Rough Justice

1

It was a good night for a lynching. No moon to speak of, and a dark ceiling of clouds concealed whatever starlight might have helped illuminate the streets of Corpus Christi. Streetlamps, few and far between, guttered and did more to accentuate the lurking shadows than relieve them. Anything could happen on a night like this, and something was about to.

Gideon Ryder lay prone on the flat roof of a cotton warehouse, peering north along the dark street below him, waiting for the lynchers to arrive. They were late already, likely drinking courage to prepare for their adventure, getting fired up for the task they’d set themselves. Hanging a man was thirsty work. Toss in his wife, and it could be downright nerve-racking.

Ryder was as ready for them as he’d ever be. His lever-action Henry rifle was loaded with sixteen .44-caliber rounds in its tube magazine, plus one in the chamber. His Colt Army Model 1860 revolver, holstered on his left side for a cross-hand draw, was likewise fully loaded, and he carried three spare cylinders to save on time, if it became a standoff. Finally, a Bowie knife was sheathed inside the high top of his right boot, but it wouldn’t come to that.

Or, if it did, Ryder supposed he would be out of luck.

One blade against a mob armed to the teeth wasn’t the kind of odds he favored. Not for getting out alive, at any rate.

The house across the way, intended target of the raid, was dark and still. He almost envied those inside, likely asleep, or maybe making love. Ryder would happily have taken either option, if he’d had a choice, but duty placed him where he was, another shadow in the night, waiting to see if someone had to die.

At least, he thought, I’m on dry land.

His last job had involved considerable sailing on the ocean, not a circumstance that he was anxious to repeat. He was a landlubber, no doubt about it, and would take a desert over rolling wave crests any day. Not that the choice would necessarily be his. He went where he was told to go and dealt with what he found awaiting him, upon arrival.

Last time, it was pirates smuggling gold. This time . . . he wasn’t absolutely sure yet, but planned on finding out.

His first job was to keep the mob from stringing up a man who might be able to supply the information Ryder needed to complete his task. He’d snooped around the town sufficiently to get a feel for what was happening, but details had been sparse to nonexistent. Rumors wouldn’t get him far, distorted as they were from traveling by word of mouth, and maybe by design.

He knew a group of terrorists was operating in the neighborhood of Corpus Christi, making life a hell on Earth for former slaves and anyone who offered them a helping hand, but that was it, so far. No names, no addresses, and dropping hints in various saloons had gotten him more dirty looks than answers.

But he did know whom the night riders despised. That much was common knowledge, more or less, and when a plan was hatched to throw that fellow a nocturnal necktie party, word of it had filtered to the streets. Ryder supposed it must have reached the local law, as well, but they were steering clear, probably shaking down some of the city’s countless pimps and prostitutes to supplement their meager city wages.

So, he’d do the job alone, or try to. Preferably without anybody getting killed.

But if he had to make that choice, Ryder intended to go home alive tonight.

Home in this case being a small room in a boardinghouse that cost him two dollars per week, no extra for the privy out back. His real home was in Washington, D.C.—or had been, until recently. He had been happy with the U.S. Marshals Service, till they’d sacked him for shooting a senator’s son. It had been self-defense, and not even a mortal wound, but rich men got their way in Washington, like anywhere else.

Now he was lying on a roof in Texas, six blocks from the waterfront, waiting to see if he would live to see another sunrise.

Now, as if in answer to his thought, he saw light breaking to the north—which made no sense, time-wise, or in relation to geography. A second look told Ryder he was staring at the lights of torches, thirty-five or forty of them, held by ragged ranks of marching men. The torchbearers wore hoods resembling flour sacks, a few with hats planted on top of them at awkward angles, and the firelight showed that all of them were armed. Two of the men in front had long ropes coiled over their shoulders, nooses dangling at their hips.

No false alarm, then.

Ryder watched the mob approaching, peering over rifle sights, wondering how many of those faceless strangers he might have to kill.

*   *   *

What is it, Tom?”

The sound of Josey’s sleepy voice distracted Thomas Hubbard, kneeling in the darkness, fumbling for the Sharps breech-loading shotgun he kept underneath their bed. When he’d retrieved the long gun, Hubbard pulled a heavy Colt Dragoon revolver from its hiding place inside the top drawer of his night table.

