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[Continuing chapter 12]
The heavy outside gate banged open. “I demand to speak to whoever is responsible for this outrage!” General Beauregard, unlike most of his men, did not sleep in his clothing. The general was still clad in a night-shirt and dressing gown as Lieutenant Alexander and his men escorted him into the main hall. “Reynolds!” Beauregard snorted condescendingly. “Never in a million years would I have credited you with the courage to do something like this.” The general’s soft, French-inflected drawl echoed around the room, and Reynolds felt a stirring in the soldiers he thought he had persuaded to his side. Beauregard would have to be handled carefully.
“General,” he began. “I’m sorry to have to wake you in this way, but as you’ll soon see, circumstances left me no—”
“Senator Reynolds,” Beauregard said. The temperature in the hall seemed to drop ten degrees. “You are quite outside your authority here. You would do best to release me right away, or I swear it will go very badly for you.”
“Not half as badly as it’s going to go for you, you British-loving Canadian bastard!”
Beauregard started. “Who in the world—” he began.
The gunshot cut his words short. Beauregard was crumpling to the packed-earth floor of the hall before Reynolds had even registered Lieutenant Parsons’s movement toward the general. Unconsciously, Reynolds clapped his hands over his ears even as he crouched, looking for a place to hide.
As the sound of the shot faded, shouting filled the hall. “I did it!” Parsons screamed gleefully. “I killed the Canadian bastard!” He waved his pistol over his head.
Reynolds stood upright again, looking with alarm at the soldiers, many of whom had broken ranks and were beginning to surround Parsons. Do something now, he told himself, or lose everything before you’ve even properly begun.
“Halt!” he shouted. “HALT!” Blessedly, everyone stopped and looked at him. “As you were, gentlemen!” he shouted to the soldiers. “That’s an order!” When nobody moved, he shouted “Now, by God!” The soldiers shuffled away from Parsons.
“Lieutenant Alexander,” Reynolds said. Alexander stepped forward, saluting. Good man, Reynolds thought. “I want you to get these men organized. Do it quickly; we haven’t any time to lose. Men, you will consider Lieutenant Alexander to be your commanding officer until such time as I inform you otherwise.”
The men grumbled angrily, and seemed unwilling to obey his order. Damn that idiot Parsons! Alive, Beauregard could easily have been disgraced. Dead, he would even more easily be made a martyr. Unless I act quickly, Reynolds thought.
“I want you all to listen carefully to what I am about to say,” he announced. The grumbling subsided, reluctantly. “General Beauregard was, I’m sad to say, a leader of the conspiracy I have sworn to fight. He was, as Lieutenant Parsons put it, born in British Louisiana. As such, his first loyalty seems to have been to the very power we find ourselves fighting against.” Reynolds prayed that nobody would mention that Beauregard had left Louisiana disgusted with his experiences in the British army, and had been a hero of the war of independence from Mexico. “I nevertheless regret the general’s death. Now he can never be called to account for his crimes.” Reynolds glared with what he hoped wasn’t too theatrical an anger at Parsons.
“I want it to be clearly understood that I do not condone what has just happened.” Parsons shouted in protest, but Reynolds out-shouted him. “We do not murder those who oppose us! That man deserved a fair trial!” Which I now, fortunately, am spared having to give him.
“He cheated me!” Parsons shouted. “He robbed me of my promotion! He was a scoundrel of the worst kind!”
“Captain Cooper.” Reynolds gestured to the Ranger, who nodded his understanding. Without warning he seized Parsons from behind, driving the lieutenant to his knees while another ranger grabbed the man’s pistol. “Lieutenant Parsons,” Reynolds said, “I find you guilty of the murder of General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard. There can be no doubt of your guilt. You are therefore sentenced to the fullest penalty the law can assess. Captain Cooper, see that the sentence is executed immediately.”
Parsons screamed like a woman as the Rangers dragged him from the hall. Reynolds didn’t watch the man go; he concentrated his attention on the soldiers before him. The fate of the revolution depended on what these men did in the next few minutes.
Lieutenant Alexander had chivvied them back into a semblance of formation, but the soldiers still resembled a mob more than an army, talking excitedly among themselves and paying Reynolds no attention whatever. At first Reynolds was afraid that he’d lost them; then he realized what the babel of voices meant: Those soldiers whose English was better were explaining to their less-fluent comrades what had just transpired. At the thunderous sound of Parsons’s execution, the voices stopped abruptly; then, after a second, they resumed at a higher pitch.
When the voices died down the men turned, one by one, to face him, and Reynolds knew that they were his. “I am sorry you had to see that,” he said. “But I want it understood that what we will do today we will not do for personal gain. We serve a greater cause. You are still soldiers of the Republic of Texas, and you are expected to follow orders.” Reynolds placed his hands on his hips and leaned toward them just a bit, increasing the volume of his voice as he adopted the more aggressive posture. “If you do as you are told,” he said, pleasuring at the sound of the room echoing his voice back to him, “I promise you that you will be rewarded appropriately.
“Now, men—are you with me?” He thrust a fist heavenward, and was rewarded with their cheer.
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Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve
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