American Dreams Trilogy

by Michael Phillips

  They reached the Brown house.

  “What is this?” said Deanna as they stopped.

  “This is the house where the Indian Mr. Brown lived. I like to come up here whenever I can. I’m certain there is some mystery about this place I am going to discover eventually. Maybe it’s silly, but whenever I come up here I feel like I am in a story whose ending I don’t know yet. There’s something… I don’t know… spooky and yet exciting about it.”

  Deanna laughed. “You’re braver than I am,” she said. “I would never come out here alone!”

  “Let me show you something—come look at the carvings on this tree.

  They dismounted, tied the horses, and Cherity led the way to the tree where she had seen the strange markings.

  “What do you think it is?” asked Deanna.

  “I don’t know, but doesn’t it look like some secret code or something?”

  “I think I saw something like that carved on a rock outside the cave where we stayed when we got here.”

  “You did?” exclaimed Cherity. “Let’s go—I want to see it!”

  They ran back to their horses, and were soon off in the direction of the cave, which was about half a mile from the Brown house.

  They reached it and again dismounted.

  “Look, it’s right over here,” said Deanna excitedly. She led Cherity to the boulder beside the entrance to the cave. On one side of the rock they could faintly make out what looked to be lines and dots that had been hammered or scraped onto it. Cherity could not imagine that she had never noticed them before. As she knelt down to look at the markings more carefully, all at once she heard Deanna cry out.

  She glanced up just in time to see her disappear inside the cave.

  “Deanna…,” she called.

  “Cherity… Cherity, help!” screamed Deanna, her voice echoing from inside the cave. “A man’s got me!”

  A chill swept through Cherity as she jumped to her feet. Elias Slade!

  Suspecting the worst, she pulled the pistol from the holster strapped to her waist, and, her knees trembling, crept toward the mouth of the cave. From inside she heard sounds of scuffling and more muffled cries for help.

  In the few seconds she had to prepare herself, a hundred things flashed through her mind. If it was Elias Slade, there was little doubt he could overpower and rape them both easily. The only way she had escaped his clutches before was by surprising him. But if he had been watching them from the cave, she would not be able to surprise him now. How could she, at barely more than five feet and a hundred pounds, get Deanna away from him?

  All this raced through her brain in a second or two. She had to act fast. From the sounds of the scuffling, whoever it was had been dragging Deanna inside. He would expect her to peer in cautiously and slowly. So she would do the opposite!

  Cherity dashed into the darkness, glancing frantically about as she ran.

  “Cherity!” shrieked Deanna.

  Cherity saw two sets of eyes glistening toward her from the depths of the blackness reflecting the light of the cave’s mouth. She ran inside as far as she dared, then quickly hugged the cave wall as far from Slade and Deanna as she could get. Sight of their eyes glimmering in the dark gave her an idea. She closed her own eyes tight, and tried silently to catch her breath.

  With her eyes closed, hopefully Slade could not see her. She waited as long as she dared, allowing her eyes to accustom themselves to the darkness, then opened them a slit. She could just barely make out two forms on the opposite side and about ten feet deeper into the interior of the cave. Again she shut her eyes.

  If she could just work her way behind them!

  Carefully Cherity set the gun down on the ground and pulled off one boot, then the other. Retrieving the gun with her right hand, and feeling about with her left so that she wouldn’t clunk her head on the roof of the cave, and opening her eyes just a slit to get her bearings, she crept on her toes back deeper and deeper into the darkness.

  “Where you be, w’ite girl?” called Slade. His voice was so close she nearly leapt into the air in fright. “Tell me where you is an’ I won’t hurt dis girl.”

  Cherity remained silent. She crept a few more steps. She was behind them now. She could see their outlines against the light of the cave opening in the distance.

  “Don’t git me angry, w’ite girl! Or else I’s gwine hab—”

  “I am right next to you,” said Cherity, jabbing the pistol hard into his huge back. “And this is Mr. Davidson’s gun. I’m not very good with it, so you probably shouldn’t frighten me or I might pull the trigger. Now let her go.”

