IT TOOK THREE more days to reach the New Columbia landing. The ship passed through a hundred-mile zone where the blinding, biting gnats were at their worst. Gatling, who had been in the Canadian woods where the black flies were pretty bad, decided he had never been so tormented in his life. The tiny bastards were like clouds of dust that never settled. They got into his eyes, ears, nose; he inhaled gnats when he took a breath. Tolliver said that nothing kept them away, not the greasy shit sold to tenderfoot travelers, not even a cake of mud. No matter what they did, the tiny fuckers found a way to get at them.
It got hotter, and then it got hotter still. There were more crocodiles than there had been; if a man fell into the river, more than piranhas would come after him. Tolliver said there were electric eels in the tributaries, none in the Amazon itself. The only sign of human life for two hundred miles was a big riverboat flying the Peruvian flag that passed them, heading downriver. But they were ready to fight the boat before it even got close; everybody was in a fighting mood. People lining the deck rails waved as the Peruvian boat went by.
Both banks of the great river looked deserted, but that didn’t mean they weren’t being watched. They kept to the middle of the river as much as they could, which wasn’t always possible because of sandbars and small islands covered with jungle growth. Some of the islands were big enough to hide hundreds of men. These islands were the places from which they could expect an attack. But none came, and there was no long-range sniping from either shore.
On the afternoon of the second day, Tolliver told Gatling they were in Parimba Province. The gnats were behind them, and it was just hotter than hell. The men were more lively; they talked and smiled more because they were close to home. There was no sign of Jorge Suarez or his bandit army.
It was too early for supper and the rum ration, so Tolliver was drinking coffee with Gatling in the shade of the top deck. A hot breeze blew through the open area they were in. The coffee was dark and rich, real Brazilian coffee; and for all the danger that surrounded them it seemed peaceful. Maybe because it was Sunday afternoon, Gatling thought. That morning there had been a religious service conducted by one of the riflemen, a middle-aged man named Briggs, some kind of lay preacher. Gatling did not attend, neither did Tolliver.
The Maxim guns had been cleaned and reloaded and covered with tarpaulins. It rained a good deal on the upper Amazon, and even when there was no rain the air was wet. The Ruffin ran steady at medium speed, and the only sounds were the crash of the stern wheel and the drone of men’s voices.
“We’ll be home tomorrow,” Tolliver said. “Least I will. You married, Mr. Gatling?”
“Never got around to it. You, Mr. Tolliver?”
“Was married a long time. Ten years. Then my woman died of fever.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Don’t be. She was no great loss. No brag but widows and such keep after me and so does the general—he’s a bit like Brigham Young, wants to keep increasing his flock—but I’ll have none of it. I don’t mind a night with a spirited widow or such as long as it doesn’t lead to a ball and chain. Had no kids by the first and only wife. Might have made it better, probably would have made it worse. Now I’m forty-seven and look forward to a long, free life.”
Gatling smiled. “Good luck to you and watch out for those widows.”
“That I’ll do. Mind if I ask you something else?”
“Fire away, Mr. Tolliver.”
“Would you mind not calling me Mr. Tolliver?”
“Whatever you like. You want it to be Burton or Burt?”
“Neither. Kilby, the little gentleman, calls me Burt. Everybody else calls me Tolliver. You like to be called by your give name, John?”
“No John, no Johnny, no Jack,” Gatling said firmly. “Gatling will do fine.”
Tolliver laughed. “At least that’s settled.”
Nothing more was said for a few minutes. Then Tolliver waved his arm toward the right bank of the river. “That’s all Suarez country over there. About fifty thousand square miles of it, maybe more. Maps and boundary lines here aren’t too reliable. Our territory is all on the left bank of the river. Thirty thousand square miles or so, about the size of South Carolina, the general says. All the way to the mountains. As mountains they’re not much, but they’re high and dry enough to grow good coffee on.”
