Dixie's Land 6.2

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(Concluding chapter 6)

Even in the dusty lilac of twilight, Stewart had no difficulty leading “Colonel Hopkins” to the Currie factory north and west of the city—the same factory he’d toured this morning. He mouthed a silent, ironic thanks to Captain Menard, who had essentially done his research for him.

The colonel had gotten them out of the hotel without attracting any attention. I could learn from watching this man, Stewart said to himself. Hopkins also seemed to know exactly where they were riding. "Have you seen this place yourself, sir?" Stewart asked. "Or have you already read my note about my visit to the factory this morning?"

"That note was addressed to General Magruder," Hopkins said. "How could I possibly have seen it?" Stewart looked at him, wondering if the remark had been meant to be funny. It was hard to tell, because the man’s face was so rigidly set.

He decided it would be more dangerous to guess than to simply ignore the statement, so instead he said, "This factory uses tools made by Yankee factories—I believe in Connecticut. But the elder Mr. Currie assures me that he has already learned the making of these tools, and his new factory in St. Louis is being equipped entirely with what he calls 'machine tools' of his own manufacture.” We should do the same, he thought—build and equip our own factories, the better to make the weapons we need. We shouldn't have to depend on anyone for arms.

They were met by Currie's youngest son, Duncan, who though only a few years older than Stewart had such a curdled air of Presbyterian determination about him that he seemed to Stewart an old man. For all that, Duncan Currie had a proper grasp of his business as far as Stewart was concerned. Stewart was pleased at the look of satisfaction on Hopkins’s face when Currie led them straight to a workbench, on which was displayed a collection of rifles, pistols and shot-guns. Stewart got straight to the point, playing to Hopkins as though to a senior officer contemplating a large arms purchase—which he might very well be, come to that. Perhaps the man might have some power in a post-revolution Texas government.

"We have three basic choices before us," Stewart said. "Three different types of rifle. The simplest is this copy of the British 1850 model Enfield. It uses the percussion firing system, is simple to maintain and seems to me very well made." The Confederacy already had some of these. Turning, he picked up a more peculiar rifle, turning a sort of crank-handle on the top of the breech. A gap opened in the breech as the crank-handle slid back over the stock like a door-bolt being opened. "This weapon could well revolutionize warfare," Stewart said. "I'm told the armies of the Holy Roman Empire will be completely equipped with this rifle by 1855. It was designed by a German named Dreyse, and it's called a 'needle gun.' I suppose that’s because this 'firing pin' device looks a bit like a large needle. As you can see, Colonel, it loads from the breech—this ‘bolt’ makes it smooth and easy. It fires a self-contained cartridge: no need to worry about men losing percussion caps."

Stewart set the needle-gun back onto the workbench. "If we were buying for our infantry regiments, I think I might recommend the needle-gun in spite of its newness and its complexity." Stewart picked up the third rifle, a clumsy-looking device compared against the slender elegance of the Enfield and the needle-gun.

"However, we are buying for mounted infantry. To my way of thinking, this type of rifle offers us the best compromise between utility and efficiency. As you can see"—he pointed to a large, revolving magazine—"this rifle utilizes the Colt mechanism, of the same type as we use in our revolving pistols. There are differences, though, that make this a good weapon for mounted troops. For one, the magazine is advanced by pulling this lever instead of thumbing the hammer." Stewart pulled down on the trigger-guard; as the guard extended, the cylinder magazine rotated until a chamber was in front of the hammer, which obediently cocked itself.

"Then there’s this little trick." Repeating what he’d been shown that morning, Stewart manipulated the top of the breech and pulled out the cylinder. "Because cylinders are so easily replaced, our men could keep a second magazine fully loaded and primed, and we could fire as many as eighteen shots before reloading. A more conventionally armed opponent could fire just two or three shots in that time.” He held out the cylinder to the colonel.

"You've done well, Captain," Hopkins said. Stewart relaxed, which made him aware of just how tense he’d been. "I’ll accept your recommendation, and order the revolving rifles. Here are the papers, which require your signature, Mr. Currie—and yours, Captain, as General Mercer's delegate."

Stewart took the contracts, and looked them over. He felt a flush creep up the back of his neck. Mercer’s an idiot, he thought. This would give the whole game away. Stewart took the pen Currie offered, changed the totals and added a brief clause at the bottom, initialing his changes before signing. "My apologies, gentlemen," he said. "There's been a small error here. It's a copying mistake, that's all, but I believe we both have to initial this change, Mr. Currie." He passed the contracts to Currie. The latter read, smiled, and signed, thanking both Stewart and Walker as he did so.

