Mississippi Raider (23 page)

Wanting to avoid any such means
of self-defense if possible, regardless of how effective she knew
them to be, Belle was carrying a bulky and cheap-looking black
reticule in
which, among some of the feminine items a person of the
kind she was pretending to be could carry without arousing
suspicions in the event of a search, was the bottle containing the
remaining whiskey laced with the kind of opiate intended for use
with the ring she was given by Captain Anatol de-Farge. She was
satisfied that there was still enough of the potent liquor to serve
her purposes. If anybody should stop and question her, it was her
intention to reply with the pronounced French accent she had
learned to employ so adequately that it made the Southern
inflection in her normal voice indistinguishable. The drugged drink
was to be used only as a last resort.

None of the precautions had proved
necessary.

For all the calm way in which
she had spoken to the Texans, the girl was experiencing a little
tension while walking briskly and with apparent nonchalance through
the streets of the town.
She knew that, with the exception of the man she
had come to meet, everybody she encountered was a potential enemy.
However, as she had anticipated and gambled upon being the
case—except for a couple of soldiers who took her for what she was
pretending to be and made an improper suggestion without attempting
to follow it up and needing to be answered in some suitable
fashion—the few people whom she passed on the not brightly lit
streets paid no attention to her.

Arriving at the combination residence and
surgery of Doctor Conried, she found the latter to be in darkness,
although lights showed from the former. Much to her relief, it was
he who came in response to her knock on the front door. He was as
she remembered him, even to the casual way in which he was dressed.
Tall, burly, and gray-haired, he had a cheerful Germanic cast of
features, although his New England mode of speech had not the
slightest trace of an accent suggestive of his being of that race.
She had no idea why a man from that Northern region where the
majority of the population were so firm in their support for the
Union had elected to become a spy for the South, being content with
knowing he was considered by Rose Greenhow as being one of the best
and most reliable of all who worked from inside Yankee territory.
Aware of how urgent the matter must be, instead of thinking about
the subject of his motivation, she commenced the ritual she knew
would be expected of her and serve as a means of identification in
case she was not remembered from her previous visit. As she had
worn masculine attire on that occasion, she felt it possible that
this might indeed happen until he was granted a closer look at her
face.

“
Southrons, hear your country call you!” Belle announced
sotto voce after having gazed about her surreptitiously yet
thoroughly to be sure nobody else was close enough to hear the
first line of the vigorously patriotic verses written by General
Albert Pike of the Confederate States Army to replace the far more
bland words that Daniel D. Emmett had penned for his minstrel song
“Dixie.”

“
Up
lest death or worse befall you!” Conried replied correctly with the
second line and no louder, indicating that he was alone in the
house and they could conduct the meeting for which the girl had
been sent in response to the message he had dispatched by carrier
pigeon in privacy and safety. “Come in, please!”

Despite the importance of the
information and the need for urgency in having a response to it
stressed by the doctor, if he was surprised or disappointed by
finding a woman had been sent to meet him, he showed no indication
of it. Rather, he accepted without comment the
girl
’s
explanation that she and her companions had considered her to be
the one best suited for avoiding attracting attention on the way
through the town to pay the visit.

Taking Belle into the surgery,
explaining as he had the time before that doing so would be
expected if anybody should have seen her arrival, he drew the
curtains after turning up the lamp he had carried to the front
door. Again, he said, this would not arouse speculation, since he
would not carry out any examination of a female patient without
making sure that whatever undressing might be required could not be
seen from outside. Asking her to strip to the waist, to give
support to the pretense of her being there for medical reasons
should anybody such as his currently absent housekeeper come in
unexpectedly—precaution she heartily approved of and had no qualms
of carrying out under the prevailing conditions—he waited until
this was done and the masculine shirt was concealed beneath the
well-worn black leather couch, upon which she had seated herself in
accordance with his instructions. Then, having
changed into the white coat he
wore when engaged in his professional duties and hung his
stethoscope around his neck, he wasted no time in getting down to
business.

Before Belle had heard many words, she
decided that there was justification for the summons. What was
more, the situation described by Conried was going to need being
given urgent attention by herself and her two companions from
Texas. She also realized that what the doctor had discovered and
was disclosing could have the potential for turning the course of
the war in the favor of the Union. At the very least, if the device
he described so graphically was as effective as he claimed it to
be, it was going to cause the South enormous loss of lives.

On hearing the name of the inventor of the
device, the girl had realized she knew something about him. A
couple of years earlier, Christopher Burke had made a tour of
Southern plantations trying to interest the owners in a machine to
perform the picking of cotton, obviating the need for numerous
human hands to perform the task. While it might have made such a
thing possible, it had proved to be complex and costly to operate,
as well as liable to breakdown and the necessity to purchase
expensive spare parts. As if these faults were not sufficient, the
device was prone to explode with sudden violence and spread flames
over a fair distance around it. Therefore, he and it had become a
laughingstock even in regions where it had not been demonstrated.
The last thing she had heard about Burke was that he had returned
north expressing a bitter hatred of all Southrons because they
declined to buy and use his machines, even though he had repeatedly
promised all the faults would be corrected prior to delivery.

The thing she had to do, the girl told
herself, was see the weapon described by the doctor, if possible,
and then decide upon what action must be taken.

