by J. T. Edson
There was, Belle had explained to the Texans, a good reason for her to adopt such garb that would also have been used if the need arose during the journey through Union territory on the way to Glissade. It was intended to give the appearance of being a maid while walking through the town just after night had fallen. The regiment of regular Union Cavalry to which the three soldiers they had left drugged belonged were camped on the outskirts at the west side and another to the north of the town. Based upon his own experiences as an officer in the Union Army prior to returning to serve the South, Stone had agreed with her observation that the wives of particularly the senior officers would have such servants and, unlike in the South, few would be Negresses. Therefore, her arrival in such a guise would arouse less curiosity and speculation over a stranger walking through the streets, since the local population were likely to assume she was just a maid from the camp carrying out a task for her mistress.
When making the explanation, the girl had not said whom she was going to meet in Glissade. Nor, as the Texans had realized why this was, had either of them asked about it. Instead, the arrangement was for them to remain where they were until she returned. Or, should they hear the kind of disturbance that would indicate she had either been captured or killed, they were to assume the same applied to the man she visited and go straight back to Richmond with the news. The same would apply if she failed to rejoin them by sunrise, since this would mean that she had been taken by the Yankees in some way that prevented her from making any noise to warn them of what had happened. There must not, she insisted, emphasizing the word of denial, be any attempt to find out her fate, much less a rescue should she have been taken alive. Regardless of how they might feel, she must be regarded as expendable. That was, she had said without any suggestion of being dramatic, one of the penalties to be accepted serving as a spy.
“I reckon I just about ought to know how soldiers think by now,” Stone replied to the comment about the behavior of the three Union cavalrymen when recovering from the effects of the drugged drink. Then a note of concern came into his voice: “But will you be safe going into town dressed like that?”
“Of course I will,” Belle declared, and went on with the kind of humor her companions often employed and, she felt, would enjoy now. “I’m absolutely, positively certain—I think.”
For all the levity, Belle was taking precautions for her protection should some emergency arise. Aware that there was no way she could have either her Colt or particularly the epee de combat with her—the unconventional design of the latter being certain to arouse curiosity if seen even in poor lighting conditions—she was going to leave them with the Texans. Instead, having put on her outer garments, she had donned her razor-edged bracelet. In addition, its canopy having been replaced by one of cheap black material such as might be expected in the possession of the kind of person she was pretending to be, she would also be carrying the parasol with the telescopic coil-spring-powered billy as a further means of defense.
As was the case with all of the girl’s other feminine clothing, none of which she had with her, the skirt of her attire was modified to allow easy removal. However, instead of the brief pantalets and black stockings that had diverted Jacques and Hunt to her advantage in Atlanta, she had a man’s figure-hugging open-necked thin black shirt and equally snugly conforming matching riding breeches underneath. These were to serve as the kind of distraction provided by the sensual undergarment worn at the gambling house should the need arise. Because they, too, would be concealed by the skirt, she was wearing the black riding boots, which she felt confident would once again prove most efficacious if an attack a la savate was called for.
Wanting to avoid any such means of self-defense if possible, regardless of how effective she knew them to be, Belle was carrying a bulky and cheap-looking black reticule in which, among some of the feminine items a person of the kind she was pretending to be could carry without arousing suspicions in the event of a search, was the bottle containing the remaining whiskey laced with the kind of opiate intended for use with the ring she was given by Captain Anatol de-Farge. She was satisfied that there was still enough of the potent liquor to serve her purposes. If anybody should stop and question her, it was her intention to reply with the pronounced French accent she had learned to employ so adequately that it made the Southern inflection in her normal voice indistinguishable. The drugged drink was to be used only as a last resort.
None of the precautions had proved necessary.
For all the calm way in which she had spoken to the Texans, the girl was experiencing a little tension while walking briskly and with apparent nonchalance through the streets of the town. She knew that, with the exception of the man she had come to meet, everybody she encountered was a potential enemy. However, as she had anticipated and gambled upon being the case—except for a couple of soldiers who took her for what she was pretending to be and made an improper suggestion without attempting to follow it up and needing to be answered in some suitable fashion—the few people whom she passed on the not brightly lit streets paid no attention to her.
