Lincoln's Ransom

by Tim Champlin

  Kinealy took off his hat and coat, squared his shoulders, and went through the door, pulling it shut behind him. They could hear his hearty voice greeting and chiding the revelers, then a general laugh.

  “Let’s get this lid nailed down!” McGuinn said, taking off his bowler and wiping a sleeve across his sweaty forehead.

  “No. We can’t be banging around in here,” Packard replied. “Let’s just get it into the wagon.”

  Mullins had come back inside and nodded his agreement.

  But they hadn’t figured on the size of the crate. It was a good eight or nine inches too wide for the door. Packard had forgotten they’d had to tilt even the smaller coffin to get it in.

  “Shit!” McGuinn spat.

  “What now?” Mullins wondered.

  They looked at each other.

  “How’d he get this thing in here?” Packard asked.

  “Through the front,” McGuinn said.

  “We can’t go back out that way,” Mullins muttered, looking worried.

  “We’ll either have to tear the crate apart or widen this doorway,” McGuinn said. “We’ve still got that axe we busted the tomb with.”

  “It’ll make too much noise. If those men in the next room catch us at this, it’s all over,” Packard said.

  “I’ll take the door off its hinges,” McGuinn offered.

  “That won’t do it.”

  “Then we’ll use a crowbar and axe to pry the door frame off,” he said.

  “That may give us enough room,” Packard said. “ If we can do it quietly enough.”

  “Why don’t we just take the lead coffin out and wrap it in that canvas?” Mullins asked.

  “How the hell we gonna get it on a train if it ain’t disguised?” McGuinn retorted.

  “Hell, I can’t work one-handed,” McGuinn said, distractedly glancing around the room. “Since I used my suspenders to tie up that nut in the wagon and then busted this button, I gotta get a piece o’ rope or something to keep my britches up.”

  As McGuinn swung his coat open and hitched up his pants, Packard noticed he’d apparently added a few inches to his girth since his prize ring days. The pants were sliding down the rounded slope of his underbelly.

  It was like wading through hip-deep molasses, Packard thought, as one problem after another delayed them. He was acutely conscious of the minutes ticking inexorably away. And trains, like time and tide, waited for no man. The only ones benefiting were the horses, which were getting a little more rest.

  At that moment, the door to the saloon opened, admitting a few seconds of loud talk and cussing from the saloon. Then it was cut off abruptly as Kinealy came in and slammed the door.

  “Quick! Into the wagon! They’re drinking, and I got ’em into a big political argument.”

  “We can’t get the crate through the door,” McGuinn told him.

  “What?” This news seemed to stagger him. He leaned his back against the closed door. The argument was getting louder in the next room.

  “We’ve got to get that thing out of here,” he breathed. “Take the lead coffin out of the crate.”

  They obeyed.

  “Put the cedar casket in the crate and put the lid on the crate.” His face showed his mind was working furiously.

  They complied.

  “Shove the crate over into the corner,” he ordered.

  The crate grated across the rough-board floor. Hay was strewn everywhere. They looked expectantly at Kinealy.

  Suddenly there was a wild yell in the saloon, and another man shouted: “Then, by God, we’ll get Kinealy to settle this!”

  “I still say Tilden wasn’t the....”

  The door burst open, knocking Kinealy aside, and three men tumbled into the room.

  “Oh, there you are, Jim. We want to...to....” The drunk stopped, swaying slightly in the lamplight and focused on the four men and the lead coffin at their feet. His eyes went wide, and he pointed as he opened his mouth to speak.

  But Kinealy’s fist got there first, knocking the words back into his throat as the man stumbled into the two behind him.

  The four pounced on the lead coffin and almost tore down the door frame getting into the alley all at once with the body.

  The untethered horses shied sideways as they came bursting out.

  McGuinn’s neglected pants immediately obeyed the law of gravity, dropped to his knees, and tripped the big man. He pitched hard against a rear wagon wheel, his crushed bowler rolling away on the cobblestones. When he fell, the other three nearly dropped the lead box, but barely managed to get one end of it onto the tailgate. Corbett had gotten to his feet, his arms still bound to his sides. But they slammed the coffin up into the wagon box, cutting his legs from under him. He fell, face first, onto the coffin.

