—Sir Duke? Ryland said.
—Damn, that does have a ring to it. But we’re all near the same footing now. So I’ll call you boys Bristol and Ryland, and you call me whatever you want.
—Yes, sir, Bristol said.
Every morning, sunshine or monsoon, Basil Duke would get up at gray dawn and exit his tent looking fresh, groomed, clean collar on his shirt. Everybody else wandered around bleary, disheveled, weary, and not wanting to keep doing what they’d been doing—which was break camp, load up, and slog down the road another day, clothes dirty and hair greased tight to their heads. The first miles of the day, Basil Duke talked about how well he had slept and how much he admired the landscape and enjoyed watching it unspool. He always said, A bad day on the road beats a good day sitting at home doing nothing.
Every night Basil Duke sat by the campfire like he was posing, finding the most flattering angle of light for a painting. He always had exactly three drinks no matter how late the night went. The younger officers—and anybody else who cared to listen, including Bristol and Ryland—gathered around, and Basil Duke led the discussion. Late, after the older men had bedded down, they laid odds that changed night by night as to which of the politicians would escape. Everybody bet that Judah Benjamin would be the first captured, and everybody but Basil Duke bet Davis would escape. But Duke didn’t believe the president wanted to escape. What Davis wanted most was justification, to defend himself in court and be hanged if he lost.
Odds on Judah Benjamin changed considerably when he took a disguise out of his big trunk—a beat-up brown suit and a gray felt hat with holes in the crown, and a dirty shirt without a collar. He took off alone with two half-dead mules and the most broken-down wagon they had. This happened around Washington, Georgia. He said he aimed for the Gulf, and if he met Federal troops, he planned to use his Louisiana French to act like a lost trader trying to get back to New Orleans—pretend he didn’t know a word of English. When he left, he lifted his beat hat from his head, and around the fat, black cigar in his mouth, he said, So long, desperadoes. See you in Havana or Paris.
All that time President Davis seemed strange, aloof from reality. Some nights he lurked at the edge of the campfires, righteous and doomed, skeletal with the firelight on his face and deep shadows under his cheekbones. He muttered constantly about the Constitution, its precious phrases. Saying how he and the other hard men left over from Lee’s and Johnson’s surrenders would head west and become horseback guerrillas, fighting the Federals—not battles but running skirmishes, covering many miles and several days of desert and prairie. Light and fast. Or he might form an alliance with Maximilian, emperor of Mexico, and return with a vast army to sweep across the South and retake the homeland. Or wear the Federals down over time, make it a hundred-year war. Last resort, the true believers could go to South America and carve cotton fields out of jungle and create a new republic, where the original Constitution and full property rights would rule.
Basil Duke whispered among the dwindling remainders, said that they accompanied Davis only to help him escape, not out of delusion that the war would continue deep into the future.
By the time they reached Washington, Georgia, the remains of the treasury had fallen into Basil Duke’s care. He acted as if it were slightly humorous, a burden. He made no secret that it had been represented to him as somewhere between five thousand and five hundred thousand dollars. Who’d lately had time to count? It took the form of gold and silver and other assets, including the Tennessee State School Fund and the old ladies of Richmond jewelry donation program, and it traveled in leather shot bags, green canvas bank money bags, little metal casks and big wooden casks, even money belts stuffed fat as an old gentleman’s paunch with coins.
Bristol and Ryland helped transfer some of it from a train broken down near the Savannah River into wagons. It was a dream night. They worked by light from a scant few tallow candles. By two in the morning they were so tired from lifting and carrying that all the gold and silver felt unreal.
Basil Duke supervised, but in a sort of bored, distracted way. As the loaded wagons rolled out, a man came running after Basil Duke shouting, Wait, wait, you forgot this. The man carried a small wood cask filled with gold coins. Basil Duke took it and said to the man, My God, you’re an idiot.
As conclusion to his story, Bristol said that everybody except that idiot dipped a little from the pot that night. Said he and Ryland eased gold coins down the calves of their boots for traveling money and that Ry’s gold was still down his boots.
—He’s lying there making fun of me for not taking it, Bristol said.
THE FUGITIVES CROSSED the Ocmulgee River after a town called Rhine and then camped near the water. Bristol got down in the muddy river to his neck and grabbled two big catfish, which Ellen filleted and dredged in cornmeal and fried. After supper, Burton and Delrey studied their maps and decided an early start might get them near a settlement called Irwinville before dark.
Next day, afternoon, out of nowhere Jefferson and a last handful of die-hard officers came riding up from behind. V’d worked on the assumption he was halfway to Texas by now, but there he was, pale and wasted, trying to be her savior because he had heard marauders scoured south Georgia for the share of treasure she was rumored to have with her.
Among Jeff’s small group was John Taylor Wood, the navy hero, who
