“Excuse me, we’re on our way to Riversend. May we pass, please?” Griff offered politely.
“You ain’t goin’ nowhere right sudden like,” Teddy growled.
“Are you connected with someone official?”
Billy Joe sniggered. “We’s the ones who are gonna officially relieve you of your money and valuables.”
“What Billy Joe means is that we’ve decided to make this a toll road. We’re gonna collect the toll from you. Steve, Lars, ride in and gather up their donations.”
Two of the bandits approached on long-burdened horses who rutched their bits in complaint. Griff’s hands began to twist in opposite directions. The moment he felt the catch come free, he rapidly forced his arms apart. A long ribbon of steel appeared in his hand.
He swung in a tight, horizontal arc. The keen edge of the sword cane bit into the side of the closest brigand’s neck, severed the jugular vein and carotid artery as it moved through to his throat, then the larynx. Lars didn’t have time to utter even a tiny scream of pain before the powerful force of Griff’s arm completed its task and the highwayman’s head fell backward, supported only by his spine. A second mouth opened and a twin fountain of blood erupted toward the sky. In the same instant, a Starr revolver appeared in Griff’s other hand. It barked once and the heavy .44 ball peeled Steve out of his saddle.
Griff dropped his sword and drew a second pistol. Alternating hands, he fired left, then right and another bandit crumpled with a belly wound. The remaining Bummers went for their weapons.
Billy Joe yanked his free and managed to ear back the hammer before a .44 bullet went in through his open, yelling mouth and blew off the back of his head. The next instant, the Starr in Griff’s right hand barked.
Teddy ducked the slug, throwing himself from the saddle in his effort. He ran forward, his 1860 Colt at the ready. Behind him he heard a high-pitched wail and a horse bolted past him, dragging a man from one stirrup, a bullet hole spoiling the symmetry of his chest. Then he came to within three feet of the frantically fighting stranger they thought would be so easy to take. He swung up his Colt and took hurried aim.
Suddenly the man was nowhere to be seen.
Griff had lost balance when his restive horse had lurched forward. His precarious stance on unsteady legs had left him and he’d crashed to the floor of the carriage. Cursing his helplessness, he raised up in time to come face to face with Teddy. His left-hand Starr roared and a neat hole appeared in the lacquered leather skin of the dashboard.
Teddy jolted backward, his chest a raging field of pain from chips of leather and a partially flattened .44 ball that had burst through his sternum. He reeled to one side and tried to focus his suddenly fuzzy vision. Griff had to drag himself up by his hands. He knelt in the trap and cocked both weapons.
The right-hand pistol fired first. Its bullet punched into Teddy’s chest, an inch to the right of his left nipple. The brigand’s Colt discharged into the ground and he spun slowly on one heel. With a regretful sigh, he crumpled dead in the dust of the Georgia road, far from the Boston slum of his birth.
Chapter Fifteen
JENNIFER CARMICHAEL CROUCHED on the floorboards of the carriage. The ear-punishing roar of gunshots had ended, yet she found herself unable to move. A long moment passed and she heard the small, suppressed gasps that told of the pain Griff endured whenever he had to exert any extra effort. He quickly checked the dead enemy and holstered his revolvers. Then his big, strong hands took her under the arms and righted her, gently placing her on the upholstered seat. A shudder passed through her body and she opened her eyes.
“Jenny. I’m sorry that had to happen. They would have … used us in any way that struck their fancy. It’s unfortunate … but it was necessary.”
Still speechless, Jennifer tried to blank out the shimmering yard of steel, the ugly, gaping red maw that opened in the young bandit’s throat. Her jaw worked convulsively and she tried to form words.
“I-i-it all happened so fast. Those men … they—”
“They can’t harm you now.” Griff lifted the reins, flicked them on the rump of their nervously twitching horse. The buggy rolled on down the road.
“I feel … ill,” Jennifer announced in a small, whispery voice. “For all of the awful conditions we saw in the hospital, I’ve never seen a man killed before. It’s … not like I thought it would be.”
