Confederate Gold Ch 03

Tuesday-Wednesday, 4-12 April, Richmond to Just North of Danville, Virginia

The men in the train had barely settled down, a bit more than two hours after they had cleared through the skirmishes at Manchester, across the James River from Richmond, and headed west along the river bank, before they pulled off on a siding in a forest near the town of Goochland.

Even though the men already were exhausted and had barely recovered from the fear of the close-call escape from Richmond, as soon as the train came to a stop, Captain Singleton was rousting the men out again.

"We'll travel only at night," he declared. "Now, I need every one of you off the train and cutting brush to lay over the rails spurring off from the main line and to hide the back of the train. Rocks and dirt over the connection as well. If there are Union scouts out during the day, we don't want them to find the train."

So, between then and the hour before dawn, the men worked hard to camouflage the train. The captain then told them all to get some shuteye into the light of day. "Get some rest," he said. "There will be work to do here in the daylight hours."

With that, he sent most of the men to the two passenger carriages in front of the freight cars and bade Eaton to come into the forward carriage with him. Settling himself and Eaton down on a padded seat at the forward end of the carriage with the other men in the carriage closer to the other end, he drew Eaton close to him and covered the both of them with a blanket. When Eaton felt one of his hands being taken in Singleton's and moved to the captain's lap under the blanket, Eaton realized that he wasn't going to get to sleep for a while.

There was no question that he would give the captain the release from tension that he wanted. Eaton enclosed his hand over the engorging cock and stroked a groaning Singleton to an ejaculation. As he did so, he could feel the captain relaxing to his touch, with just a short period of tensing up before he released his seed, followed by a long sigh and a murmur by the soldier of, "I wish to do more, but we have a greater need for sleep in the time we have."

"I don't understand why the rail line follows the James River west by northwest if it goes to Danville," Eaton said as the two dozed.

"Ah, I forget you have been given some education," the captain responded. "The line doesn't go directly southwest to Danville. It serves Charlottesville to the west, as well, and then it goes south through Lynchburg. Tomorrow night we will be in Charlottesville. Then the long run to Danville."

"And then?"

"This train goes only that far. The government will reform in Danville and stay there if it's safe but go farther south, if it isn't. We go no farther than Danville, in any case."

"And the cargo we're carrying? Where is it going?"

"Sleep now, little one. There is much work to do in the coming day."

* * * *

After daybreak there were fewer men to do the work the captain wanted done than Singleton had thought there would be. When he rousted the men out, he found, to his great anger, that nearly all of the slaves he'd brought on board had evaporated in the night. To Eaton's disappointment, this had included the black stallion slave who had laid him so completely the previous night. And they had taken some of the leather cases containing the Richmond bank assets with them. The captain didn't discover this immediately, though. Before he could discover he had lost most of his black beasts of burden, he looked out of the window of the carriage after disentangling himself from Eaton to spy two of his own soldiers stealing away from the train and carrying one of the leather cases between them.

He was sluggish getting his rifle out of its case but spot on in bringing both of the men down with just two shots. He immediately gathered his most reliable soldiers about him, kicking himself that he had put them all in the first carriage rather than on watch dispersed among the other carriages, and made all of the remaining men stand at attention as the two dead soldiers were buried. He had confiscated all firing arms except for those his own trusted lieutenants carried.

After the burial, he announced that more shovels were to be dispersed among the remaining men and that they were to start to pull some of the leather cases out of the freight cars. He specified that twenty cases were to come out, and he designated where they were to be buried at a short distance in two different directions from the train there, just east of Goochland.

Only two of his most reliable men were with him as well as Eaton, who he kept within his sight at all times, when Singleton marked four trees in four different directions with symbols that were mysterious to Eaton. The burial complete, the small contingent returned to the hidden train. There Singleton charted the locations in some sort of code in a notebook he was carrying.

