Jones cleared his throat and spoke from the platform. “That man there with Milo is named Brady Kenton,” he said. “Many of you have probably heard of him. He writes stories and draws pictures for the Illustrated American magazine.”
Kenton usually saw smiles and nods of welcome when he was recognized in a crowd, but these people didn’t seem to care. They continued to glare at him, most looking even more mistrustful now that they knew he was a journalist. The few young children in the crowd scooted behind their mothers’ skirts and peered at him unblinkingly, maybe wondering what breed of devil this stranger was.
“Mr. Kenton, you probably know, was brought to us by Milo and his scouts. They rescued him fleeing from Ottinger’s soldiers, who were shooting at him.”
The harshness vanished from most of the stares he was receiving. Any enemy of Ottinger’s was apparently a friend of theirs.
Jones went on, “Mr. Kenton, though not one of us, and a Lincolnite in former days, is nevertheless a man who has done many good things. In my opinion, the best was that he wrote stories many years ago that exposed to the world the kind of beast that J.B. Ottinger is, and this despite the fact that he and Ottinger were both on the same side during the late war. So I hope you’ll make him welcome during this brief time we have remaining together.”
There was no general rumble of welcome, however, because that last sentence instantly drew all attention away from Kenton.
A man near the front of the crowd asked, “What do you mean, ‘brief time,’ Pernell?”
Pernell Jones had the demeanor of a man who has just lost a close loved one. He looked sadly across the group and appeared to be blinking back tears. “My friends, we’ve lived as a community for many a year. Like a family, we’ve been, making our own way, living in peace with one another, being our own little nation. We’ve lived as man was intended to live: free. We ought to be proud of it. I am. I think you are, too.
“This mountainside has provided a good home for us. We’ve lived quite a few places over the years, but this place here, I think, has been the finest of them all. It’s a place I would have wished could go on forever. But it can’t.”
Jones paused to let his statement sink in. Kenton watched the crowd shift and whisper and murmur. Kenton did his best to commit the scene to memory, hoping to re-create it on a sketch pad later, and jotted notes to retain the gist of Jones’s words.
“Few of those out there in the foreign nation who have known of us have understood us,” Jones said. It took Kenton a moment to realize the “foreign nation” referred to was the United States. “They’ve thought of us as hostile and warlike. They’ve assumed we’ve pulled ourselves apart from them because we want to continue to fight them. We all know that’s not how it is. We want nothing more than for them to ignore us as we ignore them.”
He paused, struggling with rising emotion. “But there are those who refuse to ignore us. There are those who refuse to drop old grudges. As I’m sure you know, I’m talking specifically about Colonel J.B. Ottinger.”
Mere mention of the name was enough to generate angry grumbles among the people.
Jones then began to reveal information that, until then, had been known only to a few. The crowd received it in stunned silence, for it was inherently shocking news. “I’ve decided to reveal to you all that on several occasions since the end of the great and lost war, Colonel J.B. Ottinger has made attempts on my life,” Jones said. “I’ve not revealed it until now because I saw no need for it. In most cases, the attempts were rather pitiful, done by inept men Ottinger hired as assassins. Two of these men made the mistake of making their attempts in areas and situations in which I was able to defend myself. One of them admitted—before they died—that Ottinger had hired them. The remarkable thing was that this was done while Ottinger was still in Texas, and we were already here. From that far away, he tried to hire out my assassination! It shows the depth and persistence of the man’s hatred.”
Kenton could feel the tension and anger of the crowd growing.
Jones continued: “As time passed, Ottinger hired increasingly better, more dangerous, would-be assassins. Each failed, nonetheless. Some of them betrayed him, making no real effort to kill me, and I suppose satisfying themselves with however much of their pay he’d given them in advance. But I began to realize that, eventually, these failures and betrayals would only make Ottinger grow more hungry for my death. I knew that eventually, he’d involve himself directly in the business of seeing to the death of the man whose shotgun mangled his face.
“When Ottinger’s wife died and he arranged for transfer to Fort Brandon, only a few miles from here, this bore grim tidings for me…for us. I knew his motive for coming. I knew he was moving himself into a better position, a place closer to me, so he could oversee my demise.”
Kenton was intrigued. If not for what he’d personally seen of Ottinger’s mad, manipulative obsession in the Gomorrah incident, he’d have probably wondered if Jones were simply being paranoid. But he knew enough of Ottinger to know this was no exaggeration. Back before his disfigurement, Ottinger was known as a handsome and very vain man, quick to pose for portraits, photographs, eager to be at the head of any crowd. It was no wonder that such a man would be so obsessively hateful toward the one who forever ruined his appearance.
Jones went on. “I had hoped against hope that somehow Ottinger would simply give up, or at the very least, that he would keep his attempts on my life aimed purely at me alone. But it hasn’t happened that way. And now, with this strange event that has happened at Gomorrah, Ottinger has seized an opportunity to compromise us all.
