And One Wore Gray (25 page)

“Maybe,” Jesse said. He didn’t tell her that he knew Daniel well and that Daniel would never stay in prison. He’d be looking at every single possible avenue of escape, and if a means was there, Daniel would find it.

Her eyes lowered again, and Jesse almost grinned. Leave it to Daniel. Daniel would never have fallen on the farm grounds of an old woman or a graybeard. No, Daniel would manage to fall here. With this beautiful, exotic woman. He was good with horses, good with swords, damned good with reconnaissance—and good with women.

He started suddenly, realizing then what the tension in her was all about.

She had done more than care for Daniel through a fever. Things had gone much farther between these two.

He sipped his coffee, anxious that she not see what he had discerned in her eyes. She was something, this
Mrs. Callie Michaelson. Elegant, reserved, and so composed and well mannered.

It must have been interesting, Daniel, he thought.

He finished his coffee and set the cup on her table. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Michaelson, I do intend to go by and see my brother. And the conditions under which he’s being kept.” He arched a brow at her. “You are on our side, correct?”

“Which is ‘our’ side?” she asked him dryly.

He grinned. “Well, I was talking about the North. But my home is in the South, as you must know. It is a bitter feeling, Mrs. Michaelson, not to be able to go home.”

“I can well imagine, sir.”

He shrugged. “I live for the day when it will be over. When I can ride back and see the house sitting on the river….” He shrugged again. “Sorry, Mrs. Michaelson. I have a wife and a son back there.”

“In Virginia?”

“Yes. A very old plantation. The cornerstone was laid in the mid-sixteen hundreds. It’s very gracious and very beautiful, and sometimes I just pray that the house survives the war.”

“It must be quite a place,” Callie murmured

Jesse watched her smooth her fingers over her skirt.

“Once upon a time it was a very rich estate. Fields lie fallow now—not enough people to work them. Daniel was the one who looked over the estate. He knew how to keep up the house, and he knew what to plant, and what not to plant, and where to sell, and when to hold. It will not be such a rich place once we return.” He paused. “If we are ever able to return. I don’t know, Callie. Some people say that you can never go home again. What do you think?”

“I think that you can always go home,” she said softly. She looked up at him and tried to appear very
casual once again. “Your wife and child are there, so far from the world you’re living in?”

“Well, my boy is not very old. There is no place else where he could have been born, except for Cameron Hall. And Kiernan …” He smiled. “She’s quite a Rebel. It’s an interesting dilemma, isn’t it? Well, I’ve taken enough of your time, as apparently my brother has also done. I’ll leave you, but I promise I’ll write once I’ve seen Daniel.”

“Yes, will you please?”

He nodded. “I’d promise to try to come by, but the war being what it is, it’s hard to make such promises. I will write, though.”

“Thank you.” Her eyes were downcast again. She was the perfect lady. She might not realize it, clad as she was in simple cotton, but Callie Michaelson was every inch a lady.

He hoped that Daniel realized it.

He hurried down her path to his horse, Goliath. Coming to the porch, she called him back.

“Doctor Cameron?”

“Yes?”

“There was a boy who died in my barn. A Union boy. He’s—he’s buried out back, with my family. But I have his effects, a letter for his mother, his bedroll, a few other things. I’d like to write a little note myself. Would you mind waiting just a minute and taking them for me?”

He shook his head. “Not at all.”

She swirled around and slipped back into the house. She returned with the soldier’s things, handing him a letter. Again, there was that anxious look to her eyes. “Would you read the note I’ve written, sir, and see if it will help?”

Jesse quickly scanned her words.

Jesse glanced at her. “Is it the truth?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“It’s a beautiful note. I’ll see that it reaches the proper party.”

He took her hand. He was about to shake it, but he squeezed it instead.

“Good-bye, Mrs. Michaelson. Take care of yourself.”

“God go with you, sir. God go with you.”

He saluted to her and rode away. Turning back, he saw that she was still standing there, tall, beautiful, both proud and ethereal in the moonlight.

Daniel, you son of a gun, he thought. Now if I could just be sure that they could keep you in prison until the war ends!

