CIRCLE GOLD - EDITED
[An Account from the PRISM Chronicles]
Chapter 1
The Rider
Anyone out near the small, dusty trail that passed through an equally small, dusty town in the southern part of Tennessee would have seen the man as he rode an appaloosa slowly through the settlement that morning. Life was hard scrabble in 1874; the ravages of the war-that-never-should-been-but could-not-possibly-have-been-avoided were still evident. Blasted woodlands, once the target of artillery rounds, were finally starting to re-grow. Bullet holes still pocked the structures that had stood during the Civil War.
The Confederate gray of wool and cotton uniform trousers still hung on clotheslines behind wooden houses and a few shops had re-opened with such names as "Johnny Reb's Stable," "Lee's General Store," and "Beauregard Blacksmith and Farrier."
The man never changed his expression but a careful observer would have noted that his eyes beneath the black and dusty, flat-crown hat, known on the Natchez Trace as a card-player Stetson, never ceased moving back and forth, observing everything around him. He wore a long-sleeve faded gray shirt, worn and belted dark trousers over well-used boots, and a leather handgun belt about his waist.
Likewise, this same knowledgeable watcher would have taken in the .44 caliber Remington New Model revolver and the few .44-40 metallic cartridges in his belt loops. Few people could have afforded such a weapon in that day; it had cost him $14 at the store out in Arkansas. Winchester had begun making the cartridge only the year before.
There was also the Winchester lever-action rifle in its scabbard just behind his right leg over the horse's haunch. Though built just the year before for the same powerful cartridge, its stock like that of the revolver's grips showed the dents and scratches of hard use.
Something about the rider discouraged long, direct stares. There was an aura around him, some invisible thing that told observers danger was riding through their midst and they didn't really want to get close to it. He never stopped in his slow passage through town, never changed his expression. He might have watered the powerful, well-kept horse, but he made no attempt to do so. Something also implied a sense of purpose, but the wise didn't even need to consider being interested.
As is often the case, the casual observer that day let well enough alone; someone else didn't.
The quiet, dangerous rider continued out of sight, down the road for several miles. He knew exactly what he was looking for, on the left the small oak with the twisted trunk across from a low rock outcrop on the right side of the trail. He would turn off the trail and move into the woods. He was aware of the man who trailed him out of town; he was about two hundred yards behind and staying almost out of sight. But the rider's horse had kicked up dust, the breeze had hiked the small cloud out into the open around the bend in the trail, and the watcher ahead read it for what it was. He already had a plan.
From the road he pressed on deeper into the woods until he reached an outcropping of rock that reached up above the unmarked pathway he followed. He pulled the appaloosa behind the rock sentry, tied the halter to a low branch, stroked his horse's muzzle, then climbed up the back side of the rocky mass, lay flat and waited. A long, slender-blade knife he held in his left hand. The wind sighed through the pines overhead and he breathed in the scent of pine sap mixed with honeysuckle.
His tracker appeared, moving slowly on his horse, searching for the man he'd followed. With things as difficult as they after the War Between the States, this strange intruder might have something valuable on him. Ransom Caldwell could relieve him of that problem, especially that revolver and rifle. He wasn't paying attention to his surroundings, taken up as he was with thoughts of stealing from the stranger. Then he'd kill him. Nobody would know.
As he rode beneath the overhanging rock, the man atop it launched himself out and onto his tracker below, catching him by the shoulders and riding him to the ground. The knife worked flawlessly, as it had on the Mississippi at Natchez-Under-the-Hill. The stranger slit his throat, then quickly rammed his face and shoulders into the leaves, avoiding spurting arterial blood and a cleanup problem.
Finally, when his quarry ceased all movement, he retrieved the other horse, hefted the body over its saddle, untiled his appaloosa and rode on quietly into the woods. This wasn't the first fool he'd had to kill; it probably wouldn't be the last. He wasn't exactly a member of this strange group, the Knights of the Golden Circle, which had been formed shortly before General Lee surrendered to General Grant at Appomattox Court House. More like a contractor.
