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The river where Hamilton had disappeared was raging, torrents and rapids enough to drown a man, if he were not dashed to death upon the rocks first. The young boy he had rushed into the flood to save is shivering on the shore, weak and crying. With quick orders, Washington puts the boy under Tilghman’s care and rushes downriver, to where the rapids culminate in a waterfall. It is not a long drop, but the floodwaters make it so much more powerful, more deadly. His eyes scan the water as the men cry out from the shore, a few wading in as far as their mid-thighs, trying to find some sign of their brave, STUPID companion.
It is an eternity of three heartbeats before Washington sees Hamilton where he clings desperately to a jagged rock in the rapids right before the waterfall.
“Get me a rope,” he hollers over the rush of floodwaters. The men scramble for the carts they had been moving, full of medical supplies and tethered with thick rope. Hamilton is staring at him, a kind of desperation he’s never seen plain on his young face. There is blood on that face as well, and pain, and Washington wants to bundle the boy back to headquarters and keep him there.
Alexander’s fingers slip against the rock as Washington watches, wet fingers against wet rock not affording enough purchase. His officer’s coat hangs heavy around him as well, blue fabric attempting to pull the boy back into the water. He wants to yell at the boy to let the coat go, but wonders if Hamilton would be able to without losing his tenuous grip all the faster.
“Here you are Sir,” Laurens says and presents him with a heavy length of rope.
“Right,” Washington says, and sheds his own coat. The water will be shallower right in the rapids, but the current will be all the more treacherous for it. He will enter the river upstream of his boy, hopefully the river would not be too deep before he reached him. He ties the rope around his middle and raises an eyebrow at Laurens as the man opens his mouth to argue. “Floodwaters are dangerous, son,” he says “and I’d rather not have two to rescue.”
Laurens’ lips purse in unhappiness, but he does nothing but signal more men over to help. They will hold the other end of the rope as Washington walks into the furious water; they are his anchor to keep from becoming a victim himself if his footing slips.
The water is cold and strong against him, and it stinks worse than rotted hay. Washington barely notices any of this. His eyes are only for Alexander, who looks so scared and who looks to be getting weaker and weaker. If his head wound is serious, and he loses consciousness, he will be lost to the river once more, and go over the waterfall a scant thirty feet from them.
Washington keeps his footing with difficulty, using his hands against the half-submerged rocks to keep his balance as his feet sought purchase on their slippery, submerged brothers, which shift with the strong current. Any fear he feels is not for himself, but for the slight boy in the middle of this swollen waterway. The boy who had thrown himself into this mess with no thought of himself to save the boy -who could be no older than ten- who had been flailing in the waters, apparently after his small canoe had been overturned. The boy that Washington was going to find all kinds of excuses to keep him confined to headquarters for the next while, to give his own poor heart a rest of worrying about this boy who did not worry about himself.
He reached Alexander with the water up past his waist, upright only by the grace of providence and his ability to brace against the rocks on his downstream side. He takes a handhold of Alexander’s collar in his right hand, his upstream hand. Taking a wide, strong stance, Washington puts his other arm under the boy’s arms and hoists him out of the deepest part of the river, to the slightly less dangerous area that, rather than being deeper than he was tall, came halfway up his skinny chest.
“I c-c-c-can’t w-w-walk s-s-s-ir-r,” Hamilton stuttered, the cold of the snow-melt flood setting his jaw to shivering uncontrollably. “I thi-i-i-ink my-my-my legs’re brok-k-ken.”
That was not something Washington had thought of. In all honesty, his aide probably had a number of broken bones. ‘Good,’ he thought a tad savagely, ‘something to keep him abed for a few weeks at least.’ But with Hamilton collapsed against him, shaking and very obviously unable to support his own weight, Washington could not go back the way he had come. He would need to carry the boy, and he did not trust his balance on his feet alone without use of his hands to keep the water from pitching him sideways. Maybe with one hand . . .
“Hold on to me, Hamilton,” he said, and moved the boy so that his left hand snaked around the boy’s chest, pressing the slight form to his own much sturdier one. With his right hand free to support himself against the downstream rocks, he just might make it back to the shore without relying on the exhausted soldiers on the other end of the rope.
They almost make it.
The current pulls a rock from under Washington’s foot and sends both him and Hamilton off their feet. He wraps both arms around his precious cargo and holds tight, letting out a grunt as the rope around his middle becomes taut. The water has closed over his head, but he keeps himself relatively still, only kicking his legs to attempt to assist the soldiers on shore. Alexander is a tense, fearful weight in his arms, but he too is still, not thrashing in panic as Washington had expected.