“A nice piece of land,” Gatling said.
“And we mean to keep it,” Tolliver said.
“You got an idea how the general is going to use the guns?”
“Well, he doesn’t let me in on his plans, but he’s a real fire-eater. I served in his cavalry brigade during the War and he was a tiger. ‘Attack! Attack! Never retreat!’ That was his battle cry. It won us some fine battles.” Tolliver paused. “And it cost us a lot of men.”
“That’s war for you,” Gatling said cautiously. He really didn’t know Tolliver, and what little he knew about Brigadier-General Jackson Kilby wasn’t too favorable. In the States, he was all but forgotten. He did get a mention in some of the memoirs of better-known Confederate leaders; usually they described him as hotheaded and reckless, too ambitious for his own good. But Gatling didn’t feel it was his place to bad-mouth the old bastard.
Tolliver looked at Gatling and frowned. “You don’t have to pussyfoot with me. You’re a plain, no-nonsense man, and so am I. What I’m saying is other generals won more battles without getting so many men killed.”
“And you don’t want that to happen here in this war.”
“That’s right. We had to fight Indians and bandits when we first came here. That was just small potatoes compared with what we’re facing now. Indians and bandits never had a chance against us. Too many men, too many guns. Sure they killed some of our people, but we wiped them out. This is different. The general thinks it’s going to be easy. He hates and despises Suarez, so do I, but to see him as just backlands scum and no real threat is a mistake.”
Gatling nodded. “So it is. The attack plan was sound enough. Suarez couldn’t have known we’d have the Maxims set up.”
“A good thing we did.”
“He knew we’d be bringing guns to New Columbia.” Gatling had been thinking about Suarez’s knowledge of their movements since the attack. He’d been reluctant to talk about it because he wasn’t sure how Tolliver would take it.
He took it calmly enough. “He didn’t get the information from any of my people. Oh, Lord, I don’t know, Gatling. Some of the young men, born here, are married to white Brazilian women. You think it could have been one of the women?”
“I’m not pointing at anybody.”
“Maybe he just figured it out by himself. We’d be needing new weapons if we meant to fight him.”
“Could be. But I’m betting the other way.”
“Would be bad for us if there’s a spy in our camp,” Tolliver said. “But how would they get word across the river? Nobody ever goes there. The landing is heavily guarded night and day. Till he attacked us on the river there was no shooting war. But the landing was under heavy guard. You think you could be wrong?”
“I just said it looks like Suarez knew what we were doing. Looks like, I said. What makes me think I’m right was the scale of the attack. He took the trouble to go far upriver to capture that old steamboat. And the number of men he used in the attack. If he just wanted to sink your boat he could have done it easier than that. Say at night when it was tied up at the landing.”
Tolliver sighed—an odd sound coming from such a big, solid man. “It’s a puzzle,” he said. His meaty face took on a savage look. “If we catch the spy, man or woman, they’ll hang, and we’ll let Suarez know they’ve been hung.”
“Go slow,” Gatling said. “Let’s not be hanging the wrong people.”
The men cheered and the steam whistle blew when the landing came into sight. It was as good a landing as any Gatling had seen on the Mississippi. Massive pilings driven deep into the mud supported a solid dock. Warehouses and a single white-painted frame house were in back of it. A watchtower stuck up above everything. There was a stable for horses. If an attack came from the far side of the river, a man on a fast horse would ride to the settlement to sound the alarm.
The landing was crowded with men and women, something Gatling hadn’t expected. For years the Ruffin had been sailing to and from the coast. One more trip shouldn’t have brought out such a crowd.
Tolliver frowned. “I guess the guns weren’t such a secret after all. Damn it! They were supposed to be.”
Gatling said nothing.
They tied up and went ashore; the three Maxims had been moved so they were facing the other bank of the river. Gun crews were to stay in their positions. Gatling didn’t think there would be an attack all that soon, not after the drubbing Suarez had taken on the river. But Gatling and Tolliver weren’t taking any chances, and that’s why the Maxims were ready.
