pounding down on their tent so hard it almost drowned out the sound of his snoring.
Yet as deeply as he had fallen asleep, some inner alarm woke Mulrooney. He was still groggy with liquor, but an old traveling man’s instinct had sounded in his dreams and forced him, thick-tongued and sweaty, to his feet. He stepped over his slumbering women and lit a lantern. Outside, the storm had calmed, but the ground around their camp was alive with web-footed rain. No one seemed to be lurking, although the mud was as rich with footprints as Urim and Thummim’s pages were with enigmatic emblems. That thought triggered a sudden horror. He flung back inside the tent and poked the lantern toward the brothers’ modesty screen. It was a very long moment later when Mulrooney accepted what he found. The pygmies from Indiana were gone.
Dumbstruck, the professor staggered out and hunkered down on a log in the slowing rain. The clothes his wives had made for them were still there. He could not imagine what had happened. The coincidence of Lloyd’s earlier visit crossed his mind but could take no clear form that would explain his wards’ abrupt removal. Soaked to the bone and sobering fast, he kept thinking of the whirlwind from which they had supposedly emerged.
What if something in the storm had returned for them? It was improbable. But so were they. He had always been so assiduous in keeping them hidden from prying eyes—never an easy task. Perhaps they had not been captured like runaway slaves by blood-money ruffians. Perhaps they were not wet, lost, and afraid, having been stolen away—or having, in their foolishness, fled to some mooncalf idea of freedom—but home and safe, retrieved by the weather-stricken night and taken back to the secret place of the thunder? It was not much to hold on to, but Mulrooney tried. The rain dripped from the branches around him like tears.
CHAPTER 4
The Price of Surprise
THE MORNING DAWNED CLEANER AND CRISPER THAN ANY IN months. (For Mulrooney, the feeling was foreboding and recalled the day that the unfortunate Vladimir had gone missing.)
There was a rustling of ledger pages and the tapping of morning cigar ash at the City Hotel—and more than a few wagers laid over breakfast at Planter’s House, which consisted of arrowroot biscuits, coddled eggs, fresh trotters, and a serving of wild pigeon—the aromas of black tea or chicory-laced coffee cutting through the stale fumes of pipe smoke and brandy that had followed the coq au vin and bordeaux the night before.
It was the morning of a major sale. The auction house of Bladon, McCafferty & Co. of Chestnut Street was putting up on the block one hundred of the sturdiest Negro field hands valued generally at a whisker over a thousand dollars each—seventy-five older adult males, forty-eight females, and a litter of children that one squire from Kentucky likened to “French-prattling young crows.”
The event, as usual, was to take place on the steps of the proud domed courthouse on Fourth Street at noon. Typically, the public did not take much overt notice of these occasions, there being studious attention from those informed professionals either bidding or methodically recording the prices submitted by their peers. These seasoned agriculturalists and their entourages had serious business in mind and had come more than a few miles to do it. So the amateurs kept to the fringe.
Slave auctions represented significant investments in new capital equipment—gambles taken on increased productivity. An air of sober deliberation and dispassionate judgment was the rule, and for the most part an auction was no more undignified and violent than a sale of horses or cattle and easier on the nose, since the prize specimens had often been treated to a bath and an improved diet to inspire higher prices. “Beef for muscle, fresh fruit for the teeth and breath, and cod liver oil to put a shine on their hides” was the recommended short-term practice advocated by the trading houses.
No, the systematic brutality of these events was more in the mind, the soul, and heart than in the flesh. But since Negroes were not credited with having minds or souls, any explicit cruelty was considered an unfortunate by-product of what needed doing. Mating a stallion or wringing a chicken’s neck—life was filled with raw necessities, and people were much less squeamish then.
Naturally there were whips and guns on hand, but they were primarily ceremonial and symbolic. And of course the goods to be traded appeared in