~*~

Even at a distance of close to
a quarter of a mile, which was as close as Belle Boyd and Captain
Stone Hart could approach where they were originating from, the
continuous roar of detonations was awesome to the ears and the
device that was producing them made a sight that was frightening
in
its
potential. It went far beyond anything in her comprehension, and he
had never heard or seen a single weapon capable of creating the
effect. In fact, he felt sure even a number of trained riflemen at
company strength could not have been able to produce such a rate of
fire by shooting one after another in their most rapid
succession.

Good fortune had continued to favor Belle in
her mission. Doctor Fritz Conried had informed her that the weapon
that had caused him so much concern was to be demonstrated to some
senior officers the following afternoon. His assertion that it
would be possible for an unsuspected observation to be carried out
from some nearby woodland had proved correct. Having arrived there
without being detected, she and Stone had left Sergeant Waggles
Harrison to keep the horses quiet and under control while they
moved into a point of vantage on foot. They had watched the
spectators assembling where a small man in civilian clothes, whom
she recognized as being Christopher Burke on being handed field
glasses by Stone, was seated behind and showing the potential of
the revolutionary weapon he had invented. A larger civilian was
kneeling at the right of it and clearly acting as an assistant for
its operation.

“
Land’s sakes!” the girl exclaimed, lowering the field
glasses. In her concern, she inadvertently gave a clue to the
identity of her informant. “The doctor was
right.
That damned thing
could
change the whole course of the War if the
Yankees get enough of them. I’ve never even imagined there could be
anything like it. Why, it fires much faster than is being claimed
for the Williams gun of ours that I’ve heard talk about around
Richmond.”
^xiv

“
I’ve
not run across one of them yet either,” Stone admitted, “but I’ve
heard they’re pretty fair and can throw out around sixty-five
one-pounder shells a minute. Which’s better than those
twenty-five-shot Bilinghurst Requa Batteries the Yankees use can
turn loose. There was talk before I came south about something
called the Agar Coffee Mill gun being on its way, but none had come
into service when I left. Do you reckon that thing is one of
them?”
^xv

“
Not
if what I heard about Christopher Burke is correct,” Belle denied.
“I’d say he’s far too much the egotist to let somebody else’s name
be used for
his
invention. Do you think that thing is as dangerous as I do,
Stone?”

“
If
it’s
not
...” the Texan replied in a grim tone. He was thinking of
the main disadvantage that applied to the Requa and even more so to
the eighty-five to four hundred and fifty barreled Vandenburg
Volley Gun already in service with the Union Army as he continued,
“... it’ll surely do until something that
is
dangerous comes along. Like I said, its
fires faster than anything I’ve ever seen or heard tell of, and it
will be much easier to move around fast when needed.”
^xvi

The device that was causing so much concern
for Belle and Stone was mounted on a small metal tripod instead of
the modified artillery carriage that was necessary for the other
rapid-fire weapons to become available during the War Between the
States. At the rear end of the barrel what was obviously the
mechanism was housed in something shaped like an oblong box.
Through one side of this, the metallic cartridges in snugly fitting
loops on a canvas belt entered a slot to be extracted one after
another by some means and fed into the chamber. With the powder
discharged and the bullet expelled, the spent case was ejected
through a hole in the top of the box and the now-empty belt came
out at the side opposite where it entered.

On the belt in use reaching its end, while
Burke was drawing it free, the man assisting him placed one that
was fully loaded into the slot in the weapon at the other side.
When this had been drawn onward a short distance by the inventor,
be resumed firing. However, having shown how swiftly the process
could be carried out, he sent off only a few more rounds before
stopping once again. Then he came to his feet and walked toward the
observers.

Such was the apparent simplicity of the
operation and the speed by which reloading could be carried out,
that the rate of fire attained was far greater than any
contemporary multiple-shot mechanism could produce.

“
It’s
that
deadly, in your opinion?” Belle queried, wanting to satisfy
herself there was adequate reason for the drastic line of action
she was contemplating.

“
They’d come as one hell of a shock to the troops they were
first used against. Likely cause a rout and fast withdrawal, too.
There’s only one thing, though.”

“
What
is it?”

“
The
speed that gun fires, the barrel and machinery must get hot enough
to give plenty of trouble,” the Texan estimated, unwittingly
suggesting a serious problem that Burke had discovered and was
taking steps to prevent letting become apparent to the delegation
who had come from Washington to witness the demonstration. “Unless
he’s come up with some way to cope with it, I’d reckon that its
works would soon jam so tight it couldn’t go on throwing
lead.”

“
Then
we
can’t
let the Yankees put them into production,” the girl
asserted.

“
There’s a chance they won’t do that, going by what I’ve
come to know about the way the top brass thinks. It always looked
to me that they just about always shy away from every kind of
improvement that’s offered no matter how good you might reckon it
would be for the men who’ll have to do the fighting. Every time a
repeating rifle even was offered while I was with the Yankee Army,
they started saying how it’s too complicated to use and, anyway,
issuing them would cause the troops to spray lead around
promiscuously instead of aiming carefully. The same’s already been
said by our high muckety-mucks about the Agar.”

“
Then
why have these high muckety-mucks, as you uncouth Texans say, come
to see it?”

“
Could
be because he’s got some influential backing at the capital and the
top brass figure they’ve got to make a show. I don’t know whether
you noticed, but there isn’t even a brigadier general down there.
Fact being, there’s only one full colonel even, and from the look
of him, he’s a quartermaster not serving in the field. The rest are
the same. I reckon they’ve been sent along and will go back to give
a report for higher up about what they’ve seen.”