The Winter Hero Read online

  It was hard to argue against that. You couldn’t expect him to give all his money away. Still, it seemed awfully unfair for him to have this great house and barns and fields and men working for him, and to take our oxen, too. “Major Mattoon, I can’t run the farm without the oxen.”

  “I wish there were something I could do, McColloch. I’m not hard-hearted. But I must have something for my money.”

  “Major Mattoon,” I said, “I’ll come to work for you.”

  He shifted his eyes to look at me instead of Peter. “Come to work for me?”

  “If you let Peter take the oxen back, I’ll come down and work for you until the forty shillings are paid back.”

  “It’s a little more than forty shillings. There was interest on it.”

  He didn’t say anything for a minute. Then he looked back at Peter. “This is your brother?”

  “My brother-in-law. My wife’s brother.”

  “You’d put him into service to pay up your debt?”

  Peter flushed and his jaw jutted forward. “I don’t have much choice, do I?”

  “What can he do?”

  “He’s a good, strong boy. He’s worked the farm with me, and he’s worked over at Conkey’s tavern. Billy Conkey is his uncle.”

  ‘The tavern,” Major Mattoon said. “Then he’s used to sweeping and polishing and cleaning.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “I can do all that. I used to keep the tavern clean.”

  Major Mattoon nodded. “Jasper’s been complaining about being overworked. He could use some help.”

  “Jasper?”

  “The groom.” He drummed on the desk. He picked up a pen and began to figure on a piece of paper. “Let’s make it two shillings a week, and board. The sum is forty shillings, with interest for two years compounded comes to forty-four shillings, twelve pence. It makes twenty-two weeks’ work.”

  My heart sank. That was nearly half a year.

  “Major Mattoon, two shillings a week isn’t very much for a good boy.”

  “McColloch, I am not a charitable institution,” he said sharply. “Take it or leave it.”

  So that was how I came to work for Major Mattoon. We took the oxen back that afternoon, and the next day Peter rode me down on Brother with my clothes. “Keep your eyes open,” he told me at the door. “I’ll get down as often as I can to see you.” It made me forlorn to see him ride away. I was now living among strangers.

  Jasper showed me my room, a little sort of cubbyhole up in the top of the house big enough for a rope bed and a little chest for my clothes. It didn’t matter much—I wasn’t there very often. I had to get up at five o’clock every morning to get fires going if we needed them, and help the cook get the family’s breakfast started. Jasper got up at six and set the table with white cloths, polished silver, and gleaming glassware. There were six of them in the family—Major Mattoon, Mrs. Mattoon, their two children, who were six and eight, Major Mattoon’s old aunt, and some girl who was a cousin. They had ten servants to take care of them. There were six people who worked his farms—the home-farm by the house where they grew food for the house, and the out-farm where they grew mostly corn and flax for the market. At the home-farm we had four cows, swine, sheep, and pretty near two acres of kitchen garden, and a little herb garden that the cook tended, and an orchard with apple and pear trees. Then there was a house maid, a seamstress who made the clothes for the family, and a cook. And, of course, Jasper, who waited on table and drove the coach, and me.

  I was houseboy. It was my job to bring up wood and do the heavy cleaning, like scrubbing floors, washing windows, polishing the brass hinges, door knobs, fire screens, and such like. I worked right through until after the family had finished supper, when I helped Jasper clean up the dining room. Then I had my own supper. Sometimes I’d try to sit before the kitchen fire and read, but mostly I’d be too tired and I’d fall asleep in my chair before I’d read two pages. I hated it. The work was so boring, and I hated taking orders from Jasper or even Major Mattoon. One thing about it was how Major Mattoon treated everybody who worked for him. He just snapped out an order as if I were a dog. He was as polite and nice as could be to his friends, rich people like himself. But he never said “Please” or “Thank you” to us plain people, it was just “Do this” and “Do that” and you were supposed to say, “Yes, sir,” and walk away and do it. And the way they ate. When I thought about how hard Molly and Peter worked to put a little johnnycake and syrup on the table while Mrs. Mattoon didn’t seem to do much more than a little needlework, but got served fancy food every evening, it made me wonder. But there was nothing I could do about it. All I could do was grit my teeth and keep my eyes open.

