by Ed Gorman
The Negro Groton had cussed out was standing by Nell’s head, feeding her oats out of his callused hand. If he was startled by the racket, he didn’t show it.
“You were kinda rough on that door, mister,” he observed. “Anythin’ wrong?”
“Just about everything,” Gus groaned as he climbed stiffly into the saddle. “Thanks for seein’ to my animal, son.”
“No trouble. Them suet lumps you stuck on her legs? They look bloodier if you wet ’em with berry juice. Keeps the flies down, too.”
“You know ’bout horses?”
“I was a stockman down in Clarksdale ’til the Yanks burnt us out. I come up here, thought it might be better.”
“Is it?”
“Work ain’t easy to come by but I’m free now. Free’s better.”
“Yeah,” Gus nodded. “I expect it is. My name’s McKee. Got me a stock ranch over in Reynolds County. Expect I’ll be shorthanded when this fight’s over. Think you might want to work with horses again?”
“Depends. I thought you favored Mr. Groton’s side of things.”
“Son, from here on out the only side I’m takin’ is my own.” He clucked to Nell, turning her into the street. “If you want a job, you come see me now, hear?”
“Yessir. Maybe I will, at that.”
Ed Gorman is a Midwesterner, born in Iowa in 1941, growing up in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Marion, Iowa, and finally settling down in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. While primarily a suspense novelist, he has written half a dozen western novels and published a collection of western stories. His novel Wolf Moon was a Spur nominee for Best Paperback Original. About his western novels, Publishers Weekly said, “Gorman writes westerns for grown-ups,” which the author says he took as a high compliment, and was indeed his goal in writing his books. “The Face” won the 1996 Spur Award for best short fiction.
There were several assassination attempts planned for Lincoln and members of his staff during the war, and this story may have actually happened, and been lost to the mists of time.
A SMALL AND PRIVATE WAR
Ed Gorman
His nightmares once again woke her. She held his sweaty, trembling body until he eased once more into the embrace of sleep.
At breakfast, the maid Irene fed the two youngsters first. They were scheduled to be at Harvey Claybourne’s all day. It was master Harvey’s seventh birthday and festivities were to be daylong.
Aggie Monroe came down later than usual. She was a pretty, slender woman but this morning she looked pale and tired. She’d hoped to be fresh today. Needed to be. This was the day she was to follow her secretive husband and find out what he was up to. And Irene played a role in it.
Aggie was finishing her eggs when Sam came into the dining room. She noted that he’d stopped by the study and brought in a large bourbon glass three-quarters filled. She’d never seen him drink in the morning before. He came to her, kissed her on the forehead, seated himself across from her.
Before saying a word, he picked up the Tribune and scanned the front page. The Confederates had recently been routed near the Rio Grande, He sipped his whiskey. The second story he read dealt with President Lincoln sending an emissary here to speak the night before the election, the day after tomorrow. Lincoln wanted to make sure that only pro-war and pro-Northern candidates were elected. There was a small but ferocious band of Copperheads in Chicago, Northerners who sympathized with the South. They’d already shot a number of policemen, set a library on fire, and tried to smuggle arms into a prisoner-of-war camp not far from the city’s outskirts. Jefferson Davis had already declared that the South could not win the war without the consistent help of the Copperheads.
Aggie said, touching his hand, “You had the nightmare again last night.”
He nodded. “That’s why I hope you’ll excuse the bourbon. I was pretty scared when I woke up.”
“Bourbon won’t help you, dear.” She hesitated. “You need to tell me what’s going on. You need a confidante.”
He smiled. “You and your theory that something’s going on. Nothing’s going on. I’m just having nightmares about my brother dying, Aggie, that’s all.”
The Monroe family was from Virginia. Sam had come up here after graduating from Vanderbilt. He hadn’t any choice. He’d met the fetching Aggie at a governor’s ball—the Monroe family owned a construction company in Illinois, and contributed to the governor’s coffers—and since she was a self-described “unreconstructed Yankee,” he had no choice but to move north, buy himself a small bank with a loan from his father, and set about starting a family with this woman who so obsessed him.
