"What do you think of our chances, constable?" The question was pitched quietly enough that Sanderson nearly didn't hear it over the rustling of the foliage.
"Not good, I'm afraid," he said. He twisted himself around in the hope that by talking back at the colonel he could avoid being overheard by the deserters. They had turned him into a draft animal, crudely harnessing the stretcher to his shoulders so that he could drag the colonel while their captors took turns riding the mule. "Your chances are better than mine, though. If they're hoping to use me to get them past any Confederate patrols, my usefulness ends as soon as they get to the river. You probably gain in value the closer they get to Ohio or Indiana or wherever it is they decide to go."
"A cruel assessment, but probably accurate." The colonel laughed bitterly. "That makes me wonder something, though. Not to pry, but Canada and Britain are allied with the Confederate states now.* So why would you have been in a prisoner camp without an escort? I'm assuming that you were captured because you were alone."
"I was." Sanderson shook his head.
"So why would your Confederate allies value you as a hostage, but not value you enough to ensure your safety before you were taken?"
The brush to his left rattled and shook as some surprised animal fled from their approach. "I guess that was my fault, colonel. I'd hoped to speak with General Lee about my fugitive, but apparently the general has been recalled to Virginia. The rewards of success, I suppose." The colonel grimaced, though whether it was from pain or embarrassment, Sanderson couldn't tell. "I spent a whole night waiting to talk with someone, and when I finally did the man was less than polite. Some captain named Stewart, who made it clear enough that he didn't like me or anyone else from the other side of the Mississippi, treaty or no. He told me he couldn't spare anyone to help me search. So I went off on my own. Not the best of ideas, I guess."
"I've met Captain Stewart," the colonel said. "He was polite enough to me. I gather he was with the commissioners who negotiated the treaty with your government and the English last year.† I don't think he likes the English very much."
"It's a damned curious war," Sanderson said. "I'm supposed to think of those slave-owners as allies, and I just can't. But I can't say as I like the English much either. Or you folks, come to that. Nobody asked me what I thought about any of this." His eyes stung as sweat trickle into them; he desperately wanted to wipe his forehead, but had to settle for brushing his face against leafy branches as he dodged around trees.
"Politics is what makes it curious," the colonel said. "If the Confederate States are victorious, then Canada becomes the dominant country on this continent. Neither the C.S.A nor the U.S. would be able to challenge Canada's westward expansion unaided. Texas is already in debt to Britain, and California will probably follow. And I suspect that an independent Confederate States wouldn't be as independent as they'd like. They'll be junior partners to Canada and Britain. Unfortunately, our southern brothers aren't interested in listening to my theories right now. We'll all be learning bitter lessons before long, is my guess."
Sanderson wondered about the lessons Scott had learned. If he'd lived long enough to learn anything, that is. He shook his head; that wasn't the way his thoughts should be moving. He had to keep himself ready should the opportunity for escape arise.
* * * *
The Ohio River—the liquid border between Kentucky and Illinois—flowed muddily past their vantage point; the river was bloated with rain, and its confluence with the equally swollen Mississippi had a look of lazy evil about it that Sanderson, who'd grown up on the bigger river, had learned at an early age to distrust.Sanderson and the colonel lay in a hollow at the edge of a bluff overlooking the river, two of their captors watching them while the other four struggled to get the stolen boat into the water.
"You know what's ironic?" the colonel asked. He didn't wait for a response. "If it hadn't been for the British taking Louisiana, we might none of us be here right now. If we'd been allowed to expand westward, we'd have had enough new territory to worry about that we wouldn't have had time to fight over slavery or states' rights. We might have avoided this war. For a while longer, anyway."
The colonel rolled over to look at Sanderson. "Are you all right, constable? I trust I'm not boring you."
Sanderson closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He'd run out of time; it had to be now.
"Colonel," he said slow. "Could I ask you a favor?"
"I'm not in much of a position to do much at the moment," the colonel said. "But in so far as it's within my power, I'd be honored to help you. You saved my life this morning. What can I do for you?"
"If I don't come out of this alive, colonel, would you see what you can do about finding that soldier I told you about?"
