‘No, it never is,’ Paul sneered, ‘for those who have none.’
‘Stop this, Maxwell!’ David Strong said, coming across towards his sons. ‘Tell your boys to go home, and I’ll do the same. That’ll be the end of it, as far as we are concerned. ‘
‘No!’ Paul Maxwell shouted. ‘I’m going to kill this damned nigger-lover! That’ll be one less to kill when we go to war with the bastards!’ He bent down and picked up Jed’s glove, then flung it into Jed’s face. The silence around them was complete. People stood watching, as if the whole thing was a tableau and they wax dummies.
‘All right, Maxwell,’ Jed said. ‘Name the time and the place!’
‘No, Jed,’ he heard his father say softly. He shook his head: no.
‘Old Ford Crossroads!’ Paul Maxwell said. ‘Saturday at sunup.’ He turned to his brother. ‘You’ll act for me, David?’
‘I will, and gladly,’ David responded.
‘And you for me, Andrew?’ Jed said, turning to his brother.
‘No, Jed,’ Andrew replied. ‘I won’t be a party to this.’
‘Don’t you worry none, cousin,’ Travis Strong said. ‘I’ll go you. Fight the sumbitches m’self, if you’d rather!’ He stepped forward to face the Maxwell boys, the hellish light in his eyes daring them to take offence at his words. He saw David Maxwell react and saw Travis smile his wicked smile as he did.
‘You have the choice of weapons, Maxwell,’ Jed said. ‘What is it to be?’
Paul Maxwell smiled, triumph in his eyes. He was one of the best shots in Culpeper County and everyone watching knew it.
‘Pistols,’ he said. ‘At twenty paces.’
Dawn.
There were wisps of mist between the trees, like ghosts caught unaware by the coming of day. Every sound was magnified by the silence. Moisture dripped from the branches of the trees. Here and there a small bird chirruped sleepily, as though reluctant to awaken. Jed shivered, hoping it was because of the morning chill. Although he was not afraid, he was apprehensive. Life was sweet, and dying over such a triviality would be a pointless way to end it.
On the far side of the clearing in the woods where the roads crossed he could sec Paul Maxwell, his brother David, and Tom Cosgrove, Sally’s brother. Halfway between them and where Jed stood, Dr Michael Webber, family physician and friend of both the Maxwells and the Strongs, stood swathed in a dark cloak, his leather bag on the grass beside him. He looked peevish and out of sorts, like a man asked to participate in tomfoolery before he has had his breakfast.
‘They’re goin’ through with it, then?’ Travis said. There was no regret in his voice: rather, a fierce anticipation, his attitude that of a man who can’t wait for the shooting to start. They watched David Maxwell walk towards them, carrying a heavy wooden pistol case.
‘Maxwell.’
‘Will you choose a weapon?’
David Maxwell opened the mahogany box to reveal a pair of Manton dueling pistols lying on a bed of Irish baize. They were fine weapons, long-barreled and without fancy ornamentation. The metal parts were of blued steel of the highest quality, their origin proclaimed on both lock and barrel.
Travis took one of the pistols out of the case and cocked it, squinting at the frizzen and touch-hole, unlimbering the ramrod and pushing it down the barrel.
‘Who’ll load?’ he asked.
‘I’ll do it myself,’ Jed said.
He took the powder flask and one of the hand-made balls and carefully loaded the pistol. As if my life depended on it, he thought. It was strange how clichés popped into the mind at times of stress: as if their very ordinariness might provide comfort. Across the clearing, Jed could see Paul Maxwell watching him. He hefted the weapon in his hand. Its feel, the way it came up, its balance was as perfect as any he had ever held. Well, Joseph Manton of Dover Street, London, I wonder whether, when you made these pistols in 1783, you had any idea that three-quarters of a century later two men would meet in a forest glade in Virginia to kill each other with them.
‘Gentlemen!’ he heard David Maxwell say. ‘Are you ready?’
Travis looked at him and Jed nodded. ‘Ready,’ Travis said.
‘Here, too,’ Paul Maxwell called.
‘Very well,’ David said. He was trying very hard not to appear self-important, but unsuccessfully. He looked as if he might burst with it, Jed thought. ‘You will stand back to back. At my command, you will take ten paces forward. You will not turn, nor will you fire, until I say that you may do so. On my command you will turn and fire. If either man turns before the command, Tom will shoot him.’ He nodded towards Cosgrove, who held a musket at port. Cosgrove nodded grimly.
