“Have you made anything of it, Holmes? I have cudgeled my brains over it every waking hour, yet I confess to being completely baffled.”
Holmes pulled the document out of a carpetbag and smoothed it out. “Here is your document, which you gave to the purser on the Nebraska and which he in turn delivered to me. It has been carefully drafted on a type and size of stationery I have not seen in Europe—it is possibly American, as it is made of wood pulp. Someone has traced over it—presumably yourself—to make a copy; however, I believe the document itself is also a copy of an original. The diagram consists of a 36-point wheel imposed upon a spiral, in turn imposed upon a step pyramid, to which is appended a table of figures.”
He was silent for a moment.
“Do you see anything in it?”
Reaching again into the carpetbag, he removed the small leather box he had received from the Pope in Rome and opened it.
“Examine it carefully, Tuck.” There on its bed of velvet was the jewel of the Order of the Golden Spur. I kneaded my tired eyes and tried to focus on it. A cross of ivory. Rays of gold. A carving of a cavalier’s spur. I saw nothing I hadn’t seen before.
“The rowel, Tuck. Count the barbs on the rowel.”
I looked perplexed at him. The tiny golden circle was far too small to see clearly. Annoyed, Holmes handed me his smudged magnifying glass. “Look!”
Laboriously, trying to stay awake, I counted. There were thirty-six points on the rowel. A coincidence?
“Not a coincidence,” Holmes said, as if reading my mind. “You’ll remember that Adam Worth—otherwise known as Henry J. Raymond—wore the Order of the Golden Spur round his neck, as did his associate, known to you as Count Schindler. Clearly, the symbol has great significance for Worth and his gang.”
And then it struck me in my torpor like a blast from a gun. The jangling boots of the brothers Beaufort. The erudite Klansman and his beautifully tooled spurs. The intricate golden rowel …
“You see it, don’t you?” Holmes’s smile could not have been wider. “The two curious characters you encountered today wear the golden spurs openly, and one of them—the younger of the two—followed you into the arena of death this very night.”
“Their name is Beaufort—Abraham and Thomas Beaufort. They profess to be horse dealers from Kentucky.”
“So I gather. Unfortunately I was not privy to your conversation at the plantation house.”
I recounted my exchange with Tom Beaufort and his strange mixture of erudition and prejudice.
“He cried out in Latin tonight. Did you understand what he said?” Holmes asked.
“Flectere nequeo something or other. I think I have heard it before, but I could not place it.”
“Perhaps you can trace its meaning. In the morning,” Holmes said, noting my obvious fatigue. “The golden spur is one key to the cipher delivered to you by Mrs. Wells. The other key is the underlying pyramid. We must have both keys if we are to make sense of this.” He scowled as he examined the paper once again in the light of a fading candle.
As if the shades of the room were going down, darkness enfolded me, and in my exhaustion I realized that I was only beginning to glimpse the true extent of this arena of death into which I had stumbled.
“This game is deeply dangerous, Holmes,” I said wearily.
“For me, it is life, Tuck. Give me the most abstruse cryptogram. Give me the most grotesque puzzle, add to it the danger of losing all, and I am in my own proper atmosphere.”
“I am not in mine!” I spoke more abruptly than I intended. “I followed your instructions to the letter. I posted an advertisement in the newspapers just as you asked, in the very words you gave me. You assured me that the Tarleton murders would then be solved and the entire affair safely concluded.”
Holmes sniffed at this. “I did not instruct you to ride into the wolves’ lair and attempt to smuggle away their prey from under their noses. That was your choice.”
“I had no choice. I could not stand by while a mob executed an innocent man for a crime he did not commit.”
“Of course not,” he responded quietly. “Still, I should have approached the matter differently. It is of no consequence now. And I do apologize for showing such relish over this case. Most of the affairs I deal with are important but not particularly interesting; indeed, I have found that importance often saps the charm from an investigation. But here in Atlanta we are presented with a matter that is of both the highest interest and, if I am not mistaken, the utmost importance.”