  Heedless of the shouting as two men appeared at the alley door, Kinealy sprang to the driver’s seat and grabbed a handful of reins.

  “Hyah!”

  The horses jumped when the lines popped across their backs, and it was all Packard could do to keep one knee and one hand on the tailgate as the wagon lurched forward. Mullins and McGuinn had to run, and finally caught up when Kinealy slowed to make the turn out of the alley some fifty yards away.

  “Wait a damn’ minute!” a hatless McGuinn panted, grabbing for the wagon with one hand while holding his pants with the other.

  As they turned the corner, Packard caught a last glimpse of the revelers in the alley behind, one of them holding a lighted lamp.

  Packard thought they were all in a state of shock because nobody even questioned why Kinealy was driving in the wrong direction — north — out of town. The iron shoes of the horses rang on the cobblestones as they fled. Several blocks away they hit a dirt street, and Kinealy finally turned the team west, and shortly the last few darkened houses of Springfield were left behind. He urged the team to a brisk trot, and nobody spoke for a good thirty minutes.

  McGuinn unbound Corbett’s arms and helped him stand up so he could urinate over the side of the moving wagon. After the preacher restored circulation to his limbs, McGuinn tied the captive’s arms behind him, this time using Corbett’s belt and retrieving his suspenders. He even removed the gag until Corbett became abusive again, and then replaced it to give their ears a rest.

  “Boss, I think we better be lookin’ for a good place to dump this guy,” McGuinn said, jerking a thumb at Corbett. “Otherwise, we can add kidnapping to our problems.”

  “In for a penny, in for a buck,” Kinealy replied, a fit of shivering shaking his hunched frame.

  Packard looked over at him. He had removed his hat and coat in the storeroom and was driving through the cold night in his shirt sleeves.

  “Packard t-take the lines,” he finally stammered, drawing the team to a walk. “I’ve got to climb in back and warm up.”

  “What time is it?” Packard asked, sliding over and accepting the reins.

  “Don’t know,” Kinealy said as he crawled over the seat and huddled down in what remained of the hay. “Just keep ’em pointed west down this road. We should be there in time.”

  Packard whipped the Morgans to a gallop for a brief run, then settled them back to a trot. They saw no other travelers on the road, for which Packard was grateful. He wondered what Kinealy planned to do about getting the lead coffin aboard the train since they had no container to disguise it. And a blind man couldn’t fail to recognize the shape as a coffin.

  But he didn’t wonder for long. That wasn’t his problem. Maybe the happenstance of the uninvited saloon visitors would yet prove the undoing of this plot. He shook his head in amazement. This gang had operated more like a bunch of bumbling fools than a group of professional criminals. But in spite of that, everything so far had somehow fallen into place. It was almost as if some higher power was looking after them.

  The road was relatively level, and the team had settled into a ground-eating pace. As the moon was declining, Packard spotted a row of trees that signaled a meandering stream.
Guiding the horses carefully off the road and down through the black shadows, he found a low bank with firm footing so the team could drink.

  They all got down to stretch. Their breath was steam in the flare of a match as Kinealy checked his watch.

  “Eleven twenty-five,” he announced. “We’re making good time. We should be there with time to spare.”

  McGuinn got Corbett out of the wagon and loosened his bonds so he could flex his stiff arms.

  “If you keep your mouth shut, I’ll take that gag out,” McGuinn said.

  Corbett nodded, so the boxer removed the soggy bandanna. The unbalanced preacher seemed to have lost his zest for berating them, or else he just didn’t want to be gagged or punched by McGuinn again. Crazy he might be, but stupid he wasn’t. Corbett leaned his forearms against the side of the wagon and wearily rested his forehead on them. The rest of the men walked a few steps away, so they could talk sotto voce among themselves.

  “Reckon this would be a good place to leave him?” McGuinn asked. “We’re far enough from town so he can’t do us any harm”

  After taking a drink from the stream, Kinealy was pacing up and down, slapping his arms to restore some circulation.

