Only the Gallant (15 page)

He shivered and blew into his hands and returned his attention to the dangerous task before him. With trembling hands, he fished a tin of sulfur matches from his coat pocket. Two strikes and he cupped a flame, shielding it from the wind as he lit the fuse. He tossed the match aside and scrambled across the tracks. His boot toe caught on the iron and he tumbled down the embankment. Jesse scrambled to his feet and, glancing back over his shoulder, ran headlong into a menacing night-shrouded figure.

It was a big man, fully six feet tall, broad-shouldered, wide-chested, with an enormous gut straining the buttons of his wolfskin coat. Jesse rebounded off the man, staggered back, and reached for his revolver. The big man lowered a shotgun at his midsection.

“That’d be a fool thing to do,” he growled, thumbing the twin hammers of his shotgun. “I loaded me this with nails. They can ruin a man plumb awful.”

Jesse lifted his hands and showed the man his empty palms. “No call for trouble. You startled me, coming up so quiet.” His mind was racing. Had the wind blown out the fuse? A droplet of sleet doused the flame? And this blasted stranger … “Who are you?” he demanded.

“Jed Burlock,” the man growled. “I run slaves over to Nachitoches. Lost me a couple of niggers I was bringing over to a man in Edwards. I was too kind to the little bastards. I treated ’em square and they repaid me by runnin’ off.” Burlock held the shotgun with one hand and patted a black-handled whip, its leather grip capped with a silver knob. He kept the whip in easy reach. “I’ll peel their flesh when I run ’em down.”

As Burlock brushed by, Jesse could make out the man’s pasty-white features and bushy black brows now furrowed in a frown. He smelled of raw liquor and strong tobacco.

“I found your horse tethered yonder. What the hell you doin’ up there on the track?” The slaver spat a stream of tobacco in the dirt.

“I’ve been inspecting the rails. A train’s due here on the Jackson run.”

“You ain’t no lineman,” Burlock muttered, keeping the shotgun trained on McQueen. “Lie to me, boy, and I’ll cut you in half and I don’t give a shit about what color uniform you’re wearin’.”

“I’m riding the line,” Jesse repeated. He hooked his thumbs in his belt. “I was making good time until I saw these darkies—”

“Two of ’em. Young ’uns. One’s a buck, about eleven. The other’s a pretty little gal, ripe as a cherry.” The burly slaver had forgotten his suspicions. He’d lost his property and was bound and determined to get them back if it took all night. “You seen ’em?”

“The very same!” Jesse blurted out. “I just now chased them off.” He pointed toward the tracks and tried to sound convincing. “I had a feeling they were runaways.”

The slaver swung around and lumbered up the rise to the rail irons, where he stood bracing the north wind, his bleak eyes searching up track and down, then straight ahead to the cotton field, fallow in winter. “Which way did they head, goddammit?”

He turned, expecting the lieutenant to be at his side or at least back down the rise. Where the hell had the grayback run off to?

“Reb!” The north wind carried away his voice. “Hey!” The big man muttered a curse. A yard from his mud-spattered boots, a tongue of fire leaped into the air, sputtered, spewed a tendril of acrid smoke and then a geyser of sparks. In the light of the flickering fuse, seconds before the powder keg ignited in a blinding flash, Jed Burlock, slaver, spied the danger and knew he’d been tricked.

“Well, I’ll be … ” A blinding flash, a deafening roar, and then he was—

“Gawddammed!”

A
N ABRUPTLY OPENED DOOR
followed by a chill wind that swept into the bedroom roused Tom and Obedience Spivey from their sleep. Obedience, in her nightcap and bedclothes, was the first to notice the stranger standing in the bedroom doorway.

“Heaven protect us,” the woman exclaimed as she pulled the comforter up to her double chin. Her eyes grew wide and her breath fluttered as she struggled to regain her composure. Her husband rubbed the sleep from his eyes and finally managed to focus on the man in the greatcoat looming over them, a lamp in his hand. The yellow glare set Jesse’s chiseled features in stark relief. The interior of the mercantile was warm, thanks to a Franklin stove still glowing with red oak logs. Tendrils of steam began to rise from Jesse’s rain-soaked coat. Water dripped from the hem and left a puddle on the bedroom floor.

Edwards, Mississippi, consisted of a mercantile and a one-room train depot. Spivey’s mercantile furnished necessities for the plantation owners and for the farmers who populated the land between Vicksburg and Jackson. And when there were passengers for the railroad, Spivey hung a red lantern on a post by the tracks.