“In what respect?”
“It concerns nothing less than the future of the American Union.”
Chapter 22
Although I was mightily intrigued, consideration of the future of the Union exhausted me. I couldn’t begin to focus on so large a subject and fell asleep in Holmes’s thready armchair.
Well into the next morning, I woke up choking. The room was so flooded with smoke that I thought it was on fire, but it was only Holmes buried in a mountain of blankets fuming away at his pipe and gazing at Mrs. Wells’s cryptogram. Someone was hammering on the door.
“It’s … it’s Joe Harris!”
I leapt up and ushered the fellow in. “What is it?”
His red face burning from the cold and excitement, Harris could barely speak.
“Well?” Holmes shouted at him.
“Let him calm himself for a moment.” I snatched up some cold tea and gave it to him; he swallowed, grimaced, and rapidly penciled his message on a piece of paper.
“’Klan on way to jail to take James. Help please!’” I read.
Holmes threw off his blankets and pulled on his boots. “No time to lose, Tuck.”
Thankfully, Harris had brought a carriage, and the big rock jail was only minutes away. At our arrival, I noticed with dread three road-worn horses tied to the gatepost. While Harris and I made for the gate, Holmes hung back.
“Holmes! Through here!” I called.
“Go ahead. I’ll be with you straightaway.” He was standing on the pavement, looking over the neighborhood and the mournful old jail.
I followed Harris through the gates and into a bluish rock corridor, up several flights of stairs and into the jail keeper’s office. Large and littered, the office reminded me of the donjon tower of an old English castle. Piles of rusty paper, empty, corroded bottles, and all sorts of ominous ironmongery encumbered every surface. A spittoon leaked into the floorboards. The place smelled of wood rot and chamber pots. In the midst of this grandeur a ponderous gent of about sixty sat munching on a doughnut and dribbling crumbs into a beard that looked like a giant, meat-stained ball of cotton. Behind him sat two men as big as bulls and at his feet a red-nosed dog that I could swear was breathing fire.
The bearded jail keeper was interviewing three men who were coated with road dust, one of whom, I noticed with alarm, was missing an arm.
The jail keeper’s jolly laugh greeted Harris and me. “Ah! We must be near Christmas! Here are the three wise men already, and now the shepherd joins them!” He pointed at my collar. “Well, I hope you’ve all come bearing gifts.”
Harris tried to introduce me. “Reverend Grosjean, this … this is Mr. Frost, the super … super …”
“Superintendent of the Atlanta Jail!” the bearded one interrupted. “Mr. Harris of the Atlanta Constitution, with his verbal idiosyncrasies, is well known to me. But I have not made your acquaintance before, reverend suh. Doughnut?”
He held up a huge tray of greasy pastry. “Mother of one of our inmates sends up a load of these buttermilk doughnuts, and in return we make sure her son gets to keep the rest of his teeth, poor boy. Now how can I help you?”
Appalled, I demurred. “I am here in regard to one of your prisoners, Mr. James King, who was brought to your infirmary last night after being savagely beaten …”
“Yes, yes.
Well, suh, this is a remarkable coincidence indeed, for these gentlemen are here on the same errand.”
“Are you going to give him to us, Frost?” The one-armed man spoke and I instantly recognized his vulpine voice as belonging to the ruffian who had kidnapped us the night before. In daylight, he was a skinny, evil-looking fellow with a sparse red beard. Dandling rifles, two other toughs stood with him; neither of them was Thomas Beaufort. Though truly tempted, I decided it was the better part of valor not to confront them there and then.
“Now, Wash, I know this is the season of givin,’ but there’s givin’ and then there’s gettin.’ Let’s hear out this reverend gentleman fuhst.”
I looked round for Holmes, but as usual he had disappeared again. So I ignored One-Arm and spoke directly to Frost.
“James King has been accused of murder in the case of the Tarleton brothers, as you are no doubt aware. In accord with our civic duty, Mr. Harris and I convinced him to turn himself in to the representatives of the law here in Atlanta. We were on our way to the county sheriff’s when we were waylaid by a gang of hooded ruffians who mercilessly beat James and tried to hang him.”
