The two mounted men started their horses toward the hanging rings. The crowd hurrahed, but Gettys had eyes only for the stranger. "General Nathan Bedford —?"
"Forrest. Are you hard of hearing or something?"
Gettys flinched away, raising his hands in apology.
Captain Jolly, twenty-four but obviously tough and experienced, chuckled. "That Devil Forrest, as the damnyankees called him. I killed niggers for him at Fort Pillow, and I went the rest of the war riding at his side. Finest soldier in the Confederacy. Joe Johnston said so. He said Forrest would have been number one in the army, except he lacked formal schooling."
Gettys began to experience great excitement. "Do you have kinfolk in these parts, Captain Jolly?"
"No. There's just my brothers and me, traveling and making a profit wherever we can." He smiled at Woodville, who gazed at the ground. The farmer was smiling too.
"Well, this is a fine district," Gettys exclaimed. "Rich in opportunity for men of courage and principle. Perhaps you'd take a drop of corn at my store after the tourney, and let me tell you more. We need residents of your caliber, to help stand off the damn soldiers and the damn Bureau and the damn scalawags among our own people who side with them."
"If you know any of those scalawags," Captain Jack Jolly said, "I'll put them in my gun sights damn quick."
Breathless, Randall Gettys rushed back to Asia LaMotte's carriage. "I must write Des. You see that man with Edward? I've got to persuade him to stay. He's capable of doing what we discussed."
The fat old woman peered at Gettys as if he were speaking Russian. The trumpet blared again. "Don't you understand?" he whispered. "We have the desire and he has the nerve. God has sent our instrument of deliverance."
A telegraph message from George! Brought all the way from Charleston. In San Francisco, after a short confinement, Billy and Brett's child was born, Dec. 2. A son, named George William. It is a happy gift of the season.
Another is the peace that prevails in the district We remain unmolested, indeed even unnoticed. Prudence now instructs two adult women and one man, along with six children. Those who hate the school must know we can summon Bureau soldiers at will.
I feel we are out of danger. I am thankful; I am tired and want to be left alone to pursue my dream…
THE SALARY OF THE PRESIDENT.
The Secretary of the Treasury today signed a warrant in favor of Mrs. Lincoln for the sum of $25,000, less the amount Mr. Lincoln had drawn for his salary in March last. ...
News report eight months after the assassination
18
Jasper Dills, Esquire, turned seventy-four on Friday, the twenty-second of December, four days after Secretary of State Seward announced that the Thirteenth Amendment had been ratified. Childless and a widower for fifteen years, Dills had no relatives with whom he could celebrate, the birthday or the Christmas season. He didn't care. Very little mattered to him any more except his law practice, his position as Washington representative of certain large New York financial interests, and the ceaseless, endlessly fascinating battle for power in the nation's political cockpit.
In the autumn after Appomattox, however, he'd found his practice diminishing. Some of the New York clients shifted their work to younger men; other cases brought to his book-lined office on Seventh Street seemed of an increasingly trivial nature. Fortunately, to offset this, he continued to receive the Bent stipend. It helped pay for memberships in his clubs and the odd bottle of Mumm's with his hotel suppers.
Dills had long ago stopped letting his conscience bother him about the stipend. Two or three times a year he wrote a letter assuring Elkanah Bent's mother that her illegitimate son was alive. According to Dills's latest epistolary fiction, Bent was prospering from cotton acreage in Texas.
The woman never asked Dills for proof of such statements. He'd built up a reservoir of trust since he saw her last, years ago, and he dipped into it now because he simply didn't know what had happened to Bent after Colonel Lafayette Baker, head of the government's secret police force, dismissed Bent for excessive brutality in the course of an arrest. Bent had vanished into Virginia, presumably a deserter to the Southern side.
Should Bent's mother discover that, or any other part of the truth, the stipend would end. The yearly total was substantial, so the mere thought of its loss alarmed the lawyer. At the same time, it didn't grieve him one bit to be shed of dealing personally with Elkanah Bent. An obese malcontent with persecution fantasies, Bent always blamed his career failures on others. Hardly any surprise in that: Bent's late father, a Washington lobbyist named Starkwether, had chosen an unstable woman for his brood mare. She came from a large border-state family that included several persons with histories of mental disorder. One of them had even carried the taint to Washington, although she had managed to control or hide it during years of public scrutiny and personal tragedy.
Bent's mother had never acknowledged her son. He took his name from a farm couple who had raised him in Ohio. He'd gone from Ohio to West Point, and then to failure after failure. By now, his mother was ancient (in the way of the elderly, Dills still thought of himself as middle-aged), but the woman's age didn't matter. Nothing mattered so long as she accepted his lies and wrote bank drafts regularly.
To maintain his high living standard, Dills had recently taken on certain other work. He was a conduit through which five hundred or one thousand dollars could travel to this or that senator willing to use his influence to obtain an Army commission for the applicant. Dills skimmed a percentage for making it unnecessary for such a politician to meet personally and perhaps be seen with a former brevet colonel or brigadier desperately hunting reemployment. Dills fancied that he sanitized the bribe money as it passed from hand to hand.
Dills was also a pardon broker. All sorts of Washingtonians had rushed into that work, including women with no asset other than their sexual favors. A legal background had put Dills in the forefront of brokers. His connections with a few notable Democrats and many powerful Republicans helped too. At the moment he had thirty-nine pardon applications on his desk.
Earlier in the year he'd taken President Johnson an application from Charleston that bore an intriguing name: Main. That was the last name of one of the men Bent held responsible for his various difficulties, starting with his dismissal from West Point. Although the applicant's first name was Cooper and that of Bent's enemy was Orry, they were both South Carolinians, so Dills assumed a connection. He'd never been south of Richmond, but he envisioned the lower part of Dixie as one great heaving sea of cousins, all related and inbred by marriage.
Nature arranged a wet snowfall for Dills's birthday, a further guarantee of an empty office. He locked up and walked three blocks to the hushed rooms of his favorite club, the Concourse. He wandered through the club until he found someone he knew fairly well, a Republican member of the House.
"Wadsworth. Good morning. Join me in a whiskey?"
"Bit early for me, Jasper. But do sit down." Representative Wadsworth of Kentucky laid aside a copy of the Star and signaled a waiter to move a chair. Dills was a tiny man, with tiny hands and feet. Seated in the huge chair, he resembled a child.
The whiskey arrived. Dills saluted his fellow member before he sipped. "What kind of session do you think it will be?" His question referred to the Thirty-ninth Congress, reconvened early in the month.