The Golden Flask ps-3 Read online

  "Two, then you have to twist the barrel around to fire two more," said Jake, inspecting the dead men's bodies for papers or other signs of their mission. He found nothing incriminating besides a small collection of coins, which he left in their pockets. "The bullets are small but effective at close range. These were poisoned by an old acquaintance."

  The irony encased in the last word escaped Hamilton. The poison had been supplied by one of Jake's most severe enemies — the now-deceased Keen.

  "Effective. The men seemed to be farmers."

  "That's just their dress. They are British soldiers, except for the one they called Egans."

  "Why would a white dress as an Indian?"

  "Possibly adopted as a boy. Or simply a renegade. It doesn't make much difference, at the moment."

  Under different circumstances, Jake would ride to the nearest militia unit and alert them of Egans's presence. But there was no time to alert anyone or even bury the dead men. He restored his pocket pistol to its hiding place and dragged the bodies to the side of the road. Then he bowed his head.

  "Don't tell me you're praying for them," said Hamilton, incredulously. "They're the enemy."

  For every hard inch of callus applied to Jake's body by these years of struggle, another part of his inner self had softened. Enemy or not, he could not help but feel remorse at the death of a fellow human being.

  Someday, this growing well of sorrow might prevent him from fighting, despite the great justness of his cause. For now, he merely finished his silent memorial and walked to where Hamilton was sitting on his horse. As Egans had made off with the animal Jake had been riding, their remaining horse would have to be pressed into double duty. Fortunately, they were to change mounts only a few miles down the road, and then press on to New Paltz, where another fresh pair awaited.

  Jake grabbed hold of Hamilton and hauled himself up behind him. "If you have any influence with this horse," said the spy, squeezing onto the saddle, "ask him to avoid the bumps. My ribs feel as if they've just been broken again."

  "I'm afraid we've only just met," said Hamilton, spurring the stallion.

  Chapter Four

  Wherein, a carriage and traveler stop along the road, with unpleasant consequences.

  Helios had not long strung his bow in the eastern sky — nor had the sun been up very long — when a mahogany-paneled carriage happened to pass on the road near where Jake had placed the bodies. As the patriot spy had surmised, the dead men quickly caught the attention of these passers-by, and an order was given from within for the driver to halt.

  The large, gilded wheels skidded to a stop in the dirt as the horses were curled back sharply at the bit; though he had held his position as driver and guide only a short while, the Indian whose hands were wrapped around their reins knew his master was best obeyed promptly.

  Even so, the door had swung open before the carriage stopped. As if caring little for his fine, bright blue jacket and buckskin breeches, the vehicle's occupant dashed into the swirling dust. His energy belied his age, which was now past fifty. Though he had lately spent considerable time recuperating from a variety of wounds, he sprung forward with great energy to inspect the dead men. Brandishing his walking stick, he waved it over them as if it were a bishop's scepter, imparting some blessing to the already vanquished souls.

  But the man had not stopped to administer Christian niceties. He was instead a connoisseur of death, congenially interested in examining the nuances of each individual tragedy, hoping to increase his already considerable stock of knowledge on the subject. For the man who now pushed the bodies back and forth like so many laboratory specimens was no less than Major Dr. Harland Keen.

  The very same man Jake had seen fall over the Cohoes Falls to the bottom of the Mohawk River less than a fortnight before.

  The reader is entitled to some explanation for the shock of that last line, and we shall here deliver it as succinctly as possible, to avoid losing the thread of our present tale.

  As a young man, Harland Keen had left his native London to tour the world, gathering the esoteric knowledge that would supplement the skills he learned at Edinburgh and render him among the most brilliant practitioners of the medical arts in Europe. He had not yet become the evil-hearted assassin who would eventually forget his fraternity's oath against causing harm, though already his character shaded toward Life's darker vales.