Beneath his pile of beard, Frost was grinning—I could tell.
I went on. “Fortunately, the mob was frightened away and we brought him here. Now we wish to ensure that James receives his rights under the law and remains safely in your custody until the sheriff is notified.”
“The sheriff has been notified, Reverend suh,” Frost said, then chuckled and turned to One-Arm. “Not quite the story you told me, Wash. Frightened away, he says.”
“It’s all lawful,” the man called Wash protested. “We’re deputies of Sheriff Wallop and he wants his priz’ner back. Are you going to give him up or not?”
I blustered in. “These are men are deputies? Where are their credentials, their papers, their badges?”
Frost ignored me for the moment. “Sheriff Wallop, you say? You know right well that Wallop and the Fulton County sheriff’s department don’t quite see eye to eye on most things. I’m thinking there could be quite a process here, quite a legal process involved. And that process could be right costly for Sheriff Wallop … and his deputies.”
One of Wash’s men noisily cocked his rifle. The dog showed his fangs, and the two bull-like creatures behind Frost stood up on heavy legs and glowered at the rifleman.
“It’s all right,” Frost said to his men, then turned back to me. “I must apologize. I have neglected to introduce to you my assistants, Reverend suh. This is Julius and this is Hannibal. I raised ‘em from calves. Don’t snort much, but they can do a powerful head butt.”
The rifleman lowered his weapon and looked away.
“As I was sayin,’ Wash, that process of, um, extramaditin’ costs a good deal of money. So you just go back and tell Wallop that and see what his treasury can tolerate with regard to this point o’ law.”
“I can bring a good many more deputies to this place in the wink of an eye, Frost, and you know what I mean.”
Frost hesitated. “Yes, Wash, I do. But I’m afeard that the Fulton County Sheriff’s department has already made its disposition in regard to James King. Even though he’s beat blue, he’s a valuable commodity, and when he’s standin’ again, he’ll be shipped off to Dade to work in the mines. We don’t consider it morally defensible for a man to sit in a cell all day and get his cornbread and beans on the county without givin’ back in the form of honest labor.”
I was stunned. “That sounds like a sentence! James hasn’t even had a trial yet, much less a conviction.”
“Oooooh,” Frost intoned. “I understand there has been a trial, and a mighty fair one at that. Ain’t that so, Wash?”
“There has. But no execution!”
“Execution don’t pay the bottler, as my old daddy used to say. And we use up a lot of bottles ‘round here, right, Julius? Hannibal?” The two giants rumbled their assent. Frost cocked his head to one side. “Why do you want him so bad, anyways, Wash? How this colored boy any diff’ent from any other colored boy?”
“He killed the Tarleton boys.”
“That has yet to be proven in an actual trial!” I protested. “Not a mockery of a trial at midnight in the woods. I know for myself that it is a baseless charge.”
One-armed Wash looked at me with hatred. To this point he had avoided my eyes; now I stared him down as best I could.
“Gotta be more to it than that,” Frost jeered through his pillow of a beard, ignoring me. Evidently, the shrewd old man could smell unexpected profits lurking in the woods. “Tarletons been dead fifteen years. Why all this commotion now?”
“Makes no diff’ence,” One-Arm was getting heated, and the rifles came up. “You won’t give him up, we take him. Now!”
At that instant, Holmes entered the room. Coatless, bent over like an old man, he was in his shirt sleeves and wearing the green baize visor of a clerk. He spoke with a whistling Georgia accent. “Mr. Harris! Y’all are wanted at the office.”
Harris gave Holmes an astounded glance, but immediately understood the game.
“Mr. Grady himself asked for you.”
“If Mr. Henry W. Grady of the Atlanta Constitution summoned me, I would go,” said Frost with a chuckle.
As if catching sight of the guns for the first time, Holmes began to tremble. “What … what’s going on here?” he quavered. “Why the armaments?”