"The fugitive you're tracking? Constable, I'm no policeman."
Sanderson sighed. "He's not really a fugitive, sir. He's my younger brother."
"I suspected as much." The colonel's face crumpled into a tiny, satisfied smile. "No doubt your Confederate allies were prepared to accept your story at face value because you had the proper papers. But I had to wonder why you were so reluctant to tell me what this man had done. The only conclusion I could draw was that he hadn't done anything. Actually, constable, I congratulate you for not compounding the original lie. That's what trips most people up. They start with one lie, then find they have to keep lying to keep the first lie from being found out. The lies get bigger, and before they know it they're the governor or the president."
Sanderson laughed. "You're a very observant man, colonel."
"I was a lawyer before all this began," the colonel said. "And a momentarily successful liar myself, since I spent a couple of years in Washington. Noticing things about people has proved helpful to me. Do you want to tell me what happened between you and your brother?"
"It really wasn't between us," Sanderson said. "Scott and I weren't what you'd call close. I'm eight years older than he is. No, the trouble was between my mother and her father. Scott ended up listening to grandfather."
"Now you've got me interested," the colonel said. Sanderson noticed that their guards had edged closer as well, though they were taking elaborate pains to appear to be watching their companions with the boat. "How does a father-daughter dispute drive a young man into the middle of our civil war?"
"It's a long story," Sanderson said. "Truly. It goes back fifty years, to when Grandpa was a young man. He was from Virginia, you know. Says he met Washington once. Canada might be a federated kingdom now, but when Grandpa talks about his country, he still means Virginia."
"People are born in the strangest places," the colonel said. "I was born in Kentucky myself. If my father hadn't been so restless, I might have ended up wearing white and fighting for John Calhoun, Davy Crockett, and Dixie's Land."
Sanderson looked at their guards. They were exchanging glances of amusement that suggested they might be susceptible to further distraction. Raising his voice a little, he said, "Grandpa moved to Louisiana when he was sixteen and set himself up as a trader in St. Louis. Married a half-Indian daughter of a French trader." In the guise of settling into a more comfortable position, Sanderson located a stone and began to carefully work his bound wrists against it. "But when Bonaparte died back in oh-two‡ and the British got Louisiana, Grandpa refused to take the loyalty oath. He even got himself put in prison in 1810 at the beginning of Jefferson's War."
"Interesting that you should call it that," the colonel said. "That's an American term. Don't the British call it the War of 1810?"
"Like I said, my grandpa still thinks of himself as American," Sanderson said. He could feel the friction of rope against stone, and hoped that the fibers were beginning to break down. "Right up until Confederation, he truly believed that America was going to take Louisiana back. When I joined the police and put on the red uniform, he stopped speaking to me. And, my mother tells me, he started filling Scott's head with all sorts of stories about the greatness of America and the treacherousness of the English. He hates the English—and just like the sergeant down there, he seems pretty generous in terms of who he thinks of as English. His neighbors despise him. They burn him in effigy every First of July, I'm told."
"I've heard stories about what happened to American sympathizers in Louisiana after Jefferson's War," the colonel said. "Pardon me if I'm being rude, but I find yours a strange country. I can't think of any other modern state that was founded the way yours was, on the negation of a principle."
"That principle being republicanism?" Sanderson shook his head. "Some of us are equally opposed to monarchy, colonel."
"And so you don't know what you are so much as you know what you aren't—you're not English and you're not American."
"I know what I am, colonel." Sanderson shook his head again, trying to clear his thoughts. "I'm tired and I'm wet and as far as I'm concerned the whole lot of you can blow yourselves to perdition if you'll just leave me out of it."
The colonel's reply was cut short by the return of the sergeant. He had cleaned the Colt, Sanderson saw. "Time to go, boys," he said.
*This detail was changed when I got to the second-draft stage of Dixie's Land. I am not correcting the story. I don't really believe in doing this sort of thing post-publication.
†Again, the timing was changed as I wrote Dixie's Land and its sequel, The Bonny Blue Flag.
‡Yet another small detail I've changed in the timeline since this story was published. Someday I'll post the alternate timeline I've created for what are now three novels and counting...
No comments:
Post a Comment