Free On Secret Service by John Jakes Page A

head back, banging his skull painfully on the car wall. Sledge crowded past him, aimed his revolver at the man with the billy. The man immediately shoved his partner aside and leaped off the train.
    Lon meanwhile was dealing with the man standing on the coupler. The man slashed out with a butcher knife, tearing Lon’s trouser leg and raking his calf. Enraged, Lon pistol-whipped the man’s face. The man fell off the coupler, his nose spouting blood. He lay across the tracks with his head at an odd angle.
    On the steps, the last man watched Sledge extend his arm, point the Remington, and ask, “What about you, you son of a bitch?” The man jumped off like the first.
    â€œFucking cowards.” Sledge holstered his piece. The car pulled away from the crowd surrounding the man on the tracks. “I think you broke his damn neck. Congratulations.” Lon’s guilt lessened when the fallen man was lifted to his feet, dazed but upright. “Better get inside and take care of that leg.”
    The flesh wound was more bloody than painful, but it seriously wounded Lon’s purse. He couldn’t afford to replace a pair of trousers right away. He bandaged the wound with cloth the porter found. He was still shaken from the fight.
    The Pinkertons and the Army men kept the mob at bay until the car reached the other depot, where Mrs. Lincoln gradually calmed down. Rain fell steadily. As they crossed the border out of Maryland, Bob Lincoln led everyone in singing “The Star Spangled Banner.”
    Lon didn’t sing with enthusiasm. Baltimore was a stinging lesson. The Southern partisans were a hundred times more violent and dangerous than Pinkerton had said. They had to be whipped, broken, prevented at all costs from spreading their murderous anarchy. He thought his father would have been proud of his resolve.

8
1836–1858
    As a young man in Scotland, Mathias Price was attracted to the doctrine of God’s universal love preached by John Wesley. It offered hope to the masses who lived without it in the rookeries of Glasgow, his home. He was converted at a revival in Bristol, England, and ordained before he was twenty-three. He chose to answer the call of Methodism in America.
    He stepped onto American soil at Charleston and there saw a searing sight: a slave whose naked back had felt the whip many times. Stripes of scar tissue crisscrossed black flesh “like a relief map of hell,” Mathias said.
    In the 1830s the Methodist church in America was already reeling toward a schism over slavery. The Reverend Mathias Price would never serve in what he called the benighted South. He accepted a small pastorate in the village of Lebanon, Ohio, not far above Cincinnati. He’d been recommended by a first cousin, Dora Filson, and her husband, Silas, a prosperous farmer.
    Mathias found a wife in the German community of Cincinnati. A year after their marriage, Christina Price died bearing their only child. The boy knew his mother only as a smudged pencil portrait made by an itinerant artist. His father kept it in an oval frame on his desk.
    Mathias Price was a spare, strong man whose Christianity was as muscular as his body. He didn’t preach comfortable complacency about the next world, but militant reform of this one. Prominent in the parsonage was an embroidery he’d asked Dora to sew. It was his amended version of a verse from Isaiah 58:
    Loose the bands of wickedness.
    Undo the heavy burdens.
    Let the oppressed go free.
    He preached not only from the Bible, but from philosophers such as Emerson: “I do not see how a barbarous community and a civilized community can constitute a state. We must get rid of slavery or we must get rid of freedom.” He quoted Wesley to condemn “that execrable sum of all villainies called the slave-trade.” Southern sympathy was strong this close to Kentucky. Some in his congregation asked the bishop to remove Mathias. He fought back, held on,