"As I understand it, gentlemen," Currie said, "Colonel Hopkins will be arranging to receive and transport the goods within the next two weeks?"

"My latest orders are that I should collect the arms and send them northward by next Wednesday at the latest," Hopkins said. He no longer seemed so calm, and Stewart saw what looked like anger building up behind those cold grey eyes. He desperately wanted to explain what he’d done to the contract, but there was no way he could do anything now without calling undue attention to himself. 

"I hope that won't pose a problem," Hopkins said.

"Not for an initial delivery of this size," Currie said. Hopkins stiffened. He heard that ‘initial’, thought Stewart. Now he probably thinks I’ve ruined everything, instead of saving it. By the time Currie had bid them farewell and they were outside the factory with their horses, Hopkins was visibly fuming. I have to explain myself, Stewart thought, before this gets any worse.

"You'll be wanting"—Stewart began as soon as the door closed.

"I am expecting an explanation, Captain." Hopkins’s voice was practically trembling with anger.

"I'm sorry, sir," Stewart said. "But General Mercer made a serious mistake with the contract. He wrote 'one hundred fifty' as an amount."

"That is no mistake, Captain," Hopkins hissed. "That is exactly the figure I gave the general. That is the number of rifles I require. What did you do, boy? Give me that paper."

"I inflated the order, sir," Stewart said, handing the contract to him. "I would have discussed it with you had there been a chance, but with Mr. Currie expecting me to sign, I saw no way to consult you without arousing his suspicion."

He’d changed the order to read "one thousand, five hundred" where it had read "one hundred fifty." Stewart saw Hopkins look up to glare at him. "Are you insane, boy? We have no facility for transporting this many rifles. And we certainly have no need of them!"

"Please read on, sir," Stewart said. His was pleased that he was able to keep his voice steady. It helps, I suppose, that I’m right and I know it. "An order that small would draw attention to itself, sir. Remember that we're supposed to be negotiating a purchase for the whole Confederate Army. The treaty negotiations have drawn a lot of notice; the newspapers are full of speculation. We're expected to do things in a big way—at least as big as the treaty itself is supposed to be. I wanted to reduce the chances of attention being drawn to this purchase, so I increased the size of the order to something more in keeping with the kinds of purchases I saw in my duties at the War Department. Then I inserted a clause calling for ten percent of the order to be ready on your request, with the remainder to be delivered on the signing of the treaty. This way, you'll get your weapons when you need them and nobody will think twice about it. Believe me, sir, I had your best interests in mind."

"I will have to be the judge of that," Hopkins said. But the expression on his face had softened, and for a moment Stewart wondered if he saw shame flicker across those strangely lifeless eyes. "I see your point, Captain," he said, slowly, "and I apologize for my harsh words. It was good of you to catch that oversight. I only wish it could have been caught before our meeting with Currie."

"I mean no disrespect, sir," Stewart said, "but it simply wasn't possible for me to do that. I might have been able to, had I been informed of what we were going to be doing."

Hopkins stiffened, and his horse snorted in complaint at the contrary signal being transmitted through the saddle. Stewart silently chided himself for pushing the man too hard. It’s not his fault Uncle won’t let me go with them, he thought.

"All will become clear in time," Hopkins said, keeping his voice level. "In the meantime, accept my thanks for the service you've rendered this evening. You should return to your regular duties now, Captain. It is absolutely imperative that you not attempt to contact me; if the time comes when we must speak again, I will get in touch with you."

He turned to fix Stewart in his gaze. "I am not ignoring your complaint about being kept uninformed, Captain. Believe me, though, there is nothing I can do about it. If this were a more traditional military operation, it might be possible to tell you more. Unfortunately, that's not the case. We are endeavoring to free a nation with a force that General Jefferson Davis would consider insufficient to guard his baggage-train. That places additional burdens on all of us."

Stewart nodded. He thought that he was beginning to understand about the loads carried by responsible men.

“Don’t concern yourself too much, captain,” Hopkins said. “You’ve done well tonight.” He paused a moment, clearly thinking something through. “I understand you performed well in assisting the victims of that riverboat explosion as well.”

Stewart flushed. Was there anyone in this city who hadn’t heard that story? “I was only doing what any gentleman would do,” he said.

“What any gentleman should do, perhaps,” Hopkins said. “Not necessarily what he would do. At any rate, I wanted to ease your mind about something. I gather you were upset at the death of a Mississippi planter—name of Barber, I believe.”

