He paused a moment, staring out at the water, nodding, thinking, hatching it in his head as he spoke it. “I’ll ride in here on the train. It comes in at one twenty-five a.m. every night, the B&O out of Baltimore. Remember that. One twenty-five in the a.m. The B&O. I’ll be on it. When you and the Old Man’s army give me the signal, I’ll signal the fellers in the wagons on the road that it’s time to move in.”
“That sounds a little thin to me, Mr. Rail Man.”
“You got a better plan?”
“No.”
“That’s it, then. Tell the Captain he’s got to stop the train at one twenty-five, just before it crosses the B&O Bridge. I’ll get you the rest of what to do later. I got to git. Tell the Old Man to send me five hundred dollars. I’ll be back in two days on the next run. One twenty-five a.m. sharp. Meet me right here at that time. After that, don’t never speak to me again.”
He turned and left. I ran up to Cook, who stood at the top of the bank. Cook watched him leave.
“Well?”
“He says we’ll need five hundred dollars to hive the bees.”
“Five hundred dollars? Ungrateful wretches. Suppose he takes off with it. We coming to unslave them. How do you like that? The Old Man’ll never pay it.”
But when he found out, the Old Man did pay it, and a lot more. Too bad he did, too, for it cost him big-time, and by then the whole thing was blowed wide open and there weren’t no way of sending it backward, which I wish he could have, on account of a few mistakes I made, which cost everybody, including the Rail Man, pretty heavy.
Cook wrote the Old Man directly with the Rail Man’s request, and within a week, a colored man from Chambersburg rolled up to the house in a wagon, knocked on the door, and handed Cook a box labeled Mining Tools. He left without a word. Inside the box was a few tools, supplies, five hundred dollars in a sack, and a letter from the Old Man tellin’ him the army was arriving within a week. The Old Man wrote that his army would sprinkle in, by twos and threes, at night, so as not to attract suspicion.
Cook throwed the money sack into a lunch pail with some vittles and gived it to me, and I slung out to the Ferry to wait for the B&O train out of Baltimore at one twenty-five a.m. The Rail Man was the last to come off the train after the passengers and crew left out. I hailed him and gived him the lunch pail, tellin’ him out loud that it was lunch for the journey back to Baltimore—just in case anyone was within hearing. He took it without a word and moved on.
Two weeks later, the Old Man arrived alone, gruff and stern as usual. He fluffed ’bout the farm for a few minutes, checking the supplies and the roads and other matters thereabout, before he sat down and let Cook give him the lay of the land.
“I take it you has been shy of speaking our business,” he said to Cook.
“Quiet as a mouse,” Cook said.
“Good, for my army is coming soon.”
Later that day, the first of them arrived—and she was quite a surprise.
She was a girl, a white girl, sixteen, with dark hair and steady brown eyes that seemed to hold lots of surprises and a ready laugh behind them. She wore her hair pinned back in a bun, a yellow ribbon ’round her neck, and a simple farm-girl dress. Her name was Annie, and she was one of the Old Man’s older daughters. The Old Man had twelve living children altogether, but I reckon Annie had to be the best of the female lot. She was pretty as the day was long, quiet in nature, modest, obedient, and pious as the Old Man was. That took her out of my world, course, being that if a woman weren’t a low-down dirty stinker who drank rotgut and smoked cigars and throwed poker cards, there weren’t nothing she could do to mash my button, but Annie was easy on the eyes and a welcome surprise. She arrived in quiet fashion with Martha, sixteen, who was the wife of his son Oliver, who came trickling in to join us with the rest of the Old Man’s army from Iowa.
The Old Man introduced me to the girls and announced, “I knows you is not partial to housework, Onion, being more of a soldier than a home cooker. But it is time you learn the ways of women as well. These two is to help you put the house in shape. You three can tend to the men’s needs and make the farm look normal to the neighbors.”
It was a fine notion, for the Old Man knowed my girl limits and that I couldn’t cook for a pinch of snuff, but when he announced the sleeping arrangements, my feathers fell. We three girls was to sleep downstairs in the house, while the men slept upstairs. I agreed course, but the minute he hopped upstairs, Annie moved to the kitchen, drawed water for a bath, throwed her clothes off, and hopped into the tub, which caused me to scat from the kitchen and slam the door shut behind me, standing in the drawing room with my back to the door.
“Oh, you is a shy thing,” she said from behind the door.
