Lincoln's Ransom Read online

  She put the bowl on the side table and propped him in a sitting position at the head of the bunk. Then she pulled a chair close and began spooning the soup into his mouth.

  “I can do it...my hands aren’t hurt,” he protested, feeling well enough to be embarrassed at having to be fed.

  She handed over the spoon, but held the bowl where he could reach it.

  He could feel her critical gaze on him as he ate.

  “Where are you from?” she asked.

  “Nashville,” he replied. “What about you?”

  “Bardstown, Kentucky.”

  “Not far away,” he murmured, looking at her, trying to guess her age.

  They talked as he ate, and he told her about having been a schoolteacher in a west Tennessee village.

  “Did you like it?” she asked, more to make polite conversation than for information, he thought.

  He nodded, chewing some barley in the soup. “It was barely a livelihood. But more satisfying than clerking in a store, and a lot easier than farming.”

  “What will you do when this is over?” she asked softly, looking at him as if he were the last soldier in Confederate gray.

  “Don’t know.” He shook his head. “Haven’t thought that far ahead. Surviving is my main object right now.”

  “Well, if I’m any judge, you’ll survive this.” She nodded at his wound.

  “Is your husband farming this land, or is he a soldier?” Packard asked, noting her wedding ring as he placed the spoon back in the bowl, indicating he was finished.

  “Neither. We’re just passing through.”

  It seemed a rather evasive answer, but he was too tired to care. With a weary sigh, he laid his head back on the folded blanket at the head of the bunk. For the first time since he’d been shot, he felt as if he were actually going to live. And he had this woman — a total stranger — to thank for it. He rested his eyes on her classic features — the straight nose, the arching brows, the slightly prominent cheekbones above the smooth planes of her face. He found himself wondering if Helen of Troy might have looked like this. “‘The face that launched a thousand ships and burned the topless towers of Ilium...,’” he murmured.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” He felt a slight twinge of regret that she was married. “Why did you rescue me?” he asked after a short silence, thinking she was probably in sympathy with the Southern cause.

  She shrugged. “I couldn’t just leave you there to die,” she said simply.

  “Well, ma’am, I’m mighty grateful to you.”

  “The name is Janice.”

  It could have been the sultry heat, but he thought her complexion seemed to glow a little more at his expression of gratitude.

  She got up quickly, her long dress rustling. “You need to sleep. I’ll look in on you a little later.”

  * * *

  “There are hundreds of men dying all around us in these woods. Why in hell did you drag this one back here to die? And in our bedroom at that!” James Kinealy glowered at his wife.

  Janice turned away so he couldn’t see the hurt in her face. She busied herself stirring the pot of soup on the cookstove, feeling the familiar stab of denigration in her stomach.

  “No, he won’t die,” she replied firmly, her back still to him. “At least, he won’t die from this wound.”

  She ladled out a bowl of the steaming soup and set it on the table for him. But the stocky man was carefully placing stoppered bottles of various chemicals in a wooden box and stuffing rags in around them.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “As soon as Rafferty gets back from fetching the water you didn’t get, we’ll load the press into the wagon and be ready to move out of here by dark.”

  “Do we have to leave?” she asked. “The soldiers have moved off to the north. They won’t find us.”

  “Can’t take the chance,” he grunted, shutting the lid on the box and slipping a padlock through the hasp. “Military officers are no respecters of property. There’s a command post near Lee and Gordon’s Mill, not two miles away. They’re liable to bust in here any time and appropriate this house. We can’t be caught printing phony money. We’ll go deeper into the mountains for a few days until it’s safe to move again.”

  “What about him?” she asked, nodding across the dogtrot at the other room of the two-room cabin.

  “He’s a Southern boy. We’ll leave word with the first Rebel troops we see.”

  She realized it was probably too risky to remain here, and any further protest would draw her husband’s quick wrath. But the thought of leaving the wounded man pained her.

  The expression on her face must have revealed her feelings, because he paused in his packing and looked closely at her. “I guess you always were soft about bringing home injured animals,” he said in a milder tone. “Go see to him while you can....”

