That at least had to be war matériel, and thus fair plunder. He used the clumsy bowie knife to cut the ropes that had tethered the stacks in place, then began shifting the obstructing crates onto the sacks of seed. It took him the best part of five minutes to reach the dark-painted crate and still more time to lever the well-nailed lid off the heavy box to discover that it was indeed packed with paper cartridges, each one containing a bullet and a measure of powder. Starbuck did his best to hammer the lid back into place, then manhandled the box down to the ground. It was still raining, so he thumped the lid with the heel of his right boot, trying to bang the top down tight and thus keep out the rain.
There was another dark painted box under a second stack and so he climbed back into the boxcar and moved still more crates until he had excavated the second box which, like the first, bore a stenciled legend denoting that its contents were also cartridges. He added that box to the first, then climbed back inside to continue his laborious search.
“What in hell’s name are you doing, boy?” Truslow appeared at the boxcar door. He was carrying a heavy leather bag in his right hand and the guard’s pistol in his left.
“Those are cartridges”—Starbuck gestured at the two boxes beside Truslow—“and I think there might be more in here.”
Truslow kicked the lid off the nearest box, looked down, then spat tobacco juice over the cartridges. “No more use than tits on a bull.”
“What?”
“They’re point six nines like I used in Mexico. The rifles the Colonel bought in Richmond are five eights.”
“Oh.” Starbuck felt himself coloring with embarrassment.
“You could light a fire with these?” Truslow suggested.
“So they’re no use?”
“Not to us, boy.” Truslow shoved the revolver into his belt then picked up one of the cartridges and bit off its bullet. “Big son of a bitch, ain’t she?” He showed Starbuck the bullet. “Anything valuable in there?”
“I’ve only found the bullets so far.”
“Jesus wept, boy.” Truslow dropped the heavy leather bag which chinked ominously as it fell, then clambered into the boxcar and seized the bowie knife from Starbuck. “I’ve got to get our boys out of the cars before the passengers get ideas. I took as many guns as I could, but some of those sons of bitches will have kept them well hid. There’s always some bastard who wants to be a hero. I remember a young fellow on the Orange and Alexandria couple of years ago. Thought he would capture me.” He spat in derision.
“What happened?”
“He finished his journey in the caboose, boy. Flat on his back and covered with a tarpaulin.” As Truslow spoke he wrenched lids off crates, gave the contents a cursory glance, then hurled them out into the rain. A box of china plates decorated with painted lilies smashed itself on the railbed. A clothes mangle followed, then a crate of tin saucepans and a consignment of delicate gas mantles. It had begun to rain more heavily, the drops pattering loud on the boxcar’s wooden roof.
“Shouldn’t we be leaving?” Starbuck asked nervously.
“Why?”
“I told you. Colonel Faulconer’s ready to blow the bridge up.”
“Who cares about the bridge? How long do you think it will take to rebuild it?”
“The Colonel says months.”
“Months!” Truslow was raking through a box of clothes, seeing if anything took his fancy. He decided nothing did and hurled the box out into the weather. “I could rebuild that trestle in a week. Give me ten men and I’ll have it up and working in two days. Faulconer don’t know goose shit from gold dust, boy.” He jettisoned a barrel of soda and another of clearing starch. “There’s nothing here,” he sniffed, then clambered back to the ground. He glanced west, but the landscape was empty. “Go to the caboose, boy,” he ordered Starbuck, “and bring me some hot coals.”
“What are you doing?”
“Thinking that if you ask me another goddamned question I’ll shoot you. Now go and get me some damned coals.” Truslow upended both boxes of .69 cartridges into the boxcar while Starbuck climbed into the caboose where a small pot-bellied stove still burned. There was a zinc bucket of coal beside the stove. He tipped the coal out, used a poker to open the stove’s door, then raked a handful of the glowing lumps into the empty bucket.
“Right,” Truslow said when Starbuck got back. “Throw the coals onto the cartridges.”
“You’re going to burn the wagon?” The rain hissed as it fell into the bucket.
“For the Lord’s sake!” Truslow grabbed the bucket and chucked the coals onto the spilt cartridges. For a second the coals just glowed among the paper tubes, then the first cartridge exploded with a soft cough and suddenly the whole pile of ammunition was a blazing, exploding, twisting mass of fire.