Only one wounded man had survived and he was carried ashore on two wide planks nailed together. An old man who had been standing out in front of the others came forward to look at him. This could only be General Jackson Kilby, Gatling decided. He was tall and rail thin, past sixty-five. He wore his white hair down to his shoulders and had a drooping white mustache, but no goatee. He was dressed in a black alpaca coat, light gray trousers, and a white shirt with a loosely tied cravat; his light gray hat, turned up on one side, down on the other, was circled by a gold cord. A stout cane with a silver head helped to support what looked like a bad leg.
A regular old dandy, Gatling thought. A ham actor playing a Southern plantation owner. But his faded yet fierce blue eyes were the real thing. Bugles sounding the charge still blew in his head.
General Kilby grasped the wounded man’s hand and spoke a few soft words. The man on the stretcher opened his eyes and closed them again. “Take good care of this brave lad,” the general said to no one in particular.
He turned to his son, who stood in front of Gatling and Tolliver, waiting for some kind of greeting. Kilby was sober for a change, sober but shaky; Tolliver had locked up the rum the previous night after the men had their ration. Kilby got wildly angry, cursed and threatened a lot, but calmed down when Tolliver said he’d chain him to the rail if he didn’t shut up.
General Kilby shook his son’s hand, then let it drop. A politician shaking hands with a voter would have put more feeling into it. Gatling knew there had been another son, Clayton, two years older than Otis, but he was long dead of yellow fever. Clay had been the old man’s favorite, Tolliver had told Gatling. Tall, handsome, wild, arrogant, and a genuine son of a bitch.
Kilby stood aside so Tolliver could introduce Gatling to the general. The general gave Tolliver an affectionate slap on the shoulder, then shook hands with Gatling.
“An honor to meet you, sir,” Gatling said, not honored at all. But he was there as a representative of the Maxim Company, so what the hell!
“You are most welcome, sir,” the general said, courtly as all get out.
Tolliver said, “Mr. Gatling delivered everything you ordered. I’ll stay here and see to the unloading.”
General Kilby looked at the bullet-riddled sandbags as the wounded man was being placed in a light spring wagon. Crying women were being led away.
“I take it there was a trouble,” the general said to Tolliver, not his son. He didn’t seem too concerned since the guns were there.
“A big attack three days downriver,” Tolliver said. He was about to go on, but the old man stopped him.
“We’ll discuss it later, Tolliver. Come to the house after you see to the guns. Come, Mr. Gatling. Otis.”
It was five miles from the landing to the general’s big white plantation house. The plantation was a mile from the town of New Columbia. An ancient South Carolina black man called Uncle Jed, complete with green livery, drove the general’s landau. The black horses glistened with grooming. To get to the general’s place they had to pass through the town, but Gatling wasn’t surprised at how Southern it looked. Even the names above the few stores—it was a very small town—had a Southern ring to them: Tibbs, Ogilvie, Rudledge, McCoy. There was even a red-brick courthouse with a cannon and a stack of cannonballs on the bright green lawn. The flag of the old Confederacy flew over it, and as a concession to the Brazilians, their flag was there too.
Land’s sake! Gatling thought. The general had built a new South Carolina in the wilds of Brazil. There couldn’t have been anything like it from one end of the Amazon to the other. No wonder Suarez wanted to take it over.
The house, with its white columns and balconies and porches, was like everything else. Big airy rooms, polished floors and delicate furniture, elegant oil lamps and family portraits in gilt frames. The house stood on a hill so it could catch such breezes as there were. Gatling wondered if slaves had made the hill. Officially there was no slavery, but there had been when the general first arrived in Brazil.