Then, six months ago, his older brother was killed in a battle in Kentucky; he’d died in the uniform of the South. Sam had felt guilty ever since. He couldn’t even make love all the time anymore. He felt unmanned by his beloved brother’s death. But worst of all were the nightmares. He’d described them to her. How he hovered just behind his brother, trying to warn him to hit the dirt before the bullet took him in the forehead. Hit the dirt, Richard! Hit the dirt! But in the nightmares, Richard never heard him. He always stood straight up, aiming his rifle as the bluecoats came streaming over a hill. Stood straight up. Angry that so many of his friends had fallen. Stood straight up. As if daring the bluecoats to kill him.
Irene poured him more coffee.
When she was gone, Aggie said, “The way you stay out nights these days, I’d swear you had a mistress.”
This rime he didn’t smile. Nothing funny about taking a mistress. Aggie was the only woman he’d ever been with, the only woman he’d ever be with. He conveyed this to her by getting up and crossing over to where she sat and taking her hand and saying, “Never say anything like that again, Aggie. You’re my wife and the mother of my children.”
Aggie felt property admonished. She could see how she’d inadvertently hurt him. Southern men thought of themselves as men of honor and principle. A Northern man might joke about having a mistress. But not a Southern one. Not an honorable one, anyway.
He drank very little of his bourbon and ate all of his breakfast. A very good sign as far as Aggie was concerned.
When he was finished, he came to her again and kissed her. “I need to get to the bank, Aggie.”
“On Saturday morning?”
“Yes,” he said gently. “On Saturday mornings when I’ve got all this work on my desk. I’ll be home by evening.”
She knew there was no point arguing. She’d argued with him many nights about him being gone. It was a dance they did now. Him saying he was sorry he had to go, her questioning why he had to go.
In ten minutes, dressed in a suit and the kind of heavy coat called a Benjamin, his slicked-down hair smelling of perfumed macassar oil, he once again kissed her good-bye and set off.
* * *
He didn’t go to the bank. He drove his horse-drawn carriage to a small business building on State Street. He stayed there two hours, got into his buggy and drove to an isolated spot over by the packing houses and tanneries. Nearby were the tenements and small pine shacks where the workers lived. The stench of the packing-houses and tanneries was suffocating; the cries of the dying animals even worse. Chicago was a fine place to be rich in—a place to rival the infamous Calcutta if you were poor.
He had a Henry. He went to a clearing next to a wooded area and spent the rest of the day practicing on targets he affixed to trees.
He was quite good. Again and again he hit the bull’s-eye.
He shot with feverish intent. He did not stop except to reload. The Henry was a breech-loading sixteen-shot rifle. The Union army was justifiably proud when they introduced it only a month ago.
He spent the afternoon this way. Then he got into his carriage and returned to the same small business building on State Street.
* * *
Cawthorne said, “Have you ever met Jim McReedy?”
Sam Monroe had been wondering who was sitting with Big Mike Cawthorne in Cawthorne’s office.
M
cReedy, whose clothes were worn and whose expression combined anxiety and contempt, put forth a bony but strong hand. He and Sam shook.
Big Mike Cawthorne said, “McReedy here is my personal spy. I use him to make sure everybody in our little group is staying in line.”
“I’m not sure I like that, Mike,” Sam said.
“I don’t like it, either,” Big Mike said in his expansive way. Despite his 250-pound bulk, he was still a dashing figure. He wore custom-tailored clothes and moved with great strength and style. “But I’m not naive, Sam. Our little cell has to worry about being infiltrated. Or having a double agent. Jim here Just checks people out for me.”
In every major Northern city there was a half dozen or so Copperhead cells. It had been decided that cells of six or seven were safer than one large one, each operating independently. This gave the Copperheads a stronger chance of surviving.
