The Blooding

by James McGee

  Another rifle spoke.

  “Ten,” Jem Beddowes muttered.

  Wyatt glanced over his shoulder. Tewanias and the boy had disappeared. At once it felt as if a great weight had been lifted from him. He twisted and peered towards the advancing militia. “Looks like we might just have time for one more round, lads.”

  “Then can we run?” Donaldson asked.

  “Then we run,” Wyatt agreed, flinching as a musket ball struck the trunk an inch from his shoulder. More shots began to ring out, thick and fast.

  Boone fired then. As he squatted back down there came a muffled grunt and Billy Drew was propelled backwards, his shirt darkened by a large crimson stain. The rifle fell from his hand.

  “Billy!” Donaldson spun round.

  “Keep firing!” Wyatt yelled.

  And then a familiar boom sounded and the Rangers ducked as the shot whirred overhead and landed thirty yards behind them. The ground mushroomed upwards. Debris rained down.

  Wyatt spat out an expletive. The gun crew had re-entered the fray, no doubt out of frustration at seeing its men being cut down. The shot, Wyatt realized, had been aimed high deliberately, as a means of calculating the correct elevation; so the next one …

  Another boom, another whimper of a projectile in flight and, even as Wyatt screamed a warning, the ball found its mark. In an instant, the world was filled with earth and rocks, pebbles and sand, flying splinters, confusion and blood. In the midst of it all, Wyatt felt himself picked up. For one glorious moment it was as if he had grown wings and taken flight. And then came the shock of falling, of hitting the ground and tumbling for what seemed like an eternity before finally coming to rest he knew not where.

  As the darkness closed in around him, however, there was no pain. There was only a feeling of peace and immense pride in the courage of the men who had fought by his side during the final stand. Thanks to their actions, Tewanias and the boy had been able to make their getaway.

  And a promise made to a dying man had been a promise kept.

  9

  December 1812

  Hawkwood woke to the sound of voices and shadows moving in the darkness of the cabin. A lantern flickered.

  Caution made him turn his head slowly. His mind had been swimming with violent dreams. When he felt the cold, hard press of a gun muzzle against his left cheek, he froze.

  “On your feet, Mr Smith. Easy does it.”

  Stagg’s voice.

  As the end of the barrel moved away, Hawkwood felt for the musket and then withdrew his hand. Given the confined space of the cot, by the time he’d extricated the bloody thing, he’d either have taken his eye out or else received a pistol ball through his brain. And that was without knowing why he was being summoned. Better to wait and see and then make a judgement. Drawing his coat about him, he gathered himself, sat up and swung his boots to the floor.

  Lawrence was seated at the table, a subdued expression on his unshaven face. He had a gun to his head, too; held by Stagg. He raised his hands and showed his palms in a gesture of apology.

  “Couldn’t warn you, sorry. Six of them, one of me.”

  “And I had the gun,” Hawkwood said.

  Lawrence smiled ruefully. “And you had the gun.”

  Hawkwood’s eyes swept the cabin. Stagg wasn’t alone. Three of his crew were with him. Two held pistols; the third one carried a small hand-axe. Presumably, the other two were up on deck; helmsman and lookout.

  Hawkwood stared hard at the axe.

  “Sit.” Stagg pointed with his free hand to the table bench.

  Hawkwood did as he was told, making sure, as he sat down, that his legs were on the outside of the bench. The fact that there was no need to brace himself against the angle of the boat told him that Snake was either hove to, or as was more likely, turned into the wind, her sails slackened.

  “What the hell is this, Stagg?”

  “Cyrus, get the musket,” Stagg ordered.

  Without speaking, the crewman who’d stuck his gun in Hawkwood’s face retrieved the weapon from beneath the blanket and passed it to his captain. Stagg transferred the pistol to his belt and hefted the long gun in his hand. He held the stock up to the lantern and squinted as he ran a broad thumb around the lock plate.

  “Interestin’. It’s got the Harpers Ferry mark.” He looked at Lawrence. “Belonged to your father, Mr Jones, yes?”

  “Indeed it did,” Lawrence said.

  “Military-issue, too, I see,” Stagg continued in a conversational tone. “Your father a military man, then?”

