Smugglers' Gold Read Free Page A

turned his face back up toward her, and bent to let her nipples graze his lips.
    Why not?
    â€œOkay, that’s good.
Now
move, damn you! Like that. Oh, Jesus, fill me up!”
    He aimed to please, still trying not to tip over the edge too soon. Outside, through Dolly’s open window, voices reached them from the street. Men shouting back and forth, a woman’s laughter, children giggling as they ran pell-mell along the sidewalk, celebrating the indefinite suspension of their normal bedtime. No one seemed to give a damn for rules in Washington tonight, and if they heard Dolly cry out in satisfaction from her upstairs crib, nobody cared.
    Ryder collapsed into the featherbed beneath him, spent, with Dolly draped across him, barely conscious of her weight but feeling every dewy inch of skin that pressed against him. He was on the verge of drifting off when something changed about the voices rising from outside. From celebration sliding downhill into weariness, a note of panic spiked the tones coming to Ryder’s ear. A woman’s tipsy cackling spiraled up into a kind of squeal. A man passing below the open window started cursing vehemently, raging.
    â€œDear God, no!” somebody shouted, from perhaps a block away.
    As someone else cried out, “They’ve shot the president!”
    Ryder was instantly awake; he rolled Dolly’s slender form away from him and bolted out of bed. Naked, he leaned out of her window, saw a stout man reeling past, his face florid by lamplight, streaked with tears. Ryder called down to him, “Hey, you! Yes, you! What’s happening?”
    â€œSome bastard’s shot the president,” the heavy man sobbed out. “He may be dying.”
    Ryder clutched the windowsill to keep the room from tilting under him and pitching him headlong into the street. “A shooting at the White House?”
    â€œNo, during the play. Ford’s Theatre.”
    â€œWhat is it?” Dolly asked him, lolling on the bed, still half asleep.
    â€œThe president,” said Ryder, as he scrambled to retrieve his scattered clothes.
    â€œWell, what about him?”
    â€œHe’s been shot.”
    â€œThe hell you say!”
    By then, he had his pants on and had stepped into his boots. Grappling with his shirt, he heard one of the seams rip and ignored it. Pistol. Jacket. Hat.
    Dolly’s voice reached out to catch him at the door. “You come back any time, now, hear?”
    â€œI hear,” he called over his shoulder, racing to the nearby stairs and pounding down them, toward the street.

2
    F ord’s Theatre was located on Tenth Street, four long blocks from where Ryder emerged onto the sidewalk. He started running west on E Street, weaving in and out past people in his way, jostling a few who lurched into his path, deaf to their protests as he passed. The word was out already, women weeping—and a few men, too—while others walked around with stunned expressions on their faces, shock and alcohol colliding in their brains. Ryder was out of patience by the time he’d covered two blocks, close to lashing out at human roadblocks as he closed the distance.
    Lincoln, shot!
    The fear of such a thing had been a constant from the first days of the war. The District of Columbia was more or less a southern city, geographically and in its attitudes, although it was the Union capital. It lay next door to Virginia, where Richmond served as the Confederate seat of government until one week before Appomattox—barely a hundred miles from Washington, but worlds apart in terms of politics.
    Or was it? Congress had waited a year past Fort Sumter to ban slavery inside the District itself, when President Lincoln signed the Compensated Emancipation Act in April 1862. Under that law, more than three thousand slaves had been freed, while their owners received three hundred dollars per head for their lost property. Newly freed bondsmen were encouraged to leave the