by Eric Flint
“Two of ’em, I think,” Powers added.
Ray thought he was right. He gauged the course of whoever it was crawling through the grass, maybe forty yards off, and the pace they were making. Another volley went off while he did so. He could hear men shouting and screaming in the distance, but he ignored all that. The bandits who’d been caught in the camp were as good as dead. Taylor wouldn’t be taking any prisoners, given that they’d put up a resistance. Such as it was.
So he and Scott might as well assume that Andrew Clark was one of the two men making their escape. There was no point in doing anything else.
“Fancy or not?” Scott asked.
Damnation, there was a snake in here. Ray could hear it slither.
“Fuck ‘fancy.’ I can run if you can’t.”
He was out of the switchgrass and running toward the quarry not two seconds later. It didn’t occur to him until then that maybe the soldiers off in the distance would take him for a bandit.
But he ignored the risk. The range was long for muskets, and he really hated snakes.
He could hear Scott pounding behind him. As ambushes went, this one was about as crude as you could ask for.
The men in the grass heard them once they were halfway there. They rose up, each holding a pistol.
Sure enough, one of them was Clark. The other was Scott’s erstwhile friend.
“Erstwhile” being the operative term, Ray stopped and shot him when he was ten yards off. The man returned fire—tried to—but his gun didn’t go off.
Ray’s shot hit him somewhere in the ribs, turning him. Scott’s following shot hit him in the upper arm, knocking him down.
They each had two pistols, the second of which they brought to bear on Clark.
“You’re under arrest!” That came from Ray’s partner.
Clark fired his pistol. Scott yelped, clutching the top of his shoulder. Too angry to think straight, he fired back. His returning shot must have come within a hair of Clark’s head, judging from the way the assassin flinched.
“We need him alive!” Ray shouted.
“The bastard hit me! He couldn’t hit Houston right in front of him—but he hit me.”
“So what?” Ray might have had some sympathy, except it was obvious Clark’s bullet hadn’t done more than graze Scott’s shoulder.
The assassin was now trying to reload, not paying any attention to Ray at all.
Ray shook his head. “Andrew Clark, you are one dang fool.” He stepped forward a few quick paces, leaned over far enough to move the grass aside, aimed, and fired.
The shot was perfect, right through the top of Clark’s Blucher half-boots. Probably blew off a couple of toes. He wouldn’t be making any escape, for sure—and he wouldn’t bleed to death, either.
Clark screeched and threw up his hands. The pistol he’d been reloading sailed off somewhere. He stumbled backward and fell on his butt.
Up close, with Clark howling the way he was, Ray could see the scar where Houston had split his lip pretty badly. At least three teeth were missing, too.
No reason not to subtract a few more. Ray kicked him in the face, twice, and then clubbed him with the pistol butt. That ought to do it.
“You stinking bastard!”
Looking over, he saw that Clark’s companion was still alive. In fact, he’d levered himself up on the elbow of his uninjured arm.
Which was his left arm—and he was left-handed. In that position, he couldn’t fight a kitten. The world was full of dang fools.
By then, Scott had retrieved the man’s pistol and was working at it. “Sorry ’bout that, Eddie,” he said, “but ten thousand dollars is ten thousand dollars.”
“You stinking bastard!”
Scott flipped up the frizzen and shook his head. “You got some dew in the primer. You should’ve watched for that, this early in the morning, crawling through grass like you were doing.” He scraped out the powder and reprimed the pistol.
“I’ll kill you, you stinking bastard!”
“Oh, Eddie, that ain’t likely at all.” Scott cocked the pistol and shot the man in the head. At that range he could hardly miss, and he didn’t.
He looked up at Ray and shrugged. “Sorta hated to do that, him being a friend of mine and all. But Eddie always was the unforgiving sort. I don’t feel like having to look over my shoulder all the time, the next twenty or thirty years.”
That was the main reason Ray and Scott had been partners for so long. They were both reasonable men, neither one of them given to silly fancies that might strain the relationship.
By the time they got back to the fort, three days later, word had arrived about Arkansas Post. The news was on the scanty side but enough for Taylor to know that he wouldn’t be marching into the Confederacy any time soon. Victory or not—and Zack was sure that was a formality, in this instance—any army that had been battered that badly would need months to recuperate. Harrison wouldn’t be moving out of the Post until winter came, and then he might very well decide to wait for spring. He’d need reinforcements—lots of them—before he could even think of marching upriver on New Antrim.
That meant Zack was effectively stymied also. The Confederates had the advantage of interior lines. If he and Harrison didn’t move together, the enemy could simply switch forces back and forth between their southeastern and northwestern fronts.
He took it philosophically enough. Zack had never thought this war would be over quickly, to begin with, and he’d had years of experience on the frontier. Just another six to twelve months ahead, building another fort and keeping his men in fighting condition. Nothing he hadn’t done many times before.
Besides, there was at least one small benefit. He’d be able to make sure those two rascals were telling the truth.
“Send a squad down to Arkansas,” he told his aide. Then, thinking about it, amended the order. “No, better make it a whole company. The way that luna—the special commissioner—has been throwing arms around to Indians in the area, a squad might get ambushed. Under a flag of truce, of course.”