  Lawrence lifted his chin. “He was. Served with distinction.”

  “Did he now?” Stagg said, tilting his head to one side. “That’s strange. Y’see they only started making these around ten years ago. Before that they all came from the Springfield armoury. Call me suspicious, but you ain’t in the first flush, Mr Jones, so your father would have to be gettin’ on a tad, or else he’s passed over. Either way, I’m thinkin’ it’s unlikely he’d ever have fired this beauty in anger.”

  Hell and damnation, Hawkwood thought. Betrayed by a bloody musket? He took a deep breath, suspecting there was little to gain by feigning outrage. “What’s your point, Stagg?”

  “I’m gettin’ to that.” Stagg laid the musket down at the end of the table and wagged an admonishing forefinger. “Y’know, from the moment we met I kept askin’ myself who the two of you might be. Not Smith and Jones, that’s for sure.”

  “That didn’t seem to matter a whole hell of a lot when you took our sixty dollars,” Hawkwood said.

  “Aye, well, that was then. This is now.”

  “And you’ve had time to mull things over,” Hawkwood said drily.

  Stagg snapped his fingers. “Exactly. Mostly, though, I’ve been thinkin’ about that toast you made. To private enterprise.”

  “What about it?”

  Stagg tugged an earlobe. “Got to thinkin’ it weren’t a bad rule. Figured I should embark on a little private enterprise of my own.”

  “Glad I was able to help,” Hawkwood said. “But I thought that’s what you were already engaged in.”

  “Don’t mean I can’t take advantage of fresh opportunities when they come along, now, does it?” Stagg countered, unfazed by Hawkwood’s sarcasm. His brow puckered. “What’s that word they use? Diversify? Well, that’s what I’m doin’. I’m diversifyin’.” His teeth waxed yellow in the lantern glow.

  Hawkwood wondered what time it was. Pale light was filtering through the hatchway. Not quite dawn, he guessed.

  Lawrence had relieved him shortly after midnight, in continuance of their arrangement that one of them should be awake at all times. It wasn’t surprising that the crew had caught on to their precautions, but Hawkwood hadn’t bargained on Stagg using the strategy against them, waiting until they had only Lawrence to deal with before springing their trap.

  It was a tactic with which Hawkwood should have been familiar. He’d used it himself, in his duties as a Runner. If you wanted to pick up a suspect for questioning or arrest, you did it before first light, while they were slumbering. That way, you caught them off-guard before they were dressed for flight. Hawkwood was fully dressed but he was on a boat with no route of escape, and he’d been caught napping, literally. But as Lawrence had pointed out, one man against six wasn’t the best of odds. It could just as easily have been him on deck and Lawrence in the cot.

  Stagg began to pace the cabin. It was a short distance between turns and Hawkwood guessed the man was doing it to intimidate them. He and Lawrence were seated, while Stagg was showing that he was the one with the freedom to move about. Though, given his bulk, he looked more like a bear trapped in a small cage.

  As Hawkwood assessed his and Lawrence’s options, Stagg paused. “Thing is, I couldn’t help but ask myself why you were so set on securing such a swift passage to the border. It weren’t the names. Might as well have been Washington and Madison, for all I care. But I did wonder. Not about who you were but what you were
. And d’you know what my first thought was? Them’s military.”

  He looked towards Lawrence, his lips parted. The major said nothing.

  “No, it’s true. I said to myself, ‘Remus, now there’s two men who’ve marched a mile or three in their time.’ And that got me thinkin’. If you were military, whose military might you be? If you were ours, there’d be no need for you to be sneakin’ passage aboard the Snake, would there? Hell, Burlington’s not more than a skip and a jump away. You could’ve taken a coach there and hopped aboard a transport. Question was: why didn’t you? And then it came to me. It was on account of you ain’t on our side.” Stagg’s smile broadened. “You’re on theirs. Which makes you Limeys. And seein’ as you ain’t in uniform, that makes you Limey spies!”

  “The hell you say!” Lawrence snapped. “We’re no such thing!”

  Stagg held up a hand in a gesture of appeasement. “Well, I figured that out for myself, didn’t I? But it’s what I thought at the time.”

  Lawrence stared at him. “So what do you think we are now?”