Afterward, Singleton had the last freight car opened and five horses were brought out. He had the horses saddled and picked out four men to make up a scouting party with him. "I need to know if the Union forces have come this far up the river yet," he said. Before he left he took Eaton into the freight car the horses had come out of and chained him up, lying in the hay that had been spread for the horses and between hay bales, leaving little doubt that he didn't want Eaton running off like most of the other slaves had done. The other men were told to sleep until nightfall when they would be required to clear the track so that the train could make a nighttime dash to the next stop, in Charlottesville. Leaving them under the guard of soldiers Singleton could rely on, he went off with the scouting party in mid-afternoon.

About an hour after the scouting party left, Eaton heard the door of the horse carriage being rolled aside. His eyes were dazzled by late-afternoon sunlight for a brief moment before the door was slid shut again and he realized that three of the soldiers were in the car with him.

"Thought you might be lonely in here all by yourself," one said in a sneery voice.

"I know who you are—you're a male doxy from Temple's, ain't you?" the second exclaimed.

"And I know why the captain is keepin' you so close to him," the third added.

"He told us to sleep, but I'm not as tired as I'm horny," declared the first. "I can sleep better after a good fuck. You open for business as much here as you were at Temple's, ain't you?" He pulled some coins out of his pocket and tossed them in the hay beside Eaton's prone body. He turned to the other two. "Come on boys, ante up and let's keep this all business like. He has it for sale, don't you, boy?"

With a sigh, Eaton pulled his shirt over his head and unbuttoned his trousers. He saw no use in trying to deny them and it was, in fact, what he gave men who were willing to pay. There was no place for him to go anyway. He'd been chained here. They were white men. They could take what they wanted without paying him, if they wished. Once they saw that Eaton would surrender to them, the other two men were quick to add their coins to those the first man had dropped.

Eaton went on his back, his torso propped up on his elbows, his legs spread and bent, feet on the floor of the carriage, and a wad of hay under the small of his back, his pelvis rolled up and his hole open and winking at the three soldiers. "Who's first?" he asked in a weary voice.

The three took turns fucking him for two hours, in relay, both in the missionary and the doggie positions and fucking both his ass and his throat. They might have gone on for a third hour, if Captain Singleton didn't return from scouting, slide open the freight car door, and catch them in the act.

He would have shot the three soldiers there on the spot, if Eaton hadn't intervened. "I didn't deny them," he said, "and, look, they paid me. They are just men being men. And they did nothing to me that white men haven't done before."

"And colored men too," Singleton muttered under his breath, but he continued to look belligerent and stroked the trigger of the rifle he had pointed on the soldiers, Eaton said. "Don't you need these men for your mission here? Aren't they just taking what you want to have? Let them go and slide that door closed and take what you want too."

Built up with denial of a completed fuck with Eaton the day before and with the adrenaline of all that had transpired in the day and night of the evacuation from Richmond, Singleton took Eaton the first time like a wild man, fucking him rough and deep and rapidly, his throbbing cock pistoning in and out, sliding easily through the accumulated cum of the three soldiers in Eaton's passage. Eaton wildly fucked him back, moving his hips in rhythm with Singleton's thrusts, opening totally to the man's kisses as well as the thrusting of his cock, digging his fingernails into the captain's biceps and shoulder blades.

"Good as you got from that slave last night?" Singleton growled.

"Yes, yes. Fuck me hard!"

The second coupling was slower, more sensuous, with Singleton kneeling and upright, embracing Eaton's small, more delicate body in his lap, and the two rocking back and forth to provide the friction of the hard cock in the channel that induced their mutual ejaculation.

When they left the carriage to join the men, they ate ravenously of the dinner that had been prepared in the twilight, and, while the other men were clearing the track in the dark and before the train got under way again, Singleton carried Eaton out into the forest, lay his body on top of where they had buried one of the treasure troves, covered him full length, both men naked, and fucked him again in long, slow, deep slides into the quick of the sighing young slave.

After that Singleton accepted that no chains were necessary to bind Eaton to him. Eaton had been completely open to him, grasping the churning cock with his passage muscles and making caressing love to it—milking the cock and then holding Singleton close to him, inside him, and, with sighs and small cries of passion, milking it again . . . and again. Eaton couldn't get enough of the cock, and it was only the limits of time and the aching of Singleton's milked balls that brought them to a finish. It was clear that Eaton was bound by the need for the blond god's cock working inside him.