“Get the gun, Tom, get the gun!”

“Be quiet, woman, you’ll see me killed,” Tom snapped. He scratched at the white fringe of hair circling his bald pate like a snowy wreath. “I don’t have no money, mister. But take what you need from the shelves and leave us be.”

“I haven’t come to rob you,” Jesse explained. “It’s me, Tom. Jesse McQueen. I’ve stopped here often enough on my way to Vicksburg and back to Jackson.”

“Take what you need?” Obedience sat upright and glared at her husband. “And we have not one thing to spare. Hard as times are? I’m married to a coward.”

“Cease your jawing, woman. By gum, you carry on more’n a cat in heat.” Tom Spivey put on his spectacles and crawled out from under the comforter. A thin wiry man with a bandy-legged stance, he reached for his trousers and tucked his nightshirt into them as he buttoned them up. “Didn’t you hear the lad? He ain’t come to rob us. Why, it’s that nice lieutenant, the one who brung us them dried apples when you took sick.”

“Oh my,” Obedience exclaimed.

Tom Spivey glanced up to heaven and wagged his head, a long-suffering expression on his face, as he followed Jesse down the short narrow hall that opened onto the general store. The room smelled of leather and tobacco and chicory coffee brewing on the stove. Many of the shelves were bare, thanks to the Union blockade that had bottled up Confederate ports. But there were still some leather goods and bolts of cloth and nankeen pants and a few tins of meat and jars of canned fruits and sacks of flour. The pickle barrel was still half-full. And only a few days ago Tom had come by a packet of needles that the merchant considered more precious than gold. He intended to sell them individually and make a tidy profit.

“Lordy, you are a sight, boy,” Tom said. At fifty-nine, he called everyone not older than himself “boy.” He grabbed up the coffeepot and sloshed the bitter brown liquid into a tin cup that he had to hold by the rim because the metal handle was too hot. He took a sip and grimaced.

“Damn them Yankees. Keepin’ a man from his coffee ain’t no civilized way to fight a war.” He looked up as McQueen helped himself to a worn, woolen black cape and an empty flour sack.

“There’ll be a train coming through. I don’t know when exactly, but it’ll be Jackson bound. You’ll have to flag it down.”

“What for? Awful late for a train … ” Tom scratched at the salt-and-pepper stubble shading his chin. “You been samplin’ my muscadine wine afore you waked me?”

“Jefferson Davis is on that train.”

“Glory be!” Tom Spivey snapped to attention as if the president of the Confederacy were already standing over by the molasses candies.

“Northern agents have blown the track about a mile east of here.” Jesse placed a hand on the old man’s knobby shoulder. “Stop that train. Davis can wait here while the track is being repaired. They can tear up a section back here and swap it for what’s been damaged.”

“President Davis himself, stayin’ right here,” Tom Spivey recited, as if repetition would guarantee his good fortune. “President Davis comin’ here.”

“Just see that you stop the train. Tell them I’ve gone on ahead.”

“By gum, for President Davis I’ll hang both lanterns. I’ll stop that train, never you mind.” The merchant had become flush with excitement. He hurried behind the counter and pulled his coat from a wall peg. He kept an extra red-tinted lantern on one of the lower shelves. He picked it up along with a couple of matches.

“Mama! Get yourself dressed. We’re fixin’ to have President Davis stayin’ right here at Edwards.”

Obedience loosed a panic-stricken screech as she fought her way out of a tangle of blankets and comforter, excited and appalled by her husband’s announcement.

Tom Spivey turned to ask Jesse for more facts about the Union agents, but the gray-clad lieutenant had vanished into the cold and dark. The merchant scratched again at his stubbled chin and pondered the lieutenant’s strange behavior and sudden departure.

“He took my cape and that flour sack,” Tom Spivey muttered. “I wonder what for.”

Twenty-nine tons of iron and steel came driving through the snow flurries in a night as dark as a witch’s heart. The locomotive, affectionately called the BULL RUN BELLE by those it served, pulled a coal car, two troop cars (whose occupants were for the most part sleeping), the president’s private car, a freight car containing the president’s carriage and mare, and the mail car in which Colonel Henri Baptiste and two Confederate privates kept uneasy watch over Caitlin Brennan.

The steam whistle on the locomotive howled like a demon, and black smoke laced with sparks streamed from the iron smokestack as the train skirted the banks of Black Bayou a few miles west of Edwards. There were always plenty of deer on the fringe of the bayou and the engineer loosed another whistle blast to chase off any that might be on the tracks.

