Nan Ryan (2 page)

“Jesus, Sarah, look what Stanton did to Mary Surratt.” Cordell reached out, drew her again into his arms. “He had the poor woman hanged because of the rumor that she helped Booth with the Lincoln assassination.” His chin resting atop his wife’s golden head, Cordell Rogers closed his eyes and said, “Sarah, Stanton’s placed a ten thousand–dollar gold bounty on all our heads. Mine, yours, and Mollie’s.”

“Dear God, this can’t be happening,” she choked. “The world’s gone mad.”

“Oh, my love, I’m so sorry. I’ll make it up to you one day, but we must go now, tonight. This is the first place they’ll come looking for us.”

Sarah raised her head and began to wipe her eyes. “I’ll get dressed and start packing.”

He nodded. “I’ll wake Mollie and tell her we’re leaving.”

“What reason will you give her?”

“The truth,” he said, turned, and was gone.

Within the hour, Mollie, alert and excited, was outside waiting impatiently with her father, her hand stroking the velvet muzzle of her prized Appaloosa mare, Queenie. Cordell Rogers was strapping valises and carpetbags to a couple of pack horses. Only Sarah Rogers remained inside the mansion.

Sarah paused in the center hallway and slowly looked about. The once rose-and-gold pattern of the expensive wall covering imported from Europe was faded and peeling. The tapestry-covered French sofa and matching chairs were worn and threadbare. Overhead, the tarnished doré chandelier, where once indigo-colored candles had lighted the way for arriving guests, sagged and tilted at an angle.

Still, it was beautiful to the sad woman who was leaving it. Sarah Rogers placed a hand on the mahogany banister and looked one last time up the darkened stairs. In that moment she knew that she would never again sleep in her soft four-poster or stand in the main floor foyer while sunlight streamed in through the fan-lighted windows.

Sarah drew a shallow breath and moved toward those doors. She placed the lamp she carried on the hallway table, leaned over, and blew it out. She squared her slender shoulders and stepped out into the early-morning darkness.

But when she turned and carefully closed the massive front doors of her beloved home, she left a part of her heart inside.

They left in the dead of night. Heading southwest
, they rode through the piney woods of East Texas and across the timbered prairies of central Texas. Through the lush green hill country around Austin and on past San Antone and into far South Texas.

The summer heat was fierce and unrelenting, and Cordell Rogers watched helplessly as his fragile wife became pale and hollow-cheeked. Her beautiful violet eyes grew duller with the passing of each hot, tiring day on the long journey.

He knew that her heart was broken, and that he was responsible. For that he would never forgive himself. It was cold comfort that he was not the one who had actually pulled the trigger. He
was
the one who had vowed never to stop fighting. It had been he who planned and led a half dozen loyal rebels in the daring daytime raid on the Yankee gold shipment, he who had declared they would take the gold and rendezvous with General Joe Shelby to fight on forever in the name of the Confederate States of America.

Cordell Rogers’s wide shoulders slumped, and he shifted wearily in the saddle.

It was his fault, every bit of it. Lieutenant Jeffrey Battles had been the one who shot and killed the Yankee colonel, but he, Rogers, was the commanding officer. Lieutenant Battles was a good, loyal soldier who had saved his life at Fredericksburg. He couldn’t fault Battles for what had happened.

“Look, Mother, Daddy, the Rio Grande!” Mollie shouted, pulling up on her Appaloosa mare and pointing excitedly.

“The Rio Grande, darlin’,” Cordell Rogers said to his wan wife, hoping to see her smile.

Sarah Rogers drew rein, turned in the saddle, and smiled, but her dulled violet eyes did not light, and her voice broke when she said forlornly, “When we cross that river, we leave Texas behind forever.”

“Oh, sweetheart, we’ll have a good life in Mexico! You’ll see. Maximilian needs trained officers for his French Empire.” He drew his mount alongside Sarah’s. “They say that the Empress Carlotta is a lovely, intelligent woman. The two of you might soon become good friends. Why, in a matter of weeks you could be spending time at the peaceful Chapultepec palace.”

“Yes, of course,” she said, attempting to sound enthusiastic for his sake. She wasn’t too successful. Her back was aching and her face was afire and she felt as if she couldn’t possibly ride all the way to Mexico City. But she said only, “Cord, could we rest here for a while? I’m feeling a little faint.”

“Yes, my love,” he quickly assured her. “We’ll cross the river, camp on the other side. How does that sound?”

“Good,” Sarah replied, knowing her husband was worried about her, not wanting him to be.

She loved him. She loved him so much she hadn’t berated him for the foolhardy actions that had made it necessary for her to leave her home—the place where she had been born, where as a girl she had spent long summer afternoons reading poetry with her good friend Napier Dixon under the backyard oak on her father’s farm. Where, at age seventeen, she had met a young, handsome, red-haired officer at a summertime ball and had fallen madly in love the first time he touched her hand.

“Sounds wonderful, Cord.” She brightened and her smile widened when she saw her husband’s sun-bronzed face fill with relief.

Mollie Rogers’s mood was the opposite of her mother’s. A curious, thrill-seeking child who was more rash tomboy than prim young lady, Mollie viewed the move to Mexico from their war-ruined cotton plantation as high adventure, and she couldn’t understand her mother’s lingering melancholy. Why, already—in the five weeks they’d been traveling—she’d had more fun than in her entire fourteen years.