“Anyone who has to take another life feels somewhat like you do, Jenny. Anyone who is entirely sane. Try to rid your mind of it.”
A small, nervous laugh, a mere titter, escaped her lips. “That’s something I don’t think I can ever do.”
Ten minutes later they turned into the long lane that led to Riversend. Unused and untended, it sported tufts of grass, that grew in the wagon ruts, withered now under the brutal sun of August. Their horse snorted, still unsettled by the swift violence and the smell of blood. Griff touched his flank with the tasseled whip and he leaned into the harness. By the time they reached the final curve, Griff steeled himself for the sight that had so dispirited him before.
No longer could the gabled roof and white second-floor balcony of the plantation house be seen. The granary was gone and the windmill toppled. A deep sorrow blossomed painfully in his chest, more intense now that the place was his once again, and he dreaded what he knew the next few minutes would reveal.
Nothing remained of the great plantation. Griff wanted to shake his head and make it all go away when he halted the carriage halfway to where the front entrance to the main house had once presented an inviting welcome to visitors. Every building, even the sunshade over the pig pens had been burned to the ground. Only charred cinders remained. Jenny sensed his mood and said nothing. He sat in silence a long while, then sighed heavily and turned the rig around. For an extended moment, he studied the five mounds located in a grove of box elders. He owned the land. He had fought long and hard to wrest it back from the grasping thieves who had stolen it and had won.
What he had come home to made this a hollow victory.
Valdosta seemed little changed from the last time Griff had been there. The Yankee occupation blanketed the small city with as heavy a hand as elsewhere. Somehow, it didn’t seem to matter. Perhaps, the new cynical part of him suggested, he was becoming inured to the Reconstruction. Griff arranged rooms for them at a pleasant lodging house off the main square and took the carriage to the livery. Then he once again began his search.
With every step he felt more confident. It was awkward to make progress down the sidewalk with two canes. No one seemed to take notice, though. They had grown accustomed to the war-maimed. His thump-scrape, thump-scrape advance became lost in the bustle of the active hamlet. Griff scanned his memory for a plan of Valdosta and headed for the post office.
“Any letters left here for Griffin Stark?”
“Naw, suh,” a young clerk replied. He had curly red hair, through which he habitually ran long, pale fingers. “Nothin’ I can recall.”
“Look, will you?” The strain of his unassisted walk had shortened Griff’s temper. “I mean, they would probably be old now. Try the dead letter file.”
“Yessuh.”
Five minutes later, Griff had a final answer. No letters.
“There’s some here for a Missus Griffin Stark,” the redhead offered helpfully. “At Riversend. But that’s burned down and no one living there anymore.”
“I know. Those are from me. May I have them, please?”
“Glad to oblige, Mr. Stark.”
He got the same story at the general store and the millinery. Even persons who had known him since childhood seemed reluctant at first to make any comment. When they did, under the lash of Griff’s temper or out of genuine concern, their responses were all the same. They had not seen Bobbie Jean or his son and had heard nothing from them. Grimly determined, he set about searching further.
A steam whistle hooted in New York harbor. From the luxury of a fourth-floor office in the Central Bank of New York, Alb
ert Treadwell looked out over the water. His deformed left hand rested for a moment on the windowpane, then he turned back to the men in the room.
“Our westward expansion plans are going well. Food is the big item now,’’ he lectured to the financial backers of the consortium. “Many crops were destroyed by the war. Livestock went untended and died. The demand is enormous. Many people reject bison meat, though it is delicious. The brutes are also next to impossible to handle and there is no time to create a cadre of men who can manage them.
“Besides, as you well know they are the commissary of the savages and the key to the Indian lands. Reliable sources indicate that the Texas ranchers are planning to drive cattle north to the market. In anticipation of this we have purchased land and are building stockyards in Saint Louis and Chicago. We need to get in on the ground floor of the railroad development. It is my expectation that the market will move west to the source of supply.”