* * * *

"President Davis needs it to finance a new army. Some, as we did today, is being cached. But the two trains ahead of us are taking it where he can put his hands on it."

Captain Singleton and Eaton were huddled under the blanket just on the other side of the wall from the locomotive, as the train glided through the night as silently and slowly as it could toward Charlottesville to escape detection. The two were pleasuring each other with their hands under the blanket and Singleton was being surprisingly open in his responses to Eaton's questions about the captain's mission.

"Where can he put his hands on the money where the Union army can't get to it?" Eaton asked.

"The Union army isn't everywhere, and a great part of it is now bogged down in occupying Richmond. Lee's plan was never to hold the capital. He's racing his forces south even now in pursuit of Grant's headquarters. If he can capture the Union's commander, the Northern forces will collapse."

Eaton wasn't that sure he believed that. The two forces had been fighting across Virginia for years. Someone in Eaton's position was able to hear unguarded talk by Confederate military men when they visited Temple's, having no idea that a servicing darky like him would have brain enough to pay attention to and understand what they said. As far as he understood it, the South was being pounded into dust by a never-waning supply of soldiers from the North. He asked again where the assets to be used to raise a new army were going that was safe, whether that was where Singleton was headed, and whether Singleton was planning to take Eaton there as well.

"If the government can't stay in Danville—if Lee doesn't catch up with Grant and trounce him—President Davis is taking the government to Washington, Georgia, and is taking the gold on his train there with him. The second train is going to Charlotte, North Carolina, to what was the U.S. mint post there. That should be deep enough in the South to be out of the reach of the Northerners. Yes, after I have cached the gold in this train, I am to go to Georgia. And, yes, I will take you with me."

Satisfied, as the very notion of a freedom that required him to take care of himself in the chaotic conditions of the day frightened Eaton, he snuggled down in Singleton's embrace as the train crossed back to the north bank of the James River and moved up to and through Charlottesville. The train didn't stop there, as the captain couldn't be sure which army held Charlottesville at the moment. It stopped on a siding just south of the town to be camouflaged as it had been the previous night. When daylight came, Singleton commandeered wagons and teams from nearby farms, loaded them with twenty of the leather cases, and took them up onto the ridge running along the southern edge of the town. He took Eaton with him.

Standing on the ridge top as men dug holes to hide the leather cases and after Singleton had marked a perimeter of trees with similar mysterious symbols to those he had done outside Goochland, he stood, with Eaton, and looked down into the town. He drew Eaton's attention to the university buildings at the edge of the town and then beyond it to the ridge running east of Charlottesville and a small mountain upon which could be seen Thomas Jefferson's home, Monticello, untouched, thankfully by the civil war raging around it.

"Why here?" Eaton asked the captain as the soldiers and two of the slaves who hadn't managed to escape yet dug into the red-clay soil.

"A prearranged area," Singleton answered. "The ridge we're standing on is called the Hessian Hills. This is where the captured German troops who were British army mercenaries were brought to be interred when they lost the Battle of Saratoga in the American Revolution. We selected memorable spots in our history that have generally been forgotten."

Emboldened by the captain having taken him into his confidence the previous night, Eaton asked about the symbols Singleton was marking on the trees.

"Have you heard of the Knights of the Golden Circle?" Singleton asked. "I wager not."

Eaton took a few moments to conjure up conversations he'd overheard in the brothel, but couldn't surface the mention of any such organization. "No, I haven't," he answered.

"The KGC is an organization of Southern gentleman—and more than a few well-placed sympathizers in the North—who are concerned for the welfare of the Confederacy. I'm a member, as is President Davis. It was the KGC council's idea to salt some of the assets away, and, even more than historical sites, I'm burying parts of the treasury near where the KGC is in strength—secretly, of course. I'm marking the caches with the symbols they understand and am making a chart, which I will get into the right hands when our work is finished."

