John Miller - The First Assassin

Portia screamed at the blast. The force of the impact knocked Joe backward. He tripped over an exposed root and fell-a sudden drop that caused Hughes’s next shot to miss. Now Joe lay prone on the ground, and Hughes stood up, but with difficulty. His left arm was lame from the wound to his shoulder. He struggled to remain steady and looked down at the large and growing red stain on his shirt. Then Hughes turned his attention to Joe, lying motionless nearby. He hobbled over to the slave and pointed his gun.

“Don’t shoot! Oh please, don’t shoot him!” cried Portia, who had barely moved since coming down from the tree.

Hughes looked at her. She could see that he was not all there. His eyes were bleary and his face was pale. His lips moved as if he wanted to say something, but no words came out. Then he collapsed, falling to the ground just a few feet from Joe.

Portia did not move for a moment. After the earsplitting fury, the ensuing silence was eerie. Not even the birds chirped. She looked at the two bodies in front of her. She saw that the chests of both men rose and fell. They were alive.

At the thought of Joe breathing his last, she rushed over to him. The wound to his chest was enormous. It appeared fatal. That was obvious even to someone like Portia, who had never seen a deadly gunshot wound before. When she touched his face, though, his eyes opened and the corners of his mouth tried to curl into a smile. “Portia,” he whispered.

“Joe! Don’t leave me! You can’t leave me!” she wailed, tears dripping down her cheeks. She started to sob.

“Portia…”

The effort to speak even these two syllables was an enormous strain. Portia gasped when he closed his eyes. Was this the end? He opened them again and seemed to summon all that was left in his failing body to utter a single word. “Go.”

Portia moaned and raised her head to the sky. “Why? Why? Why?” she pleaded. She looked back at Joe. He mouthed the word once more. This time he could give it no voice. Go .

Portia knew there was nothing she could do for him. She kissed his mouth lightly and touched his brow. “I love you,” she said. He closed his eyes. Portia sensed that he would not open them again. A minute later, his breathing stopped. Portia rose to her feet and looked at Joe for a long minute or two. She wanted to imprint his face in her memory forever. Then she checked her pocket for the photograph her grandfather had given her-it was still there-and escaped into the trees.

“Miners use blasting powder in coal country,” explained Rook. “There’s enough here to blow up something big, and I think we know exactly what they were intending to destroy.”

Springfield, Clark, and Higginson listened to the colonel describe how a few barrels of blasting powder in the basement of the Capitol-perhaps delivered in boxes labeled as food and later on moved to strategic locations-could turn the building into a pile of rubble.

“That must be why Davis and Stephens visited there yesterday,” said Springfield. “They were studying the foundations.”

Davis finally came to his senses during this discussion. “You have no proof of that, Bishop-if that’s even your real name,” he sneered.

“It’s just as much my name as Davis is yours,” replied Rook.

“You’ve got no business being here,” yelled Davis. “It’s not against the law to possess blasting powder!”

“As far as you’re concerned,” snapped Rook, pointing his finger in Davis’s face, “my word is the law.”

With Clark and Higginson keeping their guns trained on the men in the hold, Rook hopped off the barge. Springfield followed him. “What are we going to do with these fellows?” asked the sergeant. “He’s got a point. Have they actually committed a crime?”

“Let me worry about that,” said Rook. “Late tonight, when the streets are dark and quiet, we’ll take them to the Treasury and confine them to one of those rooms in the basement, far away from the main corridors. I don’t want anyone who doesn’t need to know about them to hear them or even to suspect that they’re locked away.”

“Sir?”

“What, Sergeant?”

“This seems unusual. Why don’t we take them to the new prison at the Old Capitol?”

“Let me worry about that. Just go to the Treasury and prepare a place for them. Keep all of this to yourself.”

It took Tate nearly an hour to arrive on the scene. His own pursuit had led him in exactly the opposite direction, and there had been plenty of distance to cover. Hearing the gunshots compelled him to give up his own chase immediately. In his experience, slave hunts rarely ended with violence, except perhaps where the dogs were concerned. Slave owners generally wanted their slaves returned alive and without serious injuries, and certainly without gunshot wounds that would make them less productive or harder to sell. Because the shots were unexpected, Tate believed his top priority now was to find his companion and see if he needed help. Besides, his trail was a hard one. His dog seemed to have trouble following the scent, pausing several times or doubling back on a path it already had taken. This was the mark of a slave who knew how to evade capture, Tate thought-and it was a trait he had not believed Portia or Joe to possess.

His dog found the remains of the bloody encounter before he did. It howled in a plaintive whine Tate had not heard it make before. He soon saw why. Three bodies lay motionless on the ground. The dog was obviously dead. No person or animal could have survived the huge wounds it had suffered. Tate’s dog sniffed at the carcass, let out a few miserable squeals, and sat down with its head resting on its front paws. This must be how dogs grieve, thought Tate.

The overseer figured the fates of Joe and Hughes were no different than the dog’s. He examined the body of the slave first, and it did not take long to see that it was without life. The big gunshot wound in the chest probably was responsible, even though there was also a gash on the side of the head, a little above and behind an ear. Tate wondered if someone had clobbered the slave there, but then he noticed a small patch of blood on an exposed root a few inches away. Joe must have hit it on the way down.

Hughes lay a few steps away, and Tate initially assumed that he was a corpse too. But he saw that Hughes was actually breathing, albeit slowly. The blood had congealed around the stab he had taken from the knife. The wound was not a clean one, but Tate thought it might heal in time. It helped that Hughes had gone unconscious on his back. This stroke of luck probably saved him a good amount of blood and perhaps even his life. Tate poured water from a small canister into the injured man’s mouth. Hughes swallowed.

In the meantime, Tate would have to make a few decisions. Their slave-hunting party had been effectively reduced from two to one-Hughes would need days or weeks to recover-and now Tate could account for one of the two runaways he sought. A dog was dead too. Tate wondered about Portia. Had he been on her trail earlier? That was possible, though he had his doubts. And if that was not her trail, whose was it? Where was hers? Perhaps she had split off from Joe much earlier. Or maybe she was nearby, looking at him even now from some hidden spot. This thought forced him to examine his surroundings, spinning around like a slow-moving compass as he studied the area. There was nothing. He inspected the trees too, and there was still no sign of Portia. He did notice, however, that the sun lay low in the west. Twilight would come soon, and then darkness.

Tate determined that he was in no position to continue a pursuit that might very well fail. He did not think it was a good idea to abandon Hughes either. He knew that Bennett appreciated Portia far more than many of his slaves. As an attractive young female, she was a valuable commodity. It occurred to him that much of what he liked about her, though, was her connection to Lucius-and this was a tie that Bennett might now scorn. There was the very real possibility Portia would be caught by somebody else and returned for a bounty, too. Tate knew he was not the only person who could bring her home.