It was a surprise when, as he crossed Peter Street and was almost within view of the front gates of Chepstow, one of the many street urchins who acted as scout and runner for him when they needed a penny (perpetually, that is) sprinted out from the brush beside the road and almost bowled him over.
“Hold on there, Samkins! You’ll bust yer head on my belly!” Cobb cried as he reached out and hauled the boy up with one hand.
Sammy was wide-eyed and pasty white. His lips moved but only his frosted breath hit the air.
“You seen a ghost, have ya?” Cobb said, not unkindly.
“G-guns!” Sammy stammered.
“Whaddaya mean, guns?”
“Pistols, sir,” the boy gasped. “With handles as big as. . as big as. . yer nose.”
Cobb decided to bypass the insult in the interests of communication. “And just where did you see these big pistols?” he demanded. The mere mention of weapons in the neighbourhood of Chepstow made him jittery.
“F-follow me, sir, and I’ll show ya.”
Before Cobb could reply, Sammy wheeled and leapt back into the scrub brush and woodlot that encircled Colonel Stanhope’s estate, all of four acres on the northeast corner of Hospital and Brock. Cobb trotted behind, happy to feel the slap of his truncheon against his left thigh. Stumbling through the frozen undergrowth, they emerged about half a minute later onto a broad meadow behind the estate. Here in other seasons the colonel would graze his horses, but now it was a snow-covered expanse whipped by a northwest January wind and ringed by an iron fence that kept intruders at bay.
Sammy bolted straight ahead towards an iron gate and, in the distance behind it, a wooden-walled enclosure at the back of the sprawling mansion, which, Cobb had always supposed, was a sort of kitchen garden off the old servants quarters. The infamous inmate was said to be housed there in unwarranted comfort. Cobb’s heart skipped several beats. Had someone got past the guards at the back gate and broken into the garden? With an assassin’s pistol in hand?
When Cobb and Sammy reached the gate, they found it wide open with sentries at both posts asleep on their feet, like a pair of exhausted hogs. They appeared to be ordinary militiamen and members of the colonel’s regiment. So much for security.
“Hurry, this way!” Sammy yelled, and pointed at the Dutch door in the garden wall ahead. His cry brought the sentries awake. Cobb barked at them to follow him.
Cobb and Sammy were four or five paces from the little half door when they were stopped in their tracks by the sharp snap of pistols discharging, two of them in such quick succession they might have been one shot and its instant echo. Cobb sprang into action. He pushed Sammy aside and charged at the door, which, being unlatched, facilitated his rapid entrance into the minor drama being enacted behind it. The protagonists, three of them, froze in their places.
Directly before Cobb, in front of an unbarred door that must have led to the “prison” behind it, stood a large, red-faced man attired in the same green militia uniform as the two laggard sentries. He stared at Cobb in speechless disbelief, uncertain as to whether he ought to be fearful or outraged. At his feet a limp silk handkerchief lay like a jettisoned heirloom. Cobb directed his eyes left and right, and now it was his turn to be astonished. A few feet in front of one wall stood a tall, imposing figure in yet another military costume, a blue and yellow confection Cobb had not seen before. From his right hand, a smoking pistol dangled, its menace spent. At the wall opposite stood a young man Cobb had met several times while loitering about Beth Edwards’s shop: Billy McNair. And he too clutched a smouldering pistol, glowering at it as if it had inexplicably betrayed him.
The man with the hanky at his feet found his voice first. “What is the meaning of this intrusion!” he bellowed with more gustiness than conviction. “This is private property.”
“I am a policeman and you, sir, have just broken the law,” Cobb snapped. “You stay put and tell yer pals to bring their weapons over here. Now!”
“I will do no such thing, you have no juris-”
But Cobb was already on his way to Billy. The two sentries had come up to the Dutch door and were standing there with mouths agape.
“Get him out of here!” the big man yelled at them. “That’s an order!”
The sentries didn’t budge. They had spotted the man whom some were calling the Antichrist-with a pistol in his paw.
“Give me the pistol, Billy,” Cobb said quietly. “Fer yer mother’s sake.” As the Widow McNair was a longtime friend of his wife, Cobb felt justified in invoking her name here.
Billy obliged but said nothing. His face was a blank. Shock, Cobb thought. By some miracle the lad had just survived a duel with the notorious Caleb Coltrane, a fellow reputed to be fearless, treacherous, and deadly. For that surely was he, still standing erect at the far wall with a kind of indulgent smirk on his craggy face. The blue and yellow tunic was Yankee, through and through.
“I’m going to have to arrest these men,” Cobb said to the big fellow, who had obviously been acting as umpire and second for both duellists. He was respectful but in control. “What is your name, sir?”
“Lardner Bostwick,” the fellow said, his bravado dissipating rapidly. His rheumy eyes, the cross-hatching of veins on his bloated cheeks, and his blue bulb of a nose bespoke much of drink and inadequate restraint. He blinked and added, “Lieutenant Bostwick, adjutant to Colonel Stanhope of the 2nd Regiment, Toronto militia.”
“And are you in charge here, Lieutenant?”
“I am Major Coltrane’s jailer.”
“And is conductin’ duels part of yer duties, sir?”
“That is none of your-”
“Men shootin’ at each other are attemptin’ murder, even if they can’t shoot straight,” Cobb barked, and was pleased to see Bostwick wince and blink.
From the far wall came a hearty guffaw. “You’re going to charge me with attempted murder, are you, constable?” It was Coltrane. His voice was deep, with a basso’s vigour and masculine authority. “You can add it to the seven capital crimes they’ve already trumped up against me!” And he roared with laughter. Even the bumbling sentries seemed to find this amusing.
“If I’d’ve wanted the little weasel dead, he’d be stone cold by now.” He tossed the spent pistol at his feet with a dismissive gesture.
Cobb returned to Billy, who had not moved. “I haveta take you in, son. You’ve gone and done a very foolish thing here.”
Billy seemed to snap out of his daze, but it was not Cobb he was paying attention to. He was glaring at his adversary with a look of raw hatred that sent a chill down Cobb’s spine.
“Arrest who?”
Cobb turned in time to see a man emerge from the house through the prison door.
“What the hell is going on here?”
It was Colonel Stanhope, bristling with umbrage. Cobb recognized him from the parade in December. He was whippet-thin, and the rigidity of his posture would have embarrassed a ramrod. He was in full dress uniform-scarlet, green, and white-with his feathered shako perfectly square on his head. Here it was not yet eight o’clock in the morning and the fellow was turned out for church parade. Did he sleep in his tunic?