Blood at Dawn

by Jim R. Woolard

  I had me another sip of whiskey and asked the question that needed answering the most. “If somebody went to all this trouble, they’re serious about their stealing. Since they forged Paw’s name, he must not know what they’re about. Then who’s behind this?”

  Ensign Andy Young’s face was sober as a magistrate passing judgment on a prisoner. “It can only be Court Starnes. He was the last civilian to sign before delivery of the manifest to Samuel Hodgdon and the army for payment at set prices for each item listed. And as Duer’s chief agent, the monies will be issued directly to Starnes. If he didn’t forge the document himself, it was done on his orders. I learned while working for Father’s counting house that the captain of the ship is seldom ignorant of anything that happens aboard his vessel.”

  I thought on that, and it was like a candle suddenly flaming up in a dark room. “Starnes is stealing from the army, and William Duer isn’t even aware of it, is he?”

  The ensign’s eyes brightened, and his head bobbed with vigor. “Exactly,” he gushed. “He collects funds against the bloated forgery but forwards only the original manifest and the lesser monies due against it to Duer in Philadelphia. Quite a clever scheme, isn’t it?”

  “Do you think he’s doing this with many of the Duer boats coming downriver?”

  The ensign pursed his lips. “No, that would soon be discovered. I haven’t located any other obvious forgeries in the bundle Hodgdon gave me. But if Starnes is submitting, say, a forged manifest every other week, there’s little risk he’ll be discovered, and he’ll soon amass a small fortune. It was just a fluke of fate that St. Clair remembered my father and my clerking on the Cincinnati landing. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have directed Hodgdon to have me review the quartermaster’s paperwork.”

  I ruminated some more. “Starnes can’t know what you’ve discovered, can he?”

  “No, he wasn’t present the other evening with Hodgdon and the general. Far as I’m aware, he hadn’t yet arrived from Fort Pitt when I was on duty at the landing and checking cargo with your father. Then I was assigned to Fort Hamilton on 1 October.”

  “Have you ever seen Starnes from even a distance?”

  “No, I don’t believe so.”

  The picture of Starnes, his Roman features, his oversized skull, fists, and feet, flashed through my mind. “Trust me, Ensign. You’ve never laid eye on him. For once you have, you never forget him. He’s as powerful as he is ruthless.”

  It was time for the question that loomed over the both of us like a storm cloud. “What are you intending to do next?” I inquired softly.

  “Why, inform General St. Clair of what I’ve discovered. What else?”

  The words seemed to pop from my mouth by themselves. “Ensign Young, could I ask you to wait a few days, maybe a week?”

  The ensign’s backbone straightened and his head cocked. “Why should I? It is of utmost importance that General St. Clair understands how his army is being swindled. He’s anticipating the eventual receipt of supplies from Hodgdon’s efforts that don’t exist.”

  “I couldn’t agree more. But you yourself admitted you don’t believe you can convince a court the manifest on the table is a forgery.”

  Andy Young sighed heavily. “Not with just my testimony. Not without additional evidence,” he admitted.

  “Then hear me out, please. I will be at Fort Washington tomorrow evening. I will tell Paw everything and ask him if his memory of the Barch boat matches yours. If it does, and I can damn well swear Paw hardly ever forgets anything he sees, even if it was years ago, let alone a few weeks, you’ve got another witness. And just maybe Paw, who has no great liking for Court Starnes, knows of other shenanigans by Duer’s hires harmful to the army. Paw ain’t one to brook dishonesty from anybody, whether he’s in their pay or not.”

  The ensign helped himself to his first drink of whiskey the entire evening. He set the jug down and scratched above his ear. “I suppose a few more days wouldn’t ruin the entire campaign. I do need your father’s corroboration. It would be best if I can present indisputable evidence to General St. Clair that will allow him to take corrective action immediately thereafter and end Starnes’s deception once and for all. But I will wait no longer than a week. If I’m ordered to join St. Clair’s staff to the north, which may happen, I want your promise you or your father will still seek me out without fail.”

  “One of us most assuredly will. My orders from General Butler and Captain Starkweather are to return with bells and hobbles without delay.”

