Boom!
Even so, it caught me by surprise. Bradford’s double-barreled shotgun spoke as the rider turned toward his terror-filled voice. The charge took the delivery boy in the forearm, almost unseating him. He screamed with pain.
Things started happening faster, then. Where the open features of a rustic youth had occupied the front end of the rider’s head, now a gruesome swirling was
displayed. Moans arose from our eighteenth-century companions. The rider shrieked again as a pop and crackle at his damaged wrist announced, with a curling wisp of smoke, the demise of a twenty-second-century skinsuit. Blinded, the rider peeled away his thermoplastic head-covering to reveal the hate-filled face of Edna Janof, girl Hamiltonian. Leaning over, she hissed at me, between clenched teeth. “You Confederate son of a bitch!”
“Look out, Win!” That was Ed, trying to get his pistol charged again.
The woman ignored him, looking straight at me, brought her laser to bear as I fought my cumbersome rifle into line. Before I could get the sights on her unprotected visage, Bradford’s mighty weapon bellowed again, the shot-column missing Janof but disturbing her aim. The beam leaped out with a craaackA A tree behind me puffed into flame. Her horse reared, gave a leap, and was off down the trace, dragging the spare behind.
I snapped out of slow motion. Ed’s gun went off. Mitchell’s rifle banged. The second horse tumbled, skidding in a cloud of smoke and road dust, a mass of soul-rending screams, flailing leather, kicking legs. The men yelled at one another, ran around like stirred-up ants. Edna’s back dwindled until my brass front sight covered her.
It was pointless trying. I eased up on the trigger. The wounded horse lashed its head back and forth as it lay bleeding into the ground. Unable to take it anymore, I “finished” the animal with fake gunfire and a liberal spray of stasis-juice.
Edna, of course, was long gone. A pause for breath-catching, blinking, and reloading.
“Good god, what a mess!” I rose, wiped my hands on the thighs of my buckskins. My dry cleaner would never speak to me again. Whoever it was—Gilbert Roland or Ed Sullivan—who observed that a policeman’s lot is not a happy one didn’t know the half of it. I’d never had to cut a horse’s throat before.
“Here, Mitchell. Do you intend eating what you kill?” The poor guy turned green and looked away.
The buckshot-spatter from Bradford’s scattergun, along the animal’s side, was incidental, but Mitchell’s .45-caliber linen-patched ball had hit dead-center in the unlucky stallion’s second-most-sensitive spot. From there, it had plowed through the intestines and diaphragm, entering the rib cage to collapse the right lung and shatter miscellaneous bones before making its gory exit. Just missing the heart.
“First-rate marksmanship,” I observed to Ed—if that’s where Mitchell had been aiming, and we didn’t ask. “Just the way you’d want to take a running elk.”
“A pox upon such marksmanship!” Bradford was sorer than a boil—an appropriate turn of phrase, considering it meant that he and Mitchell had to continue riding double. “And what, pray tell me, is an elk?”
I cleared my throat, grinned at Ed. “A rather large, mulelike homed creature we have out in Cleveland?” my partner suggested.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “We hunt them with large sticks, called Elk’s Clubs.” Ed glanced at my scarlet-edged Bowie, then at my midsection. Bradford and Mitchell looked at each other and shrugged. Being twin brothers made you crazy.
The highwayman business is overrated. It took all four of us, straining and cursing, to roll the euthanized animal’s carcass over so we could get at the blood-soaked post-bag that had dug its way into the dirt, halfway through to the Indian Ocean. There was a bad moment when Ed’s disintegrating pistol-ball failed to damage the brass lock. I was thinking less and less well of our measures in the armaments area, with the memory fresh of trying to stop a bloodthirsty, skinsuit-protected Hamiltonian with what amounted to a Captain Video paralysis ray. My “twin” made lame excuses about having cast the ball, for antipersonnel purposes and reasons of economy, from brittle pewter. I saved a remark about the way we do things in Cleveland. The others were so shaken that they went along with the gag.
I levered the bag open with the same Bowie I’d finished the horse with, trying not to slice the hardened alloy of the hasp too cleanly. Then, as the others began to recover and were congratulating themselves on a daring daylight robbery, I trudged back a disgusted hundred yards to clean my forearms and the knife in the creek. And to do some throwing up. No tiny furry rabbit came to see that. I kind of missed him.