General Kilby led them to his library and sat behind an antique walnut desk with knobs and other carvings on it. Many hundreds of leather-bound books stood in glass cases. Somehow the general had managed to take his library with him after chicken-hearted Lee surrendered to Grant. Except the general before Gatling hadn’t surrendered. On the walls between the bookcases and above the mantelpiece were bugles and battle flags, framed battlefield maps and sabers, muskets and percussion revolvers. Gatling was interested when he saw a damaged Le Mat over-and-under pistol among them. The barrel looked as if it had been struck by a bullet. The general had ordered two new Le Mats from the Maxim Company.
“Well, sir,” the general said to Gatling.
Gatling took Colonel Pritchett’s envelope from its waterproof covering and gave it to the old man. In it were the weapons list, the credit agreement, and a personal letter.
Kilby watched nervously as his father put the envelope on the desk without opening it.
“Tolliver says everything is in order,” the general said.
“The guns are all here,” Gatling said. “But there’s something else you will want to discuss in private with your son. It’s not my place....”
General Kilby gave his son a savage look. “What’s he talking about? Answer me. You’ve been looking like a sick rat since you got here. Speak up so I can hear you.” The old man’s voice rose to a shout.
Kilby spoke in a slow, clear voice: “Ravenel stole the money in New Orleans. Later that night he was murdered. The police found no money on the body. I had to get the guns on credit. Please read Colonel Pritchett’s letter.”
The general’s chair was too heavy to be knocked over when he lurched to his feet. But he came close to doing it; his tall, frail body trembled with rage. He grabbed up his cane and pushed himself out from behind the desk. Gatling thought he was going to beat his son over the head and shoulders. But all he did was shake his free fist in his son’s face. Kilby shrank back in his chair.
“I’ll read you!” the old man roared. “I’ll murder you, you gutless sniveling drunkard! I warned you not to drink. You were drunk, weren’t you?”
“I wasn’t drunk. I swear to God I wasn’t drunk.” Kilby looked desperately at Gatling. “I was asleep at the hotel when Ravenel stole the money. How could I know Ravenel meant to steal the money? I thought it was safe in the hotel lockbox. They even have a shotgun guard to guard the boxes. Ravenel took my key while I was asleep.”
“Dead drunk you mean. You dolt! You idiot! To lose eighty thousand dollars like that!” The old man went back behind his desk and threw himself into his chair. “You were in such a drunken stupor you didn’t hear Ravenel, if indeed it was Ravenel, going through your pockets. Is that your soft-brained story?”
Gatling wished he was back on the landing with Tolliver. Better still, back in Denver drinking a cold beer in Jimmy Dolan’s saloon. Any goddamned place but there.
“I wasn’t drunk,” Kilby protested, spots of red showing on his sallow cheekbones. “I was just very tired and wanted some sleep. Why should I have suspected Ravenel of anything? I would have watched him if I had.”
“Wait. No more rambling talk, no more lies and excuses. I want to hear the whole story from beginning to end. I swear, sir, I’ll take a whip to you if you lie to me.”
The old man picked up a little silver bell and rang it. Uncle Jed appeared in the livery of a house servant. Gatling wondered if he’d show up later with a chef’s hat perched on his head. Uncle Jed knew what the general wanted. Gatling asked if he could have some beer.
“A very weak bourbon and branch for me,” Kilby said.
The old man sneered at that. “Get on with it,” he ordered. Uncle Jed brought the drinks and Kilby took a long swallow; then he told what had happened in New Orleans. He sounded a lot more confident after he finished the tall drink.
“That’s exactly how it was,” he said. “The New Orleans police have the complete story. They can verify everything I’ve told you.”
“What the hell do I care about the New Orleans police!” The general was back to shouting. “Bunch of crooks! Were they there when Ravenel stole the key? Were they with him when he went to the whorehouse district? Something’s wrong about this whole thing. Maybe the police killed him and stole the money. Maybe they scared off someone else and then stole the money.”
