Alden blinked up at the sky through the black splotches that obscured his vision. His head throbbed and his eyes burned, but that was the least of his worries. For the second time that night, he lay prone on the ice, though this time what took his feet from under him was no mere rap on the head. This time his musket had exploded in his hands, leaving him nearly blind and with mangled, charred wrecks where his hands had been moments earlier.
With great difficulty, he raised his head and peered through the spots to see the masked man had disappeared from the street. Then, the exertion of even so little a movement in his frail state pushing his pain to his limits, he lost consciousness again.
Moments later doors in the surrounding buildings began to swing open, loosing irregular spurts of Regulators into the streets. The two nearest the fallen teens rushed to them to check their condition while the others alternated between exchanging confused glances amongst themselves and scouring the street for any sign of the commotion’s cause.
From the veil of shadows that shrouded an alley between two closely situated buildings, the masked man studied his adversaries. He counted nineteen men, with fifteen muskets between them, the four without firearms brandishing sabers. With measured breath, drawn and exhaled through his nose to minimize the swirl of condensation, he bided his time for the right moment.
The stopper worked, he mused over the murmuring of the confused delinquents scouring the streets. In the precious few seconds while Sam had been examining Alden, he had deposited a specialized plug—a gift from an old friend—into the barrel of the elder watchman’s musket. Designed to slide only one way, with prongs that folded in upon entry but expanded to catch the barrel’s inside when it was propelled out, it had worked just as intended. So far so good, he thought. This might work, yet.
Within a few moments one of the musket-wielding Regulators had wandered within arms’ reach in his meandering investigation, blinking ineffectively in the direction of the alley. No sooner had the man turned his eyes away from the darkness than the shadow itself seemed to step into street and draw him in.
Out of the corner of his eye, another of the searching men saw his comrade’s flailing feet disappear into the gloom. Raising his musket and whistling to his associates, he started toward the alley slowly, deliberately. Two others, drawn by his signal, followed behind with their swords. A muffled struggle played out to their ears before a sharp thud and the sound of something heavy slumping to the snow.
Closing on the alley, the first man silently motioned the other two in either direction around the buildings. Pressing his back against the building to the right he crept toward the corner. After a moment’s mental preparation and a silent prayer, he pivoted away from the wall and scanned the alley down the sight of his musket. He squinted, just barely discerning the motionless outline of his fallen Regulator a few feet in. As he pondered the wisdom of proceeding further, his flanking confederates converged at the other side of the alley. Lowering his weapon, he nodded them forward to flush the attacker out.
The two traded nervous expressions and set in with their blades at the ready. Advancing through the alley slowly, they rounded each obstacle and potential hiding place with mounting caution, continually checking in visually with their hastily self-appointed leader. On one such occasion, as they looked to him for guidance, a shape descended from the eaves above him. His greatcoat fluttering, the masked man dropped, one elbow connecting with the top of his quarry’s head. The musket crunched into the snow, followed in quick succession by the sprawling form of its previous carrier and the nimble feet of the masked interloper.
Seeing this, the two with the sabers summoned their courage and broke into a run toward the fray. The stranger waited calmly as they approached, listening carefully for any signs of someone approaching from the rear. He could hear some shouts between the other Regulators, seemingly getting closer. They must have heard the commotion in the alley and would be there shortly to investigate. There wasn’t much time until they would be upon him.
The man approaching on his left reached him a split second before the other, swinging the saber down in a wide arc. The intruder’s left hand rose to greet it, the manacle deflecting the weapon’s edge harmlessly. In the same instant the saber from the attacker on the right plunged forward toward the masked man’s stomach. Sidestepping to the left, he allowed it to sail past him and grabbed the wrist holding it. Capitalizing on the momentum, he pulled the attacker in and raised his knee to meet the man’s abdomen.
As the Regulator crumpled over his knee, the masked man brought his right elbow down hard on the back of his assailant’s head. Turning his attention back to the other Regulator he saw a fist careening toward his jaw. The punch made contact but was weak, delivered from the man’s weak hand. The masked man recovered instantly, catching his opponent’s forearm with his left hand as it drifted past him. His right palm swiftly and forcefully connected with his foe’s elbow, snapping it unnaturally against the joint.
Mingling with the young man’s painful cry, the shouts of the converging Regulators were closer now, almost upon him. Without looking back he kicked off the wall to his left and propelled himself up to the eaves above. Catching the beam at the edge of the roofline, he swung his weight outward and hoisted himself onto the roof above, crunching into the snow. He trudged carefully up the pitched roof to its apex, gaining an overhead view of the remainder of the martial equation he sought to balance.
Four down, fifteen to go.
#
By now the Warriner house was a fortress. Since the time of the backfire, Henry had woken the sentry and the remaining soldiers boarding in the house that night. Amid the muffled sounds of the skirmish outside—a whimpering cry here, a musket blast there, everywhere hollers of distress and confusion—they had overturned tables for cover and fortified the entrance with the heaviest furniture at their disposal.