“Thomas?” Her tone had grown more urgent now, frightened.

“We’re having visitors,” he said, half whispering, although they were alone inside the small frame house.

“Oh, God!”

“Be calm now,” he commanded. “We’ve rehearsed this.”

“But I never thought—”

“Where do you go?” he interrupted her.

She stopped, moved close enough to touch his shoulder in the dark. “The bathtub,” she replied.

Cast iron, it was, and capable of stopping bullets once they’d spent force punching through the walls. She would be safest there, unless—

“What if there’s fire?” he pressed her.

“Run out through the back, to Mammy Waller’s.”

“And if someone gets past me?”

“I fight, if I can’t run. Thomas—”

“Go fetch your implements. Quick, now.”

She ducked into the kitchen, not a long walk in the little house, and came back bearing steel, a cleaver in her right hand, and foot-long butcher’s knife in the left. Settling beside him on the floor, she said, “Thomas, I don’t know whether I can—”

“You’ll do what you have to do,” he said, trying to reassure her. “Kiss me, now, and then go hide.”

She made it last a moment longer than he’d planned, enough to stir him at this least appropriate of times, then Josey bolted for the bathroom. As they’d planned, she did not shut the door behind her. With it open, she could keep track of the action in the house and on the street outside, and it would be more difficult for anyone to corner her. Hubbard could hear her as she crawled into the tub, her nightgown rustling, weapons clanking as their blades struck iron.

Hubbard still didn’t know exactly what had woken him. He barely slept, these nights, and hadn’t had a full night’s sleep since he arrived in Corpus Christi, but tonight was different. He’d bolted upright in the bed he shared with Josey, knowing there was danger on the way and that they did not have much time for preparation.

Just as well, then, that he’d been prepared for trouble from day one. He wished that Josey had stayed in St. Louis, but she wouldn’t hear of it, insisted on living their vows to the utmost, for better or worse.

Till death do us part, he thought, trying to swallow the lump in his throat.

Hubbard saw torchlight in the street outside and shifted his position at the window for a better field of fire. He hoped it wouldn’t come to killing, but in Corpus Christi, when a mob showed up outside your home at night, it was a safe bet they had murder on their minds. Hubbard had half a dozen buckshot cartridges preloaded, half a dozen pellets each, which ought to do some damage in a crowd. After he fired the first round, they’d be shooting back, and it would quickly go to hell from there, no matter how he tried to hold the line. The mob would have mobility and numbers on its side, and he could only hope that Josey would be able to escape before they stormed the house or burned it down around him.

Was it worth it? Hubbard asked himself. And once again, he had to answer, Yes.

For him, at least. But Josey . . .

Now the mob was coming into view, their torches giving him a halfway decent look at them. They all wore hoods, of course, embarrassed to be seen doing their “patriotic” work. Most of the group wore workmen’s clothes, although a couple out in front were dressed in suits and had their shoes polished, reflecting torchlight, so the flour sacks pulled down over their heads looked all the more ridiculous. All of the men that he could see were armed, most of them packing guns, although a few carried axes and long-bladed cane knives. The two well-dressed leaders had ropes, their hangman’s nooses dangling. Two nooses, he noted, which meant they planned on killing Josey, too.

A brutal rage welled up inside of Hubbard, blotting out most of his fear. Attacking him was one thing; he’d invited it, even expected it. But setting out to lynch a woman in the middle of the night was something else. A new low for the sneaky bastards who pretended everything they did was in the interest of defending “southern womanhood.”

Tonight, he swore, at least a few of them would pay for their effrontery. They’d pay in blood, by God, and if they took him down—which he supposed, based on their numbers, they were bound to do—at least the sons of bitches would remember they’d been in a fight.

He eased the window open, shy of smashing it himself, and called out to the street, “What do you want?”

“You need to ask?” one of the rope bearers yelled back to him, making the others laugh.

“I reckon not,” Hubbard replied, hoping they didn’t hear the tremor in his voice. “But you’d be wise to turn around and go back home.”

“Soon as we’re done here,” said the other rope man, while the others laughed some more.

“You’ve got no right to do this,” Hubbard answered back.

“We’re doin’ this for God and for the State of Texas,” said the man who’d spoken first. “We aim to set a clear example for the other carpetbaggers.”