Sam had known Cawthorne long before his brother’s death in Kentucky. They did a lot of banking business together. Cawthorne was in real estate. One drunken night Sam confessed to Cawthorne that he secretly favored the South in the war. Within days, Cawthorne had introduced him to the six other members of the Copperhead cell. Sam joined eagerly.
Cawthorne said, “Tell him, Jim.”
“Today when you were practicing with your Henry?”
“Yes,” Sam said.
“Somebody was following you.”
“What? That’s impossible. I would’ve noticed.” His vanity was hurt. How could he have not known he was being followed?
“If Jim says you were being followed, you were being followed,” Cawthorne said.
“Who was following me?”
“I don’t know. A man. I didn’t get a good look at his face. He wore this hat with a snap brim and very heavy clothes.”
Cawthorne said, “This is serious.”
Sam couldn’t argue with that. “You think they’re on to us?”
“Somebody’s on to you, anyway,” McReedy said.
“I don’t like your tone,” Sam snapped.
Cawthorne said, “Let’s stick to the problem, all right?” His disgust with both of them was obvious on his face. McReedy liked to play the expert. Sam, with his money, education, and good looks, was all male vanity. “Jim has a solution.”
McReedy was pleased he got to play the expert again. “You’re going to go home right now and I’m going to follow you again. But this time I’m going to find out who’s in the buggy behind you. I can run him off the road now that it’s dark. In the daytime too many people could see and I could get arrested.” And that, of course, could lead the police directly to Cawthorne’s Copperhead cell.
Sam figured McReedy was probably getting a lot of pleasure out of this. A lower-class man like this getting to act superior to his social better.
Yet Sam didn’t have much choice but to listen and go along.
* * *
Sam set off in his buggy. In the darkest of late afternoon on of November 1, there was a half-moon brilliant in its luminosity. It almost made the 28-degree temperature tolerable.
He could smell the slums on the carriage. He’d have to have one of the servants give it a good brushing and washing. When you were near slaughterhouses that big, you couldn’t get the stench off for days.
He drove self-consciously, aware now he was being followed. He’d been stupid not to have noticed this earlier in the day. And behind, his follower, Jim McReedy, no doubt gloating. Waiting his chance.
He went ten blocks on Dearborn before the mansions and the wide estates began appearing. His neighborhood. His house was only six blocks away. He wondered when McReedy would make his move.
He passed estates from which he could hear wonderful music, a party in progress, wondrous European chandeliers casting starlight out upon the autumn-frosted lawns. Good brandy and jokes and—Or so it had once been, anyway, before the death of his brother, before the death at the hands of the Union army had reminded Sam about who he really was in his heart and soul. Southern. Very much in agreement with his own people and their traditions. By rights he should’ve been fighting right alongside his brother. Before, he could get along with Yankees, almost convince himself that he belonged here and was one of them, But now—
McReedy made his move.
He pulled his buggy up sharply behind the follower and then lurched right up alongside of him, swerving into the follower’s vehicle as he did so. Horses crying in fear and anger; wooden wheels clashing against each other. Shouts, oaths. Sam half expected gunfire.
The paralleling buggies went on this way for half a block, McReedy finally forcing the follower’s buggy up against the plank sidewalk.
McReedy pulled his own rig ahead of the follower’s, then jumped down. The estate homes were far enough back from the street that nobody inside would see or hear any of this.
Sam, who had been watching this by leaning out of his own buggy, steered his horse over to the side of the road and hopped out. He was frightened. At this point in his life he had but one matter he wanted to take care of and he didn’t want anything—or anybody—to interfere. He hoped this follower, whoever he was, could be dealt with.
McReedy had his Navy Colt pulled and was pointing it directly at the man in the buggy. The follower’s face was lost in shadow. He said nothing.
“I want your name,” McReedy said. “I’m a private investigator and I know you’ve been following this man all day. I want to know why.”
At least McReedy had his lies down, Sam thought. He sounded very imposing. He just hoped he scared the follower.
