He tossed off the two inches with a speed that made Madeline frown. "It just means things will wind up that much faster."
Orry watched him a moment. "You don't think we can win?"
"Do you?"
Orry sat still, his gaze wandering through the pattern of the carpet.
Presently Charles stretched and yawned again. "Hell," he said,
"I'm not even sure we can sue for peace on favorable terms. Not with Unconditional Surrender Grant turning the screw."
"I knew him," Orry mused. "We drank beer together in Mexico."
"What's he like?"
"Oh, it's been years since I saw him. Our keen-minded Southern journalists scorn him for being round-shouldered and slovenly. Really important considerations, eh? Ask Pete Longstreet whether he respects Sam Grant. Ask Dick Ewell. Three years ago, Ewell said there was an obscure West Point man somewhere in Missouri whom he hoped the Yankees would never discover. He said he feared him more than all the others put together."
"God help us," Charles remarked, reaching for a blanket. "Would it be all right with you two if I went to sleep now?" Orry turned off the gas, and he and Madeline said good night. Still fully dressed, Charles rolled up in the blanket and shut his eyes.
He found it hard to rest. Too many ghosts had arisen and roamed tonight.
He dragged the blanket against his cheek. He didn't want to think about it. Not about Billy in enemy country, riding for his life. Not about the Union horse already surprisingly good but now with a chance at supremacy under Sheridan. Not about Grant, who preached something called "enlightened warfare," which meant, so far as he could make out, throwing your men away like matchsticks because you always had more.
He fell asleep as some distant steeple rang five. He slept an hour, dreaming of Gus, and of Billy lying in a sunlit field, pierced by bullet holes thick and black with swarming flies.
When he woke, the comforting aroma of the Marshall Street substitute for coffee permeated the flat. In the first wan light, he trudged to the privy behind the building, then returned and splashed water on his face and hands and sat down opposite his cousin over cups of the strong brew Madeline poured for them.
Orry's expression indicated something serious was on his mind. Charles waited till his cousin came out with it.
"We had so much to talk about last night, I never got to the other bad news."
"Trouble back home?"
"No. Right here in the city. I uncovered a plot to assassinate the President and members of his cabinet." Disbelief prompted Charles to smile; Orry's somber expression restrained him. "Someone well known and close to both of us is involved."
"Who?"
"Your cousin. My sister."
"Ashton?"
"Yes."
"Great balls of Union-blue fire," Charles said, in the same tone he might have taken if someone had told him the paymaster would be late again. He was startled to probe his feelings and find so little astonishment; scarcely more than mild surprise. There was a hardening center in him that nothing much could reach, let alone affect.
Orry described all that had happened thus far, beginning with Mrs. Halloran's visit and ending with the abrupt and mysterious disappearance of the chief conspirator and the arms and ammunition Orry had seen at the farm downriver on the James.
"For a few days after that, I thought I was crazy. I've gotten over it. They may have highly placed friends helping them cover the trail, and I know what I saw. The plot's real, Huntoon's involved, and so is Ashton."
"What are you going to do?"
Orry's stare told Charles he wasn't the only one whose hide had thickened.
"I'm going to catch her."
103
They surprised him on the creek bank at first light, creeping up while he slept. None of the three identified himself. He named them silently — Scars, One Thumb, Hound Face. All of them wore tattered Confederate uniforms.
To allay suspicion, he shared the last of his hardtack and ham. They shared their experiences of the past few days. Not to be sociable, Billy guessed, merely to fill the silence of the May morning.
"Grant put a hundred thousand into the Wilderness 'gainst our sixty or so. It got so fierce, the trees caught on fire, and our boys either choked to death on the smoke or burned up when the branches dropped on 'em." One Thumb, whose left eyelid drooped noticeably, shook his head and laid the last morsel of ham in his toothless mouth.
"How far are the lines?" Billy asked.
Hound Face answered, "Twenty, thirty mile. Would you say that?" His companions nodded. "But we all are goin' the other way. Back to Alabam." He gave Billy a searching look, awaiting reaction; condemnation, perhaps.
"The omens are bad," One Thumb resumed. "Old Pete Longstreet, he was wounded by a bullet from our side, just like Stonewall a year ago. And I hear tell Jeff Davis's little boy fell off a White House balcony a few days ago. Killed him. Like I say — bad omens."
Scars, the oldest, wiped grease from his mouth. "Mighty kind of you to share your grub, Missouri. We ain't got much of anythin' to aid us on our way home" — smoothly, he pulled his side arm and pointed it at Billy — "so we'll be obliged if you don't fuss an' help us out."
They disappeared five minutes later, having taken his mule and his pass.
Lanterns shone on the bare-chested black men. The May dark resounded with shouting, the clang and bang of rails being unloaded from a flatcar, the pound of mallets, the honk of frogs in the marshy lowlands near the Potomac. A group of George's men seized each rail, ran it forward, and dropped it on crossties laid only moments before. The rail carriers jumped aside to make room for men with mauls and buckets of spikes. It was the night of May 9; more accurately, the morning of May 10. Repair work to reopen the damaged Aquia Creek & Fredericksburg line down to Falmouth had been under way since dawn yesterday.
The butcher's bill from the Wilderness had been staggering. Now Lee had entrenched at or near Spotsylvania, and presumably the Union Army was shifting that way to engage. Without being told, George knew why the major portion of the Orange & Alexandria had been abandoned on the very morning Grant started his war machine across the Rapidan and why the Construction Corps had been transferred eastward to this duty. These tracks would soon carry dead and wounded.
George saw one of his best workers, a huge brown youngster named Scow, stumble suddenly. This forced the men behind him to halt. A lantern on a pole reflected in Scow's eyes as he swung to stare at his commander.
" 'M gonna drop."
George slipped in behind him and took the rail on his own shoulder. "Rest for ten minutes. Then come back. After we finish this fourteen miles of track, there's the Potomac Creek bridge to repair."
"You keep givin' ever' one of these niggers ten minutes, you gonna run out of minutes an' fall over yourself."
"You let me worry about that. Get going."
Scow rubbed his mouth, admiration and suspicion mingled on his face. "You're some damn boss," he said, and walked off, leaving George in doubt about which way to take that. With a grim amusement, he wondered what Scow would say if he knew his commander controlled and ran a huge ironworks and a thriving bank.
He took Scow's place in the rail-carrying team. Dizzy and growing sick to his stomach, he strove to hide it. "Come on," he yelled to the other men. He knew they felt as bad as he did, hurt in every muscle as he did. But together they ran the next rail forward, placed it, jumped down off the roadbed as the first mauls arched over and struck, and dashed back for the next one.