Confederate Gold Ch. 04

While Charles and his sister were adding to her livelihood, Eaton was helping Toby and Maggie expand the kitchen garden. Eaton never again went into the main house nor did Caroline cast eyes in his direction.

Charles and Eaton only stayed at Warrenton for three weeks before, in the waning days of June, heading east again. He might have stayed longer, but people were starting to notice he was here. One neighbor had even visited, thinking that Caroline's husband, Tyler, had returned from the war.

"You are too well known as having been part of the Confederate government," Caroline said. "I think that perhaps—"

"Yes, I agree. I think it's time that I moved on," Charles said.

So, in the last week of June, Charles and Eaton mounted up again, their saddlebags now filled with enough food to last a couple of weeks, and off they went, winding up by the second week in July at the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp on the Atlantic coast of North Carolina.

"Why here?" Eaton asked.

"Just to gain more time from the end of the fighting," Charles answered. "When it settles down more, and the roving Union troops aren't in the area as frequently, we'll go somewhere else by ship—some other country for a while, with the hope we can return with the resurgence of the South."

"But why here, in a swamp?" Eaton asked.

Before Charles could answer, though, they had been surrounded by a motley collection of mean-looking men. Luckily one of the Confederate soldiers-turned-highwayman who had descended on them recognized Captain Singleton and convinced the others he was one of them. They looked less certainly at Eaton.

It was one thing not to accost the two but it was yet another to willingly take them into the thieves' camp to hide and wait. If Eaton thought that Charles might buy their way into the men's good graces with a bar of gold, he was sadly mistaken. Charles offered his own skills and abilities to help them in marauding about the neighborhood and holding up travelers—primarily northern carpetbaggers—from Virginia's Hampton Roads area down into the Carolinas. What really won the day, though, was that Charles identified Eaton as a male whore for a Richmond brothel, who would service the men who were interested in that in exchange for sanctuary.

There were very few women in the Great Dismal Swamp camps, so many men had turned to other men in their sexual needs, and the offer of Eaton's services won the day.

Eaton, of course, didn't assert his supposed new-won freedom. He recognized Charles as his master, so he lay on his back with his legs open at the pleasure of the men for the nearly month that Charles decided they needed to lay low before attempting to leave the country.

Similarly, when at last they rode down to Elizabeth City in North Carolina, with its docks for ocean-going vessels by way of the Pagan River, Most of their passage to Jamaica was covered by Charles offering Eaton's services to the captain of the merchant vessel, Helena, rather than any part of the gold the two were carrying on their bodies.

All that Eaton cared, though, was that he was bound for someplace else and still was traveling in the company of Charles Singleton.