He doubted it. He wondered if he’d even return soon
enough
to find Daniel in Old Capitol Prison if he rode straight through tonight.

He quickened his pace.

It was exactly what he was going to do.

Prison was sometimes an interesting place to be, Daniel thought. He leaned back on his straw, lazily chewing on a piece of it.

But his eyes were moving. Not that there was much to see right now. Four of the men were engaged in a
game of cards, gambling little bits of tobacco and flasks of whiskey. Some were just sitting back, as he was himself. Old Rufus MacKenzie, the one real graybeard in their midst, was reading his Bible. They were all grouped together, twenty-four men, in the one big room. They had themselves one “necessary” pot built against the wall, and the stench could get pretty bad. Billy Boudain told him that you forgot about the smell after a while.

There were no cots, just beds of straw and whatever else the men could lump together. It wasn’t so bad. It was just bleak. As bleak as the decaying color of the walls, as bleak as the cry of the rats that became daring and loud at night.

At least, he thought wryly, he was in the company of friends.

And he watched. Daniel watched everything. Over the past few days, he had watched all that took place. He’d watched the coming and going of food and supplies, and he’d watched the way that the prison worked.

The guards, most of them, were easy to bribe. Captain Harrison Farrow from Tupelo, Mississippi, had a sister married to someone in the Yank Congress, and she saw to it that he received all manner of goodies from home, from baked pies to blankets and extremely fine cigars. Some of the fellows didn’t do so well. Private Davie Smith, a small-time farm boy from the Shenandoah Valley, didn’t know a soul in the North. But like Daniel, he had been shoeless. Prison had a way of drawing out the best and the worst in men. Captain Farrow couldn’t acquire enough from his sister to keep them all in the lap of luxury, but he had been careful to get Private Smith a pair of shoes. And Private Smith was one good-looking Southern lad who liked to flirt with the girls through the window bars as the young ladies passed by.

Every once in a while, Private Davie Smith managed to get one of those giggling young ladies—young ladies who’s mamas would have them strung up if they knew their girls were fraternizing with the enemy—to give him an important piece of information.

It was through Private Smith that Daniel learned a lot. The Rebel troops—who had done such a daring and spectacular job of taking the Union garrison—had abandoned Harpers Ferry. Jackson was moving back into the valley again. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was stirring up public sentiment just the way Daniel had assumed it would.

The Yankees were feeling mighty proud of themselves at the moment. They were claiming Sharpsburg a victory.

But so was the South.

Hell, anyone who had been there would just call it a disaster, Daniel thought, but he never said it aloud. He was the ranking officer among the prisoners, and it was up to him to watch out for morale.

As long as he stayed.

There were ways out of here. He had watched the supply wagons come and go, and he had watched the coffins come and go, and reflected on that as a means to escape.

A lot of coffins came and went. Daniel didn’t think their warders were exceptionally cruel—except for one or two of the men. When those guards jeered the prisoners, the Rebs jeered them right back, usually asking what able-bodied men were doing watching over tattered and injured Rebs. “Afraid to be out on the battlefield, eh, Yanks?” they taunted back.

The food wasn’t so bad. At least, it wasn’t any worse than what Daniel was accustomed to eating in the field. A few more years, and he’d be able to convince himself that worms were the best part of meat and that “hardtack” was just that—so hard that the challenge for a
man was not in managing to eat enough, but in managing to keep his teeth.

Old Capitol Prison was survivable, he determined, because he meant to survive. Every night, when he felt the cold dankness of the surrounding walls, when he heard his fellow prisoners hacking away with the coughs they acquired here, he thought about Callie.

He thought about her when he felt his straw crawling with all the bugs that were alive and thriving in it, and he thought about her every time one of the coffins came and went.

I will get out, he promised himself. But he meant to be careful. He didn’t mean to get caught again, he didn’t want to do anything rash or stupid. If he were caught again up here in plain breeches and white cotton shirt, he just might be considered a spy. If he was caught, he would likely soon be a dead man.

As he idly chewed his grass, he watched Billy Boudain and handsome young Davie Smith at the window. Billy was favoring his right arm, Daniel noted with a frown. He couldn’t see anything wrong with it, since Billy was wearing a gray coat with red artillery trim.