  Slade could hardly believe that the little girl would have a gun. But it did feel like steel in his back and he couldn’t take any chances. He relaxed his grip. Deanna wriggled free.

  “Run, Deanna!” cried Cherity, “Get out of here!”

  The instant his hands were free, Slade swung behind him with a mighty blow intended to whack Cherity to the ground. But she ducked and was shorter than he had anticipated. His powerful arm came crashing against the jagged rocks of the cave wall.

  He exploded in a fury of pain, swore violently, then grappled furiously in the darkness for Cherity whom he now intended to kill not rape.

  But the instant he made his move, she ducked past him and bolted after Deanna for the cave mouth, pausing only long enough to turn and fire three or four quick shots inside, aiming low and intending only to slow Slade up if he tried to follow them. Another great roar echoing from inside made her wonder if she had accidently hit him. But the charging sound of footsteps assured her that at least he was still alive.

  They raced to their horses, Cherity in her stocking feet, and were soon on their way back to Greenwood as quickly as Deanna was ready to ride.

  The moment Richmond heard of the incident, he went to his office, sat down at his desk, and wrote a brief note addressed to his neighbor:

  Dear Denton,

  There has been another dangerous incident involving your man Elias Slade. I am sorry, but this is no longer a request. I am graciously demanding that you get rid of him or I will take action.

  Richmond Davidson.

  Richard Fitzpatrick was away from home when Cecil Hirsch came to see Veronica with a new assignment. Trying to remain calm, she listened and nodded quietly. Cecil could tell some change had taken place in her, but could not quite put his finger on it.

  Ten minutes after he was gone, Veronica left for the telegraph office to notify Seth.

  She heard back from him that same day when to expect him.

  Seth arrived in the nation’s capital, checked into a hotel, then sought a hansom cab to take him to the address Veronica had given him. Veronica was anxiously waiting for him.

  “Oh, Seth, I am so glad you’re here!” she said. “Cecil will be back tomorrow. I am supposed to leave for Columbia two days after that. What should I do?”

  Seth sat down at the kitchen table while Veronica prepared a pot of tea.

  “Have you managed to find out the names of any of Hirsch’s contacts?” asked Seth.

  “Not yet. I asked him who he worked for but he looked at me a little angrily and asked why I wanted to know.”

  Seth nodded. “My editor has a plan,” he said, “that might get you out of trouble and break up Hirsch’s spy network. It might be frightening for you. If Hirsch finds out what we’re up to he will probably disappear. Then for all we know he might turn you in. It will also mean a trip to Boston.”

  “Boston… why?”

  “Mr. McClarin wants to see the documents you are supposed to deliver.”

  “But I am supposed to take them to Columbia. If the seal is broken—”

  “Don’t worry, he can take care of that. But we will have to act fast. McClarin wants us to leave for Boston as soon as possible after you get the documents from Hirsch. He will arrange to replace the documents with fake ones so that no important information will be passed to the Confederacy. Then you will deliver the fake docume
nts. We will keep the real ones to use as evidence against Hirsch, along with anything you are to bring back to him.”

  Thirty-Nine

  Prowling Bear’s son Black Wolf listened to all his father told him, and vowed to complete what was left undone.

  At twelve, he had gone out into the hills alone and, in a ceremony meaningless to any but himself, had taken a knife and cut a slit in the third finger of his left hand until his blood dripped onto the earth. He looked to the heavens, shouted a bloodcurdling cry, and in that moment vowed never to forget the Cherokee blood law. He himself would hunt out the traitors who sold their lands, even from long ago, and spill their blood on this dry evil ground as his own had been this day. If Stand Watie, Boudinot’s brother, still lived when he reached his own manhood, Black Wolf promised himself that he would kill him, just as his father had killed his brother. He would root out others as well—anyone who had participated in the treachery… man, woman, child, son, daughter, or even grandson or granddaughter—anyone who, even if but by blood, had participated.