“And my wife?”

“Be pleased to entertain ’er for a spell, before we string her up,” said someone in the hooded ranks.

Hubbard cocked the Sharps and shouted back, “Come on, then. It’ll cost you.”

He was ready—thought he was, at least—but when the first shot echoed in the street, he flinched away and wondered where in hell it had come from.

*   *   *

Ryder didn’t plan on killing anybody when he fired into the crowd. He sighted on a torch one of the hooded men was holding overhead, off to the far edge of the mob from where he lay atop the warehouse, held his breath, and squeezed the Henry’s trigger just as gently as you please. The .44 slug found its mark, the torch head detonating, raining sparks onto the man who held it. When his hood caught fire, the would-be lyncher started whooping, running aimlessly in circles while he batted at the flaming flour sack.

The others froze, then panicked, trying to determine where the shot had come from. Several turned their weapons on the house they had been planning to attack, blasting away, and someone at the nearest window fired a shotgun blast into the crowd.

Damn it!

He couldn’t blame the mob’s target for fighting back, but Ryder hoped to scare the lynchers off, not start a battle in the middle of the street. If the police showed up, he knew there was a fair chance they would take the lynchers’ side and rush the house, claiming its occupants had started everything.

And Ryder hadn’t planned on shooting any coppers.

Not yet, anyway.

He pumped the Henry’s lever action, hoped no one would spot his muzzle flash, and fired a second shot above the shrouded heads below him. This one didn’t have the same impact, with the other weapons going off down there. In fact, it almost seemed as if no one had noticed. Ryder cursed and took a chance, picked one of the mob’s leaders, standing with a large revolver pointed at the house, and sighted on his gun hand.

This time, there was no mistaking the reaction. Impact sent his target’s pistol flying, and a couple of the shooter’s fingers with it, spinning through a puff of crimson mist. The man on the receiving end let out a howl of pain and dropped his torch, clutching the wrist below his mangled paw with his free hand. He wouldn’t bleed out if he got some help before too long, but at the moment he was miles away from thinking straight.

One of his cohorts tried to help; he rushed forward with his torch and grabbed the leader’s wounded hand and brought it to the flames. That raised another cry of agony, more shrill and high-pitched than the last, before the leader snatched his helper’s torch away and smashed it down atop the other’s hooded skull. That set the pair of them to brawling, and it quickly spread among the others, fists and gun butts swinging, leaving bloody stains on cotton sacks.

So much for brotherhood.

Another shotgun blast came from the house and struck one of the brawlers in his hind parts. He went down, then struggled to his feet again and limped off toward the melee’s sideline, hands cupping his wounded buttocks. Others, maybe stung by stray shot, bolted from the fight and started running back the way they’d come, dropping their torches in the street.

Ryder was leery about firing any more shots toward the mob, chaotic as it was. The chance of seriously wounding somebody was too high, in his estimation, so he sent a parting shot over their heads and heard it smash a window, two or three blocks farther down. That kept them moving, and the man they’d come to hang was smart enough to let them go without another blast to motivate them.

In the street, where hooded men had gathered moments earlier with murderous intent, there lay close to a dozen torches, sputtering. Their light showed Ryder that the mob had dropped some of its flour sacks, two six-guns, one cane knife, and two bloody fingers blasted from their spokesman’s fist. It wasn’t much to show for a heroic outing, no bodies suspended from a tree and shot to shreds, or set afire.

Ryder supposed that he could log that as a victory of sorts, but he still had more work to do. He rose and crossed the rooftop, hurried now, and scrambled down a ladder fastened to the outer southeast wall with rusty bolts. Checking the street once more for enemies, he ran across and made his way around the backside of the little, bullet-punctured house.

*   *   *

Thomas?”

Josey’s voice surprised him, made him whip around and nearly point the shotgun at her, but he caught himself in time. “You weren’t supposed to come until I called you,” Hubbard said.

“I had to see if you were hurt, with all that shooting,” she replied.

“I’m fine. Can’t say much for the house, though.”

“I don’t care about the house.”

“You may, next time it rains.”

“Thomas, what’s happening?”

He glanced back toward the empty street outside and said, “They ran away. I think someone was shooting at them.”

“That was you. I know that much.”