  Stagg retrieved the pistol from his belt. “Oh, I don’t think. I know.” With his left hand he reached inside his coat. “Known all along, on account of information received.”

  “Christ’s sake, Stagg,” Hawkwood said. “Cut to the bloody chase. Even patient men can die of boredom.”

  The crinkles around Stagg’s eyes disappeared as he laid the folded square of paper he’d taken from his pocket on the table by Hawkwood’s elbow. Then, standing back, he waited.

  Hawkwood unfolded the paper.

  Both likenesses looked as though they’d been undertaken in a hurry, which, Hawkwood supposed, they probably had. As a result, they were not of a high quality, accuracy having been sacrificed in the interests of speed and urgent dispatch. Though anyone with the illustrations to hand and with Hawkwood and Lawrence seated in front of them would probably have no difficulty adding two and two and coming up with maybe three out of four. In other words, close enough for a positive identification.

  It was the written physical descriptions that left less room for doubt. Everything was there, from their respective heights, hair and eye colouring to their builds and complexions. In Hawkwood’s case, prominence had also been given to the faint powder-burn on his right cheek and the two scars above his left one. He had Sergeant Dunbar to thank for that, he guessed.

  Highlighted in bold lettering above each of the drawings was the proclamation: $100 REWARD! Below it, in equally bold font, were the words: WANTED FOR MURDER. There then followed a brief but florid description of the brutal acts that had been committed during the escape of an English officer and his accomplice from the Greenbush military encampment. The reward was offered for the capture and apprehension of each man.

  “Got that off the guard on the inbound coach from Albany not more’n an hour after we first spoke,” Stagg said. “He was handin’ ’em out. What’s it say there? Two troopers dead, a slew more injured and a stable block burnt to the ground? Sounds like it was quite a night.”

  “You think this is us?”

  “Oh, please …” Stagg said.

  “And if I told you it wasn’t?” Hawkwood said.

  “That case,” Stagg said drily, “I’d say you were probably talkin’ to the newly crowned King of Persia.”

  Hawkwood tossed the handbill aside. Stagg might have been many things but he wasn’t an idiot. “So what are you after, more money?”

  “Hell, yes,” Stagg said. “That’s the general idea.”

  “How much?” Lawrence asked.

  “Two hundred dollars is a tidy sum.”

  Lawrence sucked in his cheeks.

  “Can’t disagree with you there,” Hawkwood said. “Shame we don’t have it.”

  “Weren’t askin’ you for it,” Stagg said dismissively. “Just pointing out it’s a tidy sum. And I already got that.”

  “By that, you mean us,” Hawkwood said.

  “There you go,” Stagg said amiably. He stabbed a finger at the handbill. “Got me a promissory note right there. All I need now is the balance.”

  Hawkwood wondered what Stagg would do if he jammed the handbill into his mouth and started chewing furiously.

  “Balance?” Lawrence frowned. “What does that mean?”

  “Means whatever you and Mister Smith are carryin’.”

  “We’re not carrying anything!” Lawrence protested. “Damn it, we’ve paid you all we had!”

  “Yeah, right, and as I told you I’m—”

  “The King of Persia,” Hawkwood said, thinking furiously. “Yes, we got that.”

  Stagg didn’t seem too bothered by the notion that his crew was now privy to his previous financial arrangement. Either the skipper had informed his men of the transaction in the spirit of generosity or else he knew the infraction would be overlooked in favour of higher rewards to come, which only served to further illustrate the Snake’s chain of command.

  “You expect me to believe the two of you are tapped out?” Stagg shook his head. “Don’t reckon that’s likely. You wouldn’t leave yourselves short. Too risky. Nah, you’re carryin’. Sure as God made little green apples, you’re carryin’. Only question is, how much?”

  As money-making schemes went, Hawkwood had to admit Stagg’s master plan had its merits. First pick his and Lawrence’s pockets, then hand them over to the authorities for the bounty. Two bites of the same cherry. Stagg and his crew would probably make more from this run than they had from their last half-dozen combined.

  “Why wait until now?” Hawkwood asked. “If you’d already worked out who we were, you could have turned us in back at Whitehall.”

