Smugglers' Gold Read Online Free PDF

when he returned?” asked Ryder.
    â€œUnderstand, we’re learning most of this through hindsight, from informants. At the time . . .” Wood spread his empty hands. “It’s one more reason why we need the service you’ll be joining, come July.”
    â€œThere’s more,” said Ryder, confident that Wood had not shown all his cards.
    â€œThere is. We’re fairly sure that Booth has fled back home, to Maryland. We believe his object is to hide out somewhere in the South, or else—more likely, I suspect—to flee the country altogether. If he ships for Europe, or to South America, consider him as good as gone.”
    â€œSend me to Maryland,” said Ryder.
    â€œFirst things first. We also have a clue of sorts to Secretary Seward’s would-be killer. Near the scene of the attack, his bloody knife has been recovered from a gutter. Nothing points us to him yet, but I suspect that he, at least, is still somewhere in Washington or its immediate vicinity.”
    â€œYou have a good description of him?”
    â€œHere,” Wood answered, passing him a printed sheet of paper from a stack atop his desk.
    There’d been no time to have a portrait of the traitor done, but his description as compiled from witnesses to the attack was clear enough. Twenty to twenty-five years old, dark hair under a slouch hat, with a Deep South accent. He had posed as a messenger delivering medicine to Secretary Seward, then run amok when denied entrance to Seward’s bedchamber. Six witnesses stood ready to identify him, once he was in custody.
    â€œYou have a weapon, I assume?”
    â€œYes, sir.”
    â€œWe’ve no credentials yet, you understand, but this should serve for now.” As Wood spoke, he removed a business card from his vest pocket, took a dip pen from the inkwell on his desk, wrote something on the backside of the card, and blotted it. Over Wood’s neat signature, the message read:
    Agent of the U.S. Secret Service
    â€œI’ll have something better for you in July, if you’re still with us.”
    â€œYes, sir,” Ryder said and pocketed the card.
    He left Wood’s office thinking,
One job at a time.

3
    C HARLES C OUNTY, M ARYLAND
    APRIL 26, 1865
    I hate these damned mosquitoes!” Jimmy Lucas muttered, slapping at his neck. “They’ve got more of my blood inside ’em than I have in my own veins.”
    â€œForget about the bugs,” said Ryder, huddled on the skiff’s front seat with Lucas poling. “Let’s just get this done.”
    Zekiah Swamp lay at the headwaters of the Wicomico River, a tributary of Chesapeake Bay on Maryland’s eastern shore. It sprawled over 450 acres, and every square foot of it lived up to the original Algonquin name of
Sacaya
, translated to English as “dense thicket.” Aside from mosquitoes and leeches, the marsh—Maryland’s largest, running clear across Charles County—also swarmed with snakes and snapping turtles, skunks, beavers, and black bears. Ryder hadn’t seen an alligator yet, but kept his lever-action Henry rifle ready, just in case.
    With Lucas and the third man in their skiff, Bob Elder, he was hunting John Wilkes Booth. Throughout the swamp surrounding them, a dozen other three-man teams were scouring the wetland for a glimpse of Lincoln’s killer, each man hoping that he’d be the first to spot Booth or his partner, David Edgar Herold. In an inside pocket of his coat, Ryder carried a folded copy of the wanted poster Secretary Stanton had issued six days earlier. It offered fifty thousand dollars for capture of Booth, twenty-five thousand for Herold—his name misspelled in print as
Harold
—and for a third conspirator still at large, John Harrison Surratt.
    The others—those who’d been identified, at least—were already in custody. Mary Surratt, John’s mother, ran a boardinghouse in Washington that