“Not me,” he told her, frowning at the night. “Somebody else.”

“Make sense,” she chided him.

“I’m telling you, somebody opened up on them before I did.”

“But who?”

“I couldn’t answer that. It sounded like a rifle. Shot one of the torches”—Hubbard had to smile as he explained—“and set one bastard’s hood on fire.”

“Language!”

“Be serious,” he said, losing the smile.

“Who’d help us out against that mob, in Corpus Christi?” she demanded.

“They don’t speak for everyone. You know that, well as I—”

“What’s that?” she interrupted him.

A rapping at their back door, soft but clearly audible.

“Back in the tub!” he ordered.

“Tom—”

“Do like I tell you!”

Josey ducked into the bathroom. Hubbard checked the street again, saw no one lurking there, and started moving toward the back door, shotgun ready in his hands. It struck him as peculiar, that the mob or members of it would come creeping back and knock politely on his door after the skirmish sent them fleeing. Still, he knew they weren’t all idiots. Some of them might try stealth, where a direct attack had failed.

Halfway between the bedroom and the back door, Hubbard paused. What if the knocking was a trick to draw him from the street-side window, while the mob or part of it came back? They wouldn’t have to rush the house, just sneak back long enough to pitch a torch or a kerosene lamp through one of the windows. Hubbard couldn’t fight fire with a shotgun, and once he fled the house with Josey, they would be exposed to gunmen waiting in the dark.

He almost doubled back to watch the street, then realized that someone with a mind to burn the house could set a fire as easily behind it as in front. He mouthed a silent curse, then detoured to the tiny bathroom and spoke into its shadows.

“Be ready to run if I tell you,” he said, then retreated, not waiting for Josey to answer.

It was imagination, he supposed, that made him hear her whisper back, “I love you, Thomas.”

Only half as much as I love you, he thought.

Hubbard would die defending her, and gladly, but he knew it wouldn’t help if she was trapped inside the house by flames or gunfire, with him dead.

Moving toward the back door, Hubbard placed each step precisely on floorboards, cringing when they groaned beneath his weight. The little noises he’d grown used to in the weeks they’d occupied the rented house all worked against him now, marking his every movement for whoever waited in the night, outside.

Go slow and take it easy.

Hubbard knew it wasn’t the police. Most of them thought no better of him than the men who’d come to lynch him, and if they’d arrived belatedly, they would be kicking in his front door, probably arresting him and Josey for the crime of self-defense. He thought about the man he’d wounded in the butt and knew that if he died, Hubbard might well be charged with murder.

Hang me one way or another, will you? Then I may as well die fighting.

He was almost at the back door when the knocking was repeated. Slightly louder now, or was that just because he’d moved in closer? Hubbard stayed as far to one side of the doorway as the narrow hall permitted, knowing that a fusillade of gunfire blasting through the door could cut him down before he had a chance to use the Sharps.

What now?

The knock came for a third time, urgently, and someone whispered through the door panel, calling his name. A man’s voice, but he couldn’t place it.

Should he answer, or just blast the prowler straight to hell?

“Who is it?” Hubbard asked, throat dry and croaking.

“I’m a friend,” the disembodied voice replied.

And what else would it say? I’m here to kill you?

“State your name,” Hubbard demanded, knowing that the answer might well be a lie.

“Gideon Ryder.”

“Never heard of you.”

“Be disappointed if you had,” the stranger said.

The Sharps was trembling in his hands like a divining rod with water underfoot. “What do you want?”

“You’re in a spot of trouble here.”

Hubbard choked back a sudden bleat of hysterical laughter. “You think so?” he answered. “Thanks for the tip.”

“I want to help you, if you’ll open up.”

“Mister, I’ve had all the surprises I can stand for one night,” Hubbard warned him. “If you’re laying for me, I can promise you we’ll die together.”

“Trust me,” said the voice. “A minute’s all I need.”

“It’s all you’ve got,” Hubbard replied.

Half crouching, apelike, sweating through his nightshirt even with the chill breeze from the broken windows trailing him, Hubbard inched forward, cautiously unlatched the door, then flung it open, leveling his shotgun at a solitary stranger’s face.

The tall man had a rifle in his left hand, while his right was holding up some kind of badge shaped like a shield, with a five-pointed star in its center.

