Peshawar Lancers Redux: North America
- Thread starter Strategos' Risk
- Start date
Yes, but did their motivations also involve the American Civil War?
The 'Reed and Taft' incident almost lead to one, this might be it, with Mexican intervention (if they so choose) and all. End of the old regime indeed.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
By the way, what happened to the Earp family?
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The Earps are alive and well and living in Texas, as is Billy (the kid) McCarty. The action will move to the Southwest shortly.
The Earps are alive and well and living in Texas, as is Billy (the kid) McCarty. The action will move to the Southwest shortly.
Ok, but you still haven't mentioned what happened to James Garfield. He did not get assassinated like in OTL, so is he still alive?
In short order, Laforge was tied painfully tight to one of the barn’s heavy wooden posts There were three of them. An older one with a shotgun and two men in their teens or twenties. A father and his sons, obviously. From their ragged clothing, not well-off either.
At first, they had assumed that their uninvited guest was just a tramp, worth only being given a good horsewhipping and then chased off the farm. Then they found his weapon. Tramps didn't carry revolvers. Jean quickly found himself stripped to his underwear. Then they found the money concealed in a pouch under his shirt. Tramps also did not to their knowledge carry silver either , and here there was almost fifteen dollars!
They moved a few yards away and discussed the problem. Jean could hear them well enough to recognize the direction their talk was taking them. Plainly they took him for a thief or a highwayman. His wounded hand seemed to bear that out. The younger pair was urging their father to make a direct and violent solution to their problem.
“Hell, Pappy, that’s fifteen whole dollars, and them’s almost new shoes. I want them shoes no matter whut.. Me and Flem can plant him in a hole down by the woodlot and nobody the wiser. Fifteen dollars is more than Mr. Howard let us keep in cash money the last six months. Flem nodded vigorously in agreement with his brother.
“Pappy” spit on the ground, scratched his beard and thought. Plainly the idea was tempting. For a sharecropper fifteen dollars represented many, many hours of toil in the fields, and the money might buy a better plough, or enough young pigs to stave off hunger this winter…..
He reached his decision, stuffing the money into a tobacco pouch that he hung from a cord around his neck. And nodded to his sons
“I’ll git the shovels, you boys drag him down by the big pine by the creek.”
Laforge was shortly thereafter tied hand and foot and half-carried away from the barn. He could see a big tree perhaps six hundred feet away. Struggling was useless and the two young men laughed at his pleas for mercy. Even if he somehow broke free of them, Jean knew he could never outrun them in the open fields. Doubtless, he thought, the old man would not waste valuable gunpowder on him. If he was lucky, he thought, they might be kind enough to kill him with the shovels first, rather than merely burying him alive.
The old man showed up with the shovels.. The boys began to dig while Laforge lay where they had dropped him, face downwards, sobbing into the dirt.
After a while, he gradually became aware that the sounds of digging and the coarse laughter of the sharecroppers had stopped and that an unfamiliar voice was there, a commanding voice that was asking questions.
“What are you boys up to? Who is this man? What’s he done to you?”
Eventually, Jean was brought to a sitting position .and he saw a well-dressed man of middle age, mounted and staring down at him. His three captors stood there looking at the ground and looking very nervous.
“State your name, boy, and be quick about it.”
No point in lying.
“I’m called Laforge, sir. I fell asleep in that barn over yonder, and these men took my money and were fixing to kill me when you came up. Are you Mr. Howard?”
“I am , and this is one of my farms. Have you any proof of your story?”
The older one has my fifteen dollars in a pouch around his neck.”
An hour later, Laforge found himself in the bed of a wagon, closely being watched by one of Howard’s overseers while Howard himself drove the rig back towards his house some miles away. Next to him on the seat was one of the handbills that were all over Memphis. Howard had a good idea who this filthy vagabond might be, and he meant to find out for sure.
At first, they had assumed that their uninvited guest was just a tramp, worth only being given a good horsewhipping and then chased off the farm. Then they found his weapon. Tramps didn't carry revolvers. Jean quickly found himself stripped to his underwear. Then they found the money concealed in a pouch under his shirt. Tramps also did not to their knowledge carry silver either , and here there was almost fifteen dollars!
They moved a few yards away and discussed the problem. Jean could hear them well enough to recognize the direction their talk was taking them. Plainly they took him for a thief or a highwayman. His wounded hand seemed to bear that out. The younger pair was urging their father to make a direct and violent solution to their problem.