“One, two, three!”
“Oh shit! Look out for that stirrup!”
Thump! Bradford staggered, having ducked the stirrup, only to get bonked by the dead man’s boot-heel, right on the top of his cranium. At least he still had a cranium to get bonked on. The horse shied, and the headless body flopped into the dirt. I collided with Ed as we chased after the animal. Then it was John Mitchell’s turn to make a dash for the creek with his hands over his mouth. Bradford’s turn had come right after mine. Tender stomachs, these colonials.
Slinging the remains of poor courageous Baldwin over the saddle of his horse had proved to be as ugly a task as finishing off the spare and rolling it over to retrieve the mail. Hell, I’d gotten to like the man. His horse kept objecting, and, when Mitchell returned, I heard him mutter something to Bradford about Baldwin’s demise being the work of the devil. I suppose it might seem that way to someone who’d never seen a laser. If Edna had intended altering Confederate history, she was succeeding. At this rate, we’d be back in the Dark Ages any moment.
Of the mail, we left everything behind with the horse that had carried it—dead letters in more than one manner of speaking—except those all-important packets from Washington and Pittsburgh we’d been sent after. There followed a brief, subdued ride to Canonsburg, during which Ed caught Lucy and Ochskahrt up on current events. I wouldn’t get to hear the gossip myself until later, being unwilling to risk showing my suit, after the run-in with Edna. It didn’t occur to me until that moment that I might have talked to them while washing at the creek. I’d been preoccupied.
As arranged beforehand, Benjamin Parkinson met us on the Canonsburg road. His task—these having been parceled out in a manner consistent with the custom requiring every member of a lynch-mob to place his hand on the rope—was to deliver our ill-gained loot to prosecutor David Bradford. Receiving stolen goods didn’t disturb his fine sense of professional ethics. Him we rendezvoused with in the parking lot of Canonsburg’s only tavern.
“You’ve done a fine, brave job, lads,” the lawyer offered. “History will vindicate the bloody work you’ve dedicated yourselves to this day. For now, you’ll have to be satisfied with Mr. Westbay’s cellar and the products of his still.” John and William nodded, allowing as how an Imperial gallon or two might be adequate recompense for what they’d been through—for starters—Ed and I half a beat behind them. There were an even six of us now, involved in the secret conspiracy: me, Ed, Mitchell, Bradford’s cousin, Parkinson, and the state’s attorney. The concepts of leakprooficity and “need to know” were yet to be invented, never would take root in the Confederacy the way they had in my time-line.
The “town” of Canonsburg consisted of a half dozen ramshackle buildings clustered around the local nightspot Bradford had met us in front of. We were shortly joined by James Marshall, whom we’d met at Mingo Creek, dour Alexander Fulton, and a Mr. Lochry we were introduced to. The individualists of the Rebellion were on comfortable ground again, having acquired the beginnings of yet another committee. Together, the nine of us (nine!) headed for the front door of the Black Horse Tavern (Henry Westbay, Prop.—and he made it ten) to open the Philadelphia mail as an official act of war, in the august presence of local patriarch John Canon (eleven) and his comagnate, Thomas Speer (twelve—and if one more clown showed up, I was going to quit). The Prop, met us at the door.
Rather than inviting us in
to the dark, smoky tavern, beginning to fill up at this hour of the afternoon and smelling of last night’s beer and bear-grease, Westbay, the fattest man I’ve ever seen, motioned to us. We followed him out back to a grape-arbor, where the sun dappled its way through the leaves onto a stained, unpainted table. A plain girl, already promising to follow in her father’s fatsteps, brought us refreshments in unsanitary mugs on a matching unwashed tray.
Ed twisted the wounded padlock off the mail pouch. Inside the well-used leather sack was a bundle of epistles. Lochry, a rough-voiced man with the air of a retired sea-captain, grabbed the bag by its comers and upended it on the planking. A couple dozen documents spilled out. David Bradford pulled a wicked-looking folding knife from his boot, levered it open, began breaking seals. The contents were interesting. I wasn’t sure what use they were as counterintelligence.