They had ridden more than four hundred fifty miles, and they weren’t yet halfway to Mexico City! It was all too exciting for words, and Mollie hoped it took months to reach their final destination. A rebel at heart, she loved being on the trail. She was free and happy and could ride her mare fast and shoot wild game and watch for savage Indians and hide from the U.S. authorities and do a hundred other exciting things that would surely make her friends back home pea green with envy.

The devil with the palace at Chapultepec or some fine hacienda in Mexico City! She liked it out in the open where she could breathe. She liked sleeping under the stars.

The summer sun was setting as Mollie eagerly swam her Appaloosa across the muddy Rio Grande and up onto the grassy banks on the far side of the river. She let a out a great whoop of joy. Not only was she safe from the pursuing Yankee devils but tonight she, Mollie Louise Rogers, would be sleeping in a foreign country!

It was just too exciting. She couldn’t possibly sleep. Not on her very first night in Mexico. Why, she might never sleep again!

“Lieutenant, you must get some sleep.”

The motherly, uniformed nurse stepped close to the bed as she spoke. The lamp in her hand gave off the only light in the long, narrow ward where rows of beds lined the white walls. Every bed in the army hospital was filled. In each lay a badly wounded Union soldier.

The nurse set the lamp on the bedside table. She spread the white sheet up over the wide, bare shoulders of the dark-haired, slender man. “It’s past midnight, Lieutenant. You need sleep.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Lieutenant Lew Hatton.

But he couldn’t sleep. Didn’t want to sleep until he found the lawless Southern rebels responsible for the murder of his father.

“I’ll give you something for the pain, Lieutenant,” the nurse said, smiling down at him as she pushed a perspiration-soaked lock of coal black hair back off his shiny forehead.

“No. I don’t need anything. I’m fine,” Lew Hatton said.

“Sleep then, son,” she said, knowing very well that he was not fine,—that in all likelihood, the twenty-six-year-old man lying helpless in this stuffy army hospital ward might never be fine.

The wounds the young Union soldier had suffered in the war’s last hours had nearly been fatal. For days he had lain near death, weeks more he had spent confined to this narrow army-issue bed in this crowded Richmond federal hospital. His badly shattered right leg had still not healed properly. It wouldn’t surprise her if he lost it yet. And even if he kept the leg, she doubted he would ever walk again.

Feeling sorry for the handsome young man, the nurse walked away shaking her head sadly. Bless his heart, he had been improving until a well-meaning fellow officer had stopped by and brought the upsetting news that his father, Colonel William P. Hatton, while escorting a shipment of gold through Louisiana to Hooker’s occupying troops in New Orleans, had been shot and killed by Confederate rebels three months after the war’s end.

The nurse was worried about Lieutenant Hatton. Not only was the young veteran badly wounded, his heart was now filled with unforgiving hatred. If he mended, he would go looking for more trouble. She’d been near the wounded soldier’s bed when he had received word of his father’s death. She couldn’t forget the look that had crossed his pain-etched face nor the vow Lew Hatton had made.

“If ever I leave this bed, I’ll go after the men who murdered my father. I will
never
rest until they are all brought to justice.”

Sarah Rogers didn’t sleep that night. Her husband
snored softly beside her, and a few feet away Mollie slept soundly. But Sarah couldn’t sleep. She told herself she suffered from only a minor fever caused by the heat. It would be gone by morning.

At dawn Cordell Rogers awakened, took one look at his wife’s flushed face and too-bright eyes, and shouted, “Mollie, your mother’s very sick! I’m going for a doctor!”

He rode back across the river and headed straight to Laredo, Texas, where Dr. Tio Sanchez stood idly studying a wanted poster tacked to the wall of the telegraph office. Dr. Sanchez had just returned to his office when a wild-eyed horseman dismounted and stormed through the front door.

Dr. Tio Sanchez immediately recognized the man from the wanted poster—the man beneath whose likeness were the words,
WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE.

“Doctor, you must come with me!” Cordell Rogers ordered.

“No,” said the doctor. “You are a fugitive from the law, a killer. I must report you to the—”

Before he could finish the sentence, Cordell Rogers drew his Colt .44 and pointed it directly at the doctor’s chest. “I’ll kill you where you stand if you don’t grab your bag and come with me.”

Stunned, Dr. Sanchez threw his hands in the air. “Do not shoot me. I have a family!”

“So do I, and you have to save my wife!”

The young doctor knew, the minute he saw Sarah Rogers, that she had scarlet fever. He knew as well that she wouldn’t live to see another sunrise. He did what he could to make her comfortable, then examined Mollie for any signs of the contagious disease.

His stethoscope on Mollie’s slender back, he noticed the perfectly shaped butterfly birthmark below her waist.
“Mariposa,”
he murmured absently.

“What?” Mollie said over her shoulder.

“Ah, I was thinking aloud, Miss Rogers. Your birthmark, it’s a
mariposa
. A butterfly.”

“I know that!” she said, jerked her loosened pants up and her shirt down, and hurried back to her mother.

Dr. Sanchez took Cordell Rogers aside and told him the truth—that for Sarah, the end was near. Nervously he waited for the big red-haired man’s reaction. But Cordell just nodded sadly and told the young doctor he was free to go.

Sanchez looked Rogers in the eye. “It will be on my conscience if I do not tell the authorities of seeing you.”

“Tell them any damned thing you like. Without Sarah, none of it matters.”