“Hell, Pappy, that’s fifteen whole dollars, and them’s almost new shoes. I want them shoes no matter whut.. Me and Flem can plant him in a hole down by the woodlot and nobody the wiser. Fifteen dollars is more than Mr. Howard let us keep in cash money the last six months. Flem nodded vigorously in agreement with his brother.
“Pappy” spit on the ground, scratched his beard and thought. Plainly the idea was tempting. For a sharecropper fifteen dollars represented many, many hours of toil in the fields, and the money might buy a better plough, or enough young pigs to stave off hunger this winter…..
He reached his decision, stuffing the money into a tobacco pouch that he hung from a cord around his neck. And nodded to his sons
“I’ll git the shovels, you boys drag him down by the big pine by the creek.”
Laforge was shortly thereafter tied hand and foot and half-carried away from the barn. He could see a big tree perhaps six hundred feet away. Struggling was useless and the two young men laughed at his pleas for mercy. Even if he somehow broke free of them, Jean knew he could never outrun them in the open fields. Doubtless, he thought, the old man would not waste valuable gunpowder on him. If he was lucky, he thought, they might be kind enough to kill him with the shovels first, rather than merely burying him alive.
The old man showed up with the shovels.. The boys began to dig while Laforge lay where they had dropped him, face downwards, sobbing into the dirt.
After a while, he gradually became aware that the sounds of digging and the coarse laughter of the sharecroppers had stopped and that an unfamiliar voice was there, a commanding voice that was asking questions.
“What are you boys up to? Who is this man? What’s he done to you?”
Eventually, Jean was brought to a sitting position .and he saw a well-dressed man of middle age, mounted and staring down at him. His three captors stood there looking at the ground and looking very nervous.
“State your name, boy, and be quick about it.”
No point in lying.
“I’m called Laforge, sir. I fell asleep in that barn over yonder, and these men took my money and were fixing to kill me when you came up. Are you Mr. Howard?”
“I am , and this is one of my farms. Have you any proof of your story?”
The older one has my fifteen dollars in a pouch around his neck.”
An hour later, Laforge found himself in the bed of a wagon, closely being watched by one of Howard’s overseers while Howard himself drove the rig back towards his house some miles away. Next to him on the seat was one of the handbills that were all over Memphis. Howard had a good idea who this filthy vagabond might be, and he meant to find out for sure.
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John Davis Howard was the owner of ten farms in the general area of Memphis, and nobody’s fool. Before the Event, he had been the owner of a number of businesses, chiefly a foundry and a gristmill in northern Georgia. He had later done some work in Tennessee and after the fall of the Reed regime had seen the opportunity to take advantage of the economic dislocations of the time to snap up land at low prices from former Reed supporters and rent them to sharecroppers. He considered himself an apolitical, hard-nosed businessman.
The interrogation of Laforge took place under a tree in Mr. Howard’s front yard. Laforge was seated on a straight wooden chair while Howard sat opposite. Several of Howard’s sons stood a few yards away watching. All, Jean noticed, were armed.
Howard began with no preamble in a gravelly drawl.
“Boy, I want the truth and nothing else. I don’t have any patience at all for liars. If you lie to me, my only decision will be whether to kill you myself or turn you over Ez Snopes and his two sons.” He paused. “Or maybe the folks in Memphis would like to talk to you?”
Howard could see his young prisoner turn pale. That alone told him a lot.
Jean made a decision to do someth9ng he had seldom done in the past, to actually tell the truth.
He began in a shaky voice, “I’m not from around here Mr. Howard, I’m from New Orleans, and I was hired to come to Memphis to do a job…....involving the President"
“ I suspected as much. And who hired you?”
Jean told him.
Howard let out a low whistle.
For the next hour, the questions continued, until Howard was satisfied.
Eventually, Jean was sent off off to wash up and to be fed at an overseer’s cabin, Howard had some serious decisions to make.
.
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Question: Does Jamaica still have the SS Great Eastern, and if so, can it be converted to a warship from a civilian one?
