Smugglers' Gold Read Free Page B

country by a standing offer of one hundred dollars each for those who emigrated to Haiti or Liberia. How many actually left was anybody’s guess.
    And now, the worst had happened. Lincoln
had
been shot, but was he dead?
    Ryder stopped short outside Ford’s Theatre, facing a crowd of several thousand Washingtonians. Taking a chance, he climbed a streetlamp’s cast-iron pole and hung onto the crossbar set below the square glass lantern, placed there to support a lamplighter’s ladder. Clutching the bar, legs wrapped around the fluted pole, he hung there, face warmed by the lamp, watching to see what happened next.
    It took some time. Ryder’s muscles were trembling and burning by the time a group of solemn men emerged from the theater, passing through white arches from the entryway. Behind them came five soldiers in full uniform, supporting the familiar form of Lincoln in their arms. Familiar, yes, but also
different,
face slack and pale, hair matted on one side by blood, and stains of crimson on his open shirt collar.
    A head shot, then. Ryder could feel his stomach clench and twist.
    More soldiers spilled out of Ford’s Theatre—where were they, when the shooting happened?—and ran past the party carrying the president. Two of them started pushing through the crowd, while a young civilian dressed for a night on the town followed them and called out to the throng, voice straining with emotion.
    â€œPeople! Listen, please, for God’s sake! I am Dr. Albert King. The president is gravely injured. Everyone stand back and let us move him to a place where he can find the proper care!”
    Slowly, moaning like a wounded animal, the crowd drew back and split apart, forming a path for the procession to pass through. Two other grim civilians, possibly physicians, fell in line with Dr. King and led the soldiers carrying the president past ranks of stricken faces. Mary Lincoln, almost childlike in her stature, walked behind the soldiers carrying her husband, looking dazed.
    And going where? They didn’t seem to have the first idea. Their party turned first toward the nearby Star Saloon, then seemed to reconsider, veering off across Tenth Street. A man with a lantern in hand emerged from the Peterson boardinghouse, a three-story redbrick structure directly opposite Ford’s, and called out to the burdened bluecoats, “Bring him in here! Bring him in here!”
    Dr. King picked up his pace, the soldiers trying to do likewise without jostling their commander in chief. They reached the sidewalk, climbed a curving flight of concrete steps to reach the open entry to the boardinghouse, then disappeared inside. The tall door slammed behind them with a sound uncomfortably like a gunshot.
    Ryder let his legs unwind, slid down the lamppost, and dropped the last three feet. He almost tumbled, trembling legs protesting, then regained his balance and followed the crowd’s flow across the street toward Peterson’s. His mind was racing, trying to decide what he should do. Stay there and wait for news? Go home and wait to read about it in the
Daily Morning Chronicle
? Was leaving a betrayal of the president, somehow, although Lincoln would never hear of it and didn’t even know Ryder existed? He’d been ousted from the Marshals Service, owed the government no duty whatsoever, yet the thought of leaving still felt like desertion.
    Ryder looked back across Tenth Street toward the Star Saloon, a two-story building next door to the looming bulk of Ford’s Theatre. He knew the owner, Peter Taltavull, from visits to the barroom in his former professional capacity and as a private patron. They were cordial, although not close friends; Taltavull was an ex-marine who’d played a French horn in the Marine Corps band for twenty-odd years before retiring to serve thirsty Washington residents. A counterfeiting case had taken Ryder to the Star, about a year ago, but Taltavull had not been