“U.S. dollars?”
“Yes, partly in greenbacks—that’s what Yanks were paid with—but mostly in gold eagles and double eagles.”
“Duffy must’ve been one hell of a cheater,” I said.
“Likely so, but there’d often be several thousand sitting in just one pot. Look at it that way, and it’s not hard to calculate him salting away quite a load over a year and a half.”
“What happened to O’Shea?”
Twain chuckled. “For five years now a lot have wondered that. The Fenians are especially curious, since they claim first rights on the money. Rumors had O’Shea getting plugged by a guard the night of the breakout; or making it all the way to Richmond, only to be killed later in the war; or still living today like a god somewhere in the South Seas. In any case, the money never turned up.”
He emptied his pipe and reloaded it leisurely.
“But you know where O’Shea is, I gather?”
“Don’t crowd me,” he drawled. “Story as good as this needs time to spin out to its proper length.”
I lay back on the grass and watched wispy clouds trailing lazily against the sky. Soldiers’ shapes moved among them.
“The old man was in his shack by the death house that night, nervous as a cat. You can fathom his shock when O’Shea staggered through the doorway, bleeding from a mortal wound. What happened was, he’d sneaked in on Duffy and delivered a good lick to his head, figuring it would hold him. But just when O’Shea’d cleaned out all the usable money from the chest and packed it in two big knapsacks, Duffy jabbed a blade in his back. He was trying to repeat when O’Shea grabbed it away and finished him. But it was too late for O’Shea. He died in the old man’s arms.
“Well, the alarm sounded and Hades tore loose. In the confusion the old man made two trips to Duffy’s tent—it was all he could manage to lift one knapsack—and brought the money back to his hut. He spent the next days mourning over the boy, scared to death they’d come in and find the money and blame him for Duffy’s murder. He wracked his mind to figure some way out of his predicament.”
Twain refired the pipe with maddening care.
“What he finally came up with was this: He packed O’Shea into an extra-long pine box—remember, O’Shea wasn’t his name, but that’s what the old man stenciled on the lid to cover his tracks—and he packed the money in quart jars all around the boy.”
“But wouldn’t they check the phony name against prisoner records?”
“I asked him that very question. He told me some prisoners never gave their rightful names at all, just said ‘registered enemy.’ Moreover, the prison hadn’t made any plans for boys dying. First they buried them along the riverbank, till those got swept away in the flooding. At the height of the pox they used communal graves. It was all a tangle. So he didn’t fret about discrepancies—’cause nobody was looking.”
“Well, what happened?” I said. “Did the old man get the money back?”
Twain eyed me shrewdly. “Once I tell you, Sam, the two of us’ll be the only ones alive who know. I want to make a proposition. If you decide to go for the money, I’d want half as my share. Discreetly done, of course.”
“Why cut me in? If the old-timer’s dead, why not take it all yourself?”
“I don’t dare. If it ever came to light I was linked with a grave-robbing scheme, my standing with Livy’s relations’d be blasted all to perdition.” He sighed. “A sultan’s treasure for the taking, and I can’t make a stagger at it. You’re the only one I’ve run into who might be foolhardy enough to take on the job, yet honest enough to trust.”
I laughed at his assessment. “Okay, I promise. I mean, I want to hear what happened. Who wouldn’t? But I can’t see myself robbing a grave.”
“I’ll just leave it with you, then, and expect you’ll keep your shutters up.”
I nodded.
“Well, O’Shea’s coffin was taken up to Woodlawn Cemetery above Elmira. There’s a Confederate section there with over three thousand graves. They weren’t even marked at the time, but luckily an army sexton copied the names off coffins and kept track of burial plots.”
“I just thought of something,” I said. “O’Shea’s folks had no way of knowing what happened to him.”
Twain nodded. “The old man felt poorly over what he was doing to the boy’s family. His notion was to write them in Carolina, once he’d retrieved the money.
“But it never happened. What he didn’t count on was the army keeping a guard posted in Woodlawn’s military section day and night, all through the war—and after. It’s still guarded, in fact.”
“Couldn’t he have said he was kin? Claimed the body and taken it away?”
“He tried,” Twain replied. “They wanted proof. When he came back with trumped-up papers, somebody recognized him and started asking questions. That scared him off. He fretted for a long while, but came up blank. By the time I heard his tale, he’d given off doing it alone.”
“So what did he want you to do?”
“Use my ‘influence’ with city hall to have the guard removed one night.”
“Plant a bribe?”
“Most probably.”
“Would it work?”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
Ten thousand dollars. My half would set me up for a long time.
“Ponder it some,” Twain drawled. “That money ain’t going away. And if it should happen into our hands soon, why, we could boost Freddy’s flying machine and make ourselves rich as all splendor.”
“That’s quite a scenario,” I said. “You got any moneymaking schemes on the ground? Yours’re all above or below it.”
He laughed, winked his foxy wink, and said no more.
The next morning Twain left for Hartford to attend the wedding of Livy’s cousin and pore over final proofs of Innocents Abroad with his publisher, Elisha Bliss. Then he would accompany the Langdons to Elmira. He had intentions, he said,
