The Bloody Ground - Starbuck 04 (26 page)

The countryside was curiously silent. It was the absence of cocks crowing that was strange, but that, Adam knew, was because rebel foragers must have combed these gentle farms for their supplies. It would be a hungry winter in Maryland.

He watered his horse at Middlebrook, then rode on past the bottomland where he had outgalloped the rebel patrol. His spirits, which had been depressed by the futility of his assignment, began to rise with the sun as he rode through the good country. Haystacks stood neatly in well-tended fields and woodlots were stacked high, though doubtless the advancing army would soon make short work of all that hard labor. It was an image of peace and it warmed Adam's soul that now soared into a sunlit daydream of the war's ending. He doubted he could go back to Virginia, and doubted that he even wanted to return. Instead, he thought, he would go to New England and study for the ministry. He had a vision of a shingled town built about a steepling white church amidst the heavy woods; a place of honesty and hard work, a place where a man could study and preach and minister and write. He saw a study heavy with books, and maybe with his father's ivory-hilted saber, which Adam had captured and now wore at his side, hanging above the fireplace. The saber had been a gift to Adam's great-grandfather from Lafayette, and its blade was handsomely inscribed. "To my friend Cornelius Faulconer," the inscription read in French, "who joined me in the fight for liberty, Lafayette," and Adam imagined his own great-grandchildren treasuring the weapon as a memento of two wars in which virtue had triumphed over evil. He envisioned a kitchen with a heavy black range, steaming pots, drying herbs, and heaped bowls of fruit picked from his own yard. He thought of Julia Gordon in Richmond, and wondered if at the war's ending she would acknowledge the South's sins and come north to share his imagined haven in the deep, pious silence of the New England woods.

These thoughts
carried him through Clarkstown,
Hyattstown, and Urbana, until at last he crossed the Baltimore and Ohio. The rebels had prized up the rails and uprooted the ties to leave a scar across the good land, but Adam knew the North's engineers would soon repair the track and have the cars running east and west again. Ahead of Adam now was Frederick City, but all around him was nothing but deserted fields dotted with the pale marks where tents had stood and the dark smears where fires had burned. The rebels had vanished.

It was late morning when he entered the town. "Hey! Soldier!" a woman called, spotting Adam's blue coat. "Where are the rest of you?"

"They're coming, ma'am," Adam answered, courteously touching the brim of his hat.

"Lee's boys are gone, all gone," the woman said, then plunged her washing down the scrub board. "Thought you'd be here sooner."

The townsfolk greeted Adam happily. There were more Northern sympathizers than rebel adherents in the town, and the appearance of a single Yankee soldier was sufficient to prompt a display of Stars and Stripes. The flags were hung from upper story windows or hoisted on makeshift poles. Men came to shake Adam's hand and some pressed gifts on him; cigars or flasks of whiskey. Adam tried to refuse the gifts, but was embarrassed by his own apparent ingratitude and so he pretended to drink from one flask, then thrust a handful of the cigars into a coat pocket. He dismounted at Main Street. A dozen people were all talking at once to him, telling him how the rebels had gone, telling him how large their army had been, but admitting that the Southern forces had not laid the town waste. They had expected to be pillaged, but the rebels had behaved themselves, even if they had insisted on paying for their supplies with Confederate money that was next to worthless. The townsfolk wanted to know when McClellan's army would arrive and when the rebel invasion would be whipped back out of the rest of Maryland. Adam, as he tried to cope with this blizzard of talk, noticed how some people crossed the street to avoid him and others even spat as he passed. The loyalties of Frederick, despite the display of Northern flags, was plainly confused.

Adam wanted to find the mayor or a selectman, but instead he was pressed to g
o into a nearby tavern and cele
brate his one-man liberation of the town. Adam shook his head. He was close to the post office and he decided that the postmaster, being a federal official, might be a source of some authoritative information, and so he tied his horse's reins to a hitching post, took
Thorne
's gold from the saddlebag to protect it from thieves and, shaking off the importunate crowd, edged into the office. "Sweet Lord above," a woman greeted his appearance, "so you got here."