“Gideon Ryder,” the man said again. “United States Secret Service.”

2

I don’t know what that is,” Hubbard said.

“That’s because it’s a secret,” said Ryder. “You mind?”

Hubbard checked the back alley for lurkers, then let him come in, latched the door at his back, and stood watching, the long shotgun ready. A woman emerged from a room to the left, alluring in a nightgown, less so when he saw the cleaver in her right hand and the long knife in her left.

“Are you all right, ma’am?” Ryder asked her.

“So far. Who are you?”

He introduced himself again and let her see his badge.

“The Secret Service? What’s that?”

“We can talk about it while we’re moving. If you have a safe place you can go—”

“And leave our home?” Hubbard managed to seem dismayed by that idea. “I won’t be driven off by ruffians.”

“Right now, I’d worry more about the cops,” Ryder replied. “They’re bound to show up here, sooner or later, and with two men wounded that I’m sure of, there’s a good chance they’ll arrest you.”

“What? For defending our lives and our home?” Hubbard’s wife sounded outraged.

“You’re Yankees, they’re Texans,” Ryder reminded her. “Some of them—most of them, maybe—are friends of the men who attacked you. The police see you disrupting their established way of life and don’t appreciate it. They’ll use every means at hand to stop you.”

“But—”

“We don’t have time to argue,” Ryder cut her off. “There’s nothing I can do to help you, if they show up while we’re standing here.”

“What can you do to help us, anyway?” asked Hubbard.

“Stash you somewhere,” Ryder said. “Then see what I can do about the KRS.”

“You know about them?”

“Save the questions,” Ryder said, “and pack now. Anything you can’t collect within five minutes, leave it here.”

He watched them scrambling through the darkened rooms, collecting their possessions, while he stood guard at the street-side window with his Henry, counting off the seconds in his head. They whispered as they worked, the woman tearful, Thomas Hubbard trying to be strong on her account.

And Ryder knew about the KRS, all right. Knights of the Rising Sun, they called themselves, an outfit that had sprung up in Texas soon after Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Grant at Appomattox Court House, in Virginia. They were regulators of a sort, sharing some traits in common with the vigilance committees that had operated in California, Kansas, and Montana before the war broke out in ’61. The major difference was that they didn’t target gamblers, whores, and rustlers, but were focused on the northern carpetbaggers and home-grown “scalawags” who thought black people, liberated from their bondage at war’s end, should have a say in government and how they led their lives.

In Dixie, talk like that could get you ostracized, boycotted if you ran a business, murdered if you didn’t see the light and knuckle under on command. The Hubbards had come down to Texas from St. Louis, with a plan in mind to help the freedmen gain equality, and they’d been butting heads with local whites since they arrived.

That wasn’t Ryder’s problem. He was not a do-gooder in any normal sense, although he tried to do the right thing when he could. His mission, delegated to him by Secret Service chief William Patrick Wood in Washington, was to find out whether members of the KRS were bent on stirring up a new rebellion from the ashes of the old one, or if they were just another gang of crackers persecuting people they regarded as a servant class ordained by God.

If they were Rebels, Ryder had been told to use his own best judgment in discouraging their treason. That sounded familiar to him, after being left to deal with Galveston’s smugglers and pirates alone, on his first assignment. Plenty of excitement, working that way, but the tough part could be getting out alive.

The Hubbards beat his deadline by the best part of a minute. They had given up on salvaging whatever dreams inhabited their rented home, dressed warmly for the night, and packed sufficient clothes to get them by, with ammunition for the husband’s guns. Josey Hubbard, he observed, had also packed the cleaver and the knife, wanting to do her part if there was trouble.

“Ready, then?” he asked them, when they stood before him, bags in hand, Tom Hubbard with his big Sharps shotgun.

“As we’ll ever be,” Hubbard replied.

“So, where’s your safe house?”

“I can guide you there,” said Hubbard. “Emma Johnson’s place, a half mile west of here, or so.”

“Among the Negroes,” Josey added, as if she expected Ryder to object.

“You think she’ll take you in?” he asked.

“I’m sure of it,” Thomas replied. “She’s offered more than once, but I was leery of directing trouble toward her family.”

“That still applies,” said Ryder.

“But we seem to have no choice. And the police aren’t likely to go looking for us there.”

