Only the Gallant (17 page)

Jesse shielded his eyes as he looked out across the meadow. The snow seemed strewn with flakes of gold. The effect was dazzling. He heard footsteps behind him and turned as Beckah, her dark pretty features beaming with happiness, came up to hug him. She halted, thinking her behavior improper. Then she tossed propriety aside and hugged him anyway. Afterward she shyly retreated a few steps.

“Thank you, sir, for helpin’ us and givin’ me your blanket. It wears mighty warm,” she said. And looking around, she sighed. “It’s all so beautiful. Like angels been playin’ here.”

“You’re welcome, Miss Beckah.” Jesse grinned. She trotted happily back to the horse that Tommy Lee was leading out of the barn and leaped up astride the animal. Then Tommy Lee mounted behind her. He walked the dun over to Jesse.

“You sure ’nuff is a funny kind of Reb. But if you ever need me for somethin’, you can look me up in Cairo.” He held out his hand and Jesse shook it. “I’ll remember that. Good luck, Tommy Lee.” Jesse noticed the boy gazing in apprehension at the woods on the edge of the meadow. The eleven-year-old had used up about all of his courage fleeing from Burlock. “Nothing out there but trees, son,” Jesse added. “And freedom.”

Tommy Lee nodded and walked the animal out of the barnyard and into the fallow fields. Caitlin told them to wait for her as she emerged with her own mount a few steps behind.

Jesse saw the worry in her expression and met her halfway. She had a revolver and a shotgun, both of which she knew how to use, and there was hardtack and coffee to last the few days they’d be on the road.

“You’ll make it fine,” he said reassuringly.

Anger flashed in her sea-green eyes. “I’m not worried about me. You’re the one who’ll be standing in the shadow of the gallows.”

“I’ve been there before.” Jesse kicked at the snow. He didn’t much like the way she was saying good-bye.

“Come with me, Jesse.”

“I still might be of use here.”

“You’re staying for that girl, for Miss Ophelia Tyrone. She’ll get you killed, you softheaded idiot.” Caitlin scowled and clenched her fists.

“I’m staying because it’s what I have to do. And you know it.” He patted her arm. “But I’m touched that you care.”

“Oh, you impossible, arrogant, bonebrained … ” She stamped her foot, pulled him to her, and kissed him, then whirled around and climbed into the saddle.

“You’re one of a kind, Caitlin,” Jesse said, bewildered by her behavior. “And that’s good because I doubt I could handle two of you.” He brushed back his black hair and straightened his hat. Caitlin Brennan was an armful, for a fact.

“Watch yourself, Jesse McQueen.”

Jesse nodded and mounted the roan. “With Baptiste dead, I haven’t an enemy in the world,” he said.

His bravura struck a false note. “Not an enemy save the whole Confederate Army,” said Caitlin. “And everyone in Vicksburg and especially Captain Bon Tyrone and his sister.” She leaned toward him and her eyes softened. “What do you think would happen if they learned the truth?”

“Tell Abbot that the ironclad the Rebs are building upriver is just a bluff. It’s wooden-hulled and armed with Quaker cannons. Porter’s gunboats have nothing to fear. It poses no threat. Do you understand?”

Caitlin sighed. She had tried her best. And in a way, despite her Concern, she was proud of him for staying. Back in New Orleans, a lifetime ago it seemed, she had thought a romp in bed had taught her everything about Jesse McQueen. But the events of the past night and his determination to remain behind proved her estimation of him shallow indeed. Maybe someday there would be time. …

She turned her horse and rode toward the runaway slaves she would lead out of bondage. She was glad for the journey ahead. It took her mind off farewell.

Jesse watched them ride away and for one brief moment he had the urge to follow, to ride far and fast and put this terrible conflict behind him. He resisted the temptation.

“Hey!” Jesse shouted to the riders as they reached the trees. As his voice rang out he could see Caitlin turn and stop to face him across the frozen expanse. “Merry Christmas!” His voice reverberated in the still distance, returned to him, and joined, as if in chorus, with Caitlin’s “Merry Christmas.” The two voices lingered on the wintry air until they merged and became one “Merry Christmas” to warm a valiant rider on his solitary way.

S
ERGEANT DOC STARK, WITH
a soul like Lucifer’s and a heart like molten lead, led his skirmishers up from the banks of the Mississippi River and over a ridge topped with red oaks and hickory trees then down through the woods on the other side. With Milo and Titus to left and right, Doc rode at a gallop and burst free of the timbered slope. Howling in triumph astride a bay gelding, he vaulted a thicket of wild grapes and charged into the farmyard at the base of the ridge.

