Lorenzo's Revolutionary Quest (2 page)

“You think these are rustlers?”

Lorenzo nodded.

“Maybe they have a bill of sale for the cattle,” Red suggested.

“I doubt it.”

One of the men stopped, stared straight at him and Red, and pointed them out to his companions.

Lorenzo's bad feeling grew when the men split up, four driving the cattle in one direction, three loping toward them.

Red straightened. He and Lorenzo exchanged a quick look. They drew their muskets. Like all good frontiersmen, they kept them loaded and ready to fire.

Three men charged toward them. One had flowing blond hair, another dressed all in white, and yet another was short and stocky. They wore shirts, trousers, and boots. In one fluid motion, they drew arrows from their quivers, readied their bows, and shot.

“Duck!” Lorenzo yelled.

The first arrow hissed by, slicing the air where Red's chest had been a moment earlier. The second thudded into Lorenzo's horse making it squeal in pain and fall from under him. The third arrow went wide.

Musket in hand, Lorenzo jumped off, looked around for cover, and dashed to a clump of bushes.

Red, apparently realizing he was an inviting target on horseback, flung himself off and joined Lorenzo.

“Left, right, or center?” Lorenzo asked, giving Red the option of which target he wanted.

“Right,” Red said, his face grim. “Save the man on the left for last. He can't shoot straight.”

The cattle rustlers reached over their shoulders for more arrows and continued the charge.

In unison, Lorenzo and Red aimed and fired. Flame burst from their musket barrels, followed by puffs of smoke.

Two men fell from their horses. The third pulled hard on his reins, whipped his horse around, and lashed its rump furiously.

Hooves thundered behind Lorenzo. He glanced around as he reloaded. Two wranglers remained in the valley with the horses, but the rest of his soldiers dashed uphill. They pulled alongside him and Red. Upon seeing the long-horned cattle, they wore expressions that reflected the awe Lorenzo had seen on Red's face.

“
Mon dieu!
” exclaimed Private Dujardin, a twenty-year-old
Frenchman with corn-color hair.

All was confusion in the valley. Cattle, apparently spooked by the commotion, scattered.

The remaining rustlers wheeled their horses and gathered under a distant oak, joined by the rustler who had survived the charge. After a short discussion, they took off at a gallop, abandoning the cattle.

Lorenzo snorted in disgust. “They were big and brave when they thought they had me and Red outnumbered. Look at them now, running with their tails tucked between their legs.” He turned to Dujardin. “Go back to the remuda and get me a new horse. The rest of you round up those cattle. We're going to drive them back to San Antonio. Keep a sharp eye out for the rustlers.”

His men spread out to collect strays.

In the meantime, Lorenzo uncinched his saddle. Dujardin returned with a gray mare named Piñata. With the private's help, Lorenzo retrieved as much as he could from the dead horse and saddled the new one. He pondered what to do with the two dead rustlers and decided to leave them. Their fellow cattle rustlers would probably come back for their bodies.

Lorenzo's soldiers drove the cattle toward a central point. Once they were bunched into a small herd, they lowered their heads and grazed on tall grass.

Lorenzo counted them. Fifty. He hoped he wouldn't have to go to as much trouble to get the five hundred cattle General Washington expected him to deliver.

Molly Linn glanced back at the long line of men standing behind her. It looked like the whole Continental Army was being inoculated for smallpox. So many soldiers! How would General Washington ever find enough food to feed them all?

She had heard a rumor that the British planned to
send people infected with smallpox into camp to spread the disease. General Washington had taken the threat seriously and had ordered everyone to get inoculated, even civilians like Mrs. Washington. Was there enough medicine to go around?

Molly was ten years old and had never caught smallpox, but she had heard a lot about it. People said it started as a rash and turned into pus-filled sores. If it didn't kill you, it usually left ugly pockmarks. Her brother said inoculations were safe, and physicians had been giving them for as long as he could remember. Last year, he had been inoculated, and nothing bad had happened to him.