‘Is that all understood?’ David Maxwell asked.
‘Of course,’ his brother replied.
‘Paul,’ Jed said. ‘It’s not too late to call this off.’
‘You turnin’ yeller like your brother, Strong?’
‘No,’ Jed said, reining in his temper.
‘You think throwin’ your glove in a man’s face ain’t a matter of honor, that it?’
‘It was done in the heat of the moment, Paul,’ Jed said. ‘There’s no need of a killing over it.’
‘I’d say otherwise, sir,’ Paul sneered. ‘And I intend to be satisfied.’
Jed shrugged. He did not feel angry any more. A little sad, perhaps, that so petty a squabble should have escalated to this. A little sad about the stupidity of it.
‘Very well,’ he said.
They took their places. He could feel the heat of Paul Maxwell’s body through the loose coat he was wearing. The birds were all awake now, singing to the brightening sun as if this was the only day they would ever have to do it. Somewhere he heard a skylark. Death sat in the shadows between the trees, waiting.
‘One! Two! Three! Four! Five! Six! Seven! Eight! Nine! Ten!’ He took the steps automatically in time with David Maxwell’s voice, thinking about the Indians Andrew had once seen, singing about it being a good day to die. The gun butt felt slightly slick in his hand; he knew his palm must be sweating.
‘Turn!’
David Maxwell’s face was set, closed down, as though some furious anger was coursing through him. Paul Maxwell looked calm, relaxed, confident. How near we are to each other! Jed thought.
‘Fire!’ David Maxwell shouted, and even as his lips framed the word his brother was raising the pistol, taking no time to aim. Jed felt a solid blow on his left side, a sharp pain. He staggered slightly as the crack of Paul Maxwell’s pistol laid a flat, undramatic sound across the leafy glade which for a moment stilled the birdsong. A tendril of gunsmoke drifted from right to left, dispersing in the bright, green tracery of oak leaves. Paul Maxwell stood with the pistol held down at his side.
‘Good God, have I missed him?’ he said. His chin came up defiantly. ‘Well?’ he shouted.
Jed raised the pistol. He saw Dr Webber, off to one side, lift a hand as though he might say something. Jed looked down the long octagonal barrel of the pistol. Paul Maxwell glared back at him. Kill him, something said, go ahead and kill him. He pointed the pistol at the ground and fired it. The bullet kicked up a few leaves and smoke writhed around his legs.
‘Damn you, Strong!’ Paul Maxwell screeched, as if all the tension inside him had been suddenly released. ‘Why didn’t you fire at me, you craven bastard?’
‘Death will find you soon enough, Paul,’ Jed said quietly. ‘He needs no help from me.’
‘You—’
‘Be still, sir!’
The great voice was like a lion’s roar, and every man in that clearing turned to face him as Edward Maxwell came through the trees and into the open. His brows were knotted together in anger, and his hand clenched and unclenched, as though wanting to strike something. Tall as Paul Maxwell was, his father made him look reedy and weak.
‘You’ve taken your shot, sir, and had your satisfaction!’ Edward Maxwell roared. ‘It’s only by the grace of God you’re not lying dead on the ground. I will not hear you curse the man who
spared your worthless life!’
He looked towards Jed, who still had the pistol in his hand. He extended a hand and Jed nodded, laying the weapon in it. Without taking his eyes off Jed, Edward Maxwell extended his other hand and Paul put the other gun into it, retreating almost shyly like an acolyte in a temple.
‘I cannot find it in me to thank you, Jedediah,’ Edward Maxwell said.
‘There’s no need,’ Jed said. He felt strange, lightheaded. He wondered where Paul Maxwell’s bullet had hit him.
‘That’s to the good,’ Maxwell said. ‘Because by what has happened here today your family and mine are declared enemies. If God provides the moment, in business or in battle, we will destroy you. Understand me? Destroy you!’
‘As you see, sir,’ Jed said. ‘We are not so easily destroyed.’
Edward Maxwell glared at him for a moment as though there was more he wanted to say. Then he turned towards his sons, eyes burning.