“Have there been any difficulties in establishing our interests?”
“Not so far.” Albert refrained from commenting on his personal failure. Griffin Stark had eluded him again. His network of informants had established that Stark and the Carmichael girl had headed south from Washington. Their destination was unquestionably Georgia. Stark had been located one day, in Atlanta. Bitterly, Albert recalled the details.
“There is no doubt about it. The man is Griffin Stark,” his agent had written. “He can barely move about, uses two canes and drags his left leg slightly. He’s spending his days in the land records office and the tax board files.”
Albert had sent explicit orders on how to handle the matter.
One day, not long after, a huge beer wagon had hurtled down a wide street in Atlanta. The team, apparently frightened by something, had run away with the heavy cargo of filled barrels. It careened through traffic and hurtled down on a crippled man who made slow, painful progress across the thoroughfare.
At the last possible instant, Griffin Stark had leaped out of the way. Unfortunately the wagon crashed into the solid brick edifice of a bank and the driver was killed. Stark apparently thought it a simple accident. Albert’s agent could not locate anyone else willing to undertake the commission and three days later, Stark disappeared. Albert seethed at this memory of failure.
“Organizing a railroad company is a lengthy process,” one of the money men explained. “What is hurting us is our competition. They keep on expanding faster than we can put obstacles in their way. Is anything being done about that?”
“There is,” Albert assured him. “I have a reliable man working on it now.” The good colonel had better prove himself this time, Albert thought.
“Thing is, there ain’t gonna be any new Confederacy, Colonel. Not out there in the West or anywhere else.”
Colonel Chester Braithwaite sat in a spacious cabin in the Missouri Ozarks, where for the past hour he had been using his most persuasive talents to convince a stubborn pair of brothers and three of their friends that he represented a rebirth of the Confederacy and that their past experiences were in demand to further the cause. His patience, grown thin, was further worn away by the incessant squeak of a rocker in one corner near the fieldstone fireplace. Like a grande dame, the mother of the obstinate pair rocked and plied her quilting needle.
“You are being short-sighted,” Braithwaite protested. “Look at what is happening around you. The railroads are every bit as much an enemy as the Union was. They are stealing your land, dispossessing people in the name of progress. A blow against them is a stand for freedom.”
“We fought our war,” the elder brother replied. “Our cause was right but we lost. Now we ain’t at war with anyone. I want to keep it that way. It’s time to get back to farmin’ and raisin’ a family. Thank you, Colonel, but no.”
Braithwaite shrugged. The five men he had come to see rose, making it plain that the talking was over. He did the same.
“You’re making a mistake. Mark me, the time will come when you will wish you had taken me up on my offer. Good afternoon, gentlemen.”
After Braithwaite’s buggy had rattled off down the tree-lined road, the elder brother turned to the others, though his words were meant for his kin. “What do you think, Jim?”
“We have it good now. Why spoil it with more bloody raidin’? The man’s a damn fool, Cole.”
By the end of the second day, Griffin Stark felt he had spoken to every soul in Valdosta. Always with the same result. Nothing had changed since his first attempt. Fatigue sagged him as he made his difficult way down the walk toward the edge of town. A friendly shopkeeper had told him of a camp beyond the city limits where a large number of freed slaves had gathered. With plantations destroyed and unemployment monumental even among whites, they congregated in hopes of some miracle that might come out of mutual support. Before he reached his goal, he heard the singing.
“I looked over Jordan an’ what did I see? Comin’ for to carry me home ...”
A mournful chorus, rich with rumbling bass and baritone notes, joined the sweet contralto voice. Fora moment, Griff’s spirits lifted. It was like coming home to Riversend after a long hot day in the fields.
For the hundredth time that day he felt as though the last of his strength would leave him. Exerting tremendous new effort, he cane-walked his way into the camp.