It was a pleasant home site with a sturdy whitewashed two-story house whose porch needed a fresh coat of paint. There was a garden out back, a barn and hog pen set off to one side, and a creek flowing fifty feet from the porch steps with pastureland beyond. It was the kind of place most men only dream of owning, secluded and quiet and safe … on any day but this one, May 2, 1863.

Doc waved his hat to the woman in the doorway of the house. She wore a simple green dress, her hair tucked up inside a straw bonnet adorned with a yellow ribbon.

“Compliments of the Army of the West,” Doc called out as the two dozen skirmishers fanned out across the farm. Several of the soldiers headed straight for the meadow, where three cows, several calves, and a mean-tempered old bull grazed in the shade of the sweet-gum trees.

“What do you want here?” the woman called out. She sounded worried and had a right to be. She was a plain, solid-looking woman, narrow in the chest, broad at the hips, and defiant in her bearing.

“Looking for Rebels,” Doc said.

“Heard a Reb cavalry was hiding somewhere around here,” Milo said, wiping a hairy hand across his beard. He grinned at the two children crowding the doorway to peek past their mother’s skirt.

Titus reined in his skittish mare by the hog pens. “I found ’em, Doc. Looks like these Rebs are fixing to spring an ambush.”

“You check the barn. I’ll stop Johnny Reb,” Doc replied, and trotted across the yard to the split rail fence that confined the hogs. As it was late spring, the sows were beginning to show some fat, but they wouldn’t be prime until late summer. Only Doc didn’t have until late summer. And if the hogs were a might on the lean side, at least there were plenty of them. He hauled out his Colt as Milo joined him.

“So that’s what a Reb looks like. Darn near good enough to eat.” He leveled his Colt revolving rifle. The two guns thundered in the yard and the pigs squealed in terror and tried to run from the terrible noise that dropped one after another, but the pen was their prison and their doom. When the last of the gunshots echoed down the hills, even the piglets were bloody and still.

“Stop it! Stop it!” the woman on the porch shouted. She had ducked inside and returned with a single-barrel shotgun. She stood on the edge of the porch and aimed the weapon right at Doc. “Leave us be, you blue hellions.”

“Hold on now, missy. I admire a lady with fire,” Doc said. He was stalling for time while trying to remember whether or not he had fired all six rounds at the goddamn hogs. “We’re just poor hungry soldiers sent to gather food. Why, me and the lads are darn near faint from hunger.”

The farm woman eyed Stark’s gut that strained the buttons of his blue woolen shirt. “I doubt you’ve ever fainted from hunger a day in your life. Now you’ve done your harm and you’ll ride off or be buried here. I doubt your Yankee bones will rest easy in Mississippi soil.”

“Let me go!” A boy’s voice rang out from the barn. Moments later Titus Connolly reappeared. He walked his horse out from the barn and continued over into the barnyard, followed every step of the way by an irate gander who squawked and spread its wings and extended its long neck as if preparing to nip at the horse.

Titus held a towheaded ten-year-old boy under his left arm. The lad struggled against the man’s grip. He flailed away at the arm encircling his chest and kicked at the horse, but to no avail. Titus’s slight stature was misleading. He was wiry and strong and no mere child was about to break his hold. He tightened his grip and the boy groaned as the pressure increased on his ribs. The rest of the troopers paused to watch. Titus halted alongside Doc, keeping just enough distance to the side to be out of the spread of buckshot if the woman fired.

“You got your knife, cousin Titus?” Doc asked.

Titus grinned. “Right here.” He raised his right hand. The sunlight glinted off the double-edged steel. He placed the blade against the boy’s throat.

“Good. I’m gonna count to three. If Momma here don’t put down that squirrel killer by the time I’m finished, you slit the boy’s throat.”

“Ear to ear just like skinning a rabbit,” Titus said. He licked his lips and smiled. He nodded to Doc and then to Milo, who, despite his brutish nature, seemed appalled at the suggestion. It struck a sour note and he wanted no part of such a deed. He wouldn’t stop it, but he wouldn’t watch, either. Milo backed his horse away.

“One,” Doc solemnly counted, his features impassive, his mouth a thin straight slash beneath his black bushy mustache. He never had to say “two.” The boy’s mother tossed the shotgun into the yard. It landed hard enough to trigger the weapon. Nothing happened. She had confronted them with an unloaded gun.

