Chasing the Texas Wind Page 23

  “I never had anything to tell him about your organization,” Maeve protested. “I mean, I never knew any names, or where you were based, and I never told him specifics about people I had contact with. I never even told him about James Morrow. I just said that I had heard information about the beginning of the arms movement, and I wanted to help learn more. He has tried to press me for details about where I’ve gotten information, but I would never compromise a friendly agent, never tell more than was necessary to get the information out. You’re saying that he never did anything with the information I gave him, just buried it? No one knows what we learned in Avecita?”

  “We figured out Grover wasn’t to be trusted, so we stayed away from him on this job,” Matt said. “It’s been a few years since we dealt with him. We couldn’t prove any of the things we knew about him, so we had to let it drop. We just started to work with somebody else in the army, a man named Greg Stevens, but I don’t know what’s happened to your intel, Mrs. Jessup.”

  “Grover buried it,” Ham said. “There were things Maeve has told me about that I’d never heard, and I find ways to hear almost everything, even if I can’t figure out what it means. You work with Greg Stevens? So he can keep a secret after all.” Ham grinned.

  “Like I said, we just started working with him,” Matt said. “He became a Christian fairly recently. He said he heard about and helped you with the little bit of info you had about Duvalls in Parmenos. He decided to try to find out more. He got interested in why we fought so hard against that law the Mexicans passed about everybody being Catholics. Wanted to know why it was so important, what we believed. He found out.” Matt grinned. “After that he joined us. Dad wouldn’t let him bring you in, any more than he would let Dan. Lem is getting older and he’s still so busy with his law practice. Jude has to be out of state for his congressional duties. Losing men like James and Dan crippled us. James was our mapmaker. Dan was our leader. We were floundering. We wanted so much to use your brains, because Greg was sure you were going to figure things out. He thought you were getting distracted about something and losing your grip on the problem, though.”

  “I was,” Ham said wryly, “thanks to Miss Vienta. Especially when she disappeared. I was losing my grip on everything.” He squeezed Maeve’s hand under the table. “Not the least of my problems was that Grover tried to kill Maeve once that I know of, and tried to get her lost in Mexico. And she didn’t believe me when I tried to warn her about him, because I didn’t have any proof either.”

  “What soured you on Grover?” Matt asked.

  “The first time? Goliad,” Ham grunted, “the worst-run campaign in military history, or the most deceived commander.”

  “Explain,” Matt invited.

  “I was a scout for Colonel James Fannin in the Goliad campaign right after I arrived in Texas,” Ham explained. “I know, it sounds strange, since I knew nothing outside a book about Texas, that I would be a scout. But I partnered up with Dan Costain. We’d met in Officer Basic. He knew the land, and I knew how to find out things. Anyway, we volunteered for Goliad and almost immediately I told Dan something was wrong. Look at what happened. Fannin’s command was scattered in too many directions. We were supposed to give aid at the Alamo, but we couldn’t move fast enough with the artillery we had. We sent King to Refugio, to rescue civilians in danger and then Ward to help. The Georgia Battalion was lost for days. We got told to retreat but we’d sent our carts and horses with Ward to Refugio. We had no cavalry.

  “Fannin will probably go down in history as the worst commander ever, but I know he was hamstrung. He heard all the wrong things at the wrong times to stop any of what happened. Those men in the Goliad campaign died because someone was holding things back that we needed to know to make the right decisions. There were 1500 Mexicans in the area. We fought Urrea a mile from the treeline at Coleto Creek. Two hundred of them died and only a few of us, plus wounded. We only gave up because we ran out of water. We were a mile from cover, from water, from a defensible position, and we had to surrender. General Urrea was seriously worried about us being able to break through his lines even as we were, and believe me we would have tried if we’d known what Santa Ana had decreed about prisoners of war. So he lied to us about the terms of surrender.”

  Ham took a deep breath. “Fannin just didn’t know what he was supposed to know to command that campaign. I don’t mean from the scouts in the field. We were telling him what we saw, but someone held back key information from headquarters. Fannin scattered his forces and delayed his retreat based on intel, or lack of it, from back home. The man responsible for getting us that intel was Nathaniel Grover. As far as I’m concerned the men at Goliad died because of him, and I believe he did it on purpose.

