Dreams of Glory by Thomas Fleming Page B

double agent go on living, as long as he’s useful. I suspect Muzzey was more useful to them than he was to us. The information he brought us from New York was trifling.”
    â€œI didn’t trust him enough to let him anywhere near a major network,” Stallworth said. “All of which leads me to conclude that our resident son of a bitch Twenty-six sniffed out Caesar and killed him without consulting Beckford.”
    â€œWhy did he leave the body in the snow two hundred yards from this house? It would have been far more sensible to bury it under a drift in the woods, where no one would find it until
spring, if then. It’s as if whoever killed him wanted us—or someone else—to know about it. Even to implicate us in the crime.”
    â€œI can’t imagine who your someone else might be.”
    â€œIf we knew more—if we knew anything—about Twenty-six, we might have the answer to that question. I can’t see what he’s gained by arousing us. If anything, it’s increased his risks.”
    â€œAll that makes admirable sense,” Stallworth said. “There’s only one way to find out if it’s true. We must replace Muzzey. Find someone who’ll become their courier as well as ours. Someone more loyal to us.”
    â€œNot an easy order.”
    â€œI have a candidate. This chaplain, Chandler.”
    â€œChandler?” Washington looked dubious.
    â€œWe’ve got enough evidence to justify an arrest right now. Give me two or three days with him. I’ll find out if he’s one of theirs or just a fanatic. Either way, I’ll turn him into one of ours.”
    â€œI’m not sure if I like this process you’ve developed,” Washington said. “Tampering with a man’s soul is a dangerous business. Remember what happened with the Reverend Lockwood.”
    â€œLockwood was a drunkard.”
    â€œChandler’s awfully young.”
    â€œIs it any different, General, from ordering men his age to stand and die on a battlefield?”
    â€œYes,” Washington said. “It is different. Don’t forget that, Major.”
    Stallworth swallowed the rebuke. “I’ll remember it, General. Do I have your permission to make the arrest?”
    â€œYes. Even if you don’t succeed, it will at least put a stop to his sermons.”
    For a moment Benjamin Stallworth remembered the terror on Usaph Grey’s face, the anguish in Joel Lockwood’s eyes. It was not a pretty process; he was willing to admit that much.
But a battlefield was not a pretty place, either. War, especially a war for national survival, was not a pretty business. “That much you can depend on, General,” he said. “You’ll hear no more noise from Caleb Chandler.”

SEVEN
    HISSWRACK! HISSWRACK! HISSWRACK! IN THE below-zero cold, Caleb Chandler watched a private from one of the regiments in his brigade being given thirty-nine lashes for striking an officer. The soldier clung to the whipping post, biting into a lead bullet to keep from screaming. The rest of the brigade stood in ranks, impassively watching his ordeal. In their ripped and patched uniforms, they looked like an assembly of beggars.
    â€œDon’t let up, Drum Major. Thirty-nine full strokes,” growled the acting commander of the brigade, lean, imperious Colonel Jedediah Sumner, son of the richest man in Connecticut.
    The drummer wielding the lash obeyed Colonel Sumner by redoubling the force of the next seven strokes. Caleb had seen at least a dozen men whipped since he arrived in Morristown in November. Each time the sight and sound had made him numb with revulsion. He had never dreamed that free men, fellow Americans, would have to be disciplined with such brutality.
    After witnessing one particularly severe lashing—five hundred strokes for robbing chickens from a local farmer—Caleb Chandler had crossed frozen Primrose Brook to the camp of the 1st