  The main thing was to learn how things worked in the household. I had one big advantage as a spy: The kind of job I had let me go around the house pretty free. I mean, being as I was supposed to keep the brass polished, I had plenty of chances to go into Major Mattoon’s library and have a look around. There were sometimes papers lying on his desk, although mostly he kept them locked up in the cabinet behind the desk. I’d try to get in the library every couple of days or so when Major Mattoon happened to leave the door unlocked, and sneak a look at any papers I could find. Most of them were about business and didn’t interest me very much, but I kept on looking. You never knew what might turn up.

  Then, one day, two weeks after I’d started working there, a man came galloping up to the front door, dashed into the house, and ran down to Major Mattoon’s library. A few minutes later, Major Mattoon and the man came running out of the library. Major Mattoon was shouting, “Jasper, Jasper, saddle Columbia. Quickly, quickly.” Jasper was in the pantry, polishing silver. He dropped the teapot he was working on back onto the table and raced out of the house as fast as I’d ever seen him run. And in five minutes Major Mattoon and the other man were gone.

  When Jasper came back, I went into the pantry. “What was it, Jasper?”

  “I don’t know,” he said abruptly. “And I wouldn’t tell you if I did know. It’s none of your business.”

  But that evening I took some cider out to the men working in the barn. One of them had been into the village to pick up a barrel of nails Major Mattoon had ordered, and he’d got the story from some people at a tavern he’d stopped into. “A bunch of men marched into Springfield and stopped the court there,” he was telling the rest. I stood and listened. “Oh, there were maybe a thousand of them. They wouldn’t let the judges into the courthouse, and finally the judges left.”

  “That’s revolution,” one man said.

  “Don’t know what you call it,” the other said, “but it’s time the people stood up for their rights.”

  “Don’t expect it’s going to agree with Major Mattoon very well.”

  My heart lifted. Captain Shays had done it. Oh, how I envied Peter. I’d have given anything to have been in on it. But now I knew that I should stick as close to Major Mattoon as I possibly could. It was my job to find out what he and the other rich men around were planning to do in return.

  Chapter Four

  MAJOR MATTOON CAME BACK IN THE EVENING three days later. He rode up with the man he had left with, and they strode into the house looking tired and dirty and angry. “Jasper,” he shouted. “Bring us some supper into the library. And some wine. Immediately.”

  They strode down the hall to the library, and of course Jasper began shouting for me. I went out into the kitchen. The cook was hastily slicing up some cold beef, which she put on a platter with some bread and eggs. “Conkey,” Jasper said, “get two bottles of wine out of the cellar and take them in to the major. Quickly now.”

  I got the wine, napkins, two glasses, and the corkscrew, put them all on a silver tray the way Jasper had taught me, and went down the corridor to the library. The two men were sitting at the table across the room from Major Mattoon’s desk. I put the tray down on a side table and began wiping the bottles clean with the napkin, going about as slow as I dared.

  “It
’s just the beginning, Tyler,” Major Mattoon said. “They’ll do it again.”

  “I have no doubt of it, Major.”

  “It’s treason, pure and simple. It’s a hanging offense.”

  “Pretty hard to hang a thousand men,” Mr. Tyler said.

  Just then Jasper came in with the platter of food. He put it on the table between the two men and then began to serve each of them a plateful.

  “Where’s that wine, Conkey?” Major Mattoon said.

  “Just coming, sir,” I said. “The cork was pretty tight.”

  I pulled the cork, carried the bottle over to the table, filled the glasses, and went back to where I had left the other bottle. Jasper finished serving and left. As he went by me he said, “Be quick about it, Conkey.” I picked up the other bottle and slowly began to wipe it clean.