“Yes, sir. And they’re…”
“What do you think? Sam Houston was really the only eyewitness. See if he’s willing to come here and verify that we’ve got the right man.”
AUGUST 22, 1825
“Yes, that’s him. I’m quite sure of it, Colonel Taylor.”
Sam had wondered how he’d react if indeed it proved to be the man who’d killed Maria Hester. Six months earlier, he’d probably have had to be physically restrained from attacking him.
Now…
The man glaring at him from a much-battered face just reminded him of a filthy rat. Not even a cornered one, but one caught in a trap, and knowing it.
He turned away, not ever wanting to see the man again in his life. Taylor’s rough, honest features were a relief.
“And thank you, Colonel.”
“My pleasure.” Taylor looked to the guards holding Clark. “Get him out of here, and back into chains.”
When he looked back at Sam, his face was a bit stiff. “Ah…”
Sam waved his hand. “Yes, I understand, Colonel. The crime was committed against an American citizen, on American soil. The prisoner will have to be returned there for trial.”
Taylor nodded. “Personally, I’d be quite happy to hand him over to you. Or Arkansas, for that matter. But—”
He rubbed his heavy jaw for a moment. “I think it’d be best, all around, if we did everything by the book.”
There was a slight stress on everything.
“Yes, I agree. Everything by the book.”
Later that day, Sam met privately with the two men Colonel Taylor credited with the capture.
“I can guarantee you that Andy Jackson will pay his half of the reward, once he gets my letter. Clay’s half…”
He shrugged. “Who knows? And even if Clay is good for it, I’m not sure where you’d need to go to collect. You can wait for Andy’s money in New Antrim.”
Th
e two men looked particularly shifty-eyed in response to that.
“Well. Ah.” That came from the one called Ray Thompson. It might even be his real name.
His partner, Scott Powers, echoed him. “Well. Ah.”
Sam grinned. “Don’t tell me you boys are in bad odor in the chiefdom of Arkansas?”
“Well. Ah.”
“Well. Ah.”
That was worth a chuckle. “What was it? Slave trading? Or were you part of Crittenden’s crowd?”
That was worth an outright laugh. “Both, huh? Anybody ever suggest to you that you’re not walking in the ways of the Lord?”
“Well. Ah.” That was Thompson. Powers managed to return the grin. “Yeah. Started with my mother. I was maybe five.”
A thought came to Sam. It was…intriguing, anyway.
“Tell you what,” he said. “You come back to New Antrim with me. I’ll guarantee your safety.”
Those had to be the two most skeptical looks he’d ever gotten in his life.
“Safety out, too?” asked Thompson.
“Oh, relax, will you? Nobody’ll lay a hand on you, all the way in and out of Arkansas. Fact is, I think the Laird’s more likely to be amused than anything else. Charles Ball, for sure.”
At the mention of Charles Ball, Sam thought they almost jumped.
“We’ll probably have to keep you out of John Brown’s sight, however.”
At that, they did jump. Not more than half an inch, though. Tough fellows, obviously. Rogues, rascals, and renegades, too, just as obviously. But Sam was pretty sure he could find a good use for such. Several good uses, in fact.
It took two weeks longer than anyone expected to get Andrew Clark back to Washington, D.C. Not because of his bad foot, which none of his captors cared about in the least. But simply because the army soon realized it had to detail sizeable units to escort the prisoner every step of the way.
As it was, they almost lost him at Uniontown. The crowd that surrounded the company was more in the way of a small army than the lynch mobs they’d encountered in St. Louis and the Ohio river towns.
Fortunately, the governor of the state was there also, and Shulze finally managed to talk the crowd out of the hanging they’d been looking forward to.
He’d been there by pure coincidence, as it happened. News of Clark’s capture and return for trial had spread all over the country by then, but Shulze hadn’t paid much attention to the details. He’d had no idea the prisoner was coming through Uniontown when he planned to be passing through.
Word had spread all over the country about the Second Battle of Arkansas Post, too. “Word,” in the form of extensive and detailed reports printed in every newspaper in the nation.
Not always the same reports in all the newspapers, of course. Most newspapers gave pride of place to the reports filed by Bryant and Scott, those being authoritative in terms of their authors as well as being the only really eyewitness accounts from all sides of the fray. But not all did. A considerable number of papers, especially in the Deep South, refused to run the Bryant-Scott accounts at all. Several of them went so far as to point to those reports as prime examples of the sort of pernicious abolitionist propaganda that the Georgian delegation to Congress had already announced it was going to demand be banned from being carried by the U.S. Postal Service.
Some newspapers emphasized one thing; others something else. U.S. DEFEATS ARKANSAS in one paper might be MONSTER CASUALTIES IN ARKANSAS in another. But there was enough commonality for one thing to be clear to everyone.
The Arkansas War was just starting, and it wouldn’t be over any time soon.
In Washington, D.C., the president and the war secretary announced that they’d be presenting to the next Congress, convening over the winter, a plan for the drastic expansion of the American military in response to the threat posed by the Confederacy. Or Black Arkansas, as Calhoun referred to it, not being a man given to euphemisms.
