The Whiskey Rebels (71 page)

Duer’s crossing the threshold of the City Jail seemed to act as some sort of signal—his ruin was complete so no restraint was now required. Men rushed into the Two Friendly Brothers’ tavern across the way to fortify their indignation with strong drink. Accordingly, food began to fly in our direction: eggs and apples and oranges, oyster shells, and old hard rolls. Lavien and I made it inside the jail without much harm, but Duer was struck in the forehead with an old egg. The sulfurous yolk, rotten and reeking, trickled down his face, but as we led him inside the stone edifice, he did not bother to wipe it away.

O
utside the prison, stones and dead animals and fruit continued to strike the walls, a dull cannonade of impotent rage. Duer was ruined, worth less than nothing, and yet not without assets or ready money, and he had little difficulty in securing for himself the finest accommodations in the building, a pleasant suite of rooms upon the third floor. The turnkeys behaved like obsequious publicans and were rewarded by Duer for their courtesy. He sat on a chair in his little sitting room, head in his hands, his face now cleaned of the earlier yolk.

“I shall pay them back,” he said. “Every last one I shall pay back.”

“With what money?” Lavien asked.

“I shall pay them back,” Duer said.

I rubbed my face, rough with beard stubble. “Yes, yes, when the money fairies visit you in the night and dust your bed with banknotes, you will pay them back. I understand. But what will happen to the markets now that your ruin is under way?”

He stared at me as though slapped. I don’t believe he had fully accepted the truth, even though he had been struck in the face with a rotten egg, even though he sat at that moment in City Jail, vowing to pay his creditors. Until I said the word, I do not believe he fully understood that this was not merely an unseemly diversion on the road to triumph. This was, indeed, the road’s end.

Duer looked at me. “I told you if you ruined me, you would ruin the country. Did I not say so? Go now to Merchants’ Coffeehouse, and what shall you see? Men scrambling to sell their bank scrip and government issues. The prices shall plummet, and as I am made to sell off my holdings, six percents will plummet too. You men have ruined me, but not only me. You have ruined all of us.”

“There it is,” Lavien said. “This is what they wanted from the beginning and we have given it to them. Now we must ride back, as fast as we can. Our only hope is to reach Philadelphia and make certain Hamilton gets the information before the news hits the markets. Things were always much farther along than we suspected, and there is nothing we can do here. It is up to Hamilton. He can position his men to buy, and buy at decent prices. He can use the power of the Treasury to prevent a complete disaster. What happens in New York will be harmful, but the center of finance in this country is Philadelphia. If word of this reaches the Philadelphia markets before we do, it may be too late for Hamilton to stop it.”

“To stop what?”

“The collapse of our economic system,” Lavien said.

“Everything but four percents,” said Duer, who appeared to be relieved of his misery for a moment in order to lecture us on money things. “They’ve been undervalued, and I believe the collapse of six percents will revive them.”

“Is that enough to keep the markets from collapsing?” I asked.

“No. Oh, the irony of it. I had thought to ruin men like Pearson by having them gorge themselves on four percents, but if he now sells at the right moment, he shall be rich and I shall be penniless.”

I hoped, for Cynthia’s sake, Pearson would know that right moment, but we could wait to hear no more. We were out the door and pushing our way through the angry crowds. They had no knowledge of who we were and how or if we were connected to Duer, but they were angry, and only by holding ourselves erect and pushing back when assaulted, did we manage to get to our carriage unscathed.

There was no time to return to Greenwich for our horses, so we found the public stables and, using Hamilton’s credit, gained access to the best horses we could find. From there we made our way to the ferry and waited to make the interminable passage to the New Jersey side.

We sat astride our horses on the flat ferry, listening to the waves of the river lap at the sides. While icy winds blasted us, Lavien looked at me. “You have never been comfortable doing precisely what I say. Not without argument or debate.”

“Still, you have a certain regard for me.”

“I hope you prove it merited. We have been watched and followed all day—to Duer’s mansion, to the stables, to the ferry. There are at least three of them, and by their rough look I believe them whiskey men. They did not take the ferry with us, which is too bad, for I should have knocked them into the river and been done with it. They will find another boat across, however. Are you prepared for violence?”