  * * *

  Packard came out of a doze at the tag end of the day to the sound of a man’s voice somewhere outside the door. “We’ll move out as soon as it’s dark. Everything’s packed.”

  A burly man with thick hair and mustache looked around the door frame, as if to confirm that Packard was still alive and well.

  A minute later, Janice came in and stood by his bed. The late afternoon sun, pouring through the open window, was lighting her dark hair and brown eyes with a luminous glow. She squeezed his hand and looked at him. “You’ll be all right now. We have to leave, but we’ll send someone for you.” She set a full canteen on the bed, then bent and kissed his forehead.

  How do you thank someone for your life? He opened his mouth to try, but she put her fingers on his lips. “Get well and stay well,” she said. “Or you’ve put me to a lot of trouble for nothing.” Then, with one last, lingering look, she was gone.

  * * *

  The next morning he was found and taken into one of the units of Breckenridge’s command until he was well enough to be returned to his own outfit. After two months of recovery, he was given the job of orderly for General Thomas Wood and managed to serve in various clerical positions until he was mustered out three days after Appomatox.

  Chapter One

  OCTOBER 26, 1876

  SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS

  It was the craziest idea he’d ever heard — stealing Abraham Lincoln’s body from the tomb for ransom. If this gang of counterfeiters had spent years cudgeling their brains, they couldn’t have come up with a scheme that would rile up the citizenry quicker than desecrating the final resting place of their late, beloved President. But Sterling Packard was into the plot up to his fake identity, and dared not back out now. He leaned back in his chair and glanced at the four other men who slouched around the vacant tables in Kinealy’s saloon. He hoped his half-bored expression gave no clue to the icy fingers of suppressed fear and excitement that were clutching at his stomach. His life wouldn’t be worth a three-cent piece if they knew he was actually a Secret Service operative, posing as a professional grave-robber.

  James “Big Jim” Kinealy had closed his saloon two hours before midnight to hold this secret strategy session. But only a few minutes into the meeting an argument was breaking out over who was to blame for the aborted plot four months earlier.

  “Let’s get this straight.” Kinealy said, setting his beer glass on the bar and turning to face the four men. “I’m in charge of this operation, and what I say goes. No questions. Got that?”

  There was a murmur of assent as the others nodded their allegiance. In the few moments of silence that followed, a hard gust of wind from the late October storm rattled the shuttered windows.

  “If there’s another incident of drinking and blabbing to whores, I’m gone for good,” Kinealy went on, raking the fingers of one big hand through his thick, graying hair, obscuring the center part. “We’d all be in jail right now if the Lincoln Memorial Association hadn’t thought my plan was too incredible to be true.” The lines in his broad, rugged face were deepened by the overhead light of the
coal-oil chandelier.

  “They can’t arrest nobody for rumors and talk,” Stan Mullins pouted, a defensive look in his blue eyes. His unkempt, dirty-blond hair reminded Packard of a stray dog. “They didn’t give that story no credence a-tall.”

  Mullins appeared to be the weak link in the operation, Packard thought — a young man, long on looks and short on brains.

  “Hell, no!” Kinealy turned on Mullins. “But, thanks to you, they could’ve caught us in the act. That prostitute believed your brag and went straight to Police Chief Wilkinson.”

  “It wasn’t just because the story was too wild to be believed,” Rip Hughes ventured, flicking ash from his cigar into a brass cuspidor by his foot. “Chief Wilkinson was planning to run for mayor. Word got out that he’d invented the whole tale so his department could arrest a couple of fall guys as the plotters and make himself look like a hero just before the election.”

  As Hughes relit his slim cigar, Packard noted the carefully manicured fingernails and the smooth cheeks that had a sallow look, as if there were no blood beneath the skin. His black hair was neatly parted and slicked back, completing the somewhat oily but rakishly handsome appearance. Adding this to his debonair habit of dress, Packard could see how some women might find him attractive.

  “It was pure luck that the news got into the paper, or we wouldn’t have known they were on to the plan,” Kinealy declared, taking a long draught of his beer. “And we can’t go around, depending on luck.” He swept the foam from his mustache with the back of his hand.