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Alas, no. The Great Eastern delivered about 30,000 British refugees to Jamaica in several voyages before departing around the Cape of Good Hope for India. It seems likely that the GE had a long subsequent career as an armed merchantman and cargo vessel for the Royal Navy in India. Trips to South Africa and Australia were really what she was designed for by I.K. Brunel back in the '50s
That evening, Howard pondered the situation. The violent clashes that had taken place in Memphis had resulted in a highly volatile political situation. The most recent news from the city was that President Burke had claimed emergency powers to deal with “criminal elements and political assassins.” The House had denied the President’s right to so, while the Senate was paralyzed between factions. Worse, the National Police, like some evil genie let out of a bottle, seemed to be arresting hundreds, often without warrants or other restraint. And now he seemed to be in the possession of the strange young man that lay at the center of this political cyclone.
If he was any judge of men, the young man had told him the truth so far as he knew it, but the motive behind the attempted murder of the President seemed obscure. As far as Howard knew, relations between the Administration and the Mexican ambassador were very cordial. Yet apparently this Consul Marquez had hired the amoral Laforge and had him travel all the way to the Embassy in Memphis to do so.
At first, Howard had thought to merely to turn over Laforge over to the authorities, collect the promised reward and be done with the situation. He had made no promises to the young assassin about anything, and he had put him under lock and key in a stone outbuilding while Howard decided what to do. But then it occurred to him that if what Laforge had said was true, a political conspiracy at the highest levels was under way. The conspirators, whoever they might be, might assume that he, John Howard, knew entirely too much to be trusted. Damn the bad luck that had him decide to inspect that particular farm that particular morning. Snopes would have never divulged having murdered some traveler.
Simply killing Laforge was a possible course, but a highly distasteful one. Howard considered himself an honorable man and in his eyes such an action would make him little better than Ez Snopes or Laforge himself. No, he needed to dispose of this particular nuisance in a way that met his own code of honor.
It then occurred to him, late in the evening that since this was as much a high political problem as a criminal one that the only safe way to be rid of Mr. Laforge was to pass him off to a political personage who was both honest and judicious. But how that might best be done required sage political advice. But who best to give such advice? In his mind, the man who best filled that mold was a young lawyer named Joseph E. Washington that he had met a few years previous. At that time he had been a member of the legislature, and had been able to assist him in some legal difficulties, and they had developed a friendship. Howard had lately received a letter from him about his interest in returning to politics.
Fortuitously. Washington was practicing law in a town not two counties distant. Howard made his decision. He would travel there and speak to him face to face and get his advice. The following morning, he left his farm, Mr. Laforge in tow. The sooner he relinquished this particular “tar baby” the better and he had already decided to take Jed Washington’s advice in that matter very seriously. .
If he was any judge of men, the young man had told him the truth so far as he knew it, but the motive behind the attempted murder of the President seemed obscure. As far as Howard knew, relations between the Administration and the Mexican ambassador were very cordial. Yet apparently this Consul Marquez had hired the amoral Laforge and had him travel all the way to the Embassy in Memphis to do so.
At first, Howard had thought to merely to turn over Laforge over to the authorities, collect the promised reward and be done with the situation. He had made no promises to the young assassin about anything, and he had put him under lock and key in a stone outbuilding while Howard decided what to do. But then it occurred to him that if what Laforge had said was true, a political conspiracy at the highest levels was under way. The conspirators, whoever they might be, might assume that he, John Howard, knew entirely too much to be trusted. Damn the bad luck that had him decide to inspect that particular farm that particular morning. Snopes would have never divulged having murdered some traveler.
Simply killing Laforge was a possible course, but a highly distasteful one. Howard considered himself an honorable man and in his eyes such an action would make him little better than Ez Snopes or Laforge himself. No, he needed to dispose of this particular nuisance in a way that met his own code of honor.
It then occurred to him, late in the evening that since this was as much a high political problem as a criminal one that the only safe way to be rid of Mr. Laforge was to pass him off to a political personage who was both honest and judicious. But how that might best be done required sage political advice. But who best to give such advice? In his mind, the man who best filled that mold was a young lawyer named Joseph E. Washington that he had met a few years previous. At that time he had been a member of the legislature, and had been able to assist him in some legal difficulties, and they had developed a friendship. Howard had lately received a letter from him about his interest in returning to politics.
Fortuitously. Washington was practicing law in a town not two counties distant. Howard made his decision. He would travel there and speak to him face to face and get his advice. The following morning, he left his farm, Mr. Laforge in tow. The sooner he relinquished this particular “tar baby” the better and he had already decided to take Jed Washington’s advice in that matter very seriously. .