“Hey, Billy!” he called, sitting up straight on the straw and beckoning to the young man. “Come here.”

Billy crawled down from his post at the window, eyeing Daniel apprehensively.

“What is it, Colonel?”

“What’s the matter with your arm?”

Billy shook his head. “Just a little piece of shrapnel I picked up at Sharpsburg, Colonel Cameron.”

He said it lightly, as if the injury were nothing. “Let me see it,” Daniel said.

“Colonel, it ain’t nothing at all.”

“Billy, that’s an order. Take off your jacket and roll up your sleeve. Let me see your shrapnel.”

Bland-faced, Billy did so. He tried damned hard not
to wince when the jacket fell over his arm as he removed it. He kept trying not to wince as he rolled up the dingy white cotton sleeve of his shirt.

Daniel bit his lip so as not to cry out when he saw the wound. Billy was doing one hell of a job not to make a sound.

The wound was not just a little shrapnel scratch. Daniel was certain that something—some piece of metal or grapeshot—remained in the wound. All around it, the flesh was turning unnatural colors. It was mottled and oozing.

With a sinking heart, Daniel thought that Billy was going to lose his arm. If he wanted to live, he was going to have to lose it soon.

“Hell, boy!” Daniel muttered softly. “We can’t just ignore this one!”

“We got to ignore this one, Colonel,” Captain Farrow said, stepping up beside Billy.

“Ain’t nothin’ else we can do,” Davie said.

Daniel shook his head. “Something has to be done, Billy,” he told the boy bluntly. “You’re going to die if you don’t let them take off your arm.”

Billy blanched, looking to Harrison Farrow for help. Farrow shifted from one foot to another. “Colonel, I imagine that Billy would just as soon die right here as under the knife with one of them Yankee sawbones.”

Daniel looked back and forth between the two, then glanced at Davie. Davie looked away.

“They’re not all murderers,” Daniel said. He paused, looking at faces that politely hid their disbelief. “Billy, isn’t your life worth a chance?”

No one answered. Apparently, they didn’t think that Billy had any chance.

“Billy—” he began.

“Colonel, there ain’t no hope that I could keep the arm?” Billy said.

Daniel hesitated. He wasn’t the doctor, Jesse was.
But he’d been around Jesse enough, and he’d been around enough maimed limbs. Maybe it could be saved, but he only knew one man who could do it, and that man wasn’t around.

“I don’t think so,” he told Billy frankly.

Billy looked a little white around the gills. “Maybe I oughta just die a whole man then, sir.”

“Damn it, Billy! You don’t want to die! Hell, you’re just a kid—”

“Then this war is being fought by a bunch of kids,” Captain Farrow interrupted softly. Daniel stared at him. “Meaning no disrespect, sir.”

“None taken,” Daniel said. “But Billy, we’ve got to call the Yanks in on that arm.”

“Ain’t no way I’m going off with the Yanks—”

“Yes, there is. You’ll go, because I’ll go with you.”

“What if they say no?” Billy demanded.

Daniel shook his head. “They aren’t going to say no. Not unless they’re planning on putting a gun right to my head.”

“What the hell you mean by that, Colonel?”

“As it happens, I have a brother who happens to be a Union sawbones. He’ll know soon enough where I am, and he’ll have to come here. Every man jack out there knows it. So as far as playing fair with me, they’re in a bit of a knot.”

“You’ve got a brother who’s a Yankee sawbones?” Billy said incredulously.

Daniel smiled slowly. “Yeah.”

“And you’re still speaking to him?” Billy said.

“Yeah,” Daniel repeated. He lifted his shoulders. “He’s my brother.”

Billy still looked dubious. “That lieutenant colonel fellow in charge of the place when I came in didn’t seem so bad,” Daniel said.

“You mean Lieutenant Colonel Wadsworth P.
Dodson,” Captain Farrow said with a broad grin. “Our boy colonel.”

“He does look a little wet behind the ears,” Daniel agreed. “But sometimes that’s good Sometimes a young man is a good man. He hasn’t had time to find out just how worthless it is to be good sometimes.”