"Only me, I'm afraid," Adam said, and asked if the postmaster was available.

"Jack!" the woman called, then gestured at the empty tables. "No business this last week," she explained. "Guess we'll be catching up soon enough."

"I guess," Adam said, then greeted the postmaster, a big, redbearded man who emerged from a small office at the back of the building. Some townsfolk had crowded into the post office behind Adam and, to lose their ebullient company, Adam followed the postmaster to the tiny office.

The man proved less than helpful. "I can tell you there was a mighty number of the rogues," he told Adam, "but how many?" He shrugged. "Thousands. Thousands and thousands. What did you say your name was?"

"Major Adam Faulconer."

The postmaster stared at Adam with a look close to suspicion. "You're a major? Not a captain?"

It seemed an odd question, but Adam confirmed his rank. "I was promoted a week ago," he explained. He had hung
Thorne
's bag of gold coins from his belt and the dull chink of the coins embarrassed him.

The postmaster seemed not to notice the sound of the money. "What's your posting, Major?" he asked.

"I'm at General McClellan's headquarters."

"Then I guess you knew to come here, Major," the postmaster said mysteriously, and unlocked a desk drawer out of which he took a stiff brown envelope that, to Adam's astonishment, had his name written on it. The handwriting was in capital letters and was unfamiliar to Adam, but he felt a tremor of excitement as he pulled the envelope open and unfolded the single sheet of paper.

The excitement turned to astonishment, almost to disbelief, as he read the Special Order. At first, scanning the opening two paragraphs, he wondered why anyone should have bothered to send him what seemed nothing more than a set of routine housekeeping instructions, but then he came to the third paragraph and, barely able to contain his excitement, he saw that he had been given all of the rebels' dispositions. He had in his hand the whole strategy of the rebel army, the positions of every last division in Lee's forces. The paper was gold, pure unalloyed gold, for Robert Lee had scattered his army. Part was at Harper's Ferry, parts were moving north toward Pennsylvania, and others were presumably guarding the road between. Adam read the order twice and suddenly knew he was not serving his country in vain. Even McClellan, given this paper, would surely realize the opportunity. The Young Napoleon could fight each part of Lee's army separately, defeating them one after the other until the rebellion, at least in Virginia and its neighboring states, would be utterly destroyed. "Who gave this to you?" Adam asked the postmaster.

"Didn't give his name." "But he was a rebel officer?"

"He was," the postmaster paused. "I reckoned it was important, because the fellow kind of acted strange. So I kept it separate from the other letters."

Suppose it was a trap? Adam stared at the signature, R. H. Chilton. He knew Chilton, though not well. Was this a lure? But that was not his decision to make. "What did the man look like?" he asked the postmaster.

The man shrugged. "Small," he said, "plumpish. A bit, how would you say? Delicate? Like he wasn't supposed to be a soldier."

"Did he have a beard?"

"None."

Delaney? Adam thought. Belvedere Delaney? Not that the identity of
Thorne
's
spy mattered now, all that mat
tered was that this precious piece of paper should get back safe to McClellan. "Thank you," Adam said fervently, then he picked up the discarded envelope, but in his haste he tore it as he tried to put the order back inside. "Use this," the postmaster gave him a larger envelope, which Adam used to hide the order. He went to put the envelope in his pocket, but found it filled with cigars.

"Have these, please," Adam said, spilling the cigars on the desk.

"Not all of them!" the postmaster protested Adam's generosity.

"I've more than enough," Adam said. He did not smoke, but Lyman
Thorne
enjoyed his cigars, so Adam put the last three into the envelope before shaking the postmaster's hand. "Thank you again," he said fervently.

He hurried back to the street where he thrust the curious onlookers aside and pulled himself into the saddle. He transferred the gold back to its saddlebag and pushed his horse through the crowd until at last he broke free of them and could spur down the street toward the rail depot. A butcher in a bloodied apron came out of a shed as Adam trotted past. "You want to be careful, soldier!" the butcher shouted. "There were some bushwhackers west of the town not long ago."