Truslow picked up his leather bag of loot, then beckoned Starbuck away. “Come on!” Truslow shouted up to the two men he had left in the rear passenger car.
As the guards left each car they warned the passengers that anyone following the raiders would be shot. Most of those raiders were burdened with bags or sacks, and all had the looks of men well satisfied with their work. Some walked backward with drawn pistols to make certain that none of the passengers tried to be heroic. “The trouble’s going to come when we’re past the barricade,” Truslow warned. “Tom? Micky? You hang back with me. Captain Hinton! Get the engineers aboard!”
Hinton chivied the two engineers back into their locomotive’s cabin, then followed with his drawn revolver. A second later the great machine gave an enormous hiss of steam, a gigantic clank, and suddenly the whole train jerked forward. A woman in one of the passenger cars screamed. The boxcar was well ablaze now, spewing black smoke into the driving sheets of rain.
“Go on!” Truslow shouted encouragement to Captain Hinton.
The locomotive clanked forward, its funnel giving off small and urgent puffs of gray-white smoke. A black soot smut, hot and sudden, landed on Starbuck’s cheek. Hinton was grinning, shouting at the engineer who must have suddenly opened his throttle because the train jerked forward off the rail ends and shoved its cowcatcher deep into the bed. Stones and timber shattered apart. The four drive wheels, each one nearly six feet in diameter, began spinning and shrieking, but they found just enough traction so that, inch by agonizing inch, the monstrous machine shuddered forward as its small front wheels tore up the broken ties. The cowcatcher crumpled in a screech of tearing metal.
Hinton gestured with his revolver and the engineer opened the throttle full and the thirty-ton locomotive lurched forward like a great wounded beast as it toppled a few degrees sideways. Starbuck feared it was about to plunge down the river’s bank, dragging its full cars behind, but then, mercifully, the huge machine stuck fast. Steam began to jet from its farther side. One of its small front wheels spun free above the churned dirt while the drive wheels on the farther side of the engine churned a foot-deep trench into the railbed before the engineer disconnected the pistons and more steam slashed out into the rain.
“Set the tender ablaze!” Truslow yelled and Hinton ordered one of the engineers to take a shovel load of red hot timbers from the firebox and thrust it deep into the tender’s cordwood. “More!” Truslow urged, “more!” Truslow had found the venting faucet for the tender’s water storage tank and turned it on. Water poured out of one end of the tender while the other began to blaze as fiercely as the burning boxcar.
“Go!” Truslow shouted. “Go!”
The raiders pushed past the barricade and ran toward the bridge. Truslow stayed with two men to guard against any pursuit as Captain Hinton led the others across the narrow planks laid beside the rails on the trestles. Colonel Faulconer was waiting on the farther bank and shouting at Hinton’s men to hurry. “Light the fires! Medlicott!” Faulconer called down into the gorge. “Hurry!” Faulconer shouted at Hinton. “For God’s sake! What held you up?”
“Had to make sure the train didn’t go back for help,” Captain Hinton said.
/> “No one obeys orders here!” The Colonel had given the order to withdraw at least a quarter hour before and every second of the delay had been an insult to his already fragile authority. “Starbuck!” he shouted. “Didn’t I order you to bring the men back?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
“My fault! Faulconer,” Hinton intervened.
“I gave you an order, Nate!” the Colonel shouted. His other men were already mounted, all but for Medlicott, who had struck a light to the mass of combustibles about the trestle leg. “Now the fuse!” the Colonel shouted.
“Truslow!” Captain Hinton bellowed at the three men left on the far side of the gorge.
Truslow, the leather bag in his hand, was the last man away from the barricade. As he crossed the bridge he kicked the planks aside, making pursuit difficult. A gun was fired from the far barricade, the smoke of its powder snatched instantly away by the breeze. The bullet struck a rail on the bridge and whined off across the river. Two dense plumes of smoke from the burning boxcar and tender were drifting low and acrid above the North Branch.