  “He claimed he didn’t have the intel to give us, but I spent the time between Goliad and San Jacinto, when I probably should have been saving my leg, trying to make sure none of our intel depended on Grover. And you see the difference in the outcome at San Jacinto. After Dan got me sober, I started looking for ways to expose Grover but he covered his tracks so well I had to keep setting it aside to do other things. I solve puzzles by laying out the pieces and figuring out where they fit, but with Grover I still didn’t have enough pieces to start.

  “I almost got myself thrown out of the Army four years ago. Dan gave me a new fancy walking stick, black ebony, with a leaded ram’s head top and a sword inside, very neat. I just decided I would beat Grover to death with it rather than try to prove he was killing our men and destroying our cause. If Dan hadn’t stopped me I would have killed him and taken my punishment with a light heart. Dan said the world needed me. I thought the world needed to be without Grover more. Goliad’s just one example. I do have a file that I call ‘Holes Where Pieces Should Be.’ I keep it at the office and take it out and stare at it now and then, but the pieces don’t fit together. They are things I think Grover’s responsible for, incidents where intel should have been available but wasn’t. I credit him with the deaths of 1,063 men and three times as many wounded. I don’t even count that I’d still have two legs if it weren’t for him.”

  “Ham, doesn’t it occur to you that since Grover does know something about this mission he might be trying to sabotage it in some way?” Maeve asked. “I told him everything I’d learned. I’m afraid he could still do something.”

  “Grover doesn’t do things,” Ham argued. “That’s the whole point. He deprives people of things, and I don’t see how he can do that here. I have your intel and the Duvall organization’s intel and what I learned directly from Chaco. I should have all the pieces. But you know, I should double-check. I never finished laying them all out, and Matt, I need a bigger room to do it in, and more paper and ink.”

  “Use the old barn we kept the early cotton crop in,” Matt suggested. “It’s all been sold and that one’s empty now. You should be able to hop right across the yard, and the floor’s just dirt. Excuse me for not helping you, but after all I’ve heard about neglecting a leg wound over the last few days I’m going to take care I keep both my legs intact by taking it easy.”

  “Let me help you,” Maeve requested.

  “Great,” Ham agreed. “And Angelita has become my right-hand girl too. That young lady has a real head for figuring things out. You know how she found your diary?”

  “Yes, I wondered about that,” Maeve exclaimed. “I never meant for anybody to find that until the house was torn down. How did she find it?”

  “I told her the house used to be a Texas Militia base and that they might have had to hide things if they were afraid the base might be compromised,” Ham shrugged, “and that your father basically redesigned the place. So she found this little panel in the wall behind the head of your bed with a Celtic knot like your ring, and there it was. Well, actually there are about twenty little hidey-holes in that house.”

  “There are more than twenty,” Maeve assured him. “My father took me through and showed me all of them. Some are big enough to fit a
person in. The militiamen sometimes took in Mexicans or Indians trying to escape their own people and hid them until they could be assimilated into the militia. I don’t have to tell you how deserters from either group get treated if they’re caught and there was a lot of distrust on the part of the Tejanos and Texians toward them too. Even Irish like my father fought on the Mexican side, because they were Roman Catholics. But my father used a lot of hiding places for a lot of things.”

  “Well, I sealed up the stuff I’ve been working on in a few of them before I left,” Ham shrugged. “None of the servants seem to know about the holes. I thought they’d be safe.”

  “Cassius knows about them,” Maeve said. “All of them, I think. He’s been there since my father’s time. In fact, my father stole him from one of Jim Bowie’s groups of confiscated slaves in the shuffle of paperwork Bowie used to resell the slaves, and Cassius ended up with free papers. He’s been loyal to my father and to me ever since. He probably didn’t know he could trust you, Ham, so he didn’t let on about the hiding places.”

  A short time later Ham hopped around on his crutch while Maeve and Angelita laid out pieces of paper in the empty cotton barn. Ham had to keep his temper when his eagerness got ahead of the ladies’ abilities. He kept changing the locations of certain papers, muttering to himself, writing new ones, throwing out others into a heap of wads that Maeve declared was going to become a fire hazard.