“How dumb are they?” Ryder inquired.

“Not dumb, so much, as raised to think a certain way. The thought of whites and Negroes sharing quarters likely won’t occur to them.”

“Okay, let’s go,” said Ryder. Thinking to himself, I hope you’re right.

If the police or vigilantes did go looking for the Hubbards among black folk, it could spark a massacre, and Ryder didn’t want to have that on his conscience. The alternative, however, was abandoning them to their fate, and he wasn’t prepared to live with that, either.

“Shall I lock up?” Tom Hubbard asked.

“Your choice,” Ryder replied.

They both knew that if the police arrived, or members of the scattered mob returned, they’d simply force the doors, ransack the house, and burn it if they had a mind to. Still, the simple act of locking doors felt civilized and might dissuade some random thief from entering.

“I’ll lock it,” Hubbard said and plied his key, while Ryder and the lady stood by, waiting. When he’d finished, he directed Ryder westward, following an alley littered with rubbish. Rats ran squeaking from their path, together with a couple of the cats that preyed on them. They did not speak until they’d crossed a line that Ryder couldn’t see, and Hubbard said, “We’re in the Negro quarter now.”

It didn’t look much different in the dark, the homes seen from behind, but Ryder saw that some of them were smaller and in need of more repair than those they’d walked past earlier. The former slaves of Texas and the other Rebel states had been emancipated to a state of abject poverty, in most cases, the vast majority illiterate because the governments that held them captive also punished anyone who taught them how to read and write. Some had been promised forty acres and a mule to call their own, but hasty offers made in wartime were forgotten easily with peace restored. Ryder thought simple fairness might require a helping hand, rather than simply striking off their chains, but it was not his place to meddle in official policy.

They reached a side street, Hubbard pausing there with Josey at his side. “We turn here,” he told Ryder. “If we meet someone, let me do all the talking.”

Ryder nodded, thinking, That depends on who it is and what they want.

They turned the corner, walked about ten yards, and then were suddenly surrounded by a dozen men with guns, pitchforks, and clubs. The men were black and emanated raw hostility.

“The hell you want round here?” one of them asked.

“Is that you, Lazarus?” Tom Hubbard asked the man who’d spoken.

“Mr. Hubbard? We wasn’t expectin’ y’all. And who’s that with you?”

Ryder went through his introduction one more time, flashing his badge and waiting while a number of the freedmen scrutinized it by the little light available.

“First time I heard of any Secret Service,” said the one called Lazarus.

“I’m getting that a lot,” Ryder acknowledged.

“Maybe oughta put the word around some, in the newspapers and such.”

“I’ll pass that on.”

Hubbard broke in to say, “We’ve had some trouble, Lazarus. The KRS—”

“Already heard about it, Mr. Hubbard. Wasn’t sure you made it out alive, but we’re right glad to see the two of you.” Lazarus peered at Ryder, asking Hubbard, “Can you trust this one?”

“He helped us out tonight,” said Hubbard. “I will trust him till he gives us reason not to.”

“Be too late by then,” another member of the group declared.

“If Mr. Hubbard trusts him,” Lazarus announced, “that’s good enough for me.” He cut another look toward Ryder, adding, “If he prove me wrong, we’ll deal with it accordingly.” Then, back to Hubbard, “Where you headed?”

“Emma Johnson has offered several times to let us stay with her, if there were . . . difficulties. It’s an awful imposition, but we’ll try to keep it brief.”

“Let’s get you there,” said Lazarus, “before the wrong eyes see us lingerin’.”

Surrounded by the freedmen, Ryder and the Hubbards walked another three blocks north, then stopped outside a little house that had a knee-high picket fence around its scrap of yard, more dirt than grass, and bricks laid down to form a walkway from the street, up to the porch. Gate hinges squealed as they passed through, and Ryder saw a giant rise up from a rocker on the porch to bar their way.

“Teeny,” said Lazarus, “we brought some visitors to see Miss Emma.”

“Do she know you’s comin’?” asked the giant.

“It’s the Hubbards. She invited ’em.”

“I know my numbers,” Teeny answered. “I count three white peoples.”

“That’s a fact,” admitted Lazarus. “Third one’s some kinda secret fella.”

“Hunh. Wait here a second.”

