Only the Gallant (20 page)

“Even a preacher,” Jesse said.

“Especially a preacher,” Abbot replied. He removed his spectacles and cleaned them with a kerchief from his coat pocket. He leaned against the closed gate. The mare behind him looked up then returned her attention to the mound of hay Jesse had left in her stall. A couple of moths began to circle the lantern, fluttering in ever-tightening spirals that brought them closer to death. “You have done well, Jesse. From what I can see you’ve got more than I ever expected. These notes will be invaluable to Grant.” He knelt in the dirt and with a bent horseshoe nail traced a path in the hard-packed stable floor. “Here’s the Mississippi and right here Vicksburg.” He marked an “X” on the river line. Abbot looked up and found Jesse watching him in stony silence. “Grant’s crossed downriver about forty miles or so. He aims to live off the land and sweep up to Jackson, dislodge the Confederates, and then approach Vicksburg from the east.” He drew a diagonal line from the river to Jackson, indicating Grant’s intended route and reeling off names like Port Gibson, Willow Springs, Rocky Springs, and Fourteen Mile Creek.

“What if Johnston combines his forces with Pemberton and waits for Grant in Vicksburg with both armies?” Jesse asked, hooking his thumbs in his belt.

“Then we’ll have hell for breakfast,” Abbot said. He stood and tossed the nail into the cold black forge. “If Johnston moves toward Vicksburg, Grant will have to change his course of action. There’s the rub, my young friend. We have to know what General Johnston decides to do. And there’s Bragg in Tennessee. He might push south to combine armies. What are his plans?”

“That’s where I come in,” Jesse wearily interjected. He was tired of the pretense and the subterfuge and longed to fight and die, if need be, in the uniform of his country.

“You are the only one who can help us.” Abbot walked across the aisle and placed his hand on Jesse McQueen’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, son. You’ve more than earned the right to quit this game. And if I am asking too much, then ride along with me and we’ll find Grant together. And old Unconditional Surrender can take his chances and play the cards he’s dealt.” He stepped back and tried to look as earnest as possible. Jesse wasn’t fooled for an instant.

“I’ll stay. When Johnston makes up his mind, he’ll need to inform Pemberton in Vicksburg, and I’m the best courier he has,” Jesse said. “As soon as I learn something I’ll come looking for you. Twenty thousand Yankees ought to be easy enough to find.”

“It’s forty thousand. Sherman’s joined him. But just you be careful,” Abbot replied. He was relieved to hear McQueen’s decision. But he had to caution the young agent. “Things being as they are, you could get yourself shot by our own troops.”

Jesse shrugged. “Hell, Major, if it was easy, everybody’d want to be a spy.”

The door to the barn swung open, startling both men as Ophelia appeared from out of the night. She had a shawl wrapped around her shoulders and held a small hand lantern to light the way.

“The mare looks fine,” Jesse said. “Just a bit of rock lodged under the shoe. Nothing to worry about now. It made the hoof a bit tender is all.”

“Very well. I shan’t worry,” Abbot said. “Bless my soul, child. You should be resting after that sumptuous repast instead of wandering about at night.” He continued on down the aisle and bowed to the young woman. Then he glanced back at Jesse. “Thank you again, Lieutenant McQueen, I can rest assured now.”

“Best you be wary of Spider Boudreaux, Reverend Pettibone,” Ophelia said.

“Oh, indeed.” Abbot tried not to look alarmed. What did she mean?

“He is a notorious cheat at checkers,” she told him.

Abbott relaxed and chuckled. “I am forewarned. A man can’t know too much about his opponent.” He hurried through the door. Ophelia stepped aside and watched him go. Jesse brushed his foot across Abbot’s crude map, left behind in the dirt.

By the time he arrived at the barn door, Jesse had recovered his composure. “And what brings you out here, Miss Ophelia?” he asked. All the good smells of baking clung to her clothes and mingled with the scent of lilac water on her neck and behind her ears.

“I thought we might walk together,” she said. She put her arm in his.

“Sounds like a splendid idea,” he said. They left the stable arm in arm and strolled out into the warm spring night. The chickens in the henhouse fluttered and seemed to sense someone was afoot. Hogs watched them from behind the slats of their pen, blunt faces frozen in anticipation. They were hoping for kitchen slops, certainly an infrequent feast these days with Ophelia cooking only for herself and the elderly slaves that had been left behind.