Nodding over the railing to the six Regulators held up in the expansive foyer below, Henry reentered Shays’ inner sanctum. “We’re all set downstairs.”
The Captain and Parmenter sat huddled behind the makeshift oaken barricade that moments earlier had been their table. Muskets loaded, they listened intently to the pandemonium outside.
“Posse?” Parmenter speculated aloud.
Shays nodded. “Not enough gunplay to be the militia.”
McCulloch joined them behind the table, accepting the loaded musket Parmenter handed to him. “Orders, Cap?”
Shays could see the fear in the younger man’s eyes, the anxiety of anticipation that preceded one’s first battle. The determined grimace said I told you this was war, but the gaze said Get me the hell out of here!
Another shot rang out, followed shortly thereafter by a frightened scream that ended abruptly. No time to form ranks, thought Shays. I hope the drilling has paid off.
It hadn’t.
Across the town, in houses and shops where they were quartered, Regulators young and old cowered as they heard the din of combat outside. Those that had taken to the streets after Alden’s failed shot were all that heeded its informal call to action. For his part, Shays was doing little more than his frightened troops.
“Captain?” Parmenter ventured.
“We need eyes on our enemy. Hank, there’s a window facing the street in the next room. Give us a count and locations.”
McCulloch dutifully rushed to the right side of the room and through an open doorway into a long bedchamber that spanned the depth of the house from front to back. He crossed the distance to the window as quickly and quietly as he could, estimating that it had been nearly thirty seconds since the last gunshot. The commotion had simmered down, leaving the street he looked out upon eerily calm. Littered throughout the vista in clusters of two or three were several of their own in various states of defeat. Some lay splayed out, fully unconscious. Others sat or knelt in pain, nursing a broken limb or shaking the stars from their eyes.
The posse was nowhere to be seen.
Henry rushed back to the war room. “Whatever was out there is gone.”
“Whatever?” Jason asked, catching Henry’s confusion like a contagion.
“There’s no posse, or…” he said, making his way to one of two windows at the back of the room that straddled the fireplace, facing away from the scene of the upheaval. “Or if there was one, it’s vanished.”
Shays stood and paced, searching the memories of his military career for any parallel to this situation. His mind reeled from one recalled encounter to the next, trying to ignore the faint wailing of the injured outside that filtered through the building to his ears. Nothing in his experience or training had prepared him for this. The best orders he could muster under the circumstances were, “Jason, burn the maps and letters.”
Parmenter ran to the fireplace, skidding to his knees and blowing upon the diminishing embers. Setting his musket down beside him and lifting the satchel’s strap off his shoulder, he upended it over the flames that licked up under his breath. The documents illuminated from beneath like a paper lantern. After a moment or two, islands of brown formed on their surfaces, expanding outward as their cores blackened and turned to ash.
Without warning the window shattered inward showering McCulloch with a torrent of glass. Before he could react a pair of boots shot out of the swarm of shards and caught him in the chest. As he sprawled backward, the leg of the upturned table catching him between the shoulder blades, the intruder continued the somersault he had begun as he swung off the roof. The masked man rotated a full flip, greatcoat swirling like a tempest. He landed mere milliseconds after the shower of glass, coming to rest on one knee and bracing himself with the opposite hand.
McCulloch was down. Shays and Parmenter, only momentarily fazed, sprung into action. The intruder made that moment count, lunging forward into a roll, snatching the musket Henry had dropped as he tumbled backward, and rising in front of Shays. The Captain had no sooner leveled his musket toward his opponent than it was knocked aside by his foe’s newly acquired weapon, discharging into the room’s back wall.
From downstairs a clamor percolated up to their ears, the sentries taking notice of the action above them.
Jason trained his musket on the melee, hoping for a clean shot. Just as he was about to squeeze the trigger, the masked man turned his body perpendicular to the aged man’s stance, minimizing the shooter’s target. Reconsidering his shot, Parmenter watched in stunned dismay as this realignment flowed smoothly into a cartwheel in his direction. Fearing that a shot would hit his associate and thinking of nothing better to do, he reared back and swung the weapon at the approaching menace. As soon as the masked man’s feet reconnected with the floor he bound into the air again. The weapon narrowly missed its mark, sailing through the air just under the acrobat’s feet.
Twisting in the air, still holding Henry’s musket, the stranger came down facing Parmenter’s back. As he descended, he looped the musket’s strap around Parmenter’s neck. He tumbled backward, pulling the strap taut and planting his feet in the small of Jason’s back. The older man dropped his musket and clutched his throat as his feet left the ground and he was propelled head over heels behind the attacker.
The forced aerial feat was too much for Parmenter, who landed in an unconscious heap. The crowned man rose, directing his hidden glare at Shays. The Captain had nearly finished reloading his musket, stealing peeks back toward the chamber’s door, which he hoped would burst open with reinforcements any second. It had all happened too quickly though. By the sound of it, they were still mounting the stairs, easily fifteen seconds away.
The interloper had dispatched his lieutenants in ten.