  “No. There are a few farm houses in this area. If he walks to one of them, someone could drive him to town and give the alarm.”

  “Hell, those guys at the tomb have probably already sounded the alarm,” McGuinn grunted. “What difference does it make?”

  “The difference,” Kinealy replied slowly, as if his jaw was frozen, “is that no one, so far, knows what direction we went. Even those men at the saloon saw me turn north toward Chicago. We have to keep them off our track for as long as possible if we hope to make Saint Joe.”

  They fell silent for a few seconds with their own thoughts. It was true they had seen no one after they had turned west.

  “Wonder how those men at the tomb knew we would be there?” Kinealy said thoughtfully as he turned to look in Mullins’s direction.

  “Hell, it wasn’t me, boss!” Mullins objected loudly. “I didn’t say a damn’ word to anybody!”

  “Well, it’s mighty funny they were there waiting for us,” Big Jim continued.

  “Well, I didn’t leak nothing about it,” Mullins said in an injured tone. “I learned my lesson last time.”

  Kinealy let it drop. In the uneasy silence that followed, Packard hoped the big boss wasn’t beginning to suspect him, as the most recent addition to this gang.

  Finally Kinealy said: “Let’s move out. The team has rested and watered enough.”

  Another fifteen uneventful miles brought them to the deserted freight dépôt. It was nearly one o’clock in the morning. The wind had ceased some time earlier, and a hard frost was forming and seeping into Packard’s bones. But he forced himself to ignore the weather as Kinealy drew them all out of earshot of Corbett who still sat, bound and again gagged, in the wagon.

  “O K, here’s the new plan,” Kinealy said, snapping a lucifer to the bull’s-eye lantern, and then setting it on the wooden platform. He was once more the confident commander of the operation. “That train should pull in here to water and pick up freight within fifteen minutes. We’ll wrap that coffin as tightly as we can with that canvas and tie it up good. From now on, I will be Doctor Lyle Desmond, Professor of Antiquities, Harvard University. I am transporting this rare and valuable Egyptian mummy to an exhibition in San Francisco. We missed our train in Chicago, and, in order to keep to our schedule, we hired a hack to bring us here. Hmm...no, that won’t work. Here it is...we’ve heard rumors of thieves plotting to steal this valuable relic. So, in order to throw them off, we left the train in Chicago and hired a series of hacks to bring us to Springfield and to this out-of-the-way freight dépôt. You men are my hired guards and escorts.”

  He reeled off this new scenario as if he were a director, revising the scene of a play.

  “That should work,” Packard said, feeling a bit easier about what was coming. “What are you going to use for identification and documentation?”

  “The conductor and express messenger won’t need that as long as we’re traveling with the box. I’ll pay for everything in cash. You’ve got to go along with me. Remember, my name is Doctor Desmond. Just take my cue and let me do most of the talking. Act confident enough, you can bluff your way through anything.”

  If Big Jim Kinealy had ever uttered a truth, this was it. Any ordinary man would have been quaking like an aspen leaf at the prospect of what he was about to face. That’s probably what had made Kinealy a successful counterfeiter — intelligence, careful planning, and, above all, audacity. He was a living example of an old Roman proverb Packard suddenly recalled from his schoolteaching days — Fortuna audaces iuvat — Fortune favors the bold.

  “Sounds good, boss,” McGuinn said. “But how do we explain him?” He nodded at Corbett.

  “We won’t have to. This is where we part company with the fire and brimstone man. Mullins, you’re now in charge of the wagon and team and our prisoner. Drive him as far as you can before daylight. Then turn him loose somewhere out in the country. Make sure he’s not close to any farm houses or towns. I’d suggest you head southwest from here. Got that?”

  “Yes. Then what?”

  “Go a few more miles and sell the team and wagon wherever you can. Maybe Saint Louis, if you can make it that far before the horses give out. Then disappear. I’ll contact you in the usual way as soon as this is over, and we have the ransom.”