  “The point is that next time we must be better prepared,” Mr. Tyler said.

  “That’s it indeed. How do we respond? What do we do?”

  That was the important part; it was what I wanted to hear.

  “I’d try to avoid a pitched battle. I don’t know as we want to open fire on them,” Mr. Tyler said.

  “We might have to.”

  “Still, it’s to be avoided if we can. Besides, will the militia fire if ordered to? It would mean shooting their own people.”

  “It might throw a scare into them,” Major Mattoon said.

  “What we really want are the leaders. If we could catch a few of them, the whole thing would dissolve without further trouble. These people need leaders.”

  Suddenly Major Mattoon noticed that I was still there. “Conkey, what the devil are you doing with that wine?”

  “Opening this other bottle for you, sir.”

  “Must you be so slow about it?”

  “I’m hurrying, sir.” I put down the napkin and turned the corkscrew into the cork.

  Mr. Tyler reached into his coat and took out a piece of paper. “I have a list of names, Major,” he said. “I drew it up last night. I’m pretty sure these are some of the ringleaders.”

  He passed the paper over to Major Mattoon. The major read it down, frowning. I sure wanted to have a look at that piece of paper. It would be important for Captain Shays to know who they thought the leaders were.

  Major Mattoon finished reading the paper. “That’ll be very useful,” he said. He folded it up, rose, and walked across the room to the cabinet behind his desk. “Conkey, haven’t you finished yet? Leave us, we want to be alone.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. I pulled the cork, took the bottle over to where they were sitting, put it down on the table, and walked toward the door. I just had time to notice which drawer Major Mattoon put the list of names into before I went out.

  Peter came down to see me two days later. Jasper wouldn’t let him in the house, so we went out to the low shed where the firewood was kept, sat on the logs, and Peter told me about Springfield. “There wasn’t anything to it,” he said with a grin. “We marched down there and then marched up and down in front of the courthouse for a while. The militia under General Sheppard was there, but we didn’t figure they’d shoot us. They’re just plain people like ourselves, most of them are on our side anyway. Finally the judges gave in and left without holding court. Sheppard dismissed the militia and we all went home.” He grinned again. “There was nothing to it,” he said.

  “Are you going to do it again?”

  “In a couple of weeks there’ll be a court in Worcester. I think Daniel Shays will want to do the same thing there.”

  “Is Captain Shays the leader?”

  “Not exactly. There’s several of them from various places who are leaders. Luke Day from West Springfield, Job Shattuck from Groton, Eli Parsons from over in Berkshire County—and there’s others, too. But they all respect Daniel. They look to him for good advice.”

  “Peter, Major Mattoon has a list of the leaders in his cabinet.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. He was discussing it with Mr. Tyler. They had the list, but I couldn’t get a look at it.”

  “Where is it now?”

  “Locked up in his cabinet.”

  “Do you think you can get it?”

  “It would be pretty hard,” I said. “But I could try.”

  “It would be mighty useful to know what they’re thinking, Justin.”

  “I’ll try, Peter.”

  It wasn’t going to be easy. That evening Jasper had me bring Major Mattoon the glass of port he always had before going to bed. It gave me a chance to get a look at the cabinet. It was about six feet high and three or four feet wide. It had two doors that swung open. Inside, there were two rows of narrow drawers going all the way from top to bottom. There were little paper labels on each drawer, telling what was in each one. The doors weren’t paneled like ordinary cabinet doors, but were solid oak, which was almost as hard as iron. Well, not that hard, but hard enough. You could cut through it with an ax, but it would take a while. If you hit a door made of pine with an ax it would split on the first blow. You could bust through even hard maple with a couple of swings. But it might take ten minutes to smash open an oak door with an ax. And, of course, it would make an awful noise and bring everybody running.

  It would be a better idea to try to pry the doors open. The lock was set in the middle of the righthand door. I figured that if I could get something in the crack between the doors I might be able to spread the doors enough so that the lock would pull apart. You could do that sometimes.