  “Fair enough,” the ensign said, rising to his feet and extending his hand. “And if anything happens to me, make your findings known to Captain Starkweather. He may be finicky about his victuals and his person, but he can be trusted, no matter the circumstances.”

  Though warmed through in a bed with woolen blankets and a straw tick mattress, I spent another restless night. Acquiring sufficient evidence to convict Court Starnes of theft from the army would be a formidable task. And that was just the first step. Then would come the real challenge: bringing him to justice. I couldn’t imagine a man of Starnes’s strength and cunning peacefully surrendering to the army for trial and sentencing, perhaps to the hangman’s rope.

  I hardly thought of less menacing prospects such as love and the beautiful maiden with the flame-red hair.

  Chapter 11

  9 October

  No one had the opportunity to linger beneath his blankets in the morning at Fort Hamilton, not with Captain Lucas Steddeman on duty. At first light that stalwart officer cleared his perpetually clogged pipes with a hawk that rattled shutters throughout the entire compound, trudged to the door, and launched the contents of his wolf-trap jaws across the stoop with a spit rivaling the blast of a discharging cannon. Maybe it was coincidence, but I swear the drum roll commencing morning parade rat-tatted before his flying wad of spit hit the ground outside.

  Tap and I broke our fast with jerked beef, leftover bread, and hot tea served by Private Oakley while Captain Steddeman and Ensign Young oversaw the morning parade. The sun was on the rise when the two officers joined us at the table. The glum captain ate with head lowered over his tin plate, no more inclined to friendly chatter than he had been the previous evening.

  “Corporal Balser is bringing your horses in from the picket line,” Ensign Young informed us twixt swallows. “They were fed and watered last night and again before dawn. Private Oakley is bagging a ration of jerk for each of you. The weather appears to be as fair as yesterday, and you should have no particular trouble reaching Fort Washington before nightfall.”

  Clutching a second noggin of steaming tea, the ensign rose and walked to the desk he shared with his fellow officers. Upon his return, he remained standing and handed me a rolled sheet of parchment. “For your father,” he said. “Not the signed manifest we examined before retiring, but a complete copy of what that document claimed was aboard Dyson Barch’s boat. I will retain the signed manifest until I meet with your father in person.” I concurred with the ensign’s thinking and nodded.

  Tap sat beside me, rapping the table with his knuckles and listening. The old scout’s curiosity was so great his brows were threatening to brush the ceiling. He stayed quiet, howsomever, fearful that if he sniffed where his nose didn’t belong, I might not share anything with him later either.

  Tap and I took our leave after checking the priming and flints of our long guns and collecting our gear. I tied the bags of jerk filled by Private Oakley across Blue’s withers and was delighted, upon hefting our canteens, to find they had been replenished by Corporal Balser. Andy Young was mighty thorough. If summoned, he would be a valuable addition to General St. Clair’s headquarters staff.

  The ensign himself escorted us to the main gate. “Don’t forget our agreement, Mr. Downer. One week, and one week only, no longer.”

  A few miles south of Fort Hamilton, we trotted past the point at which Erin Green and I had come upon the military road on our ride north some days ago. Tap being more
familiar with the country from there to the Ohio, I followed his lead as to when and where we could best blow the horses and ease our own legs.

  The miles slipped by under Blue’s belly with me keeping a sharp vigil to my side of the road, but my thoughts inevitably ran to Paw and what he had endured since his decision last spring to become William Duer’s western agent. Disputes regarding the legitimacy of Paw’s ownership of more than half of our home place south of Lexington had created a desperate need for cash money and lured Paw into Duer’s employ. All Paw had sought was an honest share of the profit for supplying St. Clair’s forces. His initial letters had been full of promise. Gradually though, the spirit of the letters had diminished as did their number. Then, with September nearly half over, Paw had requested that Bear Watkins join him and Tap in Cincinnati. The next week, another letter arrived authorizing me and Hardy Booth to draw on family reserves, purchase no fewer than ten personal mounts for St. Clair’s officers, and fetch them to Fort Hamilton without delay.

