    After some time it seemed to dawn on the entire crowd that although the amputation must be well in progress by now, they had not heard a single outcry from the house. They began to glance at each other’s faces and saw the swimming eyes and the working throats, and suddenly a heartening cheer went up all around the house, then another, and then a third.
    The demonstration was over that quickly, and the waiting resumed, but now the entire circle of people felt themselves bound together in a certain kind of pride that they had never experienced before.
    The three cheers had sounded through the window at the most critical time for General Clark: just as the surgeon had cleared the muscles away to expose the bone to the saw. As the hideous instrument had begun to whine into the thighbone, laboring through the very armature of him as if he were but a piece of broken furniture, the full comprehension of his loss had swept through him, increasing the pain against which he thought he had so well braced himself. In that moment he had felt at last overpowered by a tide of despair, thinking: Now as everything else has been taken away from me it appears they must divide up my own personal carcass and carry it away piece by piece … And with that bitter thought he had been ready to scream out like a weakling or simply let go and die.
    But then, through the drum taps and the shrilling of the fifes, there had burst into his consciousness those rousing American huzzahs—just like the cheers his men had given when theyraised the American and Virginian colors over Fort Sackville thirty years before.
    Those cheers from the friends and the strangers in the yard saved him. Though he had for years considered himself