  Stagg pulled a face. “Aye, I could’ve, but that’d be too close to home. The local militia and I ain’t always seen eye to eye in the past. Last thing I want is them stickin’ their noses where they ain’t wanted. I’ve got more’n forty tubs of prime potash takin’ up space in the hold and a buyer lined up. Much better if we hand you over to the regulars. They’ll be less inclined to go rootin’ around down below. We’ll get paid a sight quicker that way, too. The militia ain’t exactly well organized. Most of ’em couldn’t find their own socks to shit in them. Chances are they’d want to steal all the glory, too. Don’t see why we shouldn’t come out as heroes. It’ll stand us in good stead with them that matter. Give us a reputation as upstandin’ citizens. Might even result in the authorities turning a blind eye to some of our more – how shall I put it? – minor infringements. Won’t do us any harm, leastways, you can be certain of that.”

  “Sounds as if you’ve thought it all through,” Hawkwood said.

  “Caught you with your breeches down,” Stagg quipped.

  “Can’t argue with that,” Hawkwood agreed. “Especially as you’re the one holding the gun.”

  “I knew you’d see it my way.” Stagg chuckled at his own wit and then straightened. “Right then, time to tally up. Funny, I was about to say ‘Mr Smith’, but maybe I should be callin’ you Hooper? That’s the name they’ve given you on the poster there.” Stagg turned towards Lawrence. “Which’d make you Major Lawrence, yes?”

  “No flies on you, Stagg, are there?” Hawkwood said. “But what if we don’t want to give you our money?”

  Stagg looked at him and then shook his head. “You ain’t that stupid. You know you ain’t got a choice. Hand bill don’t say anything about you being dead or alive. That means they don’t care. So either we shoot you where you sit, take your money anyway and wrap you up ready for collection, or you hand it over voluntarily and we deliver you to the military in one piece. That way, at least you’ll get to live – until they hang you, that is. An’ it means I don’t have to put up with you bleedin’ out all over my deck. Save a deal of moppin’ up. The lads don’t like moppin’ up. Do you, boys?”

  “You call that an option?”

  Stagg showed his teeth. “You know what they say: where there’s breath there’s hope.”

  “We’ll see you well re
warded if you get us to the border,” Lawrence said.

  “Figured you might say that,” Stagg responded, awarding himself a knowing smile. “If’n I were in your shoes, I’d try the same thing. But all things considered, I reckon we’ll pass. Not that I don’t trust you, of course, as officers and gentlemen – even if you are wanted for killin’ two of New York’s finest. But we’ve just rounded Caution Point; Plattsburg’s no more’n twelve miles off our port bow. Come late morning, you’ll be the army’s problem an’ we’ll be bound for St Johns. That way, everyone’s happy.”

  “Except us,” Hawkwood pointed out.

  Stagg shrugged. “True, but I don’t plan on losin’ any sleep over that.”

  “Enough of the talking, Remus. Let’s see what they’ve got.”

  Lawrence fixed the speaker with a steady gaze, though when he spoke it was with cold menace. “If I were you, my friend, I’d be careful what you wish for.”

  Before the crewman could formulate a reply, Stagg raised his pistol and aimed it at Hawkwood. “Talkin’s over. You first. What’ll it be?”

  Hawkwood stared about the cabin and took a deep, calming breath. Then, reaching inside his coat, he said resignedly, “Doesn’t look as though we’ve much choice, does it?”

  “There you go,” Stagg said, a grin forming. “You know it makes sen—”

  The word died in Stagg’s throat as in one fluid move Hawkwood drew out the pistol he’d cocked when rising from his cot, and shot Stagg through the right eye.

  The sound of the gun was incredibly loud. Stagg’s head snapped back. Blood and brains splattered the bulkhead behind him. The pistol he’d been holding clattered to the deck.

  Lawrence was already rising, going for the man at his shoulder. Hawkwood jerked aside as the second armed crewman threw up his pistol only to discover as he tried to fire off a shot that he’d failed to cock it.

  Amateur, Hawkwood thought as he came off the bench and swept his spent pistol towards the smuggler’s gun hand. The barrel slammed into the wrist as the other pistol discharged. The blow was enough to distract the smuggler’s aim. The ball grazed Hawkwood’s shoulder and struck the lantern, snuffing out the candle and plunging the cabin into darkness.