That great little letter-writer, Presley Neville, had written, griping in a bold, rounded cursive, to his father-in-law, General Daniel Morgan, about the uppity ungrateful attitude of nontaxpaying peasants. Another general, John Gibson, expressed similar sentiments to Governor Thomas Mifflin. Prothonotary James Brison (whatever the flaming hell a prothonotary was) also attempted to bend the Governor’s ear long distance, on the volatile subject of liquid assets and the so far non-existent revenue therefrom. Fort Fayette’s Major Thomas Butler did his complaining to Secretary of War Henry Knox.
Last, but parsecs away from least, was an unsigned letter Bradford opined might be in the handscrawling of somebody called Edward Day, addressed to Alexander Hamilton. Himself. I was amazed what terror mention of that name could inspire. For the first time, unspoken doubts about the wisdom and morality of this afternoon’s activities circulated among the conspirators. I shivered myself, remembering my out-of-body fever-dream and how it had ended. Day, if that’s who it was, advised Hamilton to send troops in whatever number could be mustered, reinforcements to follow. He cautioned that even twenty-four hours’ delay could prove disastrous to the continued existence of the Republic, and that local measures would be taken to secure things at this end, through the arrest, fair trial, and prompt execution of the ringleaders.
Not necessarily in that order.
I glanced at Ed, wishing to hell I’d endured an implant operation, or had taken the chance this afternoon to speak to him alone. Albert Gallatin, who as far as I knew hadn’t stirred a finger yet; was at the top of the list. Even Lucy might have trouble fending off the attack this letter promised. And the handwriting looked like Edna Janof’s to me.
David Hamilton, of course, pressed for an immediate uprising. I wondered who he’d get to substitute for him when that came to a head. Maybe I was being unfair, but watching a good man die can be hard on you. So can cutting a horse’s throat. Or seeing your heroes up close.
Hamilton (David, not Alexander) might have known better, though. We rugged individualists had our ways of doing things. Yet another militia-meeting was dccklrd on, for the afternoon of July 30, just outside of Pittsburgh, at a place called Braddock’s Field—the twentieth-century site of a similarly named Pittsburgh suburb and current property of somebody named George Wallace, a loyal Federalist. Everybody thought it was a great joke.
I kind of liked it, too, until I found out why they called it Braddock’s Field. The famous British general had been there during the French and Indian War.
And been disastrously and gorily defeated.
14
The Spirit of ’94
JULY 31, 1794
“Taxation is theft!"
The Indian pony danced, rearing to its hind legs and snorting emotional, if not philosophical agreement as its rider brandished a feather-decorated tomahawk in the middle of Pittsburgh’s only cobbled street.
“It ain’t just the excise law that’s gotta go down," the rider bellowed. “That ain’t all I want, not by a long shot! Your district an’ associate judges gotta go down, their high offices an’ salaries. I ain’t even started yet! A lot more’s gonna get done! Death to the Federalists! Death an’ destruction!”
Along the wooden sidewalks, conventionally dressed passersby shrank to the storefronts, with their imported glass-paned windows. Matrons shrieked and seized their children, holding them as they squirmed against the folds of their voluminous skirts. Here and there, an occasional cheer was heard. When people turned to stare, its origin had vanished. A young girl fluttered her lashes and swooned, offering her beau a purely medicinal opportunity to chafe her wrists or take other, more daring liberties.
“Remember the Alamo—uh, make that Bunker Hill! C’mon, Tony, let’s skedaddle!” Displaying the yellow arm-band beginning to be associated with the Rebellion, the buckskinned interloper wheeled the pinto, dashed up the street, and repeated the performance for another appreciative audience. History was in the making. Today was the first day of the Second Revolution. Yet a century from now, no historian would be able to name its rustically clad herald. She hadn’t even left a silver bullet.
Beside me on the boardwalk, Hugh Henry Brack-enridge shivered. .. it is indeed to be revolution, then, organized and managed upon Jacobin principles. My friend—” he turned to the only unpreoccupied face in the crowd—yours truly’s “—I recently penned a bit of doggerel in jest, commemorating events in France, that began ‘Louis Capet has lost his caput’...”