‘Get on your horses!’ he said. The roar had gone from his voice now. He spoke softly, but his very gentleness seemed to alarm them more than his shouted anger. They literally recoiled from his glance and hurried to do his bidding. They mounted up, and with drumming hoofs muffled by the centuries old loam of the forest, rode away from the clearing and out of sight.
Then and only then did Jed sink to one knee. With an exclamation of surprise, Dr Webber hurried across to him.
‘You’re hit, Jed?’ he said, concern in his voice.
‘I think so,’ Jed said. ‘Here, in the side.’
He lifted his coat. The left side of his body was wet with blood and when he inhaled there was a sharp, piercing pain in his side. He winced as the doctor cut away his shirt and gently palpated his rib cage.
‘You’re a fool for luck, Jedediah Strong,’ he said. ‘The ball glanced off your rib and nothing more. Maybe a fracture, but that’s all. That damned floppy coat of yours must have taken the speed out of the ball. I’ll strap it up. You come in and see me tomorrow.’
He went about his work deftly and precisely. He was a good doctor. He always said he could tell what was amiss with most people the minute they walked into his surgery to talk to him, and he was rarely wrong.
Jed and Travis rode slowly back towards Washington Farm. Jed’s feeling of light-headedness had passed; the wound in his side merely throbbed dully, like a toothache. He felt cast down; what before had been dislike between two families was now hatred and to no point.
‘That there old Maxwell, he’s a mean sumbitch an’ no mistake,’ Travis observed. ‘He was mad enough to bite a chunk out of a fencepost.’
‘You think he meant what he said, then?’
‘Nary a doubt o’ that, Jed,’ Travis replied. ‘You better just make sure you never give him any opportunity to do you harm.’
‘I can’t understand it,’ Jed said.
‘Hell, of course you can!’ Travis said. ‘You shamed his son. That’s the same as shamin’ the old man hisself. Worse, maybe.’
‘You think he’d rather I shot Paul?’
‘I reckon,’ Travis said.
‘But that would have been pointless,’ Jed said. ‘Stupid.’
‘You get an old turkey like that, all puffed up with pride and damn all else, he don’t see things the same way you an’ me might.’
‘Pride,’ Jed sighed. ‘Stupid, mule-headed pride.’
‘What’s that?’ Travis said, with that wolf s grin he had. He was trying to make Jed feel better, and Jed smiled to show his appreciation. This damned shooting-match would be the talk of the county by nightfall. It would cast a shadow across the whole holiday.
‘Thank the Lord I’m going to Texas,’ he said. He had received confirmation of his new posting just before leaving on furlough. He had applied to serve under Colonel Robert E. Lee, in command of the Military District of Texas.
‘Where they sendin’ you, Jed?’ Travis asked.
‘San Antonio,’ Jed replied. ‘Why?’
‘Well,’ Travis said, shrugging and grinning at the same time. ‘I might just come on down there with you.’
‘What the devil for?’ Jed frowned.
‘Shoot, Jed,’ Travis grinned. ‘It’s there, ain’t it?’
The army day began at five-thirty.
Bugles blared. Tired men, hung-over men, men with aching joints and uneasy bellies, old sweats with the yellow hash marks of long service on their sleeves, cocky kids on their first tour, fell unarmed and dismounted into ragged lines as the sergeants called the rolls. ‘Armstrong!’
‘Yo!’
‘Aspinall!’
‘Yo!’
Texas mornings were usually pleasantly cool and sometimes there was a mist along the banks of the San Antonio River that diffused the strengthening sunlight. Each morning, the same routine, the sergeants doing their about-face to salute the officer, shouting the same time-honored assurance that all the men were present and accounted for.
Routine: it was their way of imposing order upon an indifferent world. All army posts observed the same routines. That way, no matter where a soldier found himself, he could fit in immediately. Up at sunrise, make your bed, sweep your quarters, set everything in order for inspection twenty-five minutes after reveille. After breakfast, clean your musket, polish your brasses, brush your clothing ready for parade at nine to watch the colors being raised and hear the national anthem. At nine the cavalry buglers blew drill call. They drilled for one and a half hours every day, six days a week. Half an hour after drill finished, the bugles sounded mess call.
