“Why not? I’m sick of waiting. That gives us long enough to get ready.”
By Wednesday night it seemed to Tim that nothing could go wrong. Yesterday afternoon Devil had loosened the boards in the fence.
Tim had watched and listened from the corridor window when the wagon had come in. Aunty had cackled and slapped her thighs. She had prodded Bell to laughter with a set of faces that would have made a dying man laugh.
There had been a bad moment when one of the guards, not satisfied with watching from his usual distance, had moved up to the woodshed door. “Don’t fetch wood now,” he’d said. “Wait until the wagon leaves.”
“Need wood now,” Devil had said, staggering through the door with a teetering load. Then he’d tripped on the sill and the wood had gone flying, one piece hitting the guard on the shin, making him shout out a stream of oaths. Devil had kicked the shed door shut before he got off the ground. Tim hoped that no one passing through the alley would notice the loosened board and report it to Senn.
Tim stood by the window in the common room. He watched Red bending over his game of chess with Peter Mills and marveled at his outward calm. A little fire sputtered on the hearth and Dawson and Frazer were reading by candlelight. Brown stood in the door, staring into the fire and dreaming his private dreams. The air outside was clear as crystal, and the lights twinkled yellow in the neat white houses. A soldier and a girl passed under a lamp at the corner of the park.
Kate’s map had shown him the rail line running north along the east bank of the Broad, sticking pretty close to the river for a number of miles. That was their route, straight up the Broad. God give them the nighttime to move without pursuit.
Now the sound of music reached his ears. Tim had heard it before. It was said that the people of Columbia held great balls from time to time to raise money for the Armies of the Confederacy.
For a moment Tim forgot the meager rations in the jail, the smells, the dirty clothes, the bedbugs that plagued them at night, the eternal boredom that made the men short of temper. He thought of the people he would miss. There were Devil and Bell and Peter Mills.
Tim’s thoughts went back to a late afternoon shortly after the arrival of the officers captured in the second assault. Someone had started to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” others had joined the singer, and before a minute had passed the whole second floor had rocked with the song. The prisoners had pressed against the bars and shouted across the town.