  It was during a stay in Venice that he came upon an old woman, reputed of Borgia stock, who had gained great fame as a reader of the Egyptian cards. On a cloud-besotted day on an obscure piazza overlooking the Grand Canal, the woman plucked the Magician from the deck and nodded approvingly. But then she found Temperance inverted, and crossed severely by the Moon. Keen himself shuddered when the next card of her divinatory layout proved to be Death, mounted aboard a white charger with the red rose as his banner.

  Even a reader unfamiliar with the portents must sense the message the cards foretold. As the reading proceeded in a progressively darker vein, Keen felt his anger grow. He had never been superstitious, yet something in the woman's manner convinced him not only to believe what she said, but to take it as a curse rather than an objective interpretation of Fortune’s wheel. He pounded the table and upset the cards, demanding to know what, if any, good news she had for him.

  "You shall not die a water death," proclaimed the woman. "You cannot be killed by water."

  Suddenly, he was seized by a fit. "Let us see if the same is true of you," he shouted, picking the woman up and throwing her into the canal.

  Immediately, he repented, threw off his boots and coat, and dove into the dark water to save her. But despite the long hour he searched in the putrid stream, he could not retrieve her body.

  The full explanation for the dark roiling of his soul is perhaps more complicated, involving other choices and decisions as well as personal reverses. But it is nonetheless true that his path took a severe turn that afternoon. The woman died without relatives. Keen found himself not only free but in possession of her considerable texts and potions, and in a few hours gained knowledge his instructors at Edinburgh could not have dreamed in a lifetime.

  His career progressed, and at length he returned to London and became doctor to the highest elements of society, including the king himself. Despite his fame, his experiments brought him disrepute. He was accused of heinous crimes before King George III exiled him to America, in exchange for his life. By then, he had joined the king's secret department, sworn to carry out assassinations and other assignments in utter secrecy.

  Once a member of the department, there is no resignation short of death. Keen continued to carry out assignments under the direction of General Bacon, who besides being the intelligence chief was the king's personal representative at the head of the clandestine order of assassins.

  A few months after his arrival in New York, Keen was given the red-jeweled dagger signifying a mission — and told to kill Jake Gibbs and his friend Claus van Clyne. The doctor was bested by the pair below the great iron chain that spans the river at Peekskill, but he did not despair. Instead, he traced the two men north, and as they worked on a mission among the Mohawk he struck again.

  Keen believed van Clynne perished in a burning building, where he had left him tied and gagged. In fact, the Dutchman had escaped through a basement passage used by an earlier occupant as a beer cellar.

  Jake, meanwhile, proved harder to find, let alone kill. Keen joined forces with the local Mohawks, and was able to trick the American spy into a meeting just above the Cohoes Falls. The two men fell upon each other and engaged in a death struggle. Keen, aided by drugs that increased his stamina and natural strength, throttled Jake, then had him bound and gagged, placed into a canoe and sent tumbling over the falls.

  But the doctor himself became tangled in the tackle trailing from the boat, and plunged over in the torrent. The canoe, loaded with heavy supplies, sank at the foot of the falls — as Jake had seen.

  Jake saw this because he h
ad not been fooled by Keen, but rather played the trick back to ensnare the doctor. With the aid of a confederate … ah, but we do not wish to give the plot away to those who have not read the adventure. Suffice it to say Jake watched Keen fall, and observed the commotion on the riverbank below as the doctor's Indian allies debated what to do. By the time Jake left to complete his mission, Keen had been underwater ten minutes at least; no one, he thought, could have survived the tumult without drowning.

  But he had not counted on the Borgia curse or prediction — whichever it might be. Nor did he know that Keen had found a pocket of air within the overturned canoe. The British assassin reached the shore intact. His Indian cohorts were dumbstruck to see him. As fooled as Keen by Jake's plot, they assured him the white man had died, and after a lengthy search produced a blond scalp to back up their claim.

  The hair now rested on the bench of Keen's carriage. He was fully confident that it belonged to his nemesis. But how to explain that one of the dead men bore the unmistakable signs of having been killed by a poison few men besides Keen himself could concoct?