Teeny went inside, stooping to clear the lintel with his head, and shut the door behind him. When he came back, half a minute later, he seemed more relaxed.

“Miss Emma say c’mon inside, them that’ll fit.”

“Rest of y’all stay out here and keep a watch,” Lazarus told his armed companions. “Jonas, you and Ezekiel go scout around. Make sure they ain’t no crackers comin’.”

Tom and Josey Hubbard followed Lazarus into the tiny house, with Ryder bringing up the rear. Teeny regarded him with thinly veiled suspicion, maybe wondering if he should ask for Ryder’s weapons—or, perhaps, just twist his head off like a jar lid. Either way, he let them pass, then moved to block the door. Ryder imagined that he might not leave the house alive if this Miss Emma looked at him and disliked what she saw.

She was a tiny woman, as befit her miniature home, in stark contrast to the behemoth standing watch outside. Ryder could not have guessed her age, although he reckoned she was somewhere on the downhill side of fifty, gray hair pulled back in a bun that drew most of the wrinkles from her sharp, angular face. He would have been surprised if she weighed ninety pounds.

“Miss Emma,” Hubbard said, “I must apologize for this intrusion on—”

“Invited ain’t intrudin’, Mr. Hubbard.”

“Thomas, please.”

“Ain’t gonna call you by your Christian name. I told you that before.”

“Yes, ma’am, you did.”

“They run you off, I guess.”

“They’re trying to,” Hubbard replied. “We’re not done, yet.”

“This fella helpin’ you?”

“I’m trying to,” said Ryder, speaking for himself. He offered one more introduction, hoping it would be the last tonight.

“I heard somethin’ about your Secret Service.”

“Ma’am, I’m pleased somebody has.”

Her sly smile twinkled. “Wouldn’t be much of a secret if they all knew, would it?”

“I suppose not,” Ryder granted, smiling back at her.

“You gonna make these lousy crackers stop what they been doin’ to my people?”

“That’s my plan,” he said. “I’m working out the details.”

“Somethin’ tells me you are a determined man. That right?”

He nodded. Said, “I like to look, before I leap.”

“But mostly, you leap anyway.”

“Sometimes.”

“There’s somethin’ to be said for pure audacity.”

Surprised by her turn of phrase, Ryder smiled and said, “Yes, ma’am, there is.”

“You know about these fellas, call themselves a bunch of Knights?”

“We’ve had reports in Washington.”

“Before the war, they woulda been the paddyrollers hereabouts. What you’d have called the slave patrol. It kept some of ’em out of battle, after the secession, ever’body and his donkey scared to death about some kind of uprisin’ amongst my people. Hear ’em talk today, o’ course, it sounds like they won every scrap from Bull Run down to Chickamauga by theirselves. Windbags, but that don’t mean you get enough of ’em together, they won’t kill you.”

“I saw some of that tonight,” said Ryder.

“Did they wear their pillowcases?”

“Something similar.”

“I haven’t seen ’em, personally,” said Miss Emma. “Mebbe they’ll come by to check on me one of these nights.”

“I’ll try to see that doesn’t happen,” Ryder said.

“How you gonna do that?” she inquired.

“I’m not sure, yet. Maybe get close to them, see what they’re up to.”

“Better lose that Yankee accent, first,” Miss Emma said.

“Is it that obvious?”

“Except to deaf folk, I imagine.” She was laughing at him now.

“I’ll do my best.”

“Them Knights ain’t very smart, but they’s suspicious. Best remember that.”

“I will.”

“Miss Emma,” Hubbard interrupted, “we don’t mean to rob you of your sleep.”

“Don’t need much, when you get to be my age,” she told him. “Long sleep’s comin’ soon enough. Your missus, on the other hand, looks like she needs some ole shut-eye.”

“We can sleep out here,” said Hubbard.

“That you will,” Miss Emma said. “Ain’t room for two in my bed, anyhow, but I can spare a couple blankets. Get them pillows off the chairs.” She paused and asked, “You stayin’, Mr. Ryder?”

“No, ma’am. I’ll be on my way, if everything’s secure for now.”

“Teeny won’t let nobody in, ’less I instruct him to,” she said.

“Good night, then. Thomas, Mrs. Hubbard, you’d be wise to stay out of the public eye, the next few days.”