As Ophelia and Jesse rounded the garden a loping shadow detached itself from the edge of the forest and started toward them. Jesse spotted it and momentarily stiffened before realizing it was only a hound on its way up from the cabins of the field hands. The hound lifted its head, caught and identified Ophelia’s scent, and came on through a blizzard of fireflies to snuffle at her outstretched hand and receive a scratch behind the ears. The hound’s unerring nose caught the scent of a rabbit in the garden and he took off like a rocket, baying as he bounded over the butter beans and young stalks of corn.

“Get him, Mose,” Jesse muttered as he listened to the sounds of the chase resounding in the darkness. “Give that old blood a critter to chase and he’s happy.”

“Dogs are simple. They’re lucky. It doesn’t take much,” Ophelia agreed. Standing in the night, well away from the glare of the lantern-lit windows, she began to relax. The plantation house had become for her the eyes and ears of her older brother, watching her every move, eavesdropping on her intimate conversations. The night and distance ensured her privacy. “Bon thinks you might have helped that woman spy escape,” she matter-of-factly said.

“What do you think?” Jesse coolly replied.

“I don’t want to know.” She suddenly turned in Jesse’s arms and kissed him. He was glad to reciprocate, but an awkward discomfort tempered his passion. He enjoyed the moment, but not the accompanying guilt.

“What was that for?” he gently asked as she rested her head against his shoulder.

“My way of saying good-bye,” she answered in a hushed tone more suitable for church. Then again, she was standing beneath the littering vault of heaven itself, so why not speak with reverence? The world was changing all around her. Nothing would ever be the same again, including this night.

Jesse’s heart was filled with all the words his devotion to duty would not allow him to speak. As she had told him once, the word came back to haunt him. Someday, yes, maybe someday.

He pressed his face against her auburn hair and held her close and whispered, “Good-bye.”

Jesse and Ophelia remained in one another’s arms. Transfixed by the magical display of earth and sky, they might have been lovers, poised between fireflies and the stars.

I
T WAS MORNING, THE
ninth of May, and Jesse McQueen had been dreaming he was once more standing in the fields of Dunsinane with Ophelia in his arms, when a Confederate sergeant stopped outside his tent near the corrals on the outskirts of Jackson. The sergeant roused him from his sleep and informed him he was wanted in the command headquarters of General Joe Johnston within the half hour.

Jesse pulled on his boots and stumbled out of his tent. He blinked and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and studied for a moment the men around him as they crawled from tents, lit their cook fires, dressed, and grumbled about the various officers whose sole purpose was to make the lives of their subordinates miserable. Jesse buckled his gunbelt around his narrow waist and settled his sweat-stained gray hat on his head. Johnston’s couriers were quartered together in a cluster of tents near a corral and a gutted barn that had been commandeered from its former owner for the duration of the Confederates’ stay in the vicinity of Jackson. Johnston kept a half-dozen men attached to his headquarters, ready to ride at the drop of a hat, night or day, in fair weather or foul.

Two of their number had been dispatched to Richmond with reports for President Davis. Another was up in Tennessee looking for General Bragg, and a fourth was down with a twisted knee. Jesse glanced toward the only other courier besides himself who was ready and able to ride if required, but the officer, a fellow lieutenant, was snoring in his tent.

Jesse headed for the corral, whistled softly, and the roan broke from the rest of the herd and dutifully trotted over to be rewarded with a pat on the neck and gentle words of praise.

“This might be the day, old friend. I sense it in the air.” Jesse climbed into the corral, took a bridle he’d left on the fence, and slipped it over the stallion’s head. He saddled and led the horse out of the corral and around the remains of the barn. To the east the sun appeared on the horizon like a dipper of molten gold that spilled its contents across the sprawling city of Jackson, with its factories and warehouses, the capitol building and houses of state government, foundries and machine shops, arsenals and public stores. Church spires jutted skyward against a backdrop of vermilion and amber. Ruby clouds gradually paled, became pink then cotton white in the dawn of a new day.

General Johnston had bivouacked his army in defensive positions east and south of the capital. With only six thousand men, there was little he could do to defend the city until General Bragg dispatched reinforcements from the Army of the Tennessee.

