Free On Secret Service by John Jakes Page B

raised his son, Alonzo, to love kindness, intelligence, and above all, liberty.
    Between Sunday sermons, the Reverend Mr. Price often disappeared for days. Sometimes he returned scratched and bruised, accompanied by black men or women he hid in the root cellar until the next morning, when they were mysteriously gone. Young Lon took this more or less for granted, and accepted it when his father avoided direct answers to questions.
    When his father was away, Lon ate and slept at cousin Dora’s farm. Silas, Dora’s husband, came from Paducah, Kentucky. He opposed the Reverend’s antislavery activity because the South couldn’t survive without slave labor. Dora objected on different grounds. “He’ll injure himself, or someone will kill him. It’s dangerous work.”
    â€œBut what kind of work is it?” Lon asked.
    â€œWork that a man of the cloth shouldn’t be doing.” She would say no more.
    The Reverend’s small library was a place of refuge and happiness for the growing boy. He did his schoolwork there and read his father’s books. He loved the chivalry and derring-do of Scott, the thrills of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leather-Stocking Tales, the jollity and melodrama of Charles Dickens. He had a vivid memory of standing in a crowd with his father outside a Lebanon inn called the Golden Lamb as the great literary lion alighted for an overnight stop on his first American tour.
    Lon discovered Edgar A. Poe, whose unusual tales appeared in obscure literary quarterlies that came into the house. Particularly fascinating were the adventures of Poe’s Parisian detective, Dupin, who solved crimes with brainpower and observation. A Cincinnati newspaper article led Lon to the lurid memoirs of Vidoçq, founder of the Sûreté, the French criminal investigation bureau. Lying under a shade tree on hot summer days, Lon invented stories about himself as a clever policeman. In one of his first boyish love affairs—he was eleven, Patience ten—he said, “I want to be a detective like Dupin or the other one, I don’t know how to pronounce his name.”
    He and Patience were strolling a country road. She said, “Are there detectives like that in America?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œThen how will you become a detective?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œIf you don’t know, Alonzo, why do you bother to think about it? You should be a storekeeper, or a farmer like Silas Filson.”
    â€œThat would be too dull.”
    â€œThen what will you do instead?”
    â€œI don’t know,” he cried, vexed. The romance soon withered.
    Growing toward adolescence in the 1850s, Lon slowly reached an understanding of what his father did during his absences. Lon overheard people discuss something called the Underground Railroad, which wasn’t really a railroad but a secret route to Canada for runaway slaves. Black men and women continued to appear for their brief residence in the root cellar. Sometimes they came with little darky children Lon would have liked to play with, but his father said the children didn’t dare show themselves in daylight.
    When Lon was twelve, he worked up the nerve to ask his father, “Do you work for the Underground Railroad?”
    The Reverend gazed at his son by the light of a whale-oil lamp smoking on the parsonage desk. “Yes, I do. I’m what’s called a conductor. This home is called a station. I’ve wondered when I should tell you.”
    â€œYou think slavery’s wrong.”
    â€œIt is an abomination in the eyes of God.”
    â€œCousin Dora says that what you do is dangerous.”
    The Reverend absently touched his left eye, brilliantly discolored by a purple and yellow bruise, a souvenir of his last trip. “Dora would like me to give it up. Silas thinks Africans are natural slaves, and the institution essential to the livelihood of all those misguided