“What was that?” Bill Pike said, roused from sleep by the whistle. He was a young man of average height, with the lean solid build of a farmer. Tobit Bascomb, Pike’s companion and older by a year, grinned, showing a row of buckteeth.

“Just the devil gathering up his souls like a man picking cotton, only thing is, the devil does his ginning in hell.” Tobit Bascomb reached out and tugged Pike’s gray cap down over his eyes.

“Cut it out, Toby. It ain’t funny,” Pike complained. “You shouldn’t talk like that. Ol’ Scratch is liable to hear and come a-flying.”

“Why not? I ain’t got nothing to fear.” Bascomb chuckled. “I read the Good Book twiced a day and don’t curse or drink none.” He leaned forward, propped on the barrel of his rifle. “Pity the same cain’t be said for you.”

“Hogwash is what you’re saying.” Pike leaned back in his chair. He was satisfied he’d won the argument. But Bascomb continued to grin and stare at him. This was a warm place here by the stove, but Pike thought if he stayed much longer, he’d just have to up and wallop the bejesus out of Tobit Bascomb and that was a sure bet. No telling how such a commotion would set with the colonel. Better to back off and cool down, the private told himself. And with that in mind he stood and pulled his coat around himself and headed for the door.

“Where the hell are you going, Private Pike?” Henri Baptiste said, sitting on the edge of a narrow cot at the opposite end of the mail car. Across from him, her wrists joined by shackle irons, Caitlin Brennan pretended to sleep, bowed forward over a desk, her head cradled on her folded arms.

“That chicory coffee’s gone right through me, Colonel. I need to … ” The soldier glanced at the woman and then crooked a thumb toward the door. The tail end of the mail car sported a narrow, railed platform. A man could stand there out of the wind and empty his bladder.

“Go on,” Baptiste grumbled.

“Thankee, Colonel.” Pike made his way to the rear of the car, unlatched the door, and stepped outside, closing the door behind him. The noise of the engine, the rattle of iron wheels upon the iron rails, the droning of the wind immediately surrounded him. He gasped as the cold started to sink into his bones. The night hung black and ominous about him. For one brief second Pike thought he saw a riderless horse racing alongside the mail car. He rubbed his eyes, peered once more, and saw nothing. The young man began to question the wisdom of unbuttoning his fly. Finally he decided to wait. Maybe he could hold out till the train rolled into Jackson. The issue resolved, Pike turned to reenter the car and gasped in horror. A monstrous apparition had materialized between him and the door. The frightened soldier staggered against the rail guard and started to cry out, but a solid right fist clipped him on the jaw and knocked him backward over the rail. Pike struck the tracks, was knocked senseless, rolled down the embankment, and was lost to the night.

Jesse straightened the flour sack covering his head, adjusting the eyeholes so he could see properly. His hands were numb from the cold and there was still much to be accomplished. He tucked his hands under his arms for warmth. He had to be able to handle a gun if he wanted to rescue Caitlin. Baptiste wasn’t about to hand her over without a fight. Jesse had no way of telling how many men were guarding Caitlin, but he counted on the element of surprise and hoped his plan didn’t backfire in his face.

“I know you are not asleep,” Baptiste muttered in the ear of the woman slouched over the brakeman’s desk. He placed a hand on the back of her head and stroked her hair. Caitlin bolted upright. Her sudden movement caught the Creole by surprise and he jumped back and pulled a revolver from his belt. Caitlin smiled into the barrel of the navy Colt and took pleasure in having startled him.

“You’ll be laughing out of the other side of your mouth when I bring you to Richmond.” Baptiste kept the revolver trained on the woman. Looking into his wild eyes, Caitlin Brennan thought he might actually shoot her dead. “Yes, to Richmond. Folks there have no patience for spies. You’ll make a pretty corpse.” He was no longer the dashing Creole. His uniform was rumpled, the coat unbuttoned. His white hair needed brushing. The odor of brandy clung to his breath.

“Someone needs to talk some sense into you, darlin’,” Caitlin told him in her best Rosalie DuToit drawl. “Maybe it ought to be me.” She shrugged and gave him an inviting grin. It was time to stop waiting for a rescue and help herself. She might not have another opportunity. A change of tactics was called for. If she could lay a hand on his gun, only two men stood between her and freedom. “I’ve fought it long enough. If a girl’s got to surrender her honor, it might as well be to someone worthwhile.”