“I was there once,” Billy Blythe said to Starbuck.

“You were?”

“Saw Mister Brown hung,” Blythe said contentedly. “Smug son of a bitch.”

“What were you doing there?”

“Buying horses,” Blythe said. “That was my trade, see? And once in a while we came north to find a nag or two. Stayed at Wager’s Hotel.”

He stared at the town and shook his head. “Burned to a cinder, by the look of things. A pity. I was hoping to renew my acquaintance with a girl there. Sweet as honey, she was, only a lot cheaper,” he laughed. “Hell, she and I were watching out of a bedroom window when they hung that smug son of a bitch. Hung him higher than an angel. Kicked like a mule, he did, and all the time I was making that sweet little honey moan for pleasure.”

Starbuck felt a flicker of distaste for his second in command. “I met John Brown,” he said.

“You did?”

“He came to Boston wanting funds,” Starbuck explained, “but he didn’t get none from us.” At the time he had been puzzled that his father had refused to help the famous abolitionist, but now, looking back, he wondered if the Reverend Elial Starbuck had been jealous of the stern, ravaged-faced Brown. The two men had been very alike. Had his father feared such a formidable rival in the abolition movement? But Brown was dead now, and in the wake of his hopeless rebellion there was a plague of death across America. “He told me I’d be a warrior against the slavocracy,” Starbuck recalled the meeting in his father’s parlor, “guess he got that wrong.”

“You’re fighting to keep the slaves, is that it?” Blythe asked.

“Hell, no. I’m fighting because I’ve nothing better to do.”

“Slaves won’t be freed anyway,” Blythe said confidently.

“They won’t?”

“Not this side of heaven, and if God’s got any sense, not there neither. Hell, who’s going to pay the lazy sons of bitches wages?”

“Maybe they’re only lazy because they don’t get wages,” Starbuck said.

“Sound like your pa, Major.”

Starbuck bit back an angry retort. He was surprised at his sudden suspicions of Billy Tumlin and wondered if he was being unfair to the man, but he sensed that Tumlin’s glibness concealed a sly dishonesty. Billy Tumlin lied too easily, and Starbuck had seen proof of that when Tumlin talked with Jackson, and now he wondered how many other lies Tumlin had told. There was something that did not ring true about Tumlin, and Starbuck found himself wondering why a man who had ostensibly escaped from a Yankee prison was so well fed and so handsomely equipped with a money belt. “I’m going to get myself a map in Harper’s Ferry,” he said just after the nearest gun had thumped back on its trail.

“A map?” Blythe asked.

“I want to see where Union is in Massachusetts, Tumlin. You kind of piqued my interest. I thought I knew half the back towns in Massachusetts on account of going with my father when he preached up-country, but I sure as hell don’t remember a Union. Where was it near?”