Chapter 9

The new families seemed to fit well into our community of Maudville, and they were happy to contribute what ever they could to the skills needed by our little town. We now had 15 men upon whom we could count as fighters. As soon as houses were build to accommodate the new people, the new men were trained with the air guns. A few of them were only mediocre shots with the pistols, but they all took well to the rifles. Now, we were beginning to grow into a force to be reckoned with!

We all agreed that our main business had to be taking care of our families, but we wanted to do what we could to fight against the merciless oppression by the State of Georgia and the CSA. With only 15 men, we were not nearly capable of staging a full scale insurrection, but we could continue to pick off columns of government troops the way we did the last two times. Our problem in doing that was in knowing where and when to look for targets. Those two had simply been an example of good luck, and we could not continue to count on that. In short, we needed spies!

The serfs and the Black slaves were too much of a mixed lot for us to know where to go for information, but Henry was sure that the few Indians could be counted on to be loyal spies once they saw what we were trying to do. The biggest problem here was that there were not very many Indians left in Southern Georgia. So many of them had been sent west by the Union before the War that there were not many left for us to contact.

However, there were Indians working in menial jobs in the stores in Albany, and there surely must be others in similar jobs in other towns. The advantage of recruiting these Indians was that nobody paid any attention to them, and they heard a lot that was supposed to be a secret. What we needed to do was to find a way to contact them and to arrange for information to be sent back to us. David and Henry were the ideal contacts for this job because they spoke the local Indian dialects and would be much less suspicious to an Indian than a White person would.

Temporarily, David and Henry could wander around the county picking up whatever information that they could and bringing it back to us. We now had horses for them to use for transportation between towns, and that would greatly speed up the transfer of information. Anyway, the idea was good enough to give it a try.

We did want to avoid conflict with the CSA Army because of all of the resources that they could drop on our heads, but strikes against the Georgia militia and the local police did not carry that kind of danger. That was not a serious problem because the CSA Army was more interested in watching the borders of the CSA, and they were comfortably distant from us. All we had to do was to pay attention to who we struck at: the other states did not care one whit what went on in Georgia. That was the virtue from our point of view of the doctrine of “States’ Rights.”

The CSA was nothing more than a loose association of 12 feudal principalities who were only seriously interested in maintaining their own wealth and power. A state could sink into the ocean, and all of the other states would care only in relation to how much it disturbed them. I suspected that if we overthrew the current government of Georgia and declared ourselves to be a free country, we would probably be left alone by the other 11 members of the CSA. We were not yet ready to try that, but we might be, eventually. Come on: it never hurt to think big as long as you were careful when you tried to carry out your thoughts.

David went into Albany with Michael to try to establish relations with the Indians. He had mixed results because the local Indians were working hard to keep their heads down. However, David did find one key informant in a man who was working as a swamper in one of the saloons. This was a surprising place to find an Indian, but he was so pissed off at his owner that he was easy to recruit: Jackson Beauregard was the owner of the saloon.

Anyway, the swamper was in as good a position as the bartender to hear all kinds of local gossip, and he already had something useful for us. Four militia men were due into Albany to pick up a slave (an Indian) who had run away from the Butler plantation. He was being held in chains in a small room across the hall from the police chief’s office. The militia men were to escort the slave back to the Butler plantation for execution by fire.

Dammit, that was perfect for us. If we could rescue the slave, particularly before he left Albany, we could curry a lot of favor with the local serfs and slaves, whether or not they happened to be Indians. David thanked the man for the information and headed back to Maudville with the news.

Hell, this was such a great opportunity that we dropped everything else that we could to work on how to manage the rescue. What we needed was a diversion that would draw everybody away from where the prisoner was being held. What better than a major fire in the middle of the night!?

There was a cotton warehouse in Albany, and it was nearly empty. The only thing left in the warehouse were a dozen or so bales of substandard quality cotton that no factory had been willing to take. This fire was not going to be a major financial blow to anybody, except for the Butler plantation who owned the warehouse.

The interesting thing about a bale of cotton is that once it starts to burn, it is damned nearly impossible to extinguish the fire. Thus, we would have a long term diversion going if we could just get those bales of cotton to start burning. That is not as easy as it sounds, but it can be done. The warehouse, itself, was approximately 250’x200’, and it would be a major fire without the cotton bales, so our target was obvious.

The next night, 10 men rode into town about midnight. Eight of them headed for the warehouse and two headed for the police chief’s office. Those two were Henry and David. The plan was for them to wait around until the warehouse was aflame before they broke in to release the prisoner.

The other eight men broke into the cotton warehouse and spread coal oil over piles of tender. They lit the tinder and made sure that some of the fires were against the cotton bales. The inside of the warehouse was covered with lint from years of storing cotton, so the whole building was burning in minutes. In fact, some of us had trouble escaping the building ahead of the flames.

Once the building was burning spectacularly, we ran through Albany screaming “FIRE! FIRE!” That was one cry that got everybody’s attention, and soon the whole town turned out to try to douse the flames, or, at least, control them enough to keep the whole town from burning down.

Henry and David acted as soon as they saw the glow in the sky. They had no trouble breaking down the door to the police office to find the key to the prisoner’s chains. That was something of a problem because the desk was full of keys. Shit, in disgust, Henry ordered David to bring the whole drawer and they would find the key after they had reached the prisoner.

The door to the large closet holding the prisoner was easy to break open, and the two men rushed in. The prisoner was lying on the floor so it was easy to reach his chains. They managed to find the right keys after a few minutes of frantic searching, and they got the chains off. The prisoner had been badly beaten when he was caught, so David and Henry carried him to the horses. They had brought an extra horse for the prisoner to use, but he was still too hurt to do himself much good.

The two men got him into the saddle and tied him to the horse so that he could not fall off. That was not very comfortable, but it beat being burned at the stake! Fortunately, the fire had the whole town’s attention, so they did not have to hurry as they rode toward Maudville. Dawn was already breaking by the time they arrived, and people had started to worry about them.