Shays was tamping down the ball as he returned his attention away from the door to see that his opponent was upon him. The musket was ripped from his hands and sent clattering to the floor near where Henry lay. Two leather gloved hands clenched his collar and slammed him back into the table barricade. Against all his training, all his acumen, he succumbed to fear and shut his eyes tight. Forearms pressed against his chest, squeezing him against the oak with such force that the whole table slid forward several feet to rest against the door.
He heard the sentries outside.
“Captain Shays!”
One of them tried the door. The knob turned, but the slab wouldn’t budge.
“Captain, let us in!”
Shays marshaled the will to open his eyes and found them staring into the blank muslin weave that was the man’s face. At this proximity he could almost make out the eyes beneath, providing at least the comfort that the thing was indeed human.
“I know you don’t want this violence,” the mask whispered intensely. “You hope to turn these men’s wanton discontent into something noble, something useful.”
The door banged, skidding the table slightly.
“You hope to peacefully acquire arms and munitions to further your cause. Even if that desperate attempt succeeds your bluff will only last so long. I have taken no lives this night, but the militia will.”
“They’re our countrymen, our neighbors!” Shays stammered.
Another bang against the door. This time the stranger pushed back, simultaneously pressing Shays and reinforcing his position.
“But Lincoln and the troops marching from Boston are not.” A realization sparked in Shays eyes. He had heard the name before: General Benjamin Lincoln had been a favorite of Washington during the war, securing the office of Secretary of War in the Confederation. If he was involved it meant things had escalated beyond Massachusetts. It meant that Continental forces–the same military apparatus that had recently humbled the mighty British Empire–were about to get involved. It meant that things had gotten out of hand. “Eventually blood will flow and it will be on your hands.”
Again the table slid back as the door was pounded from the other side, several men alternating shoulder plunges against its rickety surface. Much more of this, and the door would be off its hinges.
Trying to recall the words he’d used to diffuse McCulloch’s similar logic just minutes earlier, Shays found the Regulators’ prospects dimming. Whether it was the news of Lincoln’s impending march or the disappointing show his troops made against this man’s party mattered not. He saw in that moment how deluded he had been, how much he had deluded those who put their trust in him.
Through his fabric visage the crowned man saw the tumblers falling into place in Shays’ eyes. He saw the pieces of his own plan, half-baked as it had been–somehow infiltrate the Regulators’ camp, somehow manage to cut the head off the snake, and somehow refrain from dying–coalescing into the result he sought. He saw that the sale had been made, and all he needed to do was close the deal.
“You fear the tyranny of a Governor and a Court that are deaf to your pleas. If you go through with this, if you lead these men into battle tomorrow, you will give designing men all the ammunition they need to establish a national domain every bit as tyrannical as British rule. Everything our countrymen have fought and died for will be lost.”
With that lock was sprung, the deal closed. Shays stared ahead, past the faceless vigilante to the bleak future he had helped set in motion.
“Then all is lost,” he said to himself.
The door trembled. The table slid further.
Behind the disguise, the stranger’s brows furrowed. He looked from the door–now open a few inches, enough for the men to get a musket or two through for leverage–to the defeated Captain. Seeing his victory slipping away, he grabbed Shays by the collar and pulled him in close as if to say, Clarification please?
“Parsons…Day.” he whispered enigmatically, his spirit swimming with guilt, too tortured to shed any more light on the matter than to indicate the fireplace with his eyes.
Following his gaze, the stranger saw the battle plans all but reduced to ash. A few pages that had landed toward the outskirts of the fire, that Parmenter hadn’t had the time to corral into place before the fight had begun, had been spared. Realizing that his task was far from over, he turned back to Shays.
“Tell them to stand down!” he demanded.
Shays peeked up blearily out of his rapidly deepening melancholy, saying nothing. The table screeched further into the room, the door wide enough to permit an entire arm through.
“Call them off!” the masked man insisted. “I can still stop this.”
“Stand down!” Shays called through the door, having crawled back from the precipice of despair.
“Sir! What’s go–“ one of the reinforcements began.
“That’s an order!” Shay’s yelled over his shoulder before returning to face the faceless. “My new associate and I need to speak.”
The pressure against the door ceased, giving way to indistinguishable murmurs of disapproval from the other side. The stranger exhaled sharply, realizing suddenly that he had been holding his breath. He hoped his relief wasn’t too apparent.
“They’ll still try for the Arsenal,” Shays continued his thought from before. His moment of lucidity was beginning to fade, the remorse nipping at his consciousness. Seeing this, the stranger crossed the room and tried his luck with the remnants of the papers at the fireplace. He knelt and sifted through them as Shays muttered, “Your people will never make it in time to stop them.”
“My people?” The masked man asked, shaking the ash from a rather intact map of the town of Springfield. Though the objective had been burnt away, enough landmark indicators remained to discern the rallying point.
“Your posse,” Shays ventured. The stranger allowed himself a wry chuckle as he intently studied the fragmentary chart. Shays guessed again. “Militia?”
“It would seem I needed neither. I came alone.”