“Your name,” McReedy said again as Sam came up to him.
Sam looked at the man. He was lost in an inverness cape soiled and worn by time, a large theatrical-style hat with an enormous, floppy brim covering his face. He wore tanned gloves on his hands. If he had any weapon, it was concealed somewhere within the folds of his coat.
It was cold and dark here on the street. Fresh horse-droppings scented the evening; a distant violin sang sweetly and sadly.
And McReedy, an obstinate little rat-terrier of a man, said, “Get down from there, and I mean now.”
But the follower said nothing. Nor moved.
McReedy waited no longer. He lunged up the buddy step and seized on to the arm of the follower, yanking the man out of the vehicle with strength that startled Sam.
The man might as well have been a rag doll, the way he was jerked from the buggy and flung to the street without much resistance at all.
He lay at the feet of the men, his hat, remarkably, still on, his face still hidden. “Stand up,” McReedy said.
But the man wouldn’t cooperate even now.
McReedy didn’t wait.
He leaned down and tore the hat away from the man’s head.
All Sam could do was stammer. “My god, Aggie. Why’re you following me?”
* * *
“You don’t think I have a right to know?” Aggie said.
“I’ve told you, Aggie. It’s just a gun club I belong to.”
It was past dinnertime. They’d been arguing in the downstairs study for nearly two hours.
He said, “Do you know how embarrassing it is, having your own wife follow you around?”
“I only did it because I’m worried about you. You haven’t been the same since your brother died.”
“Not ‘died.’ Was killed. There’s a difference.”
“You seem to forget,” Aggie said, “your side killed my brother. You aren’t the only one who’s lost somebody in this war.”
She sank down on one of the French Victorian chairs. David’s face came to her, fresh as it had ever been. Three years younger, he’d been. A long and distinguished career in law ahead of him, everybody said. Then the train car he’d been on had been dynamited by Confederate soldiers.
But Sam wasn’t listening. He was lost in his own troubles. “How do I explain it to them? My own wife following me around,”
“I’m worried about you and our f
amily, Sam. And all you care about is losing face with some stupid gun club.” She looked at him. “If that’s what’s really going on.” She made her remark sound as suspicious as possible. “Maybe I’ll have to start following you again if I want to find out the real truth.”
“Oh, God, don’t say that, Aggie. Promise me you won’t follow me around anymore. Promise me.” Instead of rage, her threat had inspired only a kind of half-pathetic pleading. She’d never seen her husband like this. His pleading was especially worrisome. Sam wasn’t the kind of man who pleaded with anyone. When he wanted something, he simply took it. “Promise me, Aggie. Promise me.”
What choice did she have? He looked so lost and miserable. She said, quietly, “All right, Sam. I won’t follow you anymore.”
But she had her suspicions, and she knew that she’d be following him again very soon.
* * *
When Sam returned later that evening, there was a stranger in Big Mike Cawthorne’s office when Sam walked in. McReedy was there also.
“I’m sorry about your troubles earlier,” Cawthorne said. “There’s nothing like a nosy wife. And believe me, I know what I’m talking about from personal experience.”
“A fine-looking woman, though,” McReedy said. “Mighty fine.”
Sam didn’t like the lurid implications in McReedy’s voice. This man just didn’t seem to understand his station in life, talking about a true gentleman’s wife in this sordid way.
There was some more chatter during which Big Mike was his usual expansive self. He offered brandy and cigars and everybody partook. Sam noticed that he had yet to introduce the stranger.
The man was short, blond, goateed. His clothes were several cuts above those of McReedy’s—especially the velvet vest—but he still gave an impression of the streets. Perhaps it was the feral quality of his blue eyes—an unsettling mixture of subservience and arrogance.
Big Mike Cawthorne, all blather at this point, suddenly looked uncomfortable. He glanced anxiously at the stranger and then at Sam. “Sam, this is Lawrence Dodd.” He looked nervous. “He’s going to take your place.”