The soldier in front of her disappeared into the doctor's tent.

She swallowed hard. She was next.

“Ain't afeerd, are ya, little girl?” the man behind her whispered.

“I'm not afraid of man nor beast!”

“Uh-huh.” He sounded unconvinced.

A man came out of the tent rolling down his sleeve.

Molly stepped inside. Her eyes bulged to see a man covered with smallpox lying on a cot. Dr. MacGregor sat beside him on a stool.

“Hello, Boots,” the doctor said brightly. He had called her “Boots” ever since she gave a barefoot soldier a pair of riding boots.

Molly remained by the tent door.

He motioned her forward.

She took a reluctant step and watched him pick up a toothpick from the table to his right, turn toward the pox-covered man, and open a sore. He pressed it firmly, making it ooze, and scooped clear liquid onto a quill.

It headed toward her arm. There was smallpox on that quill. Molly felt lightheaded.

“Hold still, Boots,” Dr. MacGregor cajoled. “Twill hurt but a moment.”

“They say the cure is worse than the illness.”

“Who says?”

“My brother's soldiers.”

“They're a wild lot, Boots,” the doctor warned. “You best stay away from the likes of them.”

“My brother is a soldier,” Molly said, indignant.

“He's an officer,” the doctor countered. “That's different.”

“The soldiers in my brother's company are real nice, especially Captain Bannister. I met him when he visited General Washington. He was with the flatboat flotilla bringing us Spanish gunpowder. They say they're heading back down river soon to meet Captain Bannister—OUCH!” She looked at the scratch mark made by the quill.

The doctor rubbed her arm with cotton. “Done! Now off with you. And stay out of trouble!”

“Me? Get into trouble?”

The doctor roared with laughter. “Off with you!”

“Yes sir!”

Molly trudged back to the scullery where she worked as the assistant cook. How she wanted to be part of the war. Not the battle she waged with field mice always getting into the grain or ants raiding the honey jar. Real war.

Leaning on an ax handle, Dunstan Andrews surveyed the Virginia landscape. He hated everything about this place. He hated the hills, woolly with trees. He hated the piney scent from the forest. He hated the way the king's rebellious subjects dropped their Rs.

“You!” a musket-toting guard yelled. “You with the scar! Get to work.”

Dunstan ignored the order.

Sweat rolled down his back and face. He reached for his scarlet coat draped over a boulder and fished out a handkerchief to tie around his forehead.

An oppressive heat settled over the hills, a smothering kind he had not experienced since New Orleans. Even working bare-chested gave little relief.

Dunstan stroked the scar on his cheek, the long, ragged gash he'd earned in a sword fight in England before he became a soldier. He recalled every detail.

The lord's son had made a lucky stroke, then had laughed joyously.

Oddly, Dunstan recalled, the cut hadn't hurt. Reaching up with his free hand, he had touched his cheek and felt blood seep from the open wound. Dismayed but striving hard not to show it, he had advanced toward his opponent. The next few seconds had blurred. Dunstan only remembered coming out of a haze to find his saber tip pinning the lord's son to the floor.

Dunstan had taken a slow revenge, slicing through
an embroidered waistcoat, easing the saber into his opponent's skin just enough to draw blood, then a little further, and a little further.

Ignoring his victim's pleas for mercy, Dunstan had twisted the saber a fraction to the left, then a fraction to the right. At some point, he must have hit a vital organ.

The lord's son had twitched once, then lay perfectly still.

With his cousin's help, Dunstan had fled to America, “took the King's shilling” and became a redcoat. It was paltry pay for risking his life as a soldier, but it was that or be hanged for murder.

“Hey! Saber-Scar!” the rebel guard called out, snapping Dunstan back to the present. “What's the matter? Don't you speak English?”

“The
King's
English,” he replied.