  A poison that had been on the bullets when Gibbs stole his Segallas pistol back in their fateful fight before the falls?

  There might be many theories. Perhaps one of the Indians had managed to find the gun on the body and then used it here.

  But why? The man's rough outer clothes were not exceptional, but he had on a silk undershirt. That and his pocketful of coins suggested he was an English agent, but not a robbery victim.

  Very few people in this province would not ransack a body before death. Keen knew full well Gibbs was one. He felt his blood rising against the rebel's sham virtue.

  But he was dead, wasn't he?

  The doctor saw the death wounds of each man before returning to the carriage, where his Mohawk assistant waited. The man had lived among whites for many years, and had acted as an interpreter during Keen's recent travels.

  "Clouded Face," said Keen, addressing him as he stood by the side of the carriage, "come down a moment."

  "Doctor, sir?"

  "Simply say 'doctor.' I am not a knight, nor do I aspire to be. Knighthood, in fact, is out of the question. Come down here."

  There was nothing specifically venomous in Keen's voice, yet the assistant trembled as he put down the reins. He slipped to the ground, then held his hands in a tangled, sweating knot before him, where they would be conveniently situated should he have to beg for mercy.

  "Clouded Face, you assured me Jake Gibbs was dead, did you not?"

  "Yes, sir, yes, Doctor, yes I did."

  "And you did that because of the scalp?"

  "I saw him go over the falls myself," said the assistant. "And heard the death wail. I kicked the body with the others on the shore below. You have the hair."

  "The ribbon is the same. The color, of course. But tell me. ." Keen tapped the man's uncovered head with his cane. "Tell me if a scalp could be taken without a man being killed. Or if the wrong scalp could be taken and dressed with another man's ribbon?"

  "Impossible."

  "Let us try the first, then, and see," said Keen, producing a knife. "Your knot is convenient."

  The Indian made the mistake of starting to run. Until that moment, Keen had not completely decided to kill him — he was still largely a stranger to this country, and if Gibbs were truly alive, a guide would prove useful. But he could no more allow an assistant to run from him than he could let this Gibbs continue to live. He pointed his stick and pressed a hidden button near the end of the shaft. The ornate gold head flew off with a tremendous burst of velocity, striking Clouded Face in the back of the head. The man fell forward immediately, his brain pan shattered.

  "I think that I have my answer," said Keen. "I don't suppose it will be of much use to scalp you then, but I will do so anyway, for the practice.”

  Chapter Five

  Wherein, more of Mr. Egans's particular history is explored, with unsatisfactory results

  .

  While Jake and Alexander Hamilton continued south, Claus van Clynne headed in the same general direction. But even though he took every shortcut he knew and urged his horse forward with epic entreaties and a few unvarnished threats, his progress was not half as sharp. Indeed, as the sun dawned, it found him just seven or eight miles south of the spot where Jake had left the dead Englishmen, on a dusty but sturdy road whose dips and turns ran somewhat in harmony with the nearby river.

  His lack of speed was partly caused by the fact that he had to stop every so often and search for signs of his friends and their direction; their trail was difficult to trace. But a more substantial portion of his problem was due to his horse's slow gait, which was in direct contrast to its advertised attributes. This was especially annoying as van Clynne had paid dearly for the animal. Under ordinary conditions the Dutchman would not have allowed himself to be so ill-used, nor would he have concluded a deal without several minutes', if not hours', worth of haranguing. He did not wish this taken as a sign of weakness, as he explained to the beast in great detail as they rode. Only the prospect of seeing General Washington and presenting his case made him accept the outrage as the price of doing business.

  Van Clynne's tongue was no less prolific because he was traveling alone; indeed, he found it easier to give full range to his feelings, as he was not constantly being interrupted by a companion. After he finished complaining of the high price of transportation, his topic naturally moved to the injustice of Jake's flight southward without him. Occasional jabs at the patrons, who unlike him had managed to keep the vast land holdings he was riding through, led to the subject of injustice in general, whereupon the British bore the brunt of the complaint.