  “There are lots of guns,” Ham said to nobody. “Lots and lots. But where did they come from? I got a peek at a few of them at Chilida, and they were American- or British-made. I assumed they were stolen or confiscated from captured Texans. But what if there’s another explanation? What if somebody in Texas has been selling arms to Mexico, to Chaco specifically? What if that’s what James Morrow really discovered? Maybe he didn’t realize it himself, didn’t communicate it to the others clearly, but that’s what we seem to be dealing with here. Someone, probably in Texas, formed a partnership with Chaco to supply arms to Ampudio. The intel about the dia de san Marco stand in Monterrey was buried, and --”

  Ham stopped stumping suddenly. “Maeve!” he cried. “It was buried! It was buried, you were buried, stuff the Duvall organization tried to get out was buried, and who do we know that buries things and people?”

  “Grover is the arms dealer?” Maeve gasped. “Oh, Ham, and I came right to him to try to stop what he was doing himself. What a fool I was!”

  “You didn’t know,” Ham said. “I didn’t know. Maeve, this is what fills in my holes. I look back now at every incident that I tried to match Grover up with – wait, get all this stuff out of the way, I need to start a new puzzle. Paper, ink, space, now, ladies!”

  Two hours later Ham handed a piece of paper to Angelita and she placed it on the barn floor. “C’est finis,” she said with a tired smile.

  “Oui, mon petit,” Ham sighed. “Maeve, I’ve got to go back to Palacio Del Oro. I have to go now. You and I and Angelita can see all this laid out here in scribbles and splotches but the proof is back home. Winning Monterrey isn’t good enough. We have to take Grover down, and I need my proof to do that. I need to get him arrested and in prison before he does any more harm, and now I finally can. Ten years, over a thousand dead men crying for justice, and finally I can stop him.”

  “You will not go by yourself,” Maeve said sharply. “We stay together. We’ll go see Mr. McElroy. He’ll handle getting someone out here to look after things, and then we’ll head straight back to Palacio Del Oro. Ham, you need help. We don’t know if the servants will really help you if I’m not there. Remember all those stairs?”

  “All right,” Ham conceded.

  “Mr. And Mrs. Jessup are from home, sir,” Cassius said imperturbably as Nathaniel Grover tried to push past him into the house. “I’ll be sure to tell them you called when they return.”

  “Get out of the way, old man,” Grover snarled. “Mr. Jessup has sent me to get some papers he needs to help him find Mrs. Jessup. There’s no time to lose.”

  “Sir, I can’t let you in while the family’s from home,” Cassius responded. “You’ll accept my apologies, but you’ve given me no proof that you come from Mr. Jessup.”

  “Cassius, you know Mrs. Jessup and I worked together,” Grover tried a gentler tack. “She’s in danger, and we have to hurry. Let me in.”

  “No, sir,” Cassius replied. “I’m sorry, sir, but it seems to me that you’ve been less than a friend to Mrs. Jessup, and tried to make her distrust Mr. Jessup, when he wanted to help her a long time ago. He’s been a good, patient man all this time through all these goings on you put the mistress through and I’ll stake my all that he didn’t send you here.”

  “Olivera, get him out of here,” Grover snarled. Olivera moved toward the tiny old man and Cassius took a step backward. Grover and Ross both lunged forward, only to encounter the massive bulk of Titus where Cassius had been a moment before. Titus simply put out his hands and shoved them both back out of the house.

  “When Mr. Jessup returns,” Cassius called, “I will tell him you were here trying to get at his papers, Mr. Grover. I’m sure he’ll be interested.”

  Darkness had fallen when Maeve and Ham arrived at Palacio Del Oro. Titus patrolled the grounds like a giant attack dog. Hermes jumped off the buggy seat and ran up to Titus, wagging his tail. Titus went down on one knee and kissed Maeve’s hand when she jumped out of Lem McElroy’s faithful and much-battered buggy.

  “Thank God you safe, ma’am,” Titus said fervently.