In response, Senator Andrew Jackson called for the formation of a new political party, since there was clearly no longer room in the existing Republican Party for both him and—“the rascals” was the mildest term he used—Clay and Calhoun. And he invited several key political figures in the nation to meet with him in advance of the convening of Congress, so that a common platform for the new party could be forged.
And that’s where Governor Shulze of Pennsylvania had been headed when he passed through Uniontown and, by pure accident, happened to be there at the right time to save Andrew Clark from a lynching.
At the Hermitage, in Nashville, another declaration of war was being prepared. A war, in this case, that nobody in the United States with any political sense at all thought would be over any sooner than the other one—and a goodly number thought would continue long after peace came to Arkansas.
Clark did eventually make it to Washington. The trial that followed was brief, as was the sentencing. Several congressmen from Georgia, at the last minute, made a somewhat bizarre attempt to persuade the president to commute Clark’s sentence to life imprisonment. Bizarre, at least, in its contorted logic.
But other than a few Georgians, only John Randolph rose in the House to defend the proposal, and his logic couldn’t be followed by anyone.
President Henry Clay turned them down flatly, even—very unusual for him—in a curt and almost uncivil manner. First, he said, because he had no proper jurisdiction over the matter. Granted that the District of Columbia was under federal authority, not being part of any state, murder was a local crime. So why didn’t Congress act directly instead of trying to shuffle the matter off on the president? And what exactly had happened to John Randolph’s principles concerning states’ rights and the ever-present danger of an overweening executive branch, by the way?
That last, with a sneer, which Clay did very well also.
Beyond that, he told them, even if the courts ruled that he could intervene, he would under no circumstances do so anyway.
“The bastard murdered an innocent young woman! Who might very well have been pregnant with child. Right there—not a mile away—on the steps of the Capitol! What in the name of God is wrong with—”
He broke off abruptly and resumed the seat behind his desk. “No, gentlemen,” he said. “The answer is no. Let the murderer hang by the neck until dead, and good riddance. And now, I’m sure you have other business to attend to. If not, I do.”
The murderer did hang, on January 23, 1826. But by the time the noose finally took his life, Congress had convened, and no one was paying much attention any longer.
No politician, at any rate. One observer at the hanging was a visiting plantation owner from South Carolina. When it was all over, he was heard by some of the guards to curse Andrew Clark with vehement bitterness, ending with “You dang fool! Why did you have to miss?”
CHAPTER 40
The Hermitage Nashville, Tennessee
OCTOBER 12, 1825
“—not budging an inch on the subject of the Bank! No, sir, Mr. John Quincy Adams. Not—one—inch.” Andrew Jackson broke off his angry stalking back and forth in the living room of the Hermitage. Planting his bony hands on his hips, he leaned over and, from a distance of not more than two feet, bestowed his patented Andy Jackson glare on the short, chunky man sitting in the chair in front of him.
Who, for his part, was glaring right back. Watching the two of them from the far side of the room, Jackson’s old friend and confidant John Coffee didn’t even try to hide his grin.
You had to tip your hat to Quincy Adams. The whole Jackson style just plain aggravated him, but he’d soon learned how to deal with it. The man might have the mind of a scholar, but he could be just as pugnacious as anyone in Jackson’s camp, including Andy himself.
“—don’t care about all that fancy economics prattle,” Jackson was continuing. “The issue’s not finances in the first place. It’s politics! A national bank with the authority of the federal government behind it is a mortal threat to the republic. You might a
s well put a viper in a baby’s crib.”
Standing by a window not far away, Thomas Hart Benton cleared his throat noisily. Noisily enough, in fact, to break off Andy in mid-tirade and intercept the harsh riposte that Quincy Adams was obviously about to launch.
“Got to say I agree with Andy here, John,” the senator from Missouri said, in a mild tone of voice. He then gave the Tennessee senator a look of deep reproach. “Though I can’t see where there’s any call for him to get so rambunctious about it.”
Thomas Hart Benton! Complaining that someone else was being “too rambunctious.” Coffee still had vivid memories of the gunfight in the City Hotel, not more than a few miles away though a considerable number of years back in time. It’d been a fistfight and knife fight, too, no holds or weapons barred.
“But he does cut to the heart of it, I think.” Benton took a few steps forward, placing himself in front of most of the men gathered in the room. The senator was a natural orator of the rip-roaring school, and he began lapsing into the sort of speech he might give on the Senate floor.
“I plain can’t see why, in a confederacy of such vast extent, so many independent states, so many rival commercial cities, there should be but one moneyed tribunal, before which all the rival and contending elements must appear.”
Sure enough, his left hand was slipping into his waist, and the right was beginning to wave about. “What a condition for a confederacy of states! But one single dispenser of money, to which every citizen, every trader, every merchant, every manufacturer, every planter, every corporation, every city, every state, and the federal government itself must apply, in every emergency, for the most indispensable loan!”
He was in full roar, now, the right hand no longer waving about but pointing—no, thrusting—the forefinger of denunciation from a mighty thick fist of righteousness. Fortunately, at a blank spot on a wall, beyond which lay defenseless farmland, rather than at John Quincy Adams.