  “They’ll be mighty surprised in a few days when they find out the story is true!” Jack McGuinn grinned, showing tobacco-stained teeth under his brown mustache. A bent nose, white scars in the heavy eyebrows, along with the bulging shoulders of his wool jacket hinted at his former occupation of pugilist.

  As the outside professional, Packard took no part in this fence-mending among thieves. They were like a pack of strange dogs, walking stiff-legged around one another and sniffing, but with tails cautiously wagging, not quite sure if the others could be trusted.

  In late June the story of a plot to steal Lincoln’s body had hit the newspapers. Packard, hoping the gang would not abandon the scheme permanently, saw a chance to get inside this ring of counterfeiters by selling his services as an expert grave-robber. Through a “roper” — a criminal informant — Packard had put out feelers in the half light of the Chicago underworld. Big Jim Kinealy had taken the bait and, through an intermediary, had arranged a rendezvous. When the two finally came face to face in a Chicago saloon known as The Hub, Packard reminded Kinealy of their brief meeting during the war. This tenuous connection from the past was enough, along with Packard’s fabricated reputation, to secure him a place with the plotters, and Kinealy had proceeded to confide the tomb-robbing plan to him.

  Kinealy had come south from Chicago to lead this small group of “coney men,” as counterfeiters were commonly known, in the theft of Lincoln’s body from its massive mausoleum outside Springfield. His primary goal in doing so was to force the release of his chief engraver, Ben Boyd, from prison. Boyd was probably the best engraver in the country who wasn’t employed by the U. S. Treasury Department. He was so good, in fact, that bills and notes printed from his plates could only be distinguished from the real thing by the slightly inferior quality of their paper. The fancy, intricate pictures, interwoven geometric patterns, state seals on national bank notes, portraits and designs on the U. S. currency denoted an artist of exceptional ability. But Boyd had been tracked through several Midwestern states by two of Packard’s fellow agents who had finally surprised and arrested Boyd in Fulton, Illinois a year ago. He’d been caught in the act of engraving a plate for a twenty-dollar bill on the First National Bank of Dayton, Ohio. After a trial and conviction, he was sentenced to ten years in Joliet prison.

  Kinealy usually confined himself to arranging the sale of hundreds of thousands of dollars of counterfeit money to other gangs — a spreading economic cancer that was affecting a wide area of the country. But, since he never actually touched a dollar of phony money himself, the Secret Service could not secure enough hard evidence against him to stand up in court. If the government couldn’t nab the elusive Kinealy for counterfeiting, perhaps they could catch him in the act of breaking into the tomb, Packard reasoned.

  The deed was to have been done on the country’s centennial, July 4, 1876. With the country’s patriotic fervor at its height, Kinealy had thought to collect a sizable reward for the return of the body. But the secret had been leaked and the plot abandoned. When Kinealy saw their plans printed in the Springfield newspaper, he was dumbfounded. When he found out Mullins was responsible, he was furious. He’d immediately called the whole thing off and left for Chicago on the train. But now he was back in Springfield and the bizarre scheme was about to become reality. Big Jim had rented a building and set up this saloon with his living quarters upstairs. The saloon was only a front for selling bogus money, and now for working out the details of the plot.

  “I’m willing to forget all those foul-ups. They’re past history,” Kinealy said. “Let’s get down to business. It’s getting late.”

  He leaned back against the bar and appeared to collect his thoughts. Rain was slashing down outside, and a few drops sizzled as the wind whipped them down the hot stove pipe. Packard automatically shifted his chair a little closer to the warmth of the Franklin stove in the middle of the room.

  “Where to hide the body, once we’ve got it...,” Kinealy began. “The original plan was to take it to the Sangamon River about two miles north and bury it in a gravel bar under a bridge. That’s out. Too close. We’ll have to take it farther away.”

  “There’s some caves up in the bluffs along the river about thirty miles north,” McGuinn volunteered. “Nobody would find it there.”

  Kinealy appeared to consider this briefly. “No...too difficult to get the body up there without removing it from the coffin. We don’t want to have to touch it.”