Arriving at the combination residence and surgery of Doctor Conried, she found the latter to be in darkness, although lights showed from the former. Much to her relief, it was he who came in response to her knock on the front door. He was as she remembered him, even to the casual way in which he was dressed. Tall, burly, and gray-haired, he had a cheerful Germanic cast of features, although his New England mode of speech had not the slightest trace of an accent suggestive of his being of that race. She had no idea why a man from that Northern region where the majority of the population were so firm in their support for the Union had elected to become a spy for the South, being content with knowing he was considered by Rose Greenhow as being one of the best and most reliable of all who worked from inside Yankee territory. Aware of how urgent the matter must be, instead of thinking about the subject of his motivation, she commenced the ritual she knew would be expected of her and serve as a means of identification in case she was not remembered from her previous visit. As she had worn masculine attire on that occasion, she felt it possible that this might indeed happen until he was granted a closer look at her face.
“Southrons, hear your country call you!” Belle announced sotto voce after having gazed about her surreptitiously yet thoroughly to be sure nobody else was close enough to hear the first line of the vigorously patriotic verses written by General Albert Pike of the Confederate States Army to replace the far more bland words that Daniel D. Emmett had penned for his minstrel song “Dixie.”
“Up lest death or worse befall you!” Conried replied correctly with the second line and no louder, indicating that he was alone in the house and they could conduct the meeting for which the girl had been sent in response to the message he had dispatched by carrier pigeon in privacy and safety. “Come in, please!”
Despite the importance of the information and the need for urgency in having a response to it stressed by the doctor, if he was surprised or disappointed by finding a woman had been sent to meet him, he showed no indication of it. Rather, he accepted without comment the girl’s explanation that she and her companions had considered her to be the one best suited for avoiding attracting attention on the way through the town to pay the visit.
Taking Belle into the surgery, explaining as he had the time before that doing so would be expected if anybody should have seen her arrival, he drew the curtains after turning up the lamp he had carried to the front door. Again, he said, this would not arouse speculation, since he would not carry out any examination of a female patient without making sure that whatever undressing might be required could not be seen from outside. Asking her to strip to the waist, to give support to the pretense of her being there for medical reasons should anybody such as his currently absent housekeeper come in unexpectedly—precaution she heartily approved of and had no qualms of carrying out under the prevailing conditions—he waited until this was done and the masculine shirt was
concealed beneath the well-worn black leather couch, upon which she had seated herself in accordance with his instructions. Then, having changed into the white coat he wore when engaged in his professional duties and hung his stethoscope around his neck, he wasted no time in getting down to business.
Before Belle had heard many words, she decided that there was justification for the summons. What was more, the situation described by Conried was going to need being given urgent attention by herself and her two companions from Texas. She also realized that what the doctor had discovered and was disclosing could have the potential for turning the course of the war in the favor of the Union. At the very least, if the device he described so graphically was as effective as he claimed it to be, it was going to cause the South enormous loss of lives.
On hearing the name of the inventor of the device, the girl had realized she knew something about him. A couple of years earlier, Christopher Burke had made a tour of Southern plantations trying to interest the owners in a machine to perform the picking of cotton, obviating the need for numerous human hands to perform the task. While it might have made such a thing possible, it had proved to be complex and costly to operate, as well as liable to breakdown and the necessity to purchase expensive spare parts. As if these faults were not sufficient, the device was prone to explode with sudden violence and spread flames over a fair distance around it. Therefore, he and it had become a laughingstock even in regions where it had not been demonstrated. The last thing she had heard about Burke was that he had returned north expressing a bitter hatred of all Southrons because they declined to buy and use his machines, even though he had repeatedly promised all the faults would be corrected prior to delivery.
The thing she had to do, the girl told herself, was see the weapon described by the doctor, if possible, and then decide upon what action must be taken.
~*~
Even at a distance of close to a quarter of a mile, which was as close as Belle Boyd and Captain Stone Hart could approach where they were originating from, the continuous roar of detonations was awesome to the ears and the device that was producing them made a sight that was frightening in its potential. It went far beyond anything in her comprehension, and he had never heard or seen a single weapon capable of creating the effect. In fact, he felt sure even a number of trained riflemen at company strength could not have been able to produce such a rate of fire by shooting one after another in their most rapid succession.
Good fortune had continued to favor Belle in her mission. Doctor Fritz Conried had informed her that the weapon that had caused him so much concern was to be demonstrated to some senior officers the following afternoon. His assertion that it would be possible for an unsuspected observation to be carried out from some nearby woodland had proved correct. Having arrived there without being detected, she and Stone had left Sergeant Waggles Harrison to keep the horses quiet and under control while they moved into a point of vantage on foot. They had watched the spectators assembling where a small man in civilian clothes, whom she recognized as being Christopher Burke on being handed field glasses by Stone, was seated behind and showing the potential of the revolutionary weapon he had invented. A larger civilian was kneeling at the right of it and clearly acting as an assistant for its operation.