  But was the crack wide enough? I wasn’t sure. Was there any way I could get the key? That didn’t seem very likely. Major Mattoon surely had some hiding place for his keys. Besides that, he usually locked up the library when he went away. But maybe there was some way to get hold of the key to the cabinet doors. I mean, if he went out for a minute while the key was in the door, maybe I could quickly steal it. Suppose I came rushing in and said that one of the men had got kicked by a horse, or that there was a fire in the barn; he might rush out without thinking about the key, and I could snatch it up. Or maybe even have time to search through the cabinet for my papers. But then, of course, he’d go outside and find out that nobody had got hurt, or that there wasn’t any fire, and he’d probably have me arrested and put in jail for lying.

  There wasn’t any easy answer. Over the next week or so I went on puzzling over it. Whenever I got a chance to come into the library, I tried to get as close as I could to the cabinet to examine it more carefully, but I never had enough time to get a real look at it. Major Mattoon was always there. I had to admit he really did work pretty hard.

  Meanwhile, Major Mattoon had put me to work oiling the floors. It was nasty, dirty work, which I had to fit into my regular chores. I hated doing it. And I was doing this one morning when it happened all over again—Mr. Tyler came tearing up on his horse, Major Mattoon began shouting for Jasper to saddle Columbia, and a few minutes later the two men dashed away. I grinned where nobody could see me, because I knew that Daniel Shays and Peter and the rest of them were out closing another court.

  Major Mattoon was going to be gone for two or three days. Nobody else in the house knew it, but because of what Peter had told me, I did. It was an ideal time for me to get a good look at the cabinet. But how? The library door would be locked, of course. I wondered if Jasper had a key to it. He had a big ring of keys he carried around on his belt, but I didn’t know what the keys were for.

  I went on oiling the floors, and in the middle of the afternoon I ran out of oil. I went out into the pantry where Jasper was polishing silver.

  “I’m out of oil, Jasper,” I said.

  “I’m busy. I can’t get it for you now.”

  “Major Mattoon told me to oil the floors. How am I supposed to do it if I don’t have any oil?”

  “You should have thought of it before.”

  “I’ll get it myself.” The oil was locked up in the paint closet in the cellar, along with a lot of other things like wax, polish, and
so forth. “Just give me the key, and I’ll get it myself.”

  “Nobody’s supposed to touch these keys but me. Major Mattoon doesn’t trust anybody but me with them.”

  “Come on, Jasper. What am I going to do, steal a bucket of paint?”

  “There’s no telling what you’d do, Justin. You’re getting too big for your britches.” But he undid his belt and slid the key ring off. It was a big iron ring about four inches in diameter. There were ten or fifteen keys on it. It weighed nearly two pounds. It must have been a big nuisance carrying it around all the time, but I guessed it made Jasper proud to have them. “It’s this one,” he said. “Get your oil and bring the keys back immediately.”

  I went out of the pantry and into the kitchen where the cellar door was. The cook was kneading dough. I went right on through the kitchen, and as soon as I was out of sight of the cook I began to run down the long hall to the library. I was there in ten seconds. Nobody was around. The library doors were shut. I began trying the keys in the library door lock, one at a time. The fifth one went smoothly in. My heart was beating so I could hear it throbbing in my chest. I turned the key gently, and pushed the door open. Then I slipped across the room to the cabinet. Again I tried the keys. None fit. Major Mattoon may have trusted Jasper with the keys to the paint closet, but he didn’t trust him with the key to his papers.

  Now I began to study the cabinet. I saw right away that the crack between the doors was pretty fine. You could probably pound a chisel into it, and then maybe pry the doors apart, but you’d make a lot of noise doing it. Next I checked the hinges. They were set in the jamb—there was no way I could get them. It was worrisome. I stepped back and looked the whole thing over again. There was a large brass plate over the keyhole, and one matching it on the other door. The plate would have been put on to cover the rough hole they made for the lock in the wood underneath.