  Besides the Watie brothers and the Ridges, he had heard his father speak also of one of his own cousins from many years before, a son of Nakey Canoe, daughter of the great warrior Dragging Canoe, who had also sold his birthright. His house had been burned and his family killed. But there were others, his father said, even some living among them, whose treachery had been forgotten, those who had taken the white man’s money and hid it for their own gain. There were still others who had taken the gold of the Cherokee and abandoned the tribe, to live in luxury among the white man. Some had returned in secret, their betrayal hidden from view.

  The influence from all these forms of betrayal was that now the whole tribe looked like whites, acted like whites, talked like whites. It rested with those such as himself to bring back the former glory of their proud nation. Both leaders, John Ross and Stand Watie, in the mind of Black Wolf, were but weak agents of white culture. They dressed like white men and spoke the white man’s tongue. They had done nothing to reestablish the birthright of the Cherokee.

  “Tell me again of the old times, Papa,” said the eager young Black Wolf over and over in the years of his boyhood. The question and his father’s answers were always in the Cherokee tongue, for his father refused to speak any other. On each occasion a different recollection added fuel to nurture the smoldering embers of generational hatred in the boy’s soul.

  “It was a dark night,” replied his father to the question one night as he stared into the fire and his mind drifted back even more distantly into his past than usual, all the way back to his own youth when he himself was a young man. “Rumors had been spreading for days that blood money had changed hands with the white man. The elders of the tribe did not at first know who was the latest to commit the treachery. Then suddenly on this night my father burst into our hut with passion in his voice. It is Nakey Canoe’s own son! he cried. The traitor is of my own clan. But he will not live to see the sun! My father grabbed a few things and again disappeared. My soul was in turmoil,” Prowling Bear went on. “I was seized with fear at the sound of my father’s voice with the threat of death in his tone. I ran after him and followed into the night. I saw bright flames rising in the sky. I knew what it meant, that the blood law had been avenged. Even those of one’s own clan could not escape it. Then I saw a figure running through the darkness. I waited as the runner passed close to me. It was a boy… my own younger cousin fleeing for his life! Some impulse made me follow him. What I later heard I dared not tell my father for fear of what might happen to me for allowing him, even though but a boy, to escape. I kept the words of that night buried in my soul, terrified to speak them… until now.”

  “What did you hear, Papa?” asked Black Wolf, his eyes wide with fearful curiosity.

  “I heard the man tell my cousin, ‘Come, Swift Horse, we must flee… we must flee in the night, not to return until our posterity can right the evil of this terrible deed. They of our own tribe have turned against us….’”

  Prowling Bear fell silent, staring into the embers of the fire. His next words plunged deep into the heart of his son:

  “‘The next generation depends on us,’ the man said. ‘We must take what we have been given… take it away and hide it and protect it for those who come after.’

  “They took it… stole it that night… stole it to hide it, for they knew they had betrayed Cherokee law.”

  Black Wolf knew that his father spoke of the blood money from the treacherous sale of sacred lands. And as his father never forgot, Black Wolf never forgot.

  “My father thought the whole family killed,” Prowling Bear went on after several minutes. “He always said that none must escape the vengeance of the blood law. But Swift Horse had escaped the vengeance that fell upon his father. Only I knew it. Only I had seen him running from the fire through the night.”

  Who the man was whom he had heard in the shadows, Prowling Bear never knew. As he grew, he suspected another of Swift Water’s clan of helping them, for he had seen the two talking together as the house burned.

  “And I knew,” he went on, “that if my father had been unafraid to punish one of his own clan for betrayal, neither could I fear to exact the same punishment on the son. Only I knew that the vengeance of that night was not complete. I knew I must wait and watch. And when they returned, what they had stolen must be returned and retribution exacted upon them.”

