The Old Man looked at them, all young men, gathered around him in the firelight, big, rough, smart fellers standing around looking at him like he was Moses of old, his beard flowing down to his chest, his gray eyes sure and steady. “Sleep on it. If you wakes up tomorrow with doubts, ride out with my blessing. I only ask that those who depart to watch your tongue. To forget what you have heard here. Forget us. And remember that if you have a busy tongue, we will not forget you.”
He glared around at the men. The old fire had returned now, the face hard as granite, the fists removed from his pocket, the thin, drooped body covered by the ratty soot and toeless boots standing erect. “I has more studying to do, and we will commence our battle plans tomorrow. Good night,” he said.
The men wandered outside. I watched them filter off and slip away, till only one man stood. O. P. Anderson, the only colored among them, was the last to leave. O.P. was a small, slender, delicate feller, a printer, a sharp feller, but he wasn’t overbuilt like the rest of the Old Man’s crew. Most of the Captain’s men were strong and rugged adventurers, or gruff pioneers like Stevens, who carried six-shooters on both sides and picked fights with anyone who came near him. O.P. weren’t like Stevens or the rest of them at all. He was just a drylongso colored feller with good intentions. He weren’t a real soldier or gunfighter, but he was there, and from the fret on his face, he looked to be scared something scandalous.
When he stepped out the cabin, he slowly lowered the canvas flap and wandered off to a nearby tree and sat. I sauntered over and sat next to him. From where we was, we could see inside the tiny window of the cabin. Inside, the Old Man could be seen standing at his table, still poring over his maps and papers, slowly folding them up, scratching a marking on a couple here and there as he put them away.
“What you think, Mr. Anderson?” I said. I was hopeful that O.P. thunk what I thunk, which is that the Old Man was crazy as a bedbug and we should skip off right away.
“I don’t understand it,” he said glumly.
“Understand what?”
“Understand why I’m here,” he muttered. He seemed to be speaking to himself.
“You gonna leave, then?” I asked. I was hopeful.
From where he sat at the foot of the tree, O.P. looked up and stared at the Old Man, busy inside his cabin, still fiddling with his maps, muttering to himself.
“Why should I?” he said. “I’m as mad as him.”
22.
The Spy
Like most things with the Old Man, what was supposed to take a day took a week. And what was supposed to take two days took two weeks. And what was supposed to take two weeks took four weeks, a month, and two months. And so it went. He was supposed to leave Iowa in June. He didn’t put his hat on his head and tip good-bye to that place till mid-September. By then I was long gone. He had sent me forward into the fight.
It wasn’t the fight I wanted, but it was better than getting kilt or staying out on the plains. He decided to send one of his men, Mr. Cook, ahead to Harpers Ferry to serve as a spy and to spread the word of his plan amongst the Negroes there. He announced it to his lieutenant Kagi one morning in July, when I was there serving them two breakfast in the Old Man’s cabin.
Kagi didn’t like the plan. “Cook is a chatterbox,” he said. “He’s a rooster. Plus he’s a ladies’ man. He’s sending letters to his various lady friends saying he’s on a secret mission and he’ll have to leave soon, and they’ll never see him again. He’s brandishing his gun in public and saying he killed five men in Kansas. He got ladies in Tabor fretting all over him, thinking he’s gonna die on a secret mission. He’ll crow our plan all over Virginia.”
The Old Man considered it. “He’s an irritant and he does have a long tongue,” he said, “but he’s a good talker and can scout the enemy and move about daily life there. Whatever he says about us ain’t gonna harm God’s plan for us, for no one is inclined to believe a blowhard like him anyway. I will advise him that he should use but his eyes and mouth in Virginia to our purpose and nothing more. He’d be a hindrance to us otherwise, for we have a bit more plundering to do to gather weapons and money and he don’t soldier well. We have to use everyone to their best. Cook’s best weapon against an enemy is his mouth.”
“If you want to hive the Negroes, why not send a Negro to Virginia with him?” Kagi said.
“I has considered sending Mr. Anderson,” the Old Man said, “but he’s nervous about the proposition overall, and may not toe the line. He may scatter.”
“I don’t mean him. I mean the Onion,” Kagi said. “She can pose as Cook’s slave. That way she can keep an eye on Cook, and help hive the bees. She’s old enough. And you can trust her.”
I was standing there when them two was pondering this, and I can’t say I was against the idea. I was anxious to get out of the west before the Old Man got his head blowed off. Iowa was rough living, and the U.S. Cavalry was hot on our trail. We’d had to move several times ’bout Pee Dee and Tabor to keep out of sight, and the thought of grinding over the prairie by wagon and stopping every ten minutes while the Old Man prayed, with federal dragoons riding down on us one way and Pro Slavers hunting us another, weren’t a notion that throwed a lot of sugar in my bowl. Also, I growed fond of the Captain, truth be told. I was partial to him. I’d rather he got killed or smashed up on his own time away from me and I would know he was dead later—much later would be soon enough. I knowed he was insane, and if he wanted to fight against slavery I was all for it. But I myself had no plans on doing a wink of the same. Traveling east to Virginia with Cook put me closer to the freedom line of Philadelphia, and slipping off from him would be easy, ’cause Cook never let his talking hole rest and didn’t look beyond his own self much. So I piped up to the Old Man and Mr. Kagi that it would be a great idea for me to go with Mr. Cook, and I would do my best to hive the Negroes while I was there waiting for the rest to come.
The Old Man looked me over close. The thing ’bout the Captain was that he never gived you straight-out instruction, unless you was in a shooting fight, of course. But in day-to-day living, he mostly declared, “I’m going this way to fight slavery,” and the men said, “Why, I’m going that way, too,” and off we went. That’s how it was with him. This whole business in the newspapers later ’bout him leading them young fellers around by their noses, that’s hogwash. You couldn’t get them ornery roughnecks to do what you wanted, for while they was roughnecks, they was sweet on a cause, and broad-minded to whoever led them to it. You couldn’t get a two-hundred-dollar mule to tear them fellers away from the Old Man. They wanted to be with him ’cause they was adventurers and the Old Man never told them how to be. He was strict as the devil on the matter of religion when it come to his own self, but if your spiritual purpose took you a different way, why, he’d lecture you a bit, then let you move to your own purpose. So long as you didn’t cuss, drink, or chew tobacco, and was against slavery, he was all for you. There was some straight-out rascals in his army, when I think of it. Stevens, course, was a bad-tempered and disagreeable rascal if I ever seen one, chanting to spirits and arguing about his religious beliefs with Kagi and the rest. Charlie Tidd, a white feller, and Dangerfield Newby, a colored—both of them joined up later—them two was outright dangerous and I don’t know that they had a drop of religion between the two of ’em. Even Owen weren’t all-the-way God-fearing to his Pa’s standard. But so long as you was against slavery, why, you could do just whatever you pleased, for despite his grumpiness, the Old Man always thought the best of folks and misjudged their natures. Looking back, it was a terrible notion to send Cook to spy, and a worse notion to send me as an ambassador to rally the colored, for both of us was wanting for knowledge and wisdom, and neither of us would give a sting for nothing but ourselves. We were the two worst people he could have sent ahead.