Cook frowned. Stevens snatched it and holstered it in his belt.
I walked over to Colonel Washington to have a look. He was a tall, slender white man in a nightshirt, still wearing his sleeping cap on his head, his face unshaven. He was trembling like a deer. He looked so glum and scared, it was a pity.
“When we busted in his house, he thought we was thieves,” Tidd snorted. “He said, ‘Take my whiskey! Take my slaves. But leave me alone.’ He squawked like a baby.” Tidd leaned down to Colonel Washington. “Be a man!” he barked. “Be a man!”
That got Stevens going, and he was an aggravating soul if I ever saw one. He was overall the best soldier I ever saw, but he was the devilment when it come to wagging his fists and digging into a fight. He strutted over to Colonel Washington and glared down at him, hulking over him. The colonel just shrank beneath him, setting underneath that big feller. “Some colonel you are,” Stevens said. “Ready to trade your slaves for your own wretched life. You ain’t worth a pea thrasher, much less a bottle of whiskey.”
Oh, that riled the colonel, Stevens scratching at him that way, but the colonel held his tongue, for he seen Stevens was mad.
Tidd and Owen produced pikes and rifles and begun handing them out to the coloreds, who, truth be told, looked downright bewildered. Two got up and took them gingerly. Then another grabbed one. “What is the matter with you?” Tidd said. “Ain’t you ready to fight for your freedom?” They said nothing, befuddled by the whole bit. Two of ’em looked like they had just got out of bed. One turned away and refused the weapons handed to him. The rest, after a bit of burbling and showing how chickenhearted they felt ’bout the whole affair, went along more or less, taking whatever weapon was offered and holding them like they was hot potatoes. But I took a notice to one of ’em sitting at the end of the row of the coloreds. He was seated on the floor, this feller in a nightshirt and pantaloons, with his suspenders hung low. He looked familiar, and in my excitement and fear it took me a long minute before I recognized the Coachman.
He weren’t dressed so splendid now, for he weren’t wearing his pretty coachman’s outfit with white gloves, as I seen him before, but it was him, all right.
I started toward him, then turned away, for he seen me and I got the understanding that he didn’t want me to recognize him. I knowed he had some secrets and thought it better to pretend not to know him, with his master there. I didn’t want to get him in trouble. If a feller had the impression that the bottom rail was gonna be on top, he’d act far different if he’d’a knowed that at some point the white man was gonna get the Ferry back and sling the Negro every which way. I seen what was going on down at the Ferry and he did not. Neither did Tidd, Cook, or the rest of the Old Man’s soldiers who stayed back up at the farm. But I saw O.P. pull Tidd aside and give him a mouthful. Tidd said nothing. But the Coachman watched them both, and while he didn’t hear what nar a one of them was saying, I guess he made up his mind at that moment that he weren’t going to play dumb and was going for the whole hog.
He stood up and said, “I am ready to fight,” and grabbed his pike when it was offered. “I needs a pistol as well.” They gave him one of them, too, and some ammunition.
His master, Colonel Washington, was setting on the floor of the schoolhouse porch, watching this, and when he seen the Coachman take them weapons, he couldn’t help hisself. He got snappy. He said, “Why, Jim, sit down!”
The Coachman walked over to Colonel Washington and stood over him with a terrible look on his face.
“I ain’t taking another word from you,” he said. “I been taking words from you for twenty-two years.”
That flummoxed Colonel Washington. Just dropped him. He got hot right there. He stammered, “Why, you ungrateful black bastard! I been good to you. I been good to your family!”
“You skunk!” the Coachman cried. He raised his pike to deaden him right there, and only Stevens and O.P. grabbing him stopped him.
They struggled with him mightily. Stevens was a heavy man, a big mule-strong feller, as tough a man as there was, but he could barely hold the Coachman. “That’s enough!” Stevens hollered. “That’s enough. There’s fight enough at the Ferry.” They wrestled him back away from the colonel, but the Coachman couldn’t stand it.
“He’s as big a skunk as ever sneaked in the woods!” the Coachman cried. “He sold my mother off!” and he went at Colonel Washington again even harder this time, and this time even Stevens, big as he was, couldn’t handle him. It took all four of them—Tidd, Stevens, Cook, and O.P.—to keep him from killing his former master. They had to grapple with him for several minutes. The Coachman gived all four of them all they could handle, and when they finally pinned him back, Stevens was so hot, he pulled his hardware and stuck it in the Coachman’s face.
“You do that again, I’ll air you out myself,” he said. “I’ll
“I don’t care what name you calls it,” the Coachman said. “You keep him away from me.”
By God, the thing had winged so far out of control, it weren’t funny. Stevens turned to O.P. and said, “We got to move these people now. Let’s move them to the Ferry. The Captain needs reinforcements. I’ll tend to the others. You keep him away from the colonel.” He nodded at the Coachman.
O.P. weren’t for it. “You know what’s waiting for us at the Ferry.”
“We got orders,” Stevens said, “and I aims to follow ’em.”
“How we gonna get to the Ferry? We’d have to fight our way in. It’s closed off by now.”
Stevens peered at Washington out the corner of his eye. “We ain’t got to fight our way in. We can walk in. I got a plan.”
The road from the schoolhouse on the Maryland side going down to the Ferry is a dangerous one. It’s a steep, sharp hill. At the top of it, the road arcs like the curve of an egg. You bounce high over that, and from there you can see the Ferry and the Potomac clear, then you hit that hill and fly down that till you hit the bottom. Right there, at the bottom, is the Potomac River. You got to turn left hard to follow the road to the bridge back over to the Ferry. You can’t take that hill too fast coming off that mountain, ’cause if you come down too fast, it’s too steep to stop. Many a wagon, I reckon, has bent and broken an axle or two at the bottom, trying to take that turn too fast. You got to take that thing with your horses reined up tight and your brake pulled in hard, otherwise you’ll end up in the Potomac.
The Coachman took that road in Colonel Washington’s four-horse coach like the devil was whipping him. He bounced down that hill so fast, it felt like the wind was gonna pull me off. Stevens, Colonel Washington, and the other slave owner rode inside, while the slaves, me, and O.P. rode the running boards, hanging on for dear life.
’Bout a half mile from the bottom, before that dangerous turn come up, Stevens—thank God for him—he hollered out the window to the Coachman to har them horses and stop the wagon, which the Coachman done.
I was standing on the running board, watching, with my head at the window. Stevens, sitting next to Washington, removed his revolver from his holster, primed it, pulled the hammer back, and stuck it into Washington’s side. Then he covered it with his coat so it couldn’t be seen.
“We is going across the B&O Bridge,” he said. “If we get stopped by militia there, you’ll get us through,” he said.
“They won’t let us!” Colonel Washington said. Ooooo, he growed chickenhearted right there. Big man like that, crowing like a bird.
“Surely they will,” Stevens said. “You’re a colonel in the militia. You just say, ‘I have made arrangements to exchange myself and my Negroes for the white prisoners inside the engine house.’ That’s all you say.”
“I can’t do it.”
“Yes, you can. If you open your mouth in any other direction at the bridge, I’ll bust a charge in you. Nothing will happen to you if you follow my directions.”
He stuck his head out the window and said to the Coachman, “Let’s go.”
The Coachman didn’t hesitate. He harred up them horses and sent that wagon raking down that road again. I hung on from my fingernails down, glum as could be. I would’a jumped off that thing when it stopped, but there weren’t no scampering off with Stevens around. And now, with that thing up to speed again, if I’d’a jumped off on that hill, I’d’a been busted into a million pieces by them wagon’s wheels, which was thick across as my four