“Fuse is lit!” Medlicott shouted and began clawing his way up the gorge’s side. Behind him a dribble of smoke spat and writhed from the lit fuse as it snaked down the slope toward the great heap of timber and brush stacked about the gunpowder.
“Hurry!” the Colonel shouted. A horse whinnied and reared. More men fired from the barricade, but Truslow was across the bridge now and well out of effective revolver range. “Come on, man!” Washington Faulconer shouted. Truslow still had his leather bag, just as all Hinton’s men had similar bags. Faulconer must have known from the heavy bags why his order to withdraw had been so long ignored, but he chose to say nothing. Sergeant Medlicott, muddy and damp, scrambled out of the gorge and fumbled for his stirrup just as the smoking fuse darted into the pile of brush. Sergeant Truslow hauled himself into his saddle, and Faulconer turned away. “Let’s go!” He led his men off the railroad’s embankment. The fire in the gorge had to be quickening, for thick smoke was writhing about the trestle’s lattice, though the gunpowder had still not exploded. “Come on!” Faulconer urged, and behind him the horses scrambled and slipped on the muddy slope until, at last, they were concealed from the train by foliage and, though a few random bullets ripped through the leaves and twigs, none of the Legion’s men was hit.
Faulconer stopped at the crest and turned to look back at the stricken train. The fires in the boxcar and tender had spread to the cars and the erstwhile passengers, wet and miserable, now clambered up the wet slope to escape the danger. The long passenger cars served like funnels in which the heat roared fierce until the windows cracked open and released billowing gusts of flame that licked into the driving rain.
The train was a blazing wreck, its engine derailed and cars destroyed, but the bridge, which had been the object of the raid, still stood. The fuse had failed to detonate the gunpowder, probably because the powder was damp, while the fire, which had been supposed to dry the powder and then explode it if the fuse failed, now seemed to be succumbing to wet fuel and wind-driven rain. “If you had obeyed my orders,” the Colonel charged Starbuck bitterly, “there would have been time to reset the charges.”
“Me, sir?” Starbuck was astonished at the unfairness of the accusation.
Captain Hinton was equally surprised by the Colonel’s words. “I told you, Faulconer, it was my fault.”
“I didn’t give you the order, Hinton. I gave it to Starbuck, and the order was disobeyed.” Faulconer spoke in a cold, clipped fury, then twisted his horse away and raked back with his spurs. The horse whinnied and started abruptly forward.
“Goddamn Yankee,” Sergeant Medlicott said softly, then followed Faulconer.
“Forget them, Nate,” Hinton said. “It wasn’t your fault. I’ll square the Colonel for you.”
Starbuck still could not believe that he was being blamed for the failure of the attack. He sat dumbstruck, appalled at the Colonel’s unfairness. Down on the rail line, unaware that a handful of the raiders still lingered above them, some of the train’s passengers were edging out onto the undamaged trestle while others had begun to pull the barricade clear of the broken tracks. The fire in the gorge seemed to have gone out completely.
“He’s used to getting his own way.” Truslow pulled his horse alongside Starbuck. “He thinks he can buy what he wants and have it perfect, right from the start.”
“But I didn’t do anything wrong!”
“You didn’t have to. He wants someone to blame. And he reckons that if he pisses all over you, then you won’t piss back at him. That’s why he chose you. He wasn’t going to piss on me, was he?” Truslow spurred on.
Starbuck looked back to the gorge. The bridge was undamaged and the cavalry raid, which had been intended as a glorious victory to launch the Legion’s triumphant crusade, had turned into a muddled, rain-soaked farce. And Starbuck was being blamed.
“Goddamn it,” he swore aloud, defying his God, then turned and followed Truslow south.
“Can this really be it?” Belvedere Delaney had a four-day-old copy of the Wheeling Intelligencer that had been brought to Richmond from Harper’s Ferry. The Intelligencer, though a Virginian paper, was soundly pro-Union.
“What?” Ethan Ridley was distracted and utterly uninterested in whatever the newspaper might have reported.
“Thieves stopped an eastbound passenger train on Wednesday last, one man hurt, locomotive temporarily unrailed.” Delaney was condensing the story as he scanned the column. “Four cars badly burned, a boxcar and the passengers looted, rails torn up, replaced very next day.” He peered at Ridley through gold-rimmed half-moon reading glasses. “You don’t really think this can be the first great triumph of your Faulconer Legion, do you?”