  He soon turned to the Esopus Wars, the great conflicts of the seventeenth century during which the Dutch had tamed the native inhabitants near Kingston, only to find themselves tamed in turn by the English invaders. Without following the entire path of van Clynne's logic, let us say that it left him in a sympathetic, nay, charitable frame of mind when he came upon a dusty, Indian fellow traveler sitting astride a horse on the river road not far from Murderer's Creek.

  The traveler was Egans, who had restored both his strength and his anger during the several hours that had passed since encountering Jake and Colonel Hamilton. He had also recovered sufficient composure to cloak his business in the guise of a semi-innocent wanderer.

  "Good morrow to you," said van Clynne. "Which way are you going?"

  "To the river," replied the man.

  "Not far to go, then." Van Clynne stroked his beard a moment and attempted to puzzle out the man's ancestry. Though his skin was white, his wardrobe was just the sort of mixture an Iroquois might consider his Sunday best. Obviously this was a European adopted by natives at some point in his past.

  Such men had an unsurpassed ability to slide between the two worlds and were invaluable in business. They were generally easy to enlist, and rarely understood the nuances of European exchange rates. Van Clynne hated to miss an opportunity that might lead to future profits. But his beard scratching brought him back to his true priority: finding Jake and winning an appointment with Washington.

  "I wonder if you have seen a man about six foot tall and heading south on horseback," he asked the stranger. "An early riser two towns ago thought he caught sight of him hurrying this way. He has blond hair, a fine Continental uniform, and a habit for getting involved in difficult situations, from which I inevitably rescue him."

  "I have seen no one," claimed Egans.

  "He would have been in the company of another man, a Colonel Hamilton. My friend's name is Gibbs — a remarkable individual. I have no doubt posterity will learn a great deal about him, though the edges of his story will have to be rounded for easier consumption. Modesty prevents me from describing my role in his adventures, but it has been considerable. The times I have plucked him from Hades' vestibule are too many to count."

  "You look familiar," suggested the white Indian. "What is your name?" />
  "Claus van Clynne, at your service," said the Dutchman. "You, too, seem familiar," he said. Now that he'd had a chance to think about it, he placed the man's signs and jewelry definitely among the Oneida. There were not many white men who would wear the simple stone and symbolic tree, and fewer still who would have been accorded the honor of the eagle feather tied to his scalp lock. He searched the cubbyholes of his brain and retrieved the name: "You are Egans, are you not?"

  Despite a secret hatred of the Dutch — van Clynne's ancestry was easily deduced from his clothes, to say nothing of his name and accent — Egans's stoic mask dropped for a moment. "How do you know me?"

  "You are quite famous," said the Dutchman. He slipped off his horse and approached, holding out his hand. "You were a white child kidnapped by the Mohawk, and then adopted by the Oneida during the troubles thirty years ago. Your white family came from land not far from mine, and your adopted uncle and I have made one or two suitable arrangements regarding furs and corn in the past, before the war. I believe you were baptized Christof-"

  "My Seneca name is

  Gawasowaneh."

  "Yes, yes, Big Snowsnake," said van Clynne, waving his hand as if he knew a thousand men with the Indian name. The Oneida were a touchy lot, and he did not want to provoke even an adopted son. Van Clynne was temporarily weaponless, his customary tomahawks left behind in Albany and his unloaded pistol resting comfortably in his saddlebag. "You have earned it for your role in the ceremonies."

  "I have earned it for my role as a warrior," said the Oneida. Indeed, his ceremonial names could not be uttered except at the council fire.

  "Just so, sir, just so. Would you prefer I use

  Gawasowaneh

  in addressing you? I myself am known by many Indian names." Van Clynne did not add that most of these might be translated loosely as "Big Tummy and Longer Tongue."