From what he gathered as he listened a lot and talked minimally, the group was quite serious about maintaining an armed resistance against the Union. He'd learned that the organization actually spread across the former Confederate States and out of the country to some locations in the Caribbean Sea; the overall shape of the locations where it was represented was a large circle, hence its name. They kept their money in a variety of locations in the southern states to pay their guerillas there. He was a paymaster, one of those who carried the gold and silver that compensated the secret force. He had performed this same task for that band of ghouls and cutthroats known as Quantrill's Raiders, after its leader, Confederate Colonel William Quantrill.
He did his work, but he hated that garbage with a passion. The stranger had barely avoided an incident with one of Quantrill's men who persisted in badgering him about not being a member of the band. A fight was imminent, and the stranger had every intention of killing the man quickly, but Quantrill, understanding priorities, stopped it. Better to have a completely reliable paymaster than a reluctant member of the Raiders.
The stranger didn't know who was above him in the group and didn't want to. That could get a man killed, and despite these dangerous times during the hated Reconstruction inflicted upon the former Confederate States, he had every intention of remaining alive and healthy.
He did know that some of the money flowing through the KGC came from bank and train robberies by the James gang out in Missouri. They were members of Quantrill's mob. They'd had a good thing going with robbing trains, being the first to pull off this sort of theft, and the railroads seemed powerless to grasp just how great a problem they had. He admired them for their imagination, but he knew that eventually Jesse and brother Frank would kick the wrong dog, and they'd get caught, probably killed. Still, the money kept flowing to the KGC, and he was one of their most trusted paymasters.
He admired the detailed setup of the KGC, but he firmly believed that they would fail.
That was his task now, another delivery of money. He led the dead man's horse with the body deeper into the woods until they reached a small stream, banked on the far side by a low and long rocky bluff with oddly-flat walls. On the near side there were oaks and pines. His task was beneath one of those oaks, the one with the weathered diagonal slash across one of its lower limbs. He tied off both horses, removed two glass jars with sealed lead tops from his saddlebag, withdrew a small shovel from under his bedroll behind the saddle, and began digging a hole three feet out from the base of the oak.
Into the hole he carefully placed the jars, full of gold coins in one and silver in the other, buffering them from each other with dirt. Whoever would come after him knew of this place, and they would distribute the payments to those who fought on after the war was over; for them, it would never be over. The gold and silver gleamed dully, its beautiful color testing his resistance to taking it for himself. But he was stronger than that and held the long view: he wanted to stay alive, and so he had become trustworthy in a time when almost no one was.
He re-covered the hole, smoothed leaves, pine straw and twigs over it until no one could distinguish it from the rest of the forest floor. He crossed the stream to examine the peculiar markings in the stone of the slab wall. There were circles that interlocked, a star with a line beneath it, several arrows that didn't point to anything so much as they seemed to signal something, a series of random numbers, and three wavy lines beneath the entire design. The markings could hardly be seen because they had weathered.
The quiet man mounted his horse and rode along the stream for another hundred yards before he stopped. This time he took the shovel and lengthened a hole below another rock formation. He worked for nearly an hour before it was large enough to contain the body. Then he dumped it in, clothes, hat, saddle blanket and the man's gun. He carefully replaced the dirt, knowing that it could hump up which he didn't want. Finally, he collapsed part of the crumbling rock onto the grave and reconstructed the forest floor until no one could tell anyone had been there.
Farther on, he dug another hole and buried the saddle. Nothing of his would-be robber would ever be seen again. He checked the horse for a brand, found nothing, and decided to trail the horse until he could sell it or, more likely, give it away to someone in this desperate, war-ravaged land.
He returned to the main trail, stopped just inside the tree line to check for anyone on it, and seeing nothing he moved out onto it. His conscience was at ease; he had completed another job; now there was one final task one week later in this area. With the damage the Union Army had done to southern Tennessee, apparently there were a lot of soldiers for the KGC who would be paid from the money he would be given in the week ahead.
He rode into and out of the small settlement seven days hence. Everyone knew he was there, but no one actually 'saw' him ride through. The moron who had trailed him into the woods several days ago and died for it had apparently been forgotten as part of the litter of war. He moved carefully to another site farther down the narrow road and once more buried his cache in the prescribed location near other peculiar symbols cut into a flat rock. What he left this time was much larger and included a weapon, several law enforcement items and, of course, the gold.
No one there ever saw him again.