  “Titus, help Mr. Jessup into the house, quickly,” Maeve said, kissing the giant black man on the cheek. “He had an artificial leg, and ...”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Titus interrupted with a grin, lifting Ham out of the buggy. “Reckon everybody knowed that ‘ceptin’ you. Good to have you home, sir. Been in a bit of trouble, have you?”

  “Yes, Titus, but things are looking up,” Ham returned the grin. They got to the front door. Titus made a complex knock and Cassius opened for them. Hermes scooted through and set off to find Hecate and Esperance.

  “Why is the house turned into a fortress, Cassius?” Ham asked.

  “Had a visit from Mr. Nathaniel Grover,” Cassius replied. “He was after some papers of yours.”

  “I’ll bet he was,” Ham grunted as Titus set him down on the sofa in the den. His puzzle litter still lay where he had left it. “The ladies can clear all this rubbish out now, Cassius. My puzzles are all solved now. I just have to collect a few documents I have in a safe place and Mr. Grover won’t bother anyone anymore ever. Grover say anything about how he concluded I had papers he wanted?”

  “No, sir,” Cassius replied. “He claimed you had sent him, and that they were to help you find Mrs. Jessup, but we didn’t credit that.”

  “Good,” Ham said. “I think we need to hire Consuela back.”

  “Consuela?” Maeve repeated stupidly. “I was going to fire her. You fired her?”

  “Yes, but suddenly I’m longing to see her sweet face again,” Ham replied. “And I bet Grover is too. Cassius, you think it’s possible to locate Señorita Consuela and get her back here?”

  “Certainly, sir, if you wish,” Cassius replied. “I know where she lives. I’m sure she’ll be happy to return here. I know she hasn’t found another place.”

  “Well, this’ll be just temporary,” Ham said.

  “Understood, sir,” Cassius nodded sagely. “We’ll keep a watch on her, and we’ll make sure Mr. Grover hears that she’s back.”

  “Oh, and that I’m back, too,” Ham added. “But that I’ve lost my leg, and I’m bedridden, and helpless. Make sure he hears that, too.”

  “Sir, we cannot put you in danger like that,” Cassius protested.

  “Cassius,” Ham said, “I think I have enough material to convict Mr. Grover, but it would be grand if I could save the people of Texas all the expense of trying to keep him from getting out on bail and fleeing while I prove my case against him by getting him locked up on a simpl
e attempted murder charge.”

  “Hamilton Jessup!” Maeve cried. “You’ll do no such thing!”

  “Isn’t it nice that we’re getting along so well now that we’re really married?” Ham said wryly. “Cassius, get Consuela back. The rest I’ll discuss with Mrs. Jessup. I’ll camp here in the den for now. Poor Arthur’s life of idleness is at an end.”

  “Sir, he’s been very anxious about you,” Cassius protested, “and most helpful about the house in your absence. He polishes the silver very beautifully.”

  “Indeed, he always polished my knee joint beautifully,” Ham smirked. “He has a gift for working with metal.”

  “If you’re staying in here for the night, so am I,” Maeve stated. “Don’t disturb Arthur, Cassius. Just bring us some featherbeds, please, to spread on the floor, and I’ll give Mr. Jessup all the help he needs.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Cassius said with a straight face. “Congratulations, sir and ma’am. There were those of us who knew it was meant to be from the start. We rejoice to see it true.”

  Sometime later Ham and Maeve snuggled together in front of the fire in the den, deep in a mound of featherbeds and wrapped in each other’s arms. “Too bad we couldn’t get Consuela back tonight,” Ham said. “I hate waiting.”

  “It’ll be better if she comes tomorrow,” Maeve said. “We can go back to not being married, and I can take her part against you firing her, and that will make her all the more eager to report to Grover. She’ll think she’s helping me. Cassius said she was never in on what all the other servants knew and thought about us. Apparently they were all on your side almost from the beginning. They knew you didn’t drink, and they knew I should have trusted you, and they knew I should have married you for real.”

  “And they knew about my leg,” Ham added. “You think you can keep secrets from servants? Forget it. It’s a good thing they liked me.”