“Certainly. Just as long as it is not visited upon me.”

He nodded grimly. “You will have to do as I say. It is no longer a question of strategy. I believe it is one of survival—ours and the nation’s. Above all else you must keep that in mind. This is as important as any intelligence you ran in the war. If we do not reach Hamilton before the news, I cannot guess the devastation that will befall this union.”

We came off the ferry, riding hard under a sky hooded with gray clouds foretelling not snow or rain but merely a kind of gloom. The road was free of ice, and I thought we started well. I was mistaken, for we had not gone more than five or six miles before we heard the sound of men behind us. Three of them, bent over, spurring their horses to catch us.

“Whiskey men,” I shouted, but it was not necessary. Lavien must have recognized them, for he already had taken a primed pistol from his pocket; now he turned and fired off a shot, all done seemingly without thought or exertion. It could not be, I thought, that such a shot could find its target, but one of the men threw up his hands—I know not if in pain or from the impact—and fell from his horse.

I took out my primed pistol and fired too. I was never much of a shot from a moving horse, and aiming behind rather than forward made matters even more difficult, but I was determined to fire true. I turned to glance at the riders to see who would make the better target. There were two men, one far taller than the other, and it was then that I recognized him. The taller one was Duer’s man, Isaac Whippo. I aimed at him rather than the other, purely out of irritation, but the shot went wide. Distant as he was, I saw him glower at me cadaverously.

Lavien returned his pistol to his pocket and drew a knife from his belt. From his moving horse, he took the blade between his fingers and tossed it with a hard thrust from his arm. Shooting out, it twirled like a whirligig, spiraling through the air until it struck the shorter of our pursuers in the sternum. Even above the roar of thudding hooves, I heard his groan, less a cry of pain than an exhalation of despair, the sound of a man who knows he is to die.

I had fallen behind Lavien, so I spurred my horse forward, ignoring the smoking of my spent pistol in my saddlebag, and dared another look behind me. Isaac Whippo had slowed somewhat, perhaps dispirited and no longer liking his chances quite so well as he once did.

I turned to Lavien. “He may lose heart. We’ve all but gotten away.”

It was not to be, however, for though he kept his distance, he did not leave off the pursuit. I could only presume that Lavien had no more guns or knives about him, for he did not attempt to lose this last man. Then I saw why this third man remained in pursuit even though we had bested his fellows. Up ahead, a quarter mile down the road, were two more whiskey men, their horses blocking the road. We were trapped.

“S
top,” Lavien called, and he pulled up on his reins. The men in front and Whippo behind were at enough of a distance that he would have time for at least a brief conversation before they were upon us. We brought our horses to a pause by the side of the road. Following his lead, I quickly tied mine to a tree, and then dashed into the woods behind him.

“That was Duer’s man,” I said. “He was with the whiskey men.”

“I know,” he said, in a breathy low voice as he half ran, keeping his pace both swift and stealthy. “There is a clearing in the woods. I saw it through the trees maybe half a mile back. We’ll make for that spot, keeping out of sight of the road.”

“What if they kill our mounts?”

“There are always more horses,” he said. “Their own, for instance. They won’t need them once they’re dead.”

I did not know why we should want a clearing, of all things, and I did not want to abandon the animals, but here was a situation in which I knew Lavien to be my superior, and I would not argue.

I ran hard. Unused to continuous physical exertion, almost at once I felt a stitch in my side and a burning feeling that rose in my throat and extended to the tip of my tongue. The blood pounded in my ears, and my eyes darted back and forth for any sign of danger, but as near as I could determine we were not yet seen. More than once I almost fell over in exhaustion, but Lavien continued to run hard, and I would not be the one to drag us down. Somehow I found the strength to keep pace—nearly, for I lagged ten or fifteen yards behind—until we came out in the clearing that Lavien had seen from the road.

