Excerpt from SUPREME AND RISKY FATE

Excerpt from Supreme and Risky Fate:

A profound truth dawned on Deborah Sampson as she marched southward with the other recruits. It filled up the weary hours on the road, occupied her each night on damp ground, in the few moments before exhaustion took over and gouging gravel ceased to signify. It was the comprehension that, for good or evil, the thing was done. She had taken the bounty from the drumhead. She answered to "Private Shurtleff" now—and what the army had hold of in good earnest, it did not wish to part with.

It was one thing to slip around the edges of a disrupted society posing as a gentleman traveler. It was quite another to muster with fifty men, spend every waking moment in their close company, escape the watchful eye of the officer and the idle eyes of the other recruits to snatch enough time and privacy to relieve herself—and then at night, bed down shoulder to shoulder with the lot of them. She had thought the ways of young men no mystery to her after growing up in a house full of Thomas boys, but now she applied herself to the subject as she had never pored over any other lesson, to imitate and survive.

Young men were so cocky. They pounded their friends from mere good humor. They scratched whatever might itch with abandon. They pissed with no inconvenience at all.

They were bigger, louder, more and more ever-present than she had somehow reckoned on. She tried to be as one of them, and, most importantly, to be unselfconscious about it. There were long hours when she wondered if she'd lost her mind.

On the road south, they were met and joined by a party of Connecticut recruits. In the morning they came to Fishkill, a busy military depot. Barracks buildings, piles of stores and well-guarded magazines, and a more dread spectacle, a military prison. Her first sight of the Hudson River, rolling under the Fishkill docks.

As they traveled, Ebenezer Stephens regaled them with horrid tales of the mountain lions in these parts. Eb was friendly, eager to talk to relieve his own disquiet. These here were not your mere New England cats, he swore, but some frightful catamounts, powerful enough to haul the body of a man up a tree, dripping blood—beasts as promiscuous in these forests as mice in a corncrib. They all had a good laugh about it—till quite near at hand they heard an animal scream, a sound that shivered out of the deep woods and chilled them all.

They looked at each other, and then at Eb Stephens—who looked back appalled.

Finally the trees gave way to an ugly clearing, the stumps of a forest that had given fuel to an army through a war. They descended to the river's bank, and suddenly there it all was over the water: the sheer sweep of forested heights cradling a mountain fortress called West Point.

They marched in orderly files to fill barge-like boats. They cast off and were rowed over the river. Deborah could see the black snouts of cannon nosing over battery walls. As they reached midstream, suddenly the monsters spoke, belching smoke and fire over the ramparts.

The man beside her started up off his seat. "Help, they be shooting at us!"

"Sit and be still, idiot!" the coxswain snarled—these fool recruits, too stupid to waste lead shot on. "It's a salute, you arsehole!" In spite of themselves, they laughed.

Instantly Fort Clinton, above them on the plateau, took up the salute. High atop Mount Independence, the big guns of Fort Putnam roared in answer. The sound was extraordinary, a thunderclap that crashed and re-echoed over the Hudson Highlands.

She was more than a little frightened. Everyone was subdued as they made the wharf and obediently debarked.

They were marched up to the great paradeground on the plateau and paraded in two ranks, awaiting they knew not what. A roll was called. They were told they could wait at rest, meaning they could move their hands and feet, and nervously Deborah wiped her damp hands down her thighs again and again.

"Attention!"

Head up, chin up; back straight, chest out. She relaxed her shoulders and then squared them, and felt them seem to broaden. Her hidden breasts swelled against the tight linen band. Deborah tucked her behind in and let her face go blank, eyes straight ahead.

A group of officers arrived, at first sight resplendent in uniform, at second noticeably shabby—cuffs frayed, sleeves worn at the elbows. She was aware of drums beating, of salutes being given. The officers began to pass down the line in review, inspecting the new arrivals.

"To the front—when your names are called, step forward. For the 3rd Connecticut Regiment, Captain Meigs's Company . . .

"For the 4th Massachusetts Regiment, Captain Webb's Company of Light Infantry: William Acock, Roger Barrett, Parrot Blasdell, Robert Shurtleff—" Robert Shurtleff, Deborah heard belatedly, and suddenly she was all-over gooseflesh.

What on earth was she doing here? She was already afoul of the law. She had been warned what punishment lay in store for her in the hangman's snare. Yet here she was, in the middle of a thousand men, now wilfully putting her neck into the noose.

Blankly Deborah Sampson stepped forward. Directly, at the word, she came once more to attention. And because she could not cut and run, Private Shurtleff marched off with the other recruits and joined the Continental Army.