“Our scouts, as you know, have been secretly watching the soldiers since they arrived. In some instances they’ve been able to overhear some important things as well. The gist of what they’ve learned is this: Colonel Ottinger intends to officially blame the destruction of Gomorrah on those of us in this compound. He’ll label us as violent, obsessed, old unreconstructed Rebels who planted a bomb or set a blaze in the town as some absurd act of war against the United States. And he’ll use that as a pretext to overrun us as common outlaws and seditionists.”
“Pernell, can I ask something?” a man near the front said.
“Of course you can, Michael.”
“I saw what destroyed Gomorrah. Several of us did. It fell from the sky, like a ball of fire, and exploded like no bomb I’ve ever heard of or seen. It laid the trees out like twigs and ignited near a whole mountaintop at once. How in the world could Ottinger hope to persuade anyone that we here could come up with an explosive big enough to do that kind of damage? Nobody will believe him!”
Jones succinctly explained Ottinger’s apparent strategy of relighting the fire and destroying the evidence of the fall pattern of the trees.
“But we’ve got Brady Kenton here!” someone hollered. “Get him to write the truth!”
Kenton spoke up. “You can rest assured that I will indeed write the truth,” he said. “I’ve exposed Ottinger once, and will happily do it again.” Particularly since he murdered poor Callon. I’ll see the man tried and hanged!
“I think we can trust Kenton to be true to that pledge,” Jones said. “But there’s one thing I don’t want Brady Kenton to have to write. I don’t want him to have to describe another Ottinger-led massacre. And that’s just what will happen if Ottinger actually besieges us here. This isn’t a normal man we’re dealing with. This is a man obsessed by hatred, who’ll use his authority and his troops for his own personal ends.”
“We’ll fight the bastards!” someone exclaimed. “This is a strong fort! We’re strong men!”
“Kenneth, listen to me,” Jones said firmly. “This is the United States Army we’re talking about. We resist them, we’re just giving them a reason to bring in more soldiers and swarm over us like ants. We’ll hand Ottinger even more grounds to treat us like a hostile enemy. We can’t engage them in any kind of fight. Remember what our philosophy here has always been: We aren’t seeking to continue a lost war, only to continue our lives. We just want to leave alone, and be left alone. If we take up arms against an official United States military force, we will throw all that away.”
“Pernell, you’re just talking about rolling over and letting them kick us! We have to resist!”
“No.” Jones swallowed hard, his next words obviously difficult to get out. “We can do only one thing: leave. Immediately and finally.”
Silence held a few moments. A woman said, “You’re saying we must leave our homes?”
“I can’t order anyone to do anything,” Jones said. “You’re not soldiers and I’m not a commander. But it’s my belief that the only sane and safe option is for us to abandon Confederate Ridge. Probably for good.”
This generated several stunned reactions and protests. Kenton noted a few people beginning to weep.
“But where would we go?” a woman asked.
“It would be necessary for us to scatter. To dissolve ourselves as a society and a community…perhaps forever. Or perhaps until we could find a way to re-form ourselves, maybe north of the border of the United States. Maybe south of it.”
“But if we separate, how would we ever come together again?”
“All of you know my brother. You know how and where to reach him. He could serve as our point of reference, to come together again. It would take a long time to come about, I think. But it could be done.”
The people weren’t eager to hear these words or to accept this option. Protests rose to the sky with the smoke of the bonfires, and the more distant smoke rising from Gomorrah Mountain, now burning out of control and spreading wildly across the countryside, though still far away from Confederate Ridge.
Jones lifted his hands again and spoke earnestly. “It’s a hard thing to say, I know, but you have to understand our situation. Ottinger has found a pretext that will allow him to come after not only me, but all of you. And he’s not using some private hired guns this time, but United States soldiers.”
“I still say resist them!” the man called Kenneth yelled. Others shouted agreement.
Jones shook his head. “Don’t even consider it,” he said. “It would be suicide.”
“Better to die a brave man than live a coward!” Kenneth replied.
Jones stared at him. “If you are implying that I’m a coward, Kenneth, I think you know better.”
The man blubbered and blustered, then hung his head. “Yes. I’m sorry. It just burns in me to think of turning tail.”
“You’re like me, Kenneth. No wife, no family to consider. But think of it from the standpoint of some of the others here who do have families.”
Kenneth thrust his hands into his pockets and stared at his feet.
Kenton was already dreaming up possible titles for the story he would write about this, picturing designs for the ornate frontispiece sketch that would sit like a crown on the head of the article. He played with ideas for how to word that crucial opening sentence.
“I can’t bear for us to leave our homes!” a woman declared in a high, emotional bleat.
“It ain’t right, Pernell!” her husband said.
Jones said, “There’s no other way.”
“A vote!” another man said. “We haven’t took a vote!”
“Fine,” Jones said. “All of you out there, grown men only, indicate what you want. Those of you who say stay and fight, raise your hands.”
The man who had called for the vote, plus a few others, shot hands up. Jones counted them quietly.
“All right. Those who believe we must leave, like sign.”
The hands went up much more slowly, but the numbers were far greater than those of the first voters.
Jones nodded. “It’s decided, then. We go.”
“When, Pernell?”
“This very night. I’m convinced Ottinger won’t let this compound remain unmolested for even one more day. We must get out of here before dawn.”