“Land’s sakes!” the girl exclaimed, lowering the field glasses. In her concern, she inadvertently gave a clue to the identity of her informant. “The doctor was right. That damned thing could change the whole course of the War if the Yankees get enough of them. I’ve never even imagined there could be anything like it. Why, it fires much faster than is being claimed for the Williams gun of ours that I’ve heard talk about around Richmond.” xiv
“I’ve not run across one of them yet either,” Stone admitted, “but I’ve heard they’re pretty fair and can throw out around sixty-five one-pounder shells a minute. Which’s better than those twenty-five-shot Bilinghurst Requa Batteries the Yankees use can turn loose. There was talk before I came south about something called the Agar Coffee Mill gun being on its way, but none had come into service when I left. Do you reckon that thing is one of them?” xv
“Not if what I heard about Christopher Burke is correct,” Belle denied. “I’d say he’s far too much the egotist to let somebody else’s name be used for his invention. Do you think that thing is as dangerous as I do, Stone?”
“If it’s not...” the Texan replied in a grim tone. He was thinking of the main disadvantage that applied to the Requa and even more so to the eighty-five to four hundred and fifty barreled Vandenburg Volley Gun already in service with the Union Army as he continued, “... it’ll surely do until something that is dangerous comes along. Like I said, its fires faster than anything I’ve ever seen or heard tell of, and it will be much easier to move around fast when needed.” xvi
The device that was causing so much concern for Belle and Stone was mounted on a small metal tripod instead of the modified artillery carriage that was necessary for the other rapid-fire weapons to become available during the War Between the States. At the rear end of the barrel what was obviously the mechanism was housed in something shaped like an oblong box. Through one side of this, the metallic cartridges in snugly fitting loops on a canvas belt entered a slot to be extracted one after another by some means and fed into the chamber. With the powder discharged and the bullet expelled, the spent case was ejected through a hole in the top of the box and the now-empty belt came out at the side opposite where it entered.
On the belt in use reaching its end, while Burke was drawing it free, the man assisting him placed one that was fully loaded into the slot in the weapon at the other side. When this had been drawn onward a short distance by the inventor, be resumed firing. However, having shown how swiftly the process could be carried out, he sent off only a few more rounds before stopping once again. Then he came to his feet and walked toward the observers.
Such was the apparent simplicity of the operation and the speed by which reloading could be carried out, that the rate of fire attained was far greater than any contemporary multiple-shot mechanism could produce.
“It’s that deadly, in your opinion?” Belle queried, wanting to satisfy herself there was adequate reason for the drastic line of action she was contemplating.
“They’d come as one hell of a shock to the troops they were first used against. Likely cause a rout and fast withdrawal, too. There’s only one thing, though.”
“What is it?”
“The speed that gun fires, the barrel and machinery must get hot enough to give plenty of trouble,” the Texan estimated, unwittingly suggesting a serious problem that Burke had discovered and was taking steps to prevent letting become apparent to the delegation who had come from Washington to witness the demonstration. “Unless he’s come up with some way to cope with it, I’d reckon that its works would soon jam so tight it couldn’t go on throwing lead.”
“Then we can’t let the Yankees put them into production,” the girl asserted.
“There’s a chance they won’t do that, going by what I’ve come to know about the way the top brass thinks. It always looked to me that they just about always shy away from every kind of improvement that’s offered no matter how good you might reckon it would be for the men who’ll have to do the fighting. Every time a repeating rifle even was offered while I was with the Yankee Army, they started saying how it’s too complicated to use and, anyway, issuing them would cause the troops to spray lead around promiscuously instead of aiming carefully. The same’s already been said by our high muckety-mucks about the Agar.”
“Then why have these high muckety-mucks, as you uncouth Texans say, come to see it?”
“Could be because he’s got some influential backing at the capital and the top brass figure they’ve got to make a show. I don’t know whether you noticed, but there isn’t even a brigadier general down there. Fact being, there’s only one full colonel even, and from the look of him, he’s a quartermaster not serving in the field. The rest are the
same. I reckon they’ve been sent along and will go back to give a report for higher up about what they’ve seen.”
“And then what will happen?”
“Unless things have changed a heap up here, which I wouldn’t count on a whole heap, seeing the same kind of thinking’s going on down in the South, there’ll be some considerable talk about what to do next before anything is decided.”
“And nothing might happen?” Belle inquired, knowing a man’s life could be at stake as a result of what the answer should be.
“That’ll depend on how much influence is behind him,” the Texan judged, noticing the intensity with which the girl was speaking. “Likely they’ll have the gun sent down for testing and then decide whether or not to put it into production.”
“But dare we take the chance on that damnable thing not being accepted for some reason?” the girl wanted to know.