Free Sion Crossing by Anthony Price

Georgia and Carolina had had negroes to do the cotton-picking, but there must have been many more who had done their own hard work… . But, whatever they did, none of them had been trained to march and fight and kill each other in such hellish weather, surely?
    That was the mystery which had long eluded him, though not with these strangers from Georgian plantations and Senator Cookridge’s endless corn-belt, but with his own slightly older peers, and their immediate European ancestors: what was it like, what was it really like, to get out of the trench and to stand up amongst the bullets? And what had nerved them to do it, in that last second, when the legs took chargé, pushing them upwards and forwards against higher reason and lower commonsense alike?
    Well … it was something he would never know, even if he dared to make someone tell him, and they tried to do so. For it was not something that could be told, only a thing to be experienced; and he was now past the point, both in years and in seniority, where he would ever acquire such trench-truth. In fact, to be bleakly honest with himself, safely past, since he had no great confidence in his physical courage, but only the gravest doubts—
    Stand in the trench, Achilles, flame-capped, And shout for me
    —that was a proper sentiment for brave, younger men, but not for him now, if ever.
    And for thinner men, too. He peeked around again surreptitiously, only half-looking for the woman, and felt a small inner glow of satisfaction—even felt, against bitter experience, the beginnings of approval of America. Disapproval of those extra inches in the wrong direction had always been unfair, the more so as in three-quarters of the world a certain fullness of the figure was the hallmark of success and importance and superiority, not of self-indulgence and lack of self-restraint. It had been just his bad luck to live in the other quarter, where fatness was a crime.
    But here, at least, he was safe—and doubly safe, because even if the silly woman didn’t turn up at all, and the whole trip proved abortive through no fault of his own, it would be of no consequence to his career. It simply didn’t matter: that had been the final calculation in his decision, the final safety factor which had stilled the small voice of caution, with the Senator himself merely confirming matters …
    The Senator had been disingenuous, naturally. It was more than that, he wanted: he wanted the miracle itself, just that and no more. Because, if Oliver St John Latimer was allegedly so good, Senator Thomas Cookridge was undoubtedly a winner, and he wanted the lost treasure of Sion Crossing very badly indeed to go to such eccentric lengths to find it.
    And that was where the really interesting questions started for Oliver St John Latimer. It no longer surprised him that he had the job, because that was due to a series of wholly explicable accidents in which he had played a starring rôle.
    Very simply, David Audley was the perfect and natural choice, not so much because he was a historian, and a foreigner who would bring a fresh approach to an old mystery or even because of his well-known weakness for weird assignments (Audley’s overweening curiosity was his Achilles heel: Howard Morris would know that as well as anyone) … but simply because he had a proven track-record as a finder of things long-lost. And he, Latimer, was probably only here in Atlanta now because Howard Morris, in his extremity, had led the Senator to believe that, since Audley and Latimer were the brains of Research and Development (which was true ), then Latimer and Audley were a team (which was palpably and laughably untrue ).
    No … but teams and laughter aside (though it was a good joke—and all the better for being at Audley’s expense for once) … no , what was truly interesting was the as-yet unanswered question of why Senator Thomas Cookridge needed the Sion Crossing treasure.
    He had promised a full and frank answer