and the man rushed at him, flailing in a fury, driving him back against a wall. Then the derringer was in Samuel Thomas’s hand and the pistol cracked with a yellow flash—the first time he’d fired a gun in his life—and the half- inch ball punched through the man’s neck and rang off a lamppost. The man’s head slumped like a puppet’s snipped of its string and his hat rolled off and his body raced it to the ground. Staring at the sprawled figure and the black ribbons of blood unspooling along the cobblestone seams, Samuel Thomas knew the man was dead, and a chaos of sensations coursed through him. Then he saw the watchman brassard on the man’s arm and was jolted with cold dread. He looked all about and saw no one. Then snatched up his hat and ran.
He’d gone two blocks before realizing he still had the gun in his hand and he flung it high onto a rooftop. His ear throbbed and felt to his fingers like a chunk of peeled fruit. He kept to the shadows as he hurried through the empty streets and without destination other than away from the harbor. He held his hat to his head against the strengthening wind and felt the first pricks of rain on his face—and then it was slapping into him in gusting swirls.
His thoughts were a turmoil. What if there were a witness, someone who had been looking on from the shadows? What if there were inquiries at the sailors’ inns and it was learned at the Yardarm of a guest of his description, Samuel Wolfe by name, who had gone out and not returned even to retrieve his carpetbag? He remembered now that his carpetbag still held the photograph of himself and his brother and he had a moment’s frantic impulse to return for it—then cursed himself for a fool and hastened on. To report to the
Samuel Thomas was sure the bountymen would soon be on his track. He thought to keep walking until he was clear of Portsmouth and into the woods. But then what? He turned at the next corner for no reason other than a fugitive’s instinct to vary his course. And saw up ahead and across the street a handful of men huddled in their coats and standing against the wall in front of an office with a sign identifying it as a recruiting post for the Army of the United States.
It was still raining hard when the sergeant arrived and unlocked the office, giving merry praise to such patriotism as would abide a drenching in order to serve its country. They all went inside and formed a line in front of the sergeant’s desk. When it was Samuel Thomas’s turn before the sergeant and he was asked his name, he said, “Thomas, Samuel Thomas,” believing the alias a clever one, false only in its lack of complete truth. The recruiter began to write it down. “And what’s the middle initial, Mr Thomas?”
He was unprepared for that. “It’s, ah . . . H.” The first letter that came to mind.
The sergeant smiled and entered it. Then looked up again and studied Samuel Thomas’s battered ear. “What was it she hit you with, lad, a fry pan? Well, it’s off to a better mistress now, you can be sure. She’ll clothe ye and feed ye and give ye a rifle. A goodly more than most will do, now aint it?”
Before noon he and seven other enlistees were on a recruiting wagon bound for Fort Hamilton in New York. He had decided he would not write to John Roger for a long while. He could not trust anyone to carry a letter to him without reading it—or worse, permitting it to fall into the wrong hands and be of help to manhunters.
His plan was to hide in the army for a year or so, long enough for the bountymen to give up their search. Then he would desert. He would go to the nearest port and under another name sign on with a ship for New England. He would seek out John Roger in Hanover and apologize for his long silence and explain everything to him.
Such, in any case, was his plan.
THE TURNCOAT’S TRIALS
In February of 1845 the United States annexed the nine-year-old Republic of Texas and six months later was still in diplomatic dispute with Mexico over the location of the border between the two countries. The U.S. insisted, as Texas always had, that the border was the Rio Grande. And as always, Mexico insisted it was at the Nueces River, more than a hundred miles north. But it had now become obvious that President James Knox Polk’s greater ambition was to acquire the necessary territory to expand the Yankee republic all the way to the Pacific. Acquire it by whatever means necessary. Newspapers across the country carried heated opinions on both sides of the issue. At the same time that the president was proposing diplomatic resolutions to the border argument—all of them so unfavorable to Mexico that it could never agree to them—he dispatched the benignly named Army of Observation under the command of General Zachary Taylor to the mouth of the Nueces River. Taylor’s ostensible purpose was to protect Texas against Mexican invasion, but as everyone knew, including the Mexicans, Mr Polk was in fact making ready an invasion of his own.
Even before taking refuge in the ranks, Samuel Thomas had been aware of the war talk. But the risk of combat in Mexico seemed a lesser one than facing a murder charge in Portsmouth. He was not the only one in the company on the run from legal complications, and there were of course patriots in the ranks, and no shortage of callow youths in quest of battlefield glory, but the majority of his comrades had enlisted for the ageless reason of escape from poverty. A number of them had arrived on immigrant ships, mostly Irishmen fled from the Famine. But the America they’d landed in was predominantly Protestant and of English stock, and its larger cities were hotbeds of nativist loathing of the foreign tide staining its shores, especially of the Paddies and their slavish papist faith. It was a hatred no less virulent than what the Hibernians had endured in Britain and as much a barrier to any but the most abject jobs. Rather than dig privies or scrounge in the streets for survival, many of them enlisted in the army, believing it a lesser adversity.
In late winter their regiment at last received the order to join General Taylor in Texas. For most of the company, and certainly for Samuel Thomas, who had never been outside New Hampshire before his enlistment, the journey from New York to the Gulf of Mexico was an education in American geography and regional societies. Traversing a countryside early thawing to mud, they were transported by wagons to Pittsburgh and there put aboard a sternwheel steamboat that carried them west along the Ohio River and through country budding with incipient greenery. Where the Ohio joined the Mississippi they transferred onto a side-wheeler for the trip south. The Old Man, the boatmen called the great river, and Samuel Thomas was awestruck by its breadth. The country they passed through grew more distinct from that which they left behind. The dense woodlands along the banks occasionally gave way to verdant pasturelands and fields of black earth so fertile he could smell it from the railing. He saw turtles the size of saddlebags sunning themselves on mud banks and driftwood. Saw a bald eagle high on a pine eviscerating a limp panther cub in its talons. Saw a trio of boys hauling onto the bank a hooked catfish bigger than any of them.
They churned downriver through days of surpassing loveliness and then entered an unseasonable heat broken by sporadic rainfall. When they were not sopped with rain they were sodden with sweat. They passed by a sequence of port towns and made brief moorings at some of them for fuel and supplies. Towns loud and rough and seeming like foreign countries, so profuse were they with Negroes, with the drawling speech of blacks and whites alike. The river journey ended at New Orleans, where they passed two joyous days and nights and Samuel Thomas spent the best two dollars of his life for the pleasures of an octoroon girl with caramel skin and nipples dark as chocolate and a mouth like red fruit. It was said the city suffered from chronic afflictions of fire and flood and devastating storm, that it was notorious for yellow fever and murder and every sort of carnal delinquency. But Samuel Thomas fancied its bohemian character and exuberant wickedness, and he felt somehow more at home in his two days there than he’d ever felt in Portsmouth. He thought he might someday return to stay.
They shipped out on the steamship