The ongoing French revolution was all the rage here, as well as in the rest of the United States. France’s Citizen Ambassador Edmond Genet was on a triumphant multicity speaking tour—later he’d be invited back home to his own guillotining and would become America’s first applicant for political asylum. Brack-enridge glanced up the street where the tomahawk rider had fired shots into the air—seven of them—and disappeared. He fingered his bullish neck. “It was published in the Pittsburgh Gazette. Now I must confess that I can scarcely bear to cast my eye over a paragraph of French news.”
Laughing, I clapped him on the back. “You know how it is, Hugh Henry; ‘the guilty flee where no man pursueth.’” His mouth dropped open and he stared at me. I took the cigar out of his hand, relit the clay pipe I’d acquired at one of the local emporia, then gave it back, turned on my heel, and insinuated myself into the crowd, leaving the guy who was the original prototype for expressions about “Philadelphia lawyers” to quiver in my wake. There were a thousand stories in the naked city.
I moccasined my way up the boardwalk, calabash in hand and my eyes and ears wide open. Fashionably attired citizens avoided contact with my greasy leathers. It made me feel like Marlon Brando’s motorcycle mechanic.
I was here in Pittsburgh, doing the job I was best suited for: detective work. For the benefit of her academic clients, Ooloorie had asked us to track down a smear-story to the effect that British soldiers had been spotted among the “rioters” gathering in Braddock’s Field. We couldn’t turn her down: those clients were paying for this expedition. The bit with the pony and the tomahawk had been suggested to sort of focus public awareness. The rumor wasn’t altogether baseless. There had been general speculation about rejoining the Empire back toward the beginning of the Rebellion. The Brits had outposts west of the Appalachians. Arms and ammunition might be obtained from sympathetic Canadians, and so forth, and so on. But it was silly-talk, cast more in ironic tones—“What did we fight the
Revolution for, anyway?”—than in any real seriousness. These frontier people were more American in attitude than any of the Anglophilic gang that had conspired to pass the excise laws. For that matter there’d been discussion about starting a new state, though what good that would do where a nationwide tax was involved was beyond me.
I had my own ideas about that rumor. Philadelphia-ward, the malignant spirit of Alexander Hamilton ioomed like a spectre. This story felt like his handiwork. As an idle student of The Federalist Papers, written by the Secretary and his buddies to justify the bloodless counterrevolution the Constitution represented, I knew reabsorption by the Crown had been one threat a vigorous central government was des
igned to preclude. His propaganda pieces also mentioned predations by Native Americans, war between the States (which the Constitution had failed to prevent in my time-line), uniform, reliable currency—a sort of ultimate sick-joke—and, if alien saucer invasions had been in the eighteenth-century vocabulary, he’d have thrown them in for good measure. Bogeymen were something Hamilton was conversant with, having been one for a long time, himself.
I wandered through the crowd, just one of many tourists visiting the wicked city. Locals complained that strangers were hanging out in the streets, sniffing around Fort Fayette like spies. It was circus-day, all right. An impressive number of country folk were bringing their produce to market, offering it at bargain rates for flints and powder. A lot of blacksmiths found themselves doing a land-office business repairing old guns.
I stopped at a wooden Indian, relit my pipe at the glass-encased candle it was holding, and began to seek some privacy. I never could keep a pipe going at the best of times, and it was getting to be a nuisance in a culture that hadn’t invented matches. Twenty minutes later, flies buzzed around my head as I occupied an overpriced, underluxuried one-holer behind Pittsburgh’s only commercial bath-o-mat. In the stuffy semidarkness provided by a crescent-shaped ventilator, I shifted on the planking, wondering whether the traditional decoration reflected deep-buried anti-Moslem tendencies in Christian culture.
.. add to that, the fact that the public’s being uncooperative, as usual. It’s like being a play-producer, hanging around the lobby at intermission, when all the audience wants to talk about is what was on TV last night.” In the field of vision provided by my skinsuit hood floated the deceptively smiling features of Ooloorie Eckickeck P’wheet, being transmitted from the Emperor Norton University in whatever the twenty-second-century had left of San Francisco.
“Tell me, landling, what you have managed to discover, then.”
L Neil Smith - [North American Confederacy 06] Page 9