Jesse had expected those reinforcements to arrive any day now. Once “Old Joe” Johnston had a substantial force at his command, he might well be able to join with Pemberton and stop General U. S. Grant in his tracks. Jesse’s mind wrestled with the possibility of such a disaster as he followed the wheel-rutted road to Johnston’s headquarters in the home of a family friend, Eliza Farley. Farley, a widow, had built her house outside Jackson a stone’s throw off the Vicksburg road. Jesse had only met her once but found her to be a sweet-tempered woman with a hearty appetite for life. Her husband had been a friend of Johnston’s before the war. After his death, the widow had sold off all her land holdings and retired from any of her social obligations. She had moved out of Jackson to this small but comfortable cottage, though she spent most of her time now traveling to see her sons, one of whom was in Petersburg and the other in Charleston, and her daughter, who was managing alone with three children on a plantation outside of Meridian. Two weeks ago Farley had turned her house over to Johnston and his staff and left to join her daughter.

The cottage was set back a dozen yards off the Vicksburg road. Confederate infantry was bivouacked throughout the area. Three hundred cavalrymen were also stationed in the vicinity. Jesse had counted troops from Alabama and Georgia and several from Mississippi, including the hard-riding, hard-fighting hellions of the First Mississippi Volunteers. He was surprised to see them back so soon. Tyrone had been dispatched to reconnoiter Grant’s army and keep Johnston informed of the federals’ progress.

The Gray Fox and his men had been anxious to harass the seemingly unstoppable tide of Union troops marching up through the heartland of Dixie. But Johnston was holding them all in check, unwilling to chance any losses without a battle plan. Resigned merely to play watchdog to the advancing federal army, Tyrone had evidently abandoned his mission to make a report.

Jesse turned off the road as the scent of wood-smoke, frying salt pork, and boiling chicory coffee filled the air. He started up the drive toward the widow’s house nestled in a grove of pecan trees. Several officers were congregated on the covered porch, two of whom Jesse immediately recognized. General Joe Johnston was seated in a cane-back rocking chair, a cup of coffee in his hands. He appeared to be absorbed in the opinions of his junior officers, one of whom wore a cocked-brim gray hat sporting a black plume. Captain Bon Tyrone sat with his back to the drive, one leg crooked over the railing. A major and two other captains had also arrived to meet with the general who had roused them from their sleep for breakfast and this early-morning council of war.

Besides Tyrone and the general, Jesse McQueen noticed that another courier, Lieutenant Abram Mitchell, had arrived from Tennessee. Had Bragg answered Johnston’s call for reinforcements? Mitchell appeared to have been excused from the council, for he descended the porch, gathered up the reins of his lathered mount, and proceeded down the drive toward Jesse. A few moments later, the two couriers drew abreast of each other. Mitchell touched the brim of his battered gray cap.

“Glad you made it safe, Abram.”

“Careful, Jesse. Old Joe’s in a powerful bad mood,” Mitchell replied, dabbing the sweat from his sunburned features with a swath of cloth torn from an old shirt. His uniform was caked with dust from his ride. “Bragg ain’t sendin’ doodly-squat! The general’s fit to be tied.”

The two men continued on past each other, their interchange ended.

Bon Tyrone stood and leaned his husky frame against the wall of the house as Jesse approached the porch and saluted the general. Johnston nodded and then continued speaking to the other officers on the porch.

“There’s real coffee on the stove inside. It will probably be the last we taste for a while, unless I can impose on Captain Tyrone to raid the Yankee supply lines up north.” The officers chuckled and filed inside the house, where a black servant showed them to the kitchen. Bon lingered outside on the porch. He and Jesse exchanged civilities. It disturbed Jesse how Ophelia’s brother seemed so cool toward him of late. If indeed Bon suspected his loyalty, he was unwilling to charge him in public without proof.

General Johnston glanced at an orderly who had remained at the opposite end of the porch, bent over a lap desk, his pen scratching across the paper, dipping into a brass inkwell shaped like a teardrop with a flat base.

“Have you finished that dispatch, Lieutenant?”

The orderly rose from his chair and brought the hastily transcribed dispatch over to the general. He placed the lap desk in Johnston’s hands. The officer quickly scanned the dispatch and nodded. “Very good,” he said, and signed the bottom of the page, folded it, wrapped it in oilskin, and tucked it in a leather pouch. He stood and tossed the pouch to Jesse McQueen.