“Let him go. Please,” she pleaded.

“You’ve got grit, I’ll say that for you,” Doc Stark gruffly conceded. He respected that quality in man or woman. So she had held him at bay with an empty shotgun. That was rich. At a wave of Stark’s hand Titus loosed his hold on his prisoner. The boy hit the ground running and didn’t stop until he’d reached his mother’s side. Milo looked relieved.

“Appears cousin Milo’s getting a might soft of heart.”

“You shut up, Titus. Hell, you’d have liked to slit that boy’s throat.”

“Why wait and have to face him when he’s old enough to carry a gun. Dead, he’s a good Reb.” Titus rubbed his forehead.

“I don’t see any sense in talking on it.” Milo refused to argue the point or be goaded into a quarrel.

“You’ve changed, Milo,” Titus muttered. “Damn if you ain’t taking all the fun out of this war.”

“It quit being fun when we buried Emory,” Milo retorted. The big man glowered at his cousin. “Then you never cared much for Emory, did you now?”

“Hell no,” Titus said. “But that don’t matter. I stand with family.” His eyes narrowed. “I’d hate to think you’re turning agin’ me.” Milo, for all his size and bearlike strength, wanted no part of his cousin. Titus was as dangerous as a coral snake, striking without warning, quick and silent and deadly.

“I ain’t turning on you.”

“You two quit your jawing,” Doc called back to them. He broke down his Colt and replaced the spent cylinder with a loaded spare he kept in his coat pocket. “You find something we can use to haul those pigs back to camp?”

“Wagon in the barn,” said Titus.

“Good.” Things were going well, Doc thought. “Take three men and get those hogs loaded before they spoil. Put your knife to use and butcher one out. We can cook it up over the fire.”

“What fire?” Titus glanced around, puzzled.

Doc reached behind his saddle and untied a hickory branch from the strips that held it in place. One end of the branch was wrapped in an oil-soaked cloth. He lit the torch and trotted past the farm woman, who filled the air with protests. Her other children, two girls, scampered out of the farmhouse and ran across the yard to clutch at their mother’s apron. Doc tossed the torch through the first window he came to. In minutes, flames sprang up to devour the house from within. Doc rode back to his cousin. “That fire.”

L
OOKING UPON THE TYRONE
plantation from the emerald twilight beneath the towering red oaks, Jesse McQueen delved deep into his memory and spoke aloud for the benefit of the fluttering butterflies and red-winged blackbirds.

“‘Macbeth shall never vanquished be until Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane hill shall come against him.’” His father had insisted he read the classics. A worn collection of Shakespeare had become Jesse’s favorite book. Every time he approached the Tyrone plantation, Dunsinane, the great tragedy of
Macbeth
never failed to come to mind. But it wasn’t for literature alone that Jesse delayed his arrival at the plantation. The drive he had abandoned skirted a cotton field and led right up to the front porch, with its stately white columns and ivy-covered rock chimneys on either end of the two-story house. The path continued around the house and branched. The right fork led to the barn and stables. The left fork wound behind the house, past the summer kitchen, and down to the slaves’ cabins, arranged in an orderly row on the far side of a three-acre garden.

But Jesse kept to the woods and followed a deer trail until he reached a clearing about a hundred yards from the plantation house. He walked his horse over to an oddly shaped hickory whose gnarled trunk set it apart from the other trees in the thicket. He glanced around to ensure his privacy, dismounted, and working quickly, dug a hole at the base of the twisted hickory. He removed a leather notebook from inside his coat, wrapped it in oilskin, and placed it in the freshly dug hole, then covered it over with dirt and decaying leaves. Whether entering Jackson or Vicksburg or paying a call on Ophelia here at Dunsinane, he always took care to hide the notebook. It was a necessary precaution. The drawings of fortifications around Vicksburg and Jackson and the calculated troop strengths for the entire delta could get him hung. A twig popped behind him. Jesse whirled and palmed his navy Colt. For a moment the tableau held. Jesse McQueen crouched, gun in hand, hammer pulled back, his finger curled around the trigger. A red fox, rooted in place, one white paw lifted above the brittle leaves that had concealed the twig. Keen eyes bore into the man it had surprised in the clearing. Jesse stood and returned the Colt to its holster. At the same instant, the fox became a fleeting red blur that vanished behind a patch of yellow wood sorrel that flourished where the sunlight lingered longest in the clearing.