“It was not a pretty way to die, sir.”

“Well, that’s as may be. But you might think on the fact that the late Mr. Barber wasn’t worth any tears you may have shed over him.” Hopkins turned to look closely at Stewart.

For a moment Stewart was too shocked to say anything. “I don’t know how to respond to that, sir,” he eventually said. The words emerged extremely slowly.

“Your sensitivity does you credit,” Hopkins said. “Still, if you are curious as to why I would be so harsh about the dead, you might find it would repay you to make some inquiries about Mr. Barber and his true purpose in coming to New Orleans.”

Stewart was too stunned to respond. For an unknown length of time he just rode, unconscious of his surroundings. When his mind settled enough that he could think, he tried to persuade Hopkins to elaborate on his perplexing statement. But the colonel said nothing more for the duration of their ride, and when they separated Stewart knew nothing more about Barber than he had when the man had died.

He was certain of one thing, though. Barber’s death hadn’t been the accidental by-product of an attack on the Comet. For reasons he didn’t know—and now, it seemed, would have to discover—Barber had been a target of the bomb.

* * * *

You’re probably the wrong sort to go skulking about the Irish Channel, Grant said to himself. Not that there was anything wrong with the way he looked. The tattered coat and worn trousers he’d bought that afternoon looked disreputable enough. But there was, he had to admit, something of the soldier in him no matter how he was dressed, and it was doubtful anybody would ever mistake him for a poor Irishman. “Even dressed like a tinker you’d stand out some,” was what D’Arcy McGee had said to him that afternoon.

McGee was right, much as Grant hated to admit it. But he wasn’t about to ask anyone else to do something he wouldn’t do himself. So it was Grant himself who slouched along Market Street in the direction of St Thomas, the street running through the core of the Irish Channel. James Macartey had an office on St. Thomas, near Robin Street.

The thin late-winter sunlight was fading when Macartey emerged from an uninspired four-storey building. He began walking downtown, setting a fair pace that Grant at first had trouble matching. Once he’d got into the rhythm of the thing, though, he was able to keep pace with the lawyer without, he thought, drawing attention to himself.

Macartey didn’t travel far. After just a couple of blocks he disappeared; when Grant reached the spot where Macartey had vanished, he discovered a narrow street slanting uptown in a riverward direction. A sign painted crudely on a wall proclaimed this to be Theresa Street.

It may have been named for a saint—most of the streets in the Irish Channel had women’s names—but Theresa did not appear to be the most spiritually uplifting of streets. A couple of the buildings had groceries in their ground-level floors, but the others seemed to be evenly divided between workshops, warehouses, and grog-shops. In the space of a few hundred feet there were at least a dozen doorways into which Macartey could have entered. Not the best of starts, Grant thought. Rather than despair, though, he leaned against a wall of the building on the corner, in such a way that while appearing to gaze at the traffic on St. Thomas, he could actually watch most of the doors on Theresa.

There he was. Macartey had gone into a grog-shop. Why this particular place? Since he’d decided that Macartey wanted following, everything the man did seemed sinister to Grant, charged with evil portent. That might be a ludicrous way to think, but the fact was Macartey hadn’t been in the shop long enough to take a drink, not unless he was prone to bolting his whisky.

The lawyer ducked down a narrow laneway between two buildings. At the end of the lane he turned and headed toward the river. Grant had to run the length of the lane—hard to do in the poor boots he was wearing—in order to keep Macartey in sight.

There had been enough people on the previous streets that Grant had been able to stay close to his prey without running much risk of being detected. On this street, however, traffic was almost non-existent. Macartey wasn’t wandering aimlessly, either; he seemed to know exactly where he was going. That was going to make it harder to follow him.

They were getting close to the river when Macartey slowed. His head swiveled to the left, and Grant realized that now he was the only other person on the street. He ducked into a gap between two buildings, dropped to one knee, and peered around the corner in the hope that Macartey wouldn’t think to look down. After a full look at the street around him, the Irishman reversed course a few feet, turning to face the façade of what looked to Grant to be an older cotton warehouse. He’s going to force the door, Grant thought.

The door couldn’t have been very secure, because it took Macartey just seconds to open it, and the man looked around him only once more before disappearing inside.

Grant remembered the warehouse fire the other day, and McGee’s contention that Irish gangs often set such fires to cover robberies, or to allow them to loot adjoining buildings while the authorities were distracted by the flames. He followed Macartey’s footsteps until he found the door. It was set in from the street, and in the gathering dusk it was doubtful any passer-by would notice that the door was slightly ajar.