Adam reined in. "Rebels?" he asked.

"Weren't wearing blue," the butcher said.

"I thought the rebels were gone?"

"These are bastards from over the river. Come to pick up some plunder, like as not. But they were well to the west when I saw them, but they'll be circling round to the south to look at the rail depot. You go out that road," the man pointed due east, "and you'll be well clear of them. After ten or twelve miles you'll come to Ridge-v'ille and you can turn south there."

"Thank you," Adam said, then he turned the horse, kicked his heels back, and urged the horse into a trot. He had a long journey ahead and he had to save his mare's strength and so he curbed his instinct to spur her into a canter. He touched his pocket, scarce daring to believe what was hidden there. Delaney? Was Delaney the traitor? And Adam was shocked at himself for having used the word "traitor," even in his thoughts, for whoever had sent the order was no traitor to the United States. But was it Delaney? Somehow Adam could not imagine the foppish, clever lawyer as a spy, but he could think of no one else who fitted both the postmaster's description of the rebel officer and Colonel
Thorne
's portrait of his reluctant agent. Delaney, the sly Richmond lawyer with the glib tongue, skin-deep smile, and watchful eyes.

Adam's astonishment took him past a schoolhouse, then by an empty livery stable and a Negro chapel. He splashed through a ford and spurred up the far bank onto a long stretch of road that left the town behind to run between fields blotched with the scars left by rebel camps. He passed a small orchard that had been stripped bare by soldiers and it was just past that orchard, where the road bent leftward and began to run gently down toward the Linganore Run, that he saw the rebel horsemen.

He reined in. The five men were a quarter mile away, motionless, and watching him almost as if they had been expecting him. Two of the horsemen were on the road, one was well to the north, while the others were in the pasture south of the road. For a few seconds the six men all watched each other without moving, then Adam wrenched his mare's head around and spurred her back toward the town.

He had thought of trying to outrun the handful of rebels, but his horse had covered too many miles on a hot day to be capable of a lung-stretching gallop across miles of country. A McClellan-like caution was the best plan and so he kicked his heels to urge the mare back past the plundered orchard.

Adam felt a tremor run through the mare, then she stumbled, and he had to lean to his right to help her keep her balance. For a second he thought she must have put a foot into a hole, but then the sound of the shot arrived. He kicked his heels back again and the mare tried to respond, but a bullet had hamstrung one of her back legs and there was no more she could do for him. She tried one last gallant pace, then buckled and whinnied aloud with the pain. Her blood splashed bright on the dusty road.

Adam kicked his feet free of the stirrups. The dying echo of the single carbine shot crackled about the hot countryside, fading into the heat haze that cloaked the day. He glanced behind and saw the five rebels spurring toward him. He pulled the gold free, then scrambled away from the thrashing horse. He ran into the trees and drew his revolver. Sweat stung his eyes. The horse was crying pitifully, her hooves banging on the road as she fought against the pain in her leg.

Adam steadied himself against the trunk of an apple tree and leveled the revolver. The enemy was still two hundred yards away, a hopelessly long shot for a revolver, but he might be as lucky as they had been with their one fateful shot and so he emptied the cylinder chamber by chamber, aiming at the
two closest men who were advanc
ing on the road itself. His view of the enemy was blocked by the smoke of his shots and he had no idea where his bullets were going. He fired his last round, then ran back into the orchard where he crouched, panting, as he reloaded the gun. He was hurrying, and so he fumbled with the cartridges before forcing himself to be methodical. Fear battered him, but he kept it at bay by reminding himself of the stolen order in his pocket. He had to survive.

He pushed percussion caps onto the revolver's cones, then peered eastward. The two horsemen on the road had paused, reluctant to ride closer to his fire, but the other three men had vanished and Adam suddenly realized they must be riding north and south to outflank him. He would be trapped in the orchard and hunted down like a cornered fox.