Here he folded his hands before him and prattled off a prayer for a good fifteen minutes. Several of his men, nonbelievers, got bored, turned on their heels, and wandered off. Kagi departed to a nearby tree, sat down under it, and fiddled with his knife. Stevens turned around and walked off, cursing. A feller named Realf produced pen and paper and commenced to scribbling poetry. The others, Christians and heathens alike, stood patiently as the Captain railed at God, the wind blowing against his face, going high and low with his prayer, up and down, round and round, asking the Redeemer for guidance, direction, chatting ’bout Paul when he wrote Corinthians and how he weren’t good enough to take the strap off Jesus’s shoes and so forth. He gone on with that railing and ranting at full steam, and when he finally throwed out the last “Amen,” those who had departed to read their mail and monkey with their horses saw he was finally ready and returned hastily.
“Well, now,” he said, “as I said before, I has commingled with our Great Redeemer, He Who hath sheddeth His blood. We has discussed this entire enterprise from top to bottom. We has wrapped our minds around each other like a cocoon wraps a boll weevil. I has heard His thoughts, and I, having heard them, I must say here that I am but a tiny peanut in the corner sill of the window of our Savior’s great and powerful thoughts. But, having studied with Him and asked Him several times, going on years now, of what to do about the hellish institution of evil that exists in this land, I am certain now that He has chosen me to be an instrument of His purpose. Course, I already knowed that, just like Cromwell and Ezra the prophet of the old knowed it, for they was instruments in the same fashion, especially Ezra, who prayed and afflicted himself before God in the same fashion as I have, and when Ezra and his people were in a strait, the Lord busily and quietly engaged them to the arrangement of safety without harm. So fear not, men! God is no respecter of persons! Indeed it says in the Bible, the book of Jeremiah, ‘For these are the days of vengeance and there shall—’”
“Pa!” Owen cut him off. “Out with it!”
“Hmph,” the Old Man snorted. “Jesus waited an eternity to free you of the curse of mortal sin, and you didn’t hear Him bellowing like a calf as you are now, son. But”—and here he cleared his throat—“I has studied the matter, and I will share with you here what you need to know. We are going to trouble Israel. We will raise the mill. And they will not soon forget us and our deeds.”
With that, he turned and lifted the flap on the door of his cabin and pushed the door to go back inside. Kagi stopped him.
“Hold on!” Kagi said. “We have tarried here, hanging kettles and banging rocks with wood swords for quite a bit. Are we not men here, with the exception of the Onion? And even she, like us, is here of our own volition. We deserve more than cursory information from you, Captain, lest we go out and fight this war on our own.”
“You will not succeed without my plan,” the Old Man grunted.
“Perhaps,” Kagi said. “But surely there is danger involved. And if I am to wager my life on any plan, I would like to know the manner of it.”
“You will know it soon enough.”
“Soon enough is now. Or I, for one, will announce my own plan, for I have been working on one. And I suspect the men here will hear it.”
Oh, that knotted him up. The Old Man couldn’t stand it. He just plain couldn’t stand having someone else be the boss or tell a plan better than his. The men were watching close now. The wrinkles in his face knotted up and he blurted out, “All right. We’re leaving in two days.”
“For where?” Owen said.
The Captain, still holding the canvas door cover over his head, dropped it, and it flapped across the cabin door like a giant, dirty sheet hung out to dry in the wind. He glared at them with his hands in his pockets, jaw jutting out, disgruntled to the limit. It just plain irritated him to be talked to that way, for he listened to no council but his own. But he hadn’t no choice.
“We plans to strike at the heart of this infernal institution,” he said. “We will attack the government itself.”
A couple of fellers tittered, but Kagi and Owen did not. They knowed the Old Man better than the others, and knowed he was serious. My heart skipped a beat, but Kagi said calmly, “You mean Washington? We can’t attack Washington, Captain. Not with thirteen men and the Onion.”
