heaviness of both wagons in relation to their appearance had long ago convinced him of the existence of false floors.
He would investigate, though he certainly wouldn't remain here through the night to do so. He wanted no contact with the Jicarillas. It wasn't wise to buck the odds. A man won a pot with a pair only once in a while.
Merely by surviving the night, he would win plenty. He would win the chance to come back to the gully. He doubted these particular Apaches would ever come back to it, and they would be gone by daylight. The debris in the gully was safe for a while; this was not a heavily traveled route. He could return weeks, even months later, and be confident of finding whatever the burned wagons had concealed. Especially if it were gold.
Banquo Collins didn't know a lot about metallurgy, but he knew some. Gold could change its form. Mingle with other elements in the earth — that was gold ore. But it couldn't be destroyed. So long as no one chanced on the gully or examined the ashes, any gold that was there would remain there, his for the claiming.
Feeling good, he slipped away from the junipers by the stream. The red light down in the gully faded as he limped east beneath the huge full moon, wetting his lips occasionally as he imagined himself a wealthy tourist swallowing raw oysters and bouncing a San Francisco whore on each knee.
136
Homebound soldiers stopped occasionally at Mont Royal, bringing the Mains vivid word pictures of the ruin in the state. These they traded for water from the well. Cooper had no food to offer the travelers.
Although no partisan of the South, especially of the reasons it had waged war, Judith broke down and cried when she heard descriptions of the huge swathes of burned forest, trampled fields, looted homes that marked the passage of Sherman's juggernaut.
Columbia was scorched earth, whole blocks gone except for a fragment of wall or an isolated chimney standing amid acres of rubble. The new statehouse, roofless and unfinished, had been spared, though its west wall had been marked forever by four Union cannonballs fired during a bombardment from Lexington Hills, across the Congaree.
Bands of blacks clogged the roads, the visitors said, free but generally baffled by their new status and, for the most part, starving. There was no food available for white or black, and many village storekeepers had closed and boarded up their places. Altogether, the picture was one of desolation.
Since the danger of crop damage from the spring rice birds was past, Cooper decided to plant three squares for a June crop, something his father always did in case the earlier planting was ruined by the birds or by a storm- summoned infusion of salty water. To help him prepare the ground with a few rusty, unbroken implements remaining, he had only Andy, Cicero — too old for the work — Jane, and his daughter. Judith helped when she wasn't cooking or tending the small house built of raw pine.
Unused to physical labor, Cooper stumbled back to the house every night insect-bitten and hurting from his ankles to his neck. He would eat whatever tiny portion of food was offered, saying little, and go straight to his pallet. Often he moaned or exclaimed in his sleep.
Questions without answers tormented him during his waking hours. Could they raise enough rice to sell off a little, retaining the rest to help them survive the coming winter? Would the South be occupied by hostile troops for years now that the North was reportedly set on harsh reprisal because of Lincoln's murder? How would he ever learn what had happened to Orry's body since Richmond had been burned and, presumably, many army records destroyed? One soldier who had stopped described the mass graves around Petersburg, hundreds of corpses dumped in each with little regard for identification.
Questions hammered at his head till it ached as much as his body while he scratched the Carolina soil in the steaming sun. He was bent at the task one afternoon when Andy called his name sharply. He raised his head, wiped his sweaty eyelids to clear his vision, saw Judith dashing along the embankments separating the squares.
From her haste and her reddened face, he could tell something was wrong. He ran to meet her.
'Cooper, it's your mother. I went in during her nap, as I usually do, and found her. If I can judge from her expression, her passing was peaceful. Perhaps painless. I'm so sorry, darling —'
She stopped, cocking her head, puzzled and a little frightened by his queer half-smile. He didn't explain the momentary recollection that produced the strange reaction. Memories of Clarissa airily wandering about in the midst of the guerrilla attack. She had walked where guns were firing and never been scratched.
The odd smile disappeared; practical matters intruded. 'Do you suppose we can find any ice at all for the body?'
'I doubt it. We'd better bury her right away.'
'Yes, I think you're right.' He slipped a throbbing arm around her, tears filling his eyes. They returned to the yellow-pine house for the rest of the day.
Cooper had discovered long ago that life had a perverse way of surprising you with the unexpected when you least needed it. He was sweating with Andy in the dusk, hammering together a coffin for Clarissa, when Jane appeared.
'We have three visitors.'
Cooper swabbed his wet brow with his forearm. 'More soldiers?'
She shook her head. 'They came by railroad as far as they could — they say it's been reopened part of the way. Then they managed to buy an old mule and a wagon, both about done for —'
Testy, he said, 'Well, whoever they are, you know what to tell them. They're welcome to camp and use the well. But we have no food.'
'You'll have to feed these people,' Jane said. 'It's your sister and her husband and Miss Madeline.'
When he thought it reasonably safe, Jasper Dills went down to occupied Richmond.
He was appalled at the destruction that had accompanied the collapse and flight of the Confederate government. A Union officer told him that while the fires raged, small-arms ammunition and more than eight hundred thousand shells had detonated over a period of several hours. A few substantially fireproofed buildings remained standing, but there were blocks and blocks destroyed. It was the heart of springtime, and the air should have smelled of flowers and new greenery. In Richmond it smelled of smoke.
The rutted streets were dumps for broken and abandoned furnishings, clothing, rags, bottles, books, personal papers. Even more distasteful to the little attorney was the human litter. Destitute white families roaming. Confederate veterans, many as young as fourteen, sitting in the sun with starved faces and vacant eyes. Crowds of Negroes, some strutting outrageously. And everywhere — on foot, astride saddle horses, driving wagons — soldiers in the blue of the conqueror. They were the only whites in the city who smiled, Dills noticed.
He was in a high state of nerves when he reached the sutlers' tents set up, complete with outdoor tables and cheap chairs, on the lawns of Capitol Square. At one such establishment, identified by its canvas banner as Hugo Delancy's, he met his contact, a former operative of Lafayette Baker's whom Dills had hired at a high price, dispatching him to Virginia to attempt to pick up a trail that was, perhaps, nonexistent.
The operative, a burly fellow with a cocked eye, took Dills to an outdoor table at Delancy's. He swilled lager while Dills drank a pitiful watery concoction passed off as lemonade.
'Well, what do you have to report?'
'Didn't think I'd have a blessed thing till six days ago. Tramped up and down the James almost three weeks before I turned up something. And it still isn't much.'
The operative signaled a waiter to bring another beer. 'Early in July last year a farmer saw a body floating in the James. Civilian clothes. The body was too far from shore to be retrieved, but the description — an obese man; dark-haired — roughly matches the one you provided for Captain Dayton.'
'Last July, you say —?' Dills licked his lips. The stipend had continued during the intervening months. 'Where did this happen?'
'The farmer was on the east bank of the river, about half a mile above the Broadway Landing pontoon bridge the army built later in the autumn. I spent another three days in the neighborhood, asking questions, but I didn't turn up anything else. So I'll take my money.'