The afternoon was utilized for fatigues: there was never any end to those. Police the fort, shoe the horses, fix the chimneys, mow the grass, repair boots, saw and plane the lumber, burn the debris. Roll on sunset, they used to say. Roll on, retreat, when the colors came down the pole to the sad, sweet accompaniment of the bugles blowing, tattoo and roll-call, then taps sounding on the drums at nine-thirty. Every day the same, monotonous yet reassuring, repetitive and necessary, for without the routine there would be nothing but barrack room poker or the Mex women in Dobie Town.
September, October: the seasons were awry this far south. You looked for a change in the weather, the three-day blow that stripped the leaves from the trees up North at about the same time each year. In Texas it never came. Summer ended: winter began. In the summer, although it might get very cold at night, the sun shone relentlessly by day until you cursed it and wished for any kind of change. Then, when the rains came and turned the streets of San Antonio into a quagmire of red mud, you longed for the dry heat of the summer mornings.
Headquarters at San Antonio of the Military District of Texas was a two-story building at the corner of Houston and St Mary’s streets, just four blocks from the Alamo. It was to this building, and to the office of Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee, commanding, that Lieu tenant Jedediah Strong had reported when he arrived in Texas on the first day of May in 1860. Now, in late October, the place was as familiar to him as had been his room at the Military Academy.
When he got to headquarters, he found his friend, Lieutenant Jonah Harvey, waiting nervously in the commandant’s anteroom. The adjutant bade Jed take a seat: the colonel would be with them directly, he said.
‘What’s up, Jonah?’ Jed muttered.
‘Search me,’ Jonah said. He was tall and stoop shouldered, and his dark hair was already receding. He had a prominent, beaky nose, and deep-set brown eyes with dark shadows beneath them. Before he could speak again, the door of Lee’s office opened. They came to attention immediately: Lee tolerated no sloppiness in his command.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said. ‘Please come in.’
At fifty-three, Robert Edward Lee was still a handsome man, his dark hair and moustache only faintly touched by the gray to come. Jed knew Lee’s history as well as his own, for Lee had been superintendent at West Point when Jed was there. The son of a famous Revolutionary War cavalry officer, member of a Virginia family long distinguished in public and military life, Lee had been a succes
sful army engineer for fifteen years prior to the Mexican War, in which he served with distinction under Winfield Scott. Lee had left West Point the year after Jed’s graduation to become Lieutenant-Colonel of the Second Cavalry at Jefferson Barracks in Missouri, later moving to Texas. In his company Jed felt the calm assurance that any soldier feels who knows he has a good commander. He had sensed it as a cadet at West Point; tasted it for the first time during the siege of the engine-house at Harper’s Ferry in which John Brown and his followers had barricaded themselves; and experienced it a dozen times more since his arrival in Texas. If Lee had told Jed to ride into the jaws of Hell itself, Jed would have done it without question. Lee was a soldier’s soldier. Jed could think of no one he would rather emulate, no one whose approbation he valued more.
‘Well, gentlemen, I think I’ve a little excitement for you,’ Lee said, sitting down behind his desk. There was no litter. He was a methodical and ordered man who abhorred clutter, deeming it the mark of an undisciplined mind. ‘That damned terrorist El Gato is up to his tricks again down Brownsville way.’
El Gato! The army had tried a dozen times to put an end to the terror-raids of the Mexican bandit they called ‘The Cat’. His base was somewhere south of the border. Every few months he led his carrion crew on a sickle-shaped raid into Texas, plundering farms, stealing stock, raping and killing. More than once, his bandidos had ambushed cavalry patrols and cut them to ribbons. The moment a force of any size appeared, El Gato retreated across the border to safety: the army could not cross without creating an international incident.
‘I would like you, Lieutenant Strong, with Lieutenant Harvey as second-in-command, to mount two columns of cavalry and proceed immediately to Ringgold Barracks, there to rendezvous with Colonel John Gallehawk of the Texas Rangers. You will place your command at his disposal. El Gato and his thugs have invaded the town of Brownsville, burned buildings in the town and raped several Mexican women. They have sequestered old Fort Brown and defy anyone to get them out.’ He leaned forward, arms on the desk, and looked them both straight in the eye. ‘I want that renegade, gentlemen. I want him so badly that it makes my teeth ache to think about it. And I am looking to you both to see that he is caught and, if possible, hanged from a tall tree. If,’ he added with a wry smile, ‘you can find one.’
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