It was perhaps a fifty-foot circle of flat earth pocked with mounds of dirty snow. There were signs that men had slept here recently—footprints and the bones of a small animal, perhaps a rabbit or a chicken—and a stink that suggested they had not wandered far to use the necessary. Nearly at the center was a small stone circle in which they had made a fire, and there were still pieces of wood there, some but blackened coal, others reasonably fresh.

I stood still, panting and holding my side, which now flared and fired and set forth cannonades of pain.

“Good,” said Lavien in a low voice, as he stooped to examine the stone circle. “This will do. There’s enough wood left to burn well.”

He handed me his pistol, took a tinderbox, and began to relight the fire. “You’ll find powder and balls in my travel bag. Prime the weapons.”

“Are you mad? They’ll see our smoke.”

“Captain, that is what I wish. We haven’t time for evasion. We’ve got to get to Philadelphia, and that means we need to fight them. If we want to do it quickly and without fear of sharpshooters, we must engage them on our terms. We will draw them here.”

I readied the firearms, though I did it slowly and clumsily. My hands shook from the exertion of the chase and the running, and I kept searching the woods for any sign that the whiskey men had found us before we wished them to. There was no point in doing so. These were border men who stalked bears naked and slept in trees for days, waiting to pounce upon deer. If they knew we were here and wished us dead, we would be dead already.

Lavien quickly lit the fire, poking at it until it burned vigorously. He then went over to the nearest tree and broke off several small twigs, which he put upon the blaze.

“They’re moist, and will make the fire produce more smoke.” He gazed about him and took one of the smaller pieces of wood from the fire, a rounded branch not more than a foot long, and narrow enough to easily hold in the hand, and lifted it like a torch. “This way,” he said, gesturing away from the road.

“Why do you want that?” I asked.

“You will see why,” he answered, in a grim tone that suggested confidence but no satisfaction. “We must not let this fire go out.”

I followed him out of the clearing. We moved back several feet, that we might not be seen, or not seen easily, from the vicinity of the fire. He held his torch behind a tree and squatted, his other hand in his bag, his eyes wide and unblinking.

“Let us hope they are as rushed as we are,” he said quietly. “These Westerners are good hunters, as stealthy and deadly in their own way as the Maroons of Surinam.”

“I understand,” I said.

“If we die, we do not get our message to Hamilton.”

“And we’ll be dead. That is undesirable in itself.” I felt tension, urgency, and anxiety for what must come next. It was not precisely fear, though there was fear in it. I am not one of those men who go into battle with nothing but courage in his heart. I felt fear aplenty, but enough other things that it was merely one flavor of the stew.

“I’ve no doubt,” he continued, “that they have good shots among them, and they could pick us off, if they choose, before we even sensed they were near.”

“I said I understand, damn you.”

He grinned at me. “Just making certain.”

He muttered something under his breath. It sounded like a prayer, and it sounded like a foreign language, though I know not know if it was Hebrew or the heathen Maroon tongue.

Then he was silent and there was little else but silence, the silence of the woods in winter when men have come tramping through moments before. There was a rustle of dead branches and birdsong, sporadic but distant. I heard the click of speedy animal claws not far away—perhaps a hearty squirrel that had not slept for the winter or had awoken early.

In a few moments one of our pursuers walked into the clearing. He was an older man, missing an eye, of average height but thin build, with fair hair and pale skin, somewhat blemished with freckles and the scars of smallpox. His clothes looked several sizes too big for him, and he comported himself with the shambling attitude of the habitual drinker.

The one-eyed rebel looked at the fire and then turned back the way he had come and let out a whistle, the kind that sounds precisely like a man trying to sound like a bird. In a moment, Whippo and the third whiskey rebel walked briskly into the clearing. Soon the trio was circling the fire, speaking in low tones, attempting to make sense of it, read some logic into its presence, some indication of our location.

Whippo turned, not precisely toward us but close enough, facing a deep thicket of wood. Hands upon his narrow hips, he called, “I know you’re in there, Saunders. Why not come out and talk things over? You’re taking it all a bit hard. I suppose it’s our own fault, making you think us so ruthless. We’re not violent men, just clever ones. We need not be at odds.”