trembled and he nearly drew two straws, but Arch clamped his fingers and only one slid out. It did not look especially short, either.
One of the prisoners, Stengel, was a foreigner pretty much. He was one of those worm-browed, dark Dutchmen with strong shoulders and bulbous cheeks. He pulled his straw coolly, and I knew the game was up, for it was winningly short and no mistaking it.
The game was completed with two more selections, but it was just exercise. Stengel would be the courier.
“Jacob,” said Alf Bowden pitifully. “Jacob.”
“This man,” Black John said, resting a hand on top of Stengel’s head, “will carry the letter to Lexington.” He then patted the Dutchman’s skull and said, “You are fortunate.”
“Ja,” replied Stengel, peering into the ground between his knees.
Desperate Samaritanism consumed me. I nudged at Stengel with my boot. He looked up. My face felt twisted and hot atop my neck, and my lips, I knew, had flexed into a sneer.
“ ‘Ja! Ja!’ ” I said angrily. “This Dutch boater can’t hardly talk American.” I gestured at Black John. “How is he to present our case?”
Black John shrugged.
“As best he can,” he replied.
“Lloyd and Curtin are lost if he is our courier.” I looked about me to see how my theatrics were being received. “ ‘Ja, ja’—hell, they’ll not believe him for a minute.”
“He is right,” Pitt Mackeson said. For once his hatchet face looked on me fairly. “A goddamn lop-eared Dutchman—why it don’t make sense to free him.”
Black John slowly spoke. “Well, that is all well and good. But he won the draw.”
Near me stood Jack Bull Chiles. His face had an empty expression, but his lips were ever so thinly curling up as if a grin hid in ambush behind them. I thought he nodded to me as though we had a secret. I could never conceal much from him.
“Straw pulling is just a game,” I said. “Lives are at stake here.” I strode over to Alf Bowden, who was hunkered on the ground, and slapped his face. He grunted and turned away, so I leaned over and slapped him again. “Why, this man would present our case better than a lop-eared immigrant—you know it’s so!”
Black John seemed to get taller. “You are not ready to be telling me what I know, Roedel. I will do that—always.” His eyes burned into me and he did not speak for a nervous amount of time. “But I see your point. Send the American.”
With that he turned and walked away, as did most of the men. Bowden began to whimper at my boots and I feared he might lick them.
“Get up,” I said. I lifted his head by jerking a lock of hair. “Get up, you’ve got travel ahead of you.”
Huge disappointment was at work on Stengel. He growled and tried to grapple with me, saying Dutch insults as he did so. I curled a crooked-armed punch that hooked him in the face. His nose went down and blood flooded his chin. This took the fight out of him but he still grumbled.
As Bowden was being cut totally loose of rope, I felt someone come stand behind me. I thought it was Jack Bull but, no, I faced about and it was Holt, the nigger.
“I am on to you, Roedel,” he said softly, then walked backward, keeping his gaze fixed on me.
“Get too much on to me and I’ll throw you off, Holt,” I said. “A nigger is meaningless to me.”
Even in the night I could see it—he actually smiled.
This was curious conversation with points that were uncertain, and disturbing. But then, what was not?
The letter was wrapped in oil paper and given to Alf Bowden. We put him astride a gimpy horse. Now that he was saved, his fright was lessened. He looked on me with less desperation and more anger.
“Do your best,” I told him. “Show some sand or these men will die because you didn’t.”
He did not reply, but set off in the deep dark, picking his way toward Lexington. There had been no sign of thanks in him at all.
Gratitude is such an infant’s expectation, always, but it is one I only slowly outgrew. He might have said something.
Salt pork and oatcakes fueled the next day. The boys sat in comfortable clusters, oiling pistols and limbering jawbones. George Clyde, who had been born in Dundee, Scotland, acted as a Plato or Socrates might have, staggering us with questions.
“If a six-teated dog runs ten miles an hour shittin’ splinters,