“It doesn’t sound like Faulconer. Now listen, Bev.”
“No, you listen to me.” The half-brothers were in Delaney’s rooms in Grace Street. The parlor windows looked through velvet curtains at the graceful spire of St. Paul’s and, beyond it, toward the elegant white Capitol Building that was now the seat of the Provisional Confederate government. “You listen, because I am going to read the best part to you,” Delaney said with exaggerated relish. “‘It might be thought, from their despicable behavior, that the plug-uglies who intercepted the cars on Wednesday were mere vagabond thieves, but thieves do not attempt to destroy railway trestles, and it is that feeble effort of destruction which has convinced authorities that the villains were southern agents and not common criminals, though how it is possible to differentiate, we cannot tell.’ Isn’t this delicious, Ethan? ‘The world is well instructed now in southern manners, for the bravery of the rebels encompassed the robbing of women, the frightening of children, and an abject failure to destroy the Anakansett Bridge which, though lightly toasted, was carrying freight the very next day.’ Lightly toasted! Isn’t that amusing, Ethan?”
“No, goddamn it, no!”
“I think it’s highly amusing. Let’s see now, bold pursuit by Ohio cavalry, held up by rains, swollen streams. Rogues got clear away, so clearly the pursuit wasn’t near bold enough. Raiders are thought to have retired east toward the Shenandoah Valley. ‘Our brethren of eastern Virginia who so like to boast of their greater civilization, seem to have sent these men as emissaries of that vaunted superiority. If this be the best we can hope to see of their belligerent skills then we can rest assured that the nation’s crisis will be short-lived and that the glorious Union will be reknit within weeks.’ Oh, splendid!” Delaney took off his reading glasses and smiled at Ridley. “Not a very impressive display if it was your future father-in-law. One toasted bridge? He’ll have to do better than that!”
“For God’s sake, Bev!” Ridley pleaded.
Delaney made a great play of folding the newspaper, then of slipping it into the rosewood rack of other newspapers and journals that stood beside his armchair. His parlor was wonderfully comfortable with leather chairs, a big roun
d polished table, books on every wall, plaster busts of great Virginians and, over the mantel, a massive mirror with a gilded frame of linked cherubs and aspiring angels. Some of Delaney’s precious porcelain collection was displayed on the mantel, while other pieces stood among the leather-bound books. Delaney now made his brother wait even longer as he polished the half-moon glasses and carefully folded them into a velvet-lined case. “What on earth,” he finally asked, “do you expect me to do about the damned girl?”
“I want you to help me,” Ridley said pathetically.
“Why should I? The girl is one of your whores, not one of mine. She sought you out, not me. She’s carrying your child, not mine, and her father’s revenge threatens your life, certainly not mine, and do I really need to continue?” Delaney stood, crossed to the mantel, and took one of his yellow paper-wrapped cigarettes, which he used to import from France, but which now, he supposed, would become rarer than gold dust. He lit the cigarette with a spill ignited from the coal fire. It was astonishing that he should need a fire this late in the year, but the rains that had come thundering out of the east had brought unseasonably cold winds. “Besides, what can I do?” He went on airily. “You’ve already tried to buy her off and it didn’t work. So clearly you’ll just have to pay her more.”
“She’ll just come back,” Ridley said. “And back again.”
“So what exactly does she want?” Delaney knew he would have to help his half-brother, at least if he was to go on profiting from the Faulconer Legion purchases, but he wanted to stretch Ethan on the rack a little before he agreed to find a solution to the problem posed by Sally Truslow’s unexpected arrival in the city.
“She wants me to find her somewhere to live. She expects me to pay for that, then to give her still more money every month. Naturally I’ve got to keep her bastard too. Jesus Christ!” Ridley swore viciously as he considered Sally’s outrageous demands.
“Not just her bastard, but yours, too,” Delaney pointed out unhelpfully. “Indeed, my own nephew! Or niece. I think I’d prefer a niece, Ethan. Would she be a half-niece, do you think? Maybe I could be her half-godfather.”