“Back to work!” the blue-coated soldier ordered, making a threatening gesture with the bullwhip.

Swinging his ax overhead, Dunstan buried it deep into a log and pretended the splintering wood was Lorenzo Bannister's head. In his mind's eye, he saw the boy responsible for his capture by traitors who called themselves Americans. Someday he would kill him. It would be a slow death, too, the kind he'd given the lord's son.

Dunstan positioned another piece of wood on the block. This time, the wood became Lorenzo's neck. He swung his ax with a vengeance, splitting the log neatly in two pieces.

A scrawny-looking boy no more than thirteen years old moved down the line of prisoners with a wooden bucket. He offered each a dipper of water.

Dunstan remembered seeing him arrive in camp the day before in the midst of twenty Hessian prisoners transferred from Pennsylvania. The boy didn't look particularly bright or useful. He dressed like a Quaker in a plain coat with no pleats in the sides or buttons on the
pockets or sleeves. He assumed the boy was a loyalist arrested by the rebel vermin.

“How art thou?” The boy pushed back a shock of light brown hair that had fallen across piercing blue eyes.

“Are you a Quaker?” Dunstan asked.

“I am a Friend,” the boy corrected with a small smile, emphasizing the last word.

The Society of Friends, commonly called Quakers, did not believe in war. Even so, they were on both sides of the rebellion, some as Tories supporting Britain, others supporting Washington's rebels.

The boy glanced at the nearest prisoner, about three feet away, and lowered his voice. “Thy cousin sent me with a message.”

Dunstan jerked his head up. “My cousin?”

“Aye. Thou hast friends in high places.”

Dunstan considered that. His cousin worked for British intelligence, as did he.

“What's the message?”

The boy cleared his throat. “Thy cousin said, ‘I have an important mission for you. Report to me at once.'”

An hour went by. Lorenzo and his soldiers herded the recovered cattle toward San Antonio with the rust-colored bull in the lead. The two horse wranglers trailed behind.

“This is the most exciting thing I've ever done,” Private Dujardin said in French. “Incredible! I am herding cattle like a real vaquero!”

Lorenzo understood his excitement. He had felt the same way the first time he rode herd.

French continued to spill from Dujardin as he and Lorenzo headed toward San Antonio.

Lorenzo was glad Eugenie had taught him her native language. Otherwise, he would have been forced to use hand signs to communicate with Dujardin.

Private Jean-Paul Dujardin had left France the year before and joined the Continental Army. It was rumored that his girlfriend's father had placed a hefty bounty on his head. Lorenzo could only guess why a father would do that.

An embarrassing moment with Eugenie a month earlier leaped to mind. They were in the house of Colonel De Gálvez, Spanish governor of Louisiana. Lorenzo leaned over the desk in the colonel's study and explained the planned cattle drive to her.

“The cattle are there in San Antonio,” Lorenzo had said, pointing to a map, “and there is the Mississippi River. This,” he said, plopping down a paperweight, “represents the cattle. And this,” he said, holding up a
bar of sealing wax, “will be the flatboat flotilla.”

Eugenie leaned close.

Lorenzo momentarily lost concentration as he breathed in her perfume. She was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. A tress of red hair fell over her shoulder. She tucked it behind her ear.

“The flatboats come this way,” Lorenzo said as he maneuvered the sealing wax across the map. “We herd the cattle this way.” He moved the paperweight. “And voilà, the two meet up.”

“It would be easier to send the cattle by ship,
n'est-ce pas
?”

“Colonel De Gálvez and I discussed that. Hurricane season is upon us. There's no way to know when a storm is brewing in the Gulf of Mexico. Besides, pirates are a problem, not to mention having to go around Florida, and the British control that. Traveling by ship is dangerous. That's why we went up the Mississippi and Ohio by flatboat last year. We had a better chance getting through that way. The Mississippi River is the best way to get supplies to General Washington. If the British ever gain control of the river, the war is lost.”