  “That lead-lined casket’s going to be mighty damned heavy,” Hughes growled, “wherever we tote it.”

  “I’ve thought about this a good deal,” Kinealy continued. “And I think we should haul it as far away as possible...as quickly as possible.”

  “We’ll think we’ve whupped into a hornets’ nest for sure when daylight comes and they find out it’s been stole!” Mullins glanced around at the others with a grin that was not returned.

  “Every place in the immediate area of Springfield will be searched. You can bet the law won’t leave a stone unturned,” Kinealy continued. “The nights are long this time of year. We can haul it a good distance in a light spring wagon before daylight.”

  Hughes shook his head. “Too many people on the roads to be packin’ old Abe around in a wagon,” he objected.

  “Why do you think I picked November Seventh as the date?” Kinealy answered, giving him a condescending look. “Everybody and his mule will be in town near the telegraph and newspaper offices, trying to get early news of the election returns. Hell, with Rutherford B. Hayes and Sam Tilden running, this promises to be one of the closest contests in United States history. There won’t be anybody on the roads that night.”

  “I’ve got an idea,” Packard said, putting in his two cents’ worth just to show he was really one of them.

  “O K, let’s have it.”

  “I’ve got a friend, Dan Clark, who’s in the same cadaver-procurement business as I am,” Packard said, nervous energy forcing him out of his chair. He paced up and down, his boots clumping on the wooden floor. “He owns a piece of land six miles northeast of Mount Pulaski in the bottomlands of Salt Creek, near the Isaac DeHaven grist mill.” He gestured as if they could see what he was describing. “There’s a big hollow log in some pawpaw bushes near the bridge. We could easily get there before daylight and hide the body in the hollow log. But here’s the main part of my idea....” He paused for dramatic effect, until all eyes were on him. “Since Clark
can’t be connected to us in any way, why not hire him to accidentally discover the body after a reward has been posted for it. Then he collects the reward and shares it with us. That way, we avoid all the danger of demanding a ransom.”

  Kinealy was silent for only a few seconds. “That’s O K as far as it goes,” he said slowly. “But it won’t do...for a couple of reasons. I don’t want any more people let in on this. And it’s not only the ransom. We have to force Ben Boyd’s release from prison.”

  Kinealy apparently still had some of Boyd’s plates that had not been confiscated and had been able to continue overseeing the printing and selling of bogus bills as long as there were no design changes in the currency or no new series issued. But continued operation of the coney men was totally dependent on the services of a highly skilled engraver. Boyd was the key. His freedom was indispensable.

  Packard nodded. “You’re right. If Ben Boyd is to be sprung, then we have to go with a straight-up ransom demand of the governor.”

  “That’s why we have to get the body far away...fast,” Kinealy continued. “We’ll put the coffin on a train headed west. By daylight, the coffin, with one of us riding coach, will be across the river into Missouri.”

  “What?”

  “That’s crazy!”

  “We can’t go fooling around any trains. We’ll be caught for sure,” came the immediate chorus of protest from the other three, as they all tried to talk at once.

  “There are a hundred good places we could hide it around close,” Hughes said thoughtfully, removing the cigar from between thin lips.

  “I don’t want no part of this,” Mullins whined. “Too dangerous. We’ll be arrested before we get out of the dépôt.”

  Kinealy held up his hand until they all had stopped talking, and then a few seconds longer to be sure he had the floor. “O K, now. If you trusted me before, then give a listen to me now. Don’t you think I’ve planned all this out? We won’t be at the dépôt. There’s a westbound express from Toledo that highballs through Springfield at ten minutes to midnight. Thirty miles west of town, in some rolling farm country, it stops to take on water. We can reach the spot with the body in a wagon just before the train gets there, close to one o’clock. There’s only a little freight station there. We’ll have the coffin in a wooden crate labeled ‘harrows’ to be shipped to Saint Joe, Missouri. I’ve already got the papers made up for it. Marking the crate as farm implements made of iron will account for the weight of it in case anybody’s curious. While the locomotive’s taking on water, the Wells Fargo messenger routinely loads up any odds and ends of freight that have been left there by folks from the surrounding towns or farms.”