As he gave this explanation, he was using a telescope to survey the valley between the two ridges in which the town of Charlottesville was nestled. He suddenly growled an expletive, snapped the telescope shut, and declared, "I see a company of mounted soldiers down there, coming into the town from the north and wearing blue uniforms. We need to get back to the train now."

Within moments, the men were back in the two wagons and riding along the ridge to the south to where the train was hidden. When they got back it was to find that several more soldiers had deserted the train and had taken cases with them. There wasn't much Singleton could do about that at this point. He was losing control over who was loyal to him and his mission and who wasn't.

"What now?" Eaton asked him.

"We just have to continue with the plan," the captain answered. "Tonight we push on to Danville. We'll let President Davis decide what happens then. We've cached what I was directed to hide between Richmond and Danville. But for you and me now . . ." he said, turning a lustful eye on Eaton, who had no doubt that his "now" was going to be on the hay in one of the freight carriages, writhing under the captain.

Later, they were, indeed, in a freight car alone among bales of hay, with much of the hay having become undone and strewn around on the floor of the car. Eaton, naked, was sitting on a bale of hay, with Singleton standing between his legs, the fly of his trousers flared, his suspenders hanging down on either side, and his hands pressing into the back of Eaton's skull, as the young black took his cock deep in the throat at the manipulation of Singleton's hands. When he was ready, the captain reached down, grabbed Eaton's ankles, and pitched him onto his back on the bale. He then pressed in between Eaton's spread thighs, thrust inside his passage, and pumped him to an ejaculation.

Yielding totally to him, Eaton relaxed and opened his passage to take the officer's hard cock deep, raising his arms to run his fingers into the captain's blond chest hair and rub the man's taut nipples, while making little moaning sounds of total surrender in the back of his throat and murmuring, "Yes, yes, be good to me. Take me to heaven."

Singleton did just that, filling and fully possessing the young quadroon who was his slave in more ways than one.

When he was done, Singleton buttoned his fly and pulled the suspenders up unto his bare shoulders. He walked over to the sliding door to the carriage, turned, and said. "I need to be able to count on the loyalty of a few of the men at least. Do you understand?"

"I can see the need for that," Eaton answered.

"There are two who are my best—Lyle and John. I've seen the way they look at you when you are with me. Do you understand how important it is for me to keep them with me—with us?"

"Yes," Eaton answered, dipping his head in submission.

"Do you understand what I need you to do for me?"

"Yes," Eaton said, not daring to lift his head so that Singleton could see the hurt and love in his eyes.

Singleton pulled the car door open and told the first man who passed by, "Find Lyle and John and tell them I want to see them here now."

"Yes, sir."

The two delighted soldiers fucked Eaton in successive turns, easily sliding their cocks in each other's cum inside Eaton as well as what Singleton had earlier deposited there. Eaton lay there, the dutiful quadroon slave prostitute, receiving them as he had been trained to do so, legs bent and spread, arms outstretched in an attitude of openness and supplication, as the two rough soldiers plowed him hard. One crouched over where Eaton was on his back on the hay bale just as Singleton had been when the captain had fucked Eaton earlier and the other at the other side of the bale, holding Eaton's head between his hands, and arched back to give the soldier a straight slide of his cock into Eaton's throat. When the first one had come, the two soldiers, not believing their luck but ever grateful to their captain, who sat on another bale, stroking his cock and watching them, exchanged positions.

Thereafter, when it was convenient, Lyle and John were given sex privileges with Eaton—but only after Singleton had fucked him first. Their loyalty to Singleton was solidified.

There was no indication that Singleton was disturbed by this at all. Steeped in the culture of the South, he saw himself as both the master and the protector of Eaton, for whom he had a great deal of benevolent affection and whose servicing he enjoyed immensely. But Eaton was a slave, no matter what Abraham Lincoln said about it, and he was a prostitute. His lot in life was to take men's cocks, including Singleton's, to open his legs on command and pleasure and give release to men, and to serve Singleton as he was needed. Singleton's principle concern was that he get his release inside Eaton first—officers before soldiers. The randy little quadroon had made abundantly clear that he wanted men's cocks inside him. Besides, he was a slave; he really had no opinion to entertain in the matter.