I answered him, glaring with as much meaning as I could into his eyes. “These three men are about to kidnap an inmate at gunpoint. A colored man named James King.”
“A colored man, looks like he wuz beaten up?” Holmes croaked. “He just went out the front gate on his way down Butler Street.”
“He’s escaped?” Frost fought to get to his feet.
Everyone sprang for the door at once. The three Klansmen screeched curses as they clattered down the stairs with Frost, his dog, and his two giants close behind. We heard the crashing of cell doors as they verified that James was gone, and then angry yelps and shrieking horses in the courtyard below.
Holmes sneered, straightening up and pulling off the visor.
“What has happened?” I whispered too loudly. “What have you done? Where is James? Shouldn’t we pursue them?”
“A childish game,” Holmes answered with contempt. “I deduced what was going on here, so I lagged behind, found my way to the infirmary, and informed the guard that I was a plainclothes officer from the city police here to take James to his arraignment. The fool believed me. I helped James outside to our wagon, covered him with my coat and hat, and gave him my key and instructions to drive to my hotel. He’s well away from here by now, driving west toward the depot while our fatuous friends are riding hell-bent toward the south.”
“And the visor you wear?”
“Borrowed from a clerk at the bank next door. We must hurry—I’m afraid James was just able to stand when I put him in the wagon. I want to talk to him before he dies.”
“Do you think he is as badly off as that?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I only wish you were a medical man so you could be of some use. Whether he lives or dies, we must talk to him as soon as possible.”
We three leapt on a horse-car that appeared to be propelled by an old mule, but soon realized we could walk the length of Decatur Street much faster than the counterfeit horse could pull the car. Harris and I struggled to keep up with Holmes, whose weightless stride made me feel as though I had anvils locked to my legs.
Fortunately, Holmes’s hotel was run by a clerk who was so blind he could not have distinguished a half-dead black man wearing Holmes’s coat and hat from Holmes himself. When we arrived, James had managed to pull himself up the stairs to the bedsit, where he collapsed snoring.
“Let him sleep,” I insisted, as Holmes prepared to wake him.
“Very well. You,” he point
ed at Harris, “Go find him some nourishment. Tea. Hot.”
Without a word, Harris obeyed, and Holmes and I were left alone with the shivering man on the bed. Holmes did not take his eyes off him.
“Why are you so anxious to speak with him?” I asked.
“Isn’t it obvious? Why are all these villains so concentrated on eliminating this one hapless Negro? Why cast him as the scapegoat? Why go to the trouble of bringing in night riders from another state to kill him?”
I shook my head.
“Because he is the only witness to the Tarleton murders.”
Chapter 23
When Harris returned with tea and bread, we consumed it like animals and I got some of the hot liquid into James. The poor man’s head was blistered from pine tar, much of which still adhered to his skin. His beaten face bloated the color of iridescent flint, he could hardly speak—he merely groaned a few quiet words of thanks and then slipped back into a swoon.
After breakfast Harris returned to his office. Feeling the need to bathe and change out of my filthy cassock, I decided to go back to the rectory and then ascertain how Sister and her servant were getting along. I told Holmes of my intention.
“When you see Sister, ask her why she betrayed us.”
“What do you mean?”
“Only she could have communicated to the Klansmen the whereabouts of James. We have her to thank for our encounter of this morning.”
“You think she … ?”
“I’m sure of it. Of course, I already know what her answer will be. She is determined to see James hang for the murder of her friends.”
Holmes was no doubt right. I promised to return later and spent the forenoon as planned. At Sister’s house I was told she was sleeping and could not be disturbed, while I found the servant Marta completely recovered and frolicking about in the mews at the side of the big gray-stone mansion. She went on and on about the dozen or so well-kept horses who were her best friends.
Then without notice she turned to me.
“Oh, Pastor,” she said, “last night I had the most horriblest dream about big red spots on my eyes and the Klan comin’ to get me and then a giant burnin’ ghost of a Klansman flyin’ through the dark… .”
The Tarleton Murders Page 16