Kilby was about to say something, but was silenced by another roar. The general turned to Gatling. “You look like a man that’s been around. You think the police stole the money?”
“Anybody could have stolen it, General. The police have been known to steal. May I ask you a question, sir?”
The general nodded stiffly and Gatling said, “Was Ravenel a stupid man? Was he dumb enough to walk around the most dangerous district in New Orleans with eighty thousand dollars in his possession? Second question: was he a heavy drinker?”
“Why no,” the old man said quietly. He gave his son a spiteful look. “He was no kind of drinker and he wasn’t dumb. No genius to be sure, but dumb, stupid—certainly not. I’d say he was pretty smart for a boy of his age. Twenty-four is all he was. He was young, but I hoped he’d be a steadying influence on this drunken idiot son of mine.”
“He liked it here?”
“He loved it here. He was born here, wanted to live his whole life here. I know because I watched him grow up. He wasn’t a liar and he wasn’t a thief. I had big things planned for that poor boy.” General Kilby drank some of his drink as if in memory of poor dead Ravenel Pike. “What he didn’t do, I swear by the suffering Christ, was steal that money.”
The old man’s drink was a long julep; he drank it to the bottom without taking the glass from his mouth. Then he pointed a trembling finger at his son.
“Did you steal it?” he said. This time he didn’t roar.
Kilby sat up straight in his chair. “That’s a crazy thing to say.” A little confidence was left over from the tall bourbon and branch. “Of course, I didn’t steal it. Would I be here if I had stolen eighty thousand dollars? That much money would set me up anywhere in the world. On my mother’s grave, General, I didn’t steal it.”
He calls his own father General, Gatling thought. Theirs, for sure, was no happy family.
“I had just enough money left to give Ravenel a decent burial and buy a train ticket to New York. I had to borrow money from Colonel Pritchett to pay for my hotel room and meals.” Kilby turned to Gatling. “Gatling was there when the colonel gave me the money.”
“That’s right,” Gatling said when the old man looked at him. What else could he say? At least that part of it was true. It had crossed his mind that Kilby had stolen the money himself, but it seemed a bit far-fetched. It didn’t jibe with the rest of Kilby’s character. The man was a fool and a liar, but he had the drunkard’s timidity. There was nothing daring about him, or so it appeared. To steal eighty thousand dollars of that terrible old man’s money would take nerve; to come back and face him later would take even greater nerve.
Gatling knew he could be wrong; men did things he never expected them to do. A henpecked husband might murder his hectoring wife. A meek bank clerk might make off with half a million. Things like that. But on the face of it, as far as Kilby was concerned, it didn’t wash.
They heard Tolliver’s loud voice in the hall. “Say no more,” the general warned. “I will talk to you later, Otis.” General Kilby rearranged his face and was smiling when Tolliver came in. “Sit down, Tolliver. We were just talking business and, of course, about poor young Ravenel. A sad business that.”
Tolliver knew about Pike’s death from Gatling. “Very sad,” he agreed.
“You won’t say no to a drink.” Without waiting for an answer, the general rang his little bell and Uncle Jed was told to fetch a glass of sugarcane rum with ice for Tolliver, fresh drinks for the rest of them.
The general’s eyes brightened with excitement as Tolliver told about the fight on the river. Tolliver knew what the old man wanted and he gave it to him. Every few minutes, the old man darted a look at his son as if wondering what part he played in the sinking and burning of the Pedro II.
“All our people fought like wildcats,” Tolliver said quickly. “Everybody did fine. Not a man there you wouldn’t have been proud of, General.”
“Good. Good.” There was a long silence while the old man thought about New Columbia’s first great victory, all the while rubbing his long, papery hands together. Gatling’s beer was rich and dark and cold, as good as anything he’d ever drunk. It was worth waiting for.
“And now, gentlemen,” the general said, like a man coming out of a trance, “we must talk about how we’re going to put a quick end to this degrading little war.”
They waited for him to go on.