But attention was Cook’s middle name. He asked ’bout in town and when he didn’t hear what he wanted, went into the town’s biggest tavern, declaring he was a rich miner for a big mining outfit and I was his slave and he needed a house to rent for some miners that was on their way. “Money is no object,” he said, for the Old Man had outfitted him with a pocket full of fatback. Before he left the place, every man in the tavern knowed his name. But a slave owner did come up to us and told Cook he knowed of a settlement nearby that might be up for rent. “It’s the old Kennedy farm,” he said. “It’s a bit out of the way from the Ferry, but it might suit your purpose, for it is large.” We rode out to it and Cook looked it over.
It was far from the Ferry, ’bout six miles, and it weren’t cheap—thirty-five dollars a month—which Cook was sure the Old Man would squawk ’bout. The farmer had passed away and the widow weren’t budging on the price. The house had two rooms downstairs, a tiny upstairs, a basement, and an outdoor shack to store arms, and across the road, an old barn. It was set back ’bout three hundred yards from the road, which was good, but it was awful close to a neighbor’s house on both sides. If the Old Man had been there he wouldn’t have took it, ’cause anyone peeking from the neighbors’ houses could look in on it and see in. The Old Man had been clear that he needed a house that was set back by itself, not around no other houses, for he’d have a lot of men hiding there and a lot of traffic going in and out, what with shipping arms and gathering men and all. But Cook had a hankering for a fat white maiden he seen hanging laundry down the road when we first rode out to scout the place, and when he seen her, he cashed in his chips on it. “This is it,” he said. He paid the widow owner of the place, told her his boss of the mining company, Mr. Isaac Smith, was coming in a few weeks, and we was in.
We spent a couple of days setting up, and then Cook said, “I am going to town to joust about and get information on the layouts of the armory and the arms factory. You go roust the coloreds.”
“Where are they?” I asked.
“Wherever colored are, I expect,” he said, and was gone.
I didn’t see him for three days. I sat there the first two days scratching my ass, figuring ’bout my own plans to run off, but I didn’t know nobody and didn’t know if it was safe to walk ’bout. I had to know the lay of the land before I cut, so, not knowing what to do, I sat tight. On the third day there, Cook came busting in the door, laughing and giggling with that same fat, young little blond lady we seen down the road hanging laundry, both of ’em cooing and dewy-eyed. He spied me setting there in the kitchen, and said, “Why didn’t you go roust the colored like you was supposed to?”
He said this right in front of his lady friend, giving the plan away right off. I didn’t know what to say, so I blurted out, “I don’t know where they are.”
He turned to the lady with him. “Mary, my slave here”—oh, that boiled me some, him playing it that way. Playing it to the hilt, he was, playing big, after he done gived the whole plan away—“my colored here’s looking for some coloreds to congregates with. Where is the coloreds?”
“Why, they is
“Ain’t they living someplace?”
“Sure,” she giggled. “They lives everywhere out and ’bout.”
“Well, as I told you, we is on a secret mission, my sweet. A very important mission. For which you can’t tell a soul, as I told you,” he said.
“Oh, I knows that,” she said, giggling.
“And that is why we needs to know exactly where the Onion here can go find some colored friends.”
She considered it. “Well, there’s always some high-siddity free niggers wandering ’bout town. But they ain’t worth peanuts. And then there’s Colonel Lewis Washington’s nigger plantation. He’s the nephew of George Washington himself. And Alstad’s and the Byrne brothers. They all got colored slaves, nice and proper. There’s no shortage of niggers ’round here.”
Cook looked at me. “Well? What you waiting for?”
That needled me, him playing big shot. But I cut out the door. I decided to try the plantations first, for I figgered an ornery and snobbish colored wouldn’t be no use to the Captain. Little was I to learn they could be trusted as much as any slave and was good fighters to boot. But I’d only trusted two coloreds up to that point in my life, not counting my late Pa—Bob and Pie—and neither of them worked out to the dot. I’d got instructions from Cook’s lady friend on where the Washington plantation was, and went out there first, being that it was on the Maryland side of the Potomac, not too far from where we was staying.
The house was on a wide road where the mountain flattened out. It set behind a wide wrought-iron gate, down a long curved driveway. At the front of that gate, just outside it, a slim colored woman was out gardening and raking leaves. I approached her.
“Morning,” I said.