  “Got it,” Mullins nodded, his chest expanding, obviously pleased to be entrusted with so important a mission. Packard thought Mullins was also relieved that he wouldn’t have the perilous task of riding the train with Lincoln’s body.

  “Here’s a hundred dollars for expenses. And that doesn’t mean you buy any liquor with it. Now, get going before the train gets here. That lunatic might later guess which way we went, but....”

  “Hell, boss, he explodes in more directions than a mortar shell. Nobody’s going to listen to any babbling about us stealing a body or kidnapping him,” Mullins said effusively, glancing back at the darkened wagon where Corbett was sitting up, his back braced against the coffin. “They’ll think he’s just reliving the war, or holding a revival meeting.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Kinealy said.

  “He’s a wanderer, probably without any family,” Packard added. “There shouldn’t be anyone to report him missing.”

  “O K, let’s do it,” Kinealy said, rubbing his cold hands together. “Lend me your coat, McGuinn. I’ve got to look a little more like a real professor.” Then he dug out a pocket comb and ran it through his wavy, graying hair, relining the middle part.

  As they lashed the tan canvas tightly around the lead coffin, and lifted it down to the freight platform by the light of the bull’s-eye lantern, Packard was struck by how much the shape of the bundle actually did resemble a mummy case.

  Mullins then climbed to the wagon seat and, with a few parting warnings from Kinealy, rumbled away into the darkness, carrying the bound and gagged Corbett.

  They’d been gone less than five minutes when the mournful wail of a steam whistle sounded in the distance — the midnight express, blowing for a crossing about a mile away. Shortly, the weak beam of a big oil headlamp came swinging through the trees as the locomotive rounded a curve, and the train began to slow for the water tank.

  Kinealy shrugged his shoulders, then buttoned McGuinn’s tweed jacket. “O K, boys, get ready.” He smoothed his mustache with one hand. “The curtain is about to go up on the Professor Lyle Desmond show.”

  Chapter Eight

  The big drive wheels of the American locomotive ground slowly to a halt within a few yards of them, a cloud of steam hissing from the escape valves. By the light of their lantern, Packard read Toledo, Wabash & Western in gold letters on the side of the tender.

  Two brakemen clambered atop the train to pull down the counterbalanced spout from the water tank as the locomotive lay quietly pa
nting like some great, thirsty, black beast. The train was composed of an engine, tender, Wells Fargo freight and mail car, two passenger coaches, and a caboose. At this time of night, the lamps in the day coaches had been turned down so they were barely illuminating the square windows.

  Hardly had the train stopped rolling than a black-coated conductor was on the ground, lantern in hand and thumping a fist on the door of the mail car. As they watched from the platform, the big door was slid open from the inside, and the messenger jumped down. There was a mumbled exchange, then the two came forward.

  “What have we got here?” the conductor asked as the messenger went on past and jangled a ring of keys by the door of the unattended freight shed.

  “Professor Lyle Desmond,” Kinealy said, drawing himself up to his full height. “These are my two associates. I would like to put this box aboard your train and accompany it as far as you go. I believe your line runs to Hannibal, Missouri?”

  “That’s right,” the conductor said, eyeing them rather warily. “What’s in the box?”

  Kinealy picked up their bull’s eye lantern and flashed it quickly over the canvas-wrapped coffin.

  “Oh, a dead body?”

  “Not just a dead body, sir...a rare and valuable archaeological treasure...an ancient Egyptian case containing the mummified remains of one of the greatest of the Pharaohs...Rameses the Second.”

  “O K, O K.” The conductor thrust out his hand. “Lemme see the papers on it.”

  “Papers?

  “Bill of lading. Some kind of receipt.”

  “Well, I’m afraid we have a problem there.”

  Kinealy backed water with such convincing hesitation that Packard was almost tempted to believe what he said next. He plunged into the story he had just concocted about a gang of thieves trying to steal this prize to sell it to the highest bidder. He lamented that they had been forced to abandon the train along with their luggage containing all their documents in Chicago to throw the robbers off their trail. The newly created Dr. Desmond confided that they were on a tight schedule to get to the exhibition in San Francisco. It was an acting job worthy of Edwin Booth.