Some two hundred former slaves stood in the irregular streets of the tent city. Others gathered around a small bonfire where meat was roasting arid the singers had congregated. Griff grunted with each step as he headed in that direction. No one moved as he passed by, neither to help nor hinder him. He came upon the harmonizing group and his stomach cramped in reaction to the succulent odor of cooking flesh. He realized he had not eaten since morning.
“M-Mistah … Mistah Griffin, suh?” a hesitant female voice stammered out.
Griff looked across the smoky fire at a face vaguely familiar, though lined now with privation and confusion. Then the connection was completed in his brain and he saw the afternoon long ago when his father’s funeral had just ended and he had intervened on behalf of a young house servant. Daphne. That had been her name.
“Daphne?”
“Yassah, Mistah Griffin. It’s me all right. We was tol’ you was dead.”
“I’m alive enough.” The reunion ended abruptly. “My wife? Do you know anything about Bobbie Jean and my son?”
Daphne’s eyes glanced away for a second, uncertain how to explain. Her own memories of the fateful day at Riversend still haunted her. “Yassah, I do. The boy’s gone to Mistah Tucker’s place,” she evaded, not wanting to give him the awful news.
“But what about my wife?”
“Let’s go over there where you can sit down, Mistah Griffin. You looking mighty tired.”
“News about my wife would refresh me remarkably,” Griff snapped impatiently.
“Please. Let’s go sit down.”
Under the shade of a widespread sycamore, they sat on a circular bench fashioned by some long-ago carpenter. The eagerness and hope that shined in Griff’s face pierced Daphne to the heart. She knew no words. Nothing to soften the blow. Her pink tongue darted out and licked dry lips.
“She dead, suh. Missus Bobbie Jean is dead. I don’ know any easy way to tell it. It happened many months ago.”
An animal cry of sheer torment tore from Griff’s chest. His eyes went unfocused, and for a moment it appeared that he would topple off the seat. Daphne put a steadying hand on his shoulder and her eyes filled with tears.
“The … the Bummers came. They kilt Caesar and Cicero. Shot ’em down like dogs. Then they used me shamefully. They was gonna do those things with your missus, too, only she fought ’em. She did for two of them with that hoss pistol you give her. One of them shot her. Then they burned everything.
“After … after it was all over, I got two of the field hands who didn’t run off and we buried everyone. Didn’t have nothin’ to make a marker with, so we just put up some wood crosses. They’s still out there,
I expect. When we finished I took Mastah Jeremy to his Auntie Julie’s.”
“How did you get there?”
“Walked. The Bummers runned off all the stock.”
“That’s a long way.” The words came mechanically, Griff’s mind still trying to reject the finality of Bobbie Jean’s death.
“We didn’t get there until long after dark. There was lots of Yankees on the road an’ we had to hide several times.”
“And Jeremy is still at the Tuckers’?”
“Yes, sir. Far as I knows.”
“Thank you, Daphne. Thank you for caring. Was she brave? Bobbie Jean?”
“To the very last. Put the fear of God in them lowlifes.”
“T-that makes me … proud of her. Thank you. Is there anything I can do for you?”
“Not unless it’s a job. Work’s around to do aplenty, but the jobs is mighty skeerce.”
“I … I can’t help you there. But, here, this isn’t much. Only fifty dollars, but it can get you food, take you somewhere to find work.”
“Oh, I couldn’t take money from you, Mistah Griffin. You … you’ll need it for Mastah Jeremy.”
“We’ll be all right. You take it. It’s the … least I can do.”
“Will I see you again, Mistah Griffin?”
“Perhaps. Perhaps I’ll rebuild Riversend. If I do, you’ll always have a place there.”
“Bless you, Mistah Griffin. God bless you an’ all yours.”
Propelled by an indomitable iron will, Griffin Stark made it all the way back to the lodging house, unmindful of the agony in his legs. The left one felt cold and tingly all the while and the shooting pains had become nearly unbearable. He negotiated the steep stairway without assistance and got into his room before his grief exploded and he wept without restraint for more than an hour.
The Confederate Page 15