  I understood now, after talking with Ensign Young, that something big had started to go amiss on Paw if he suddenly needed extra hands and eyes that wouldn’t fail him short of death. Only the direst of situations would have caused him to so drastically reduce the number of men assigned to protect my mother and sisters and complete autumn chores on the Downer plantation. The farther south we pounded on the military road, the more anxious I grew to learn the truth and size of Paw’s troubles. It was all I could do to keep from kicking Blue into a gallop, a poor notion what with our still being miles shy of our destination.

  A little added pondering, and I decided I’d no choice except to tell Tap the whole story. If anything befell me before we reached Fort Washington, what help Ensign Young could offer Paw might die stillborn. I seized the occasion as we rested the horses before starting the ride across the broken hills that separated us from Mill Creek and the descent into Cincinnati. “You saw the paper the ensign handed me upon our departure?” I started.

  Tap lowered his canteen, nodded, and listened with rapt attention as I proceeded to tell him about Dyson Barch’s Kentucky boat, the forged manifest, and my commitment that either Paw or I would be in touch with Andy Young within the week. At the finish, the old scout stared at the nearby trees and sipped more water. When his canteen lowered again, he was ready to parley.

  “Forged manifest, huh. Well, I can damn sure nail to the hoof of the jasper you want to ask how that came to pass. You need to root out that clerk Court Starnes sent from Fort Pitt ahead of hisself . . . Cyrus Paine, that’s his name. He’s ugly as a wharf rat, bald as me, an’ wears a long black coat, no matter the weather. He took charge of the ledgers an’ shipping papers the day he arrived. Had him a letter from Starnes, he did. He keeps every scrap of paper under lock and key.”

  “How does Paw feel about him?”

  “You know your paw. He ain’t much for bitchin’ over which dogs he has to sleep with when he makes the bed hisself. That is, till he learns you’re a thief or you’re lyin’ to him. Then the devil, clever as he be, can’t hide yuh from Caleb Downer.”

  “Then we best go share what we’ve learned with him, hadn’t we?” I proposed, stepping aboard Blue.

  Tap chuckled and mounted Bear’s brown gelding. “Yeah, could make for a little excitement down on the river tonight.”

  The St. Clair road was twisty as a coiled snake in the miles where it forged through the hills above Mill Creek. We moved along at a brisk trot though, for the road was now wider and the stumps fewer, the result of extra labor by the general’s regiments during the weeks the army had camped at Ludlow’s Station on the creek’s west bank for training in the field.

  We gained the deserted station at midafternoon and halted in the yard fronting the blockhouse to blow the horses and eat the jerk Private Oakley had bagged for us. Tap had observed St. Clair’s forces while they were encamped on Mill Creek and couldn’t resist relating the gist of what he’d seen. “It was somethin’ to behold, lad. Most of them Philadelphia and Baltimore recruits, bein’ fresh from the tavern an’ the jail, had never fired off a musket afore. And the bulk of ’em had the shakes, that bein’ because they couldn’t lay hold of liquor here like they had every whipstitch at Cincinnati. Lordy, but they was a danger to flying birds, clouds, the sun, an’ anybody a-watchin’. The safest place to be them days was with the targets they set up over on that stretch of high ground shy of the creek. That was true the last week same as the first. It was a terrible waste of black powder.”

  We watered the horses at the creek, crossed the knee-deep stream on the solid limestone bottom of McHenry’s Ford, and slanted southeast for Cincinnati and the Ohio. The weather remained fair and cool with the faintest of breezes stirring, ideal conditions for riding stock beginning to tire from hours of constant motion and little forage. The country bordering the road had been grazed clean of grasses by the advancing army’s cattle, oxen, and horses. Tap, also aware of the scarcity of natural forage, quipped, “Damn rabbit would have to pack his own victuals to travel through here without starvin’.”