“They’ll be right here,” Miss Emma said. “Gwan, now, Secret Service man.”

*   *   *

Teeny stood far enough aside for Ryder to edge past him, on the porch. The other freedmen watched him go, a nod from Lazarus to see him on his way. Ryder imagined a policeman passing by would be alarmed, seeing the group of them outside with weapons, but he guessed that warning them about white law would be superfluous. They’d all been born and raised under the gun and lash. Nothing in Ryder’s personal experience could match what they’d lived through.

He had kept track of streets, while he was escorting the Hubbards to Miss Emma’s, and he knew the way back to his rooming house. It had a private entrance, at the rear, and no curfew on boarders. The walk let Ryder clear his head and gave him time to think about his plan, such as it was.

Miss Emma had a point about his infiltration of the KRS. He had done something similar in Galveston, on his first job, but posing as a smuggler obviously differed from pretending to be Texas born and bred. He’d need another angle of attack to make it work—but what?

It hit him when he’d covered roughly half the distance to his rooming house. With only minor effort, Ryder thought that he could turn himself into a copperhead, one of those northerners who’d given aid and comfort to the Rebels while the war was on, and who were clamoring for readmission of the states that had seceded on their own terms, meaning that the freedmen would not vote, hold public office, or by any other means disturb the “southern way of life.” He knew the arguments by heart, believed that he could sell himself as a Confederate devotee, but a slip could get him killed.

What else was new?

He detoured past the Hubbards’ place on his way back and smelled the smoke three blocks before he got there. Closer in, he saw the house engulfed in flames and sagging at the roofline, almost ready to collapse. The street was lined with sullen-looking men and members of the Corpus Christi fire brigade, their horse-drawn ladder wagon standing idly by, its Deming four-man end-stroke hand pump unattended. Someone had decided just to let the house burn down, and no one was prepared to buck that plan.

He moved on, keeping to the shadows, unobserved. All eyes were on the fire, some of the watchers doubtless disappointed that the house would be unoccupied when it collapsed. Police were just arriving on the scene—some kind of record for a slow response, Ryder supposed—and huddled with the fire brigade’s commander on the sidewalk opposite the blaze. They didn’t notice Ryder passing, Henry rifle down against his leg and mostly out of sight.

Another block, and he was clear, the fire and crowd behind him. Ryder knew he should feel something, maybe outrage, but he’d seen too much during the war and since to make believe that much of anything surprised him now. Brutality was commonplace, and he was not above employing it himself, as need arose.

There were no guidelines, in particular, for how he did his job. The Bill of Rights applied, of course, but Ryder’s chief in Washington seemed less concerned with legal niceties than with results. His first case hadn’t gone to trial, but Ryder had achieved what he set out to do, albeit at a bloody cost. This time, he hoped it wouldn’t turn into a massacre.

But if it did, he planned to be the one who walked away.

Two blocks west of the boardinghouse, he passed the Stars and Bars saloon, a favorite watering hole for Knights of the Rising Sun. The tavern’s name was borrowed from the Rebel battle flag, commonly mistaken among Yankees with the national flag of the late Confederacy. In fact, the real flag of the severed southern states had changed three times during the four-year Civil War, and while the last two versions had incorporated versions of the stars and bars, most Yanks—and many southern partisans, besides—still mistook the national banner for that of General Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.

Ryder stood across from the saloon a while, watching the celebration that was going on inside. He doubted that the man whose hand he’d shot away was boozing with the others, or the one whose backside Tom Hubbard had ventilated with his Sharps. Both of them likely would survive, unless a clumsy sawbones made things worse, but Ryder wasn’t overly concerned with them. It was the rest of their fraternity that worried him, a gang of thugs and louts bent on undoing what had cost four years of blood and sweat, more than one hundred thousand Union lives, and untold millions from the U.S. Treasury in order to achieve.

The slaves were free. They needed help beyond lip service out of Washington. And any die-hard Johnny Rebs who thought they could refight the war, and maybe win it this time, had a rude surprise in store for them. The lesson that they should have learned at Appomattox needed to be driven home, by any means available.

Was Ryder the man for that job?

Maybe not. He just happened to be the man sent to perform it, however. And one thing he’d never been able to master was quitting.