No, it wasn’t. Macartey had closed it after him. He hadn’t re-set the lock, though, and after a moment’s hesitation Grant worked the latch and went in. He wasn’t entirely sure of the law as it applied in the British Empire, but in Illinois you were allowed to enter someone’s property if by doing so you could prevent a crime from being committed.

There wasn’t much light left, and almost none of what there was had penetrated this building. For a moment Grant just stood, waiting until he could see. While he waited for his eyes to adjust to the gloom, he tried to identify the smells that pervaded the place. Mostly the building’s interior smelled like dust, dust that had been overheated by the day’s sun until it nearly smelled cooked. There was a hint of turpentine, and the all-too-familiar smell of freshly tanned leather. Grant’s father was a tanner. Grant hated the smell of new leather. Old leather, rich with the scent of a good horse—that was different. But if he never again set foot in a tanner’s shop, he would thank the Lord.

With nothing to see, Grant found himself paying more attention to what he could hear. Macartey’s footsteps were awfully loud for a man who’d broken in, but at least Grant was left in no doubt that the man had gone upstairs.

It took him several moments of blundering before he found a closed door along a wall to his left. Once he’d opened the door, Grant could see a staircase. In fact, he could see much better: there must be more windows on the next level. Cursing his cheap boots for the way they creaked, he carefully stepped up the stairs. Now he could smell a mix of cotton lint and tobacco, very stale, suggesting that this building’s second floor hadn’t stored much of anything for some time. The footsteps had stopped.

At the second-floor landing the stairs continued up, and a half-open door to his right presumably opened onto the second floor storage. Grant tried to revive in his mind a picture of the building from outside: had there been three floors, four, or did this set of stairs go up to the roof? He was conscious now of the fact that his heart was beating rapidly, and he tasted something bitter at the front of his mouth.

Nothing to be gained by worrying, Grant decided after a moment, and nudged the door further open. He saw a huge, empty space, lit by windows whose stains, spots, flaws, and cracks were highlighted by the setting sun bouncing off the river. The high ceiling was held up by massive oak beams, cut crudely but worn smooth over decades. The smell of dust was especially strong. There was, however, no sight of Macartey, and little evidence here of any place the lawyer might have hidden.

There were three floors, he remembered now. Whatever Macartey was doing, he was doing it on the third floor. Or the roof. Grant was beginning to think he should have looked for the watch rather than following Macartey inside. Now that he was here, though, he found himself curious to learn what the man was up to. Carefully, he pulled the door back to its original position, and went up the stairs.

On the third-floor landing the door to the storage room was closed, but in the ceiling, above a rickety ladder, a hatch was open. On the roof? Grant wondered. That was a strange place to set a fire, but perhaps arson hadn’t been Macartey’s intent.

Grant listened, first at the closed door, then at the bottom of the ladder, but heard nothing. Whatever he was doing, Macartey had stopped moving. Feeling a sudden chill, Grant set one booted foot on the bottom rung of the ladder.

It creaked abominably, like an old man groaning in pain. Grant froze for a moment, then carefully stepped back off the ladder. Was that a footstep?

Wait a minute. He looked at the ladder. He hadn’t heard creaking before he came up here: Wherever Macartey was, he wasn’t on the roof. Grant tried the door.

It was locked.

When he brought his hand away, his fingertips were coated with dust.

Was this landing darker now than it had been a moment ago?

He was behind the second-floor door. Cursing himself, Grant turned to go back down the stairs. Should have opened it all the way. The second-floor door was closed now. Why didn’t I hear it close? He suddenly felt as though his internal organs had dropped down into his boots.

He knows I’m here.

At the moment of realization, light flooded the staircase as the door on the ground floor swung open with a bang. “Come down slowly,” a voice said. Grant was pretty sure he heard Irish in it. “And raise your hands above your head.”

When Grant reached the bottom of the stairs he found a watchman, holding a lantern and a small single-shot pistol. The barrel pointed straight into his chest. “You, sir, are under arrest for breaking and entering,” the watchman said.

He grabbed Grant by the collar and pulled him outside. It wasn’t yet so dark that Grant couldn’t recognize James Macartey in the middle of the street, smiling at him and standing beside another smiling man, a man wearing the uniform of a captain of the New Orleans City Watch.

Next     Chapter One     Chapter Two     Chapter Three    Chapter Four