His head breaks into air again for a disorienting moment, before Washington is able to find the men-in-blue on the shore, working to haul the rope and its catch back to solid land. Alexander is a heavy weight in his arms, and for a moment, Washington debates getting that heavy coat off of him, but the army is low on supplies for uniforms and the men on shore were dragging them through the water at a good clip, and he didn’t want to risk losing purchase of the boy, who was limp in his arms.
“Alexander!” he called, desperate to know whether the boy had lost his hold on consciousness. He would be in so much more danger if he had.
“Sir?” The voice was nearly too faint to hear over the roar of the flood, but Alexander brought his hands up to grip at Washington’s arms around him.
“Stay awake, at least ‘till we get to shore.”
“Y-y-yes s-sir,” the boy says, and he sounds remarkably aware, all things considered. The cold of the river had made its way into Washington’s bones at this point, and how cold must the boy be, who had been in the water so much longer?
When they are close enough to shore that the current no longer tugs at them, Washington stands in the shifting mud and pulls Hamilton into his arms like a child. For once, no protests are forthcoming. He wades the rest of the way to solid ground; as solid as any ground is after days of torrential rain. It’s only when he sets Hamilton down upon the blanket that some soul with forward thinking had spread over the reedy grasses that he sees the blood. It’s not only on his boy’s face; it’s running down his leg as well, and he can see a deep gash in the boy’s shoulder where the stitching of the coat’s shoulder had been torn. Laurens (who, Washington remembered suddenly, had aspirations to become a doctor) was quickly at his friend’s side, lifting him up and onto his side, despite his pained cries, and encouraging him to cough.
Hamilton did so, grunting through the pain as he brought up the water that had found its way into his lungs.
“Did you swallow any of that water?” Laurens asked urgently, glancing at Washington as well. Washington shook his head, but Hamilton looked sheepishly up at his friend. “You need to purge it before you become actually ill, Alexander,” Laurens said, and, with no further talk, stuck his fingers into his friend’s throat, causing him to gag violently. Looking away from the (admittedly alarming) sight of the young aide vomiting muddy river water into the grasses at the side of the blanket, Washington took his coat back from the young man who had hold of it.
He stripped himself of his soaked shirt; he would not warm up wearing that, and pulled the coat on. “We need to get back to camp,” he ordered, “The doctor should be fetched when we arrive. Tilghman, does the boy have family nearby?”
“Yes sir,” the man said, and Washington nodded.
“See him safely delivered and then report back,” he said, then turned back to where Laurens was wrestling Hamilton out of his soaked clothing.
“Is there room on one of the carts for Hamilton?” he asked.
“We can make room Sir,” said one of the men, and Washington nodded at him to do so.
“I c-c-can r-r-id-de sir,” Hamilton complained, but Laurens shushed him as he pulled the boy’s shoes and stockings from his feet.
“Not with your legs broken and your ribs fractured,” the boy said, and then “anyone by the cart, I could use some bandages!”
Washington knelt next to Hamilton once more and looked the boy over now that most of the wet clothing had been discarded by Laurens. Mottled bruising covered the boy’s chest and back, there were deep wounds in his left thigh, his right shoulder, and his right side. His face was heavily scraped by the log that had originally swept Hamilton off-course when he was rescuing the boy. The debris in a flood could be more dangerous than the waters themselves.
“We need to bind his ribs before I’d feel comfortable with him moving, Sir,” Laurens said, as if he felt the need to justify the use of bandages.”
“I agree,” Washington gentled him, “do what you can for him. The faster we can get to camp, the sooner Doctor Mann can look him over.”
“Can I sleep now?” Hamilton’s eyes looked to be growing heavy, and the plaintive tone to his voice was something Washington had never heard before.
“Try not to. Not until night-fall, at least, please, Hammy,” Laurens said. “I worry about your head wound.”
“But I am tired,” the boy said plaintively, and Washington moved off of the blanket as Laurens made to wrap the shivering boy with it.
“I know,” Laurens said, “but ‘twould be a pity for you to go through all you have and die in your sleep from a head-wound.”
“Tired.”
“Not tired enough,” Laurens growled as he wrapped the bandage one of the soldiers had presented him with around Hamilton’s ribs.
Washington left the boys to their bickering, hoping that it would be enough to keep the boy from drifting off. He moved to the carts and helped to make space for the boy, then moved to his horse, taking a bit of dried meat from the saddle-bags. They should be back to camp by nightfall. If they weren’t, he worried what would happen to Hamilton. Would his wounds, which had been bathed in filthy water, fester if they stopped to rest the horses over-night? If he could have sent Hamilton on a horse with good conscience with cracked ribs and broken bones he would have sent him with Laurens ahead to camp. But no. They would leave Hamilton to the tender mercies of time by keeping him still and putting him in a slow cart. God, but he hoped he was making the correct decision.