  With many such stories Prowling Bear filled Black Wolf’s impressionable boy’s mind—mingling legend and hearsay with fact and exaggeration and outright untruth. By the time Black Wolf was ten, the requirement of the blood law had deeply penetrated as an obsession into his consciousness. It was not only the white man who was his enemy but those of his own tribe, even his own clan, who were traitors against their heritage, those who had sold their land and had given themselves to the white man’s ways.

  Throughout the rest of his life, fiery images of retribution and violence filled the soul of Black Wolf son of Prowling Bear and turned his heart toward darkness. Nor did he forget the rumors of those who had escaped, cowards fleeing in the night, fleeing with gold gained from selling their lands, and later gold stolen from the Cherokee caves. Whenever and wherever a son or even grandson or granddaughter of such a traitor was discovered, one who possessed what belonged to the tribe, he would himself carry out the duty of the ancients which now rested on him.

  As his father had said, he too waited and watched… waited for the moment when vengeance for the past would be demanded.

  His anxiety now redoubled concerning Elias Slade, Richmond at last forbade further rides away from Greenwood until he had the chance to attempt to deal with the matter satisfactorily. The very afternoon he drafted a brief note to Denton Beaumont, it was followed by a more formal letter to the authorities in Richmond.

  Cherity had intended to leave for Boston before now. Her plans, however, had been preempted by Thomas’s sudden appearance. Deanna, however, was anxious to get home, and Cherity knew she could not delay her own plans indefinitely. Time was ticking away, and Greenwood’s future was in jeopardy.

  “Why don’t we go north together?” Cherity suggested to Deanna, “at least as far as Philadelphia. Then you can go home and I will continue on to Boston.”

  Unknown to either of the girls, Richmond and Carolyn had also been talking about accompanying Deanna back to Mount Holly, to ensure her safety but also as an excuse to see her parents again. That would be a reunion, like theirs with Thomas, they did not want to miss!

  And Thomas, when he heard of the plans, was not about to be left behind!

  Thus it was that Richmond, Carolyn, and Cherity, along with Thomas and Deanna, boarded the train together in Dove’s Landing, bound for Washington, then Philadelphia. From there Cherity would continue north, and the three Davidsons would take Deanna the rest of the way to Mount Holly.

  When Cecil Hirsch presented himself at 37 Myrtlebriar Court, Washington D.C. and asked to see Mrs. Fitzpatri
ck he was met by the housekeeper.

  “Are you Mr. Hirsch?” she said.

  “I am,” he replied.

  “Mrs. Fitzpatrick is expecting you,” said the woman. “She is not here but she left something for you. If you will just wait a moment.”

  The woman disappeared inside the house leaving Cecil waiting, a little perturbed, at the door. He did not like surprises, unless he was himself the author of them.

  The housekeeper returned and handed him a letter. He took it brusquely, and began walking away from the house, then unfolded it.

  Dear Cecil,

  I thought it best not to meet at the house. I was afraid Mrs. Netting might be growing suspicious. I will wait for you at Garabaldi’s instead.

  Veronica

  Still annoyed, Hirsch mounted his carriage, flicked the reins, and hastened into the city. The thing made sense, but he still didn’t like Veronica calling the shots.

  He walked into Garabaldi’s Restaurant thirty minutes later and glanced around for Veronica. She was seated in a corner at the far end. Some commotion was under way at one of the tables nearby that appeared to be a wedding party. He noticed a man standing with some contraption on a three-legged device giving directions to the people at the table. One of these new photographers, he thought to himself. But he strode past whatever the festivities and sat down opposite Veronica.

  “What do you mean telling me to come here like this?” he said. “We could just as well have—”

  “I didn’t want to meet at the house,” said Veronica. “I explained that in the note. Besides, I was in the mood for a nice lunch.”

  Before Hirsch could object further, he glanced up to see the owner of the restaurant approaching.

  “Garabaldi…,” nodded Hirsch, betraying a tone of inquiry.

  “Hello, Hirsch,” said Garabaldi, taking a seat beside Hirsch. “What did you want to see me about, Mrs. Fitzpatrick?” he asked.