Bold Sons of Erin by Owen Parry, Ralph Peters Read Free Book Online Page A

Heckschersville, if not in the state of Denmark.
    Have you ever noticed Mr. Shakespeare’s affinity for graves? He ponders death, as all good Christians should. I sucked the sweetness from another chestnut. And I thought of the living woman, Mrs. Boland, who was so queer, then of Macbeth’s witches and Cleopatra. I do think Mr. Shakespeare had Welsh blood. He had an eye for the oddities in mankind that would elude the sharpest eye in England.
    It had come as a great surprise to me when Mr. Lincoln told me I was to go home to Pottsville to look into the murder of a general. Of course, I was the obvious choice, since I knew the place and the people. But our president had been cryptic, which was unlike him. Even Mr. Nicolay, his private secretary and, I thought, an honest friend to me, had been a very miser with his facts. I was told only that Brigadier General Carl Stonehad been jaunting about the coal fields in an attempt to raise a regiment of volunteers. He had nothing to do with the draft or its enforcement. Yet, they found him dead south of Heckschersville, atop a hill along the Thomaston Turnpike. Stabbed in the chest, but otherwise unmarked. He last had been seen alive in Ryan’s Hotel, a ramshackle house in Heckschersville itself.
    Deep I was in my ruminations and chestnuts, when a tableau of the streets asked my attention.
    A woman in a ragged shawl dragged a boy through the mud, crying, “Get-tup, or Oi’ll take the belt to ye, oncet we’re ta home. Oh, ye’ll be gettin’ the belt but good, Oi’m tellin’ ye truly.”
    The child was willful, strong and unafraid.
    “Oh, sir,” the woman called to me, a perfect stranger, “did ye ever see the likes o’ this one here?”
    Now, children are fond of me, for I do not worry them, and I paused to see if I might lend assistance.
    “Obey your mother, and you will have a chestnut,” I bid the lad.
    He wiped a blot of mud from his brow and said, “Shove your dirty chestnut up your ass, Shorty.” But change his behavior he did. Of a sudden, he clutched his mother and begged, “You won’t go off with that one, will you, Ma?”
    I thought it best to make my way along.
    MR. LINCOLN AND MR. NICOLAY HAD made it clear they wanted no reports sent over the telegraph. Nor was I to discuss the least thing I found with anyone else, but only with one of those two. It seemed a fuss to me. Generals had been promoted in plenty—Washington fair stank with them, from the saloon bars to the lowest harlot’s alley—but there was a special matter to do with this fellow. They told me less than I would have told a bootblack.
    I admit I was affronted by their secrecy, though self-regard is always out of place. I do believe that was the sin of vanity in me,about which Mr. Wesley warned us, as surely as do the Testaments, Old and New. Yet, I had served my masters well and loyally. And now I was not trusted with full knowledge of a matter I was expected to explain.
    I had set aside another business I was pursuing for Mr. Lincoln, an affair of folly, if not of treachery, at Harper’s Ferry earlier in the autumn. I took me up to Pottsville on the railways, only to find my old friend Hughes the Trains overseeing the loading of the general’s coffin—sealed with leads—onto a freight wagon in the yards. The box was to go to Washington, without the least delay, and a trio of armed soldiers would travel with it. Next, I had learned from the provost that the murderer had been found out, a miner named Daniel Boland, only to die of cholera the very same day. The authorities seemed relieved and disinclined to question the coincidence. But that was all too neat for Abel Jones. And so it was I went to digging up corpses. And found a girl who should have been a man.
    Troubling none, I was on my way to Market Street, where my darling keeps her shop. If I could not eat her cooking at home, I might at least feast my eyes upon my beloved. For she is fair as Heaven on a Sunday. Strolling and