  Paw being a surveyor, he was always searching for ways to describe land and its many settings. In the letters he faithfully wrote to Mother, he called Cincinnati the “giant’s eye,” the high tier of hills north of the city forming the brow, the city and its surrounding environs the ball, and the Ohio the lower lash. Our approach to Cincinnati being from the north, we enjoyed an awesome sight from the giant’s craggy brow, for we could see the whole of the huge eye from Deer Creek in the east to Mill Creek in the west in a single vast sweep. Straight brown streaks, obviously the wide streets of the city Paw had noted in his letters, slashed through yellow-leafed trees on the eyeball’s downward curve. Thin stems of smoke, narrow and straight as lines drawn by a quill pen, sifted upward from the area of the lower lash.

  “Cincinnati’s a mighty peaceful lookin’ place from up here, ain’t it,” Tap commented. “But there ain’t a hellhole the equal of it this side of the Alleghenies. Garrison town, she is, the army suckin’ the fore teat in everythin’ from trade to sin. The dice box, the whiskey keg, an’ the card table be the king and the queen for one and all. Come along, lad, the first visit is always the best for you young studs.”

  Compared to Lexington, Kentucky, with its 800-plus inhabitants, 200 dwellings, numerous trading houses, and well-appointed taverns, Cincinnati resembled a festering sore on a sow’s rear. Its permanent population barely exceeded 200. Its building inventory consisted of 60 raw structures huddled mainly in a straggling cluster along the river on the flat below Fort Washington. The wide streets and unproven out lots running back to the base of the northern crescent of surrounding hills composed the bulk of the city. On the plateau extending east and west the width of the city above the river flat, a large pond of water at Fifth and Main Streets necessitated the construction of a causeway to enable travelers to escape its miring clutches. Frogs not yet driven underwater by autumn frosts serenaded Tap and me as we walked our mounts across the timbers of the causeway in the last tinges of daylight.

  We turned east at Third Street, and even in the growing darkness Fort Washington dominated the eastern skyline. The fort was an imposing structure 180 feet square with two-story blockhouses at the four angles. Cabins a story and a half high made up the walls and doubled as barracks, those better furnished being assigned to officers. A two-pole alley, the easternmost street of Cincinnati, extended north and south parallel with the fort’s main gate and slanted downward to the flat adjoining the river.

  We reined south into the alley short of the fort, and the watery expanse of the Ohio came into full view. The hour seeming of little consequence, the farther down the alley we rode, the more human folk we encountered. Every kind of dress, whether of broadcloth, buckskin, linsey-woolsey, linen, or calico as well as every size and shape of hat, whether of furred pelts, leather, knitted cloth, or feathers, adorned the men and women passing by.

  Crews unloaded Kentucky boats and smaller cr
aft tied to wooden landings along the riverbank. Bodies big and small hustled from cabin to tavern to shop. Outhouse doors closed with sharp bangs, the clap of wood against wood booming above the loud talk. Weapons, whether rifle, musket, pistol, or bladed, were in evidence everywhere. More than a few armed men and leering women stopped and appraised us with frank stares. Had I any doubts of Tap’s assessment of Cincinnati’s rude character, our ride along the city’s waterfront dispelled them forever.

  A two-story log building forty feet square soared above smaller cabins at the water’s edge, the massiveness of the structure blotting out the entire expanse of the Ohio once we came abreast of it. The push and rush of inbound and departing occupants was eased by the presence of three main entryways, and given the size of the crowd entering and taking their leave at the same time, a fourth would have been helpful. A female face, coarse and painted beneath a towering black wig, appeared briefly among the crowd jamming the center doorway. The sour, angry expression contorting the painted face vanished as eyes red-veined and bleary spotted Tap riding at my left stirrup.

  “Tap Jacobs, yuh ol scamp! Come to lift my skirt agin, have yuh now?” shrilled what was most certainly a tavern wench accustomed to offering up more, much more, than tankards of rum and whiskey.

  I glanced at the old scout. No blush of shame or embarrassment darkened the bare skin above his chin whiskers. Instead, an ornery grin surpassing that of the painted harlot knotted the corners of his mouth. “In a while, Sally me darlin’! I’ll be back in a while!”

  A surge of the inbound crowd swept the harlot from the doorway. When I looked again at the old scout, he was sitting higher in the saddle, his once tired eyes fairly dancing. “Maw’s right. You are a seeker of fleshly pleasure at every opportunity,” I joshed.