Love and War: The Coltrane Saga, Book 1 (35 page)

Sam and the others brought Travis up from the ravine and laid him on the ground. The young doctor, or assistant, as Kitty decided was all he could be, knelt down. She did, too, fighting to keep from gagging at the stench. Travis had been soaked in the discharge from the horse’s entrails as they had wallowed under the first impact. The assistant was pulling out a knife to rip open the uniform, baring the wound from thigh to knee.

He examined it quickly, then ordered in a high-pitched voice, “I’ll have to operate here. Build up a fire…”

“Hell, no, you aren’t cutting off my leg,” Travis raised his head to look at him, and Kitty saw that his face was smeared with blood, his eyes glowing with the intense pain he must be feeling.

“Well, that’s my decision to make,” the assistant snapped. “Do you want to die? Men, hold him down. I don’t have time to argue.”

No one moved.

“Did you hear me? I said hold him down! I don’t have any chloroform. He’s still bleeding. If we don’t act now, he’ll bleed to death…”

Still no one moved. The nervous-looking young man got to his feet, dancing impatiently, fists clenched at his sides. “Damn you, hold this man down. Build up that fire. We’re supposed to save lives when we can—not deliberately stand by and allow them to die!”

Kitty turned to see that Travis was watching her intently, his eyes now burning into hers with an unspoken message. What was he privately trying to convey to her? That he would rather be dead than spend his life on a wooden leg?

“Kitty, examine my leg and tell me what you think,” he spoke quietly, no evidence of pain or apprehension in his voice. He was quite calm. “And whatever you say, I’ll go along with.”

“What? How dare you pass over my judgment for that of a woman!” The assistant’s face was turning a fiery red in the early morning light. “How dare you? How dare you? I forbid this.”

“Fuck you, jackass!” Sam shoved him aside roughly. He nodded to Kitty. “Go on. Do what the Captain wants.”

Kitty probed her fingers into the gaping flesh.
Look for the artery,
Doc had told her.
Look for the artery and see if it’s severed. If it is, then there’s no hope
but
to cut.

There did not seem to be deep, penetrating damage to the muscle and tissue, and the blood that was oozing forth was not spurting. Of course, if it had been, and the artery had been severed, there was a good chance he would have bled to death by now. So it appeared that the artery was still intact. The next thing was the extent of the damage. If the flesh was hopelessly torn and shredded, the bone shattered and splintered, then the leg would have to come off.

“Give me more light,” she whispered feverishly. She could feel Travis wincing with pain, but he did not cry out. She parted the torn, mangled flesh, saw the exposed bone of the thigh. Intact. Not injured except for a slight crack. Fracture. That was what Doc said it was when the bone is found to be cracked, not broken.

A fresh flow of blood was now coming from the wound. “Lint,” she said to Sam, who was hovering nearby. “Get me some lint and some material for a tourniquet. Then we’re going to suture and put the leg in a splint.”

“You’ve got to cut that leg off!” The assistant was dancing up and down in his anger once again. “I forbid this. I’m the doctor in charge here.”

He yanked at Kitty’s arm as she fumbled in the bag she had brought, and that’s when Sam sent his fist driving into his face. He fell backward onto the ground, and Sam pointed his finger at him. “Now you get the hell out of here. This woman knows more by instinct, and just plain givin’ a damn about savin’ lives, than you’ll ever learn from a book.”

Travis’s head fell back, a grateful, relieved smile on his lips. Kitty worked feverishly, mopping up the blood, stitching the torn flesh together as best she could. She sent the men into the woods to search for something with which to make a splint, then she told Sam to get Andy and have him bring a stretcher. “We’ve got to get him back to the hospital where we can keep a watch on him. If the Confederates are going to overrun us, then we’ve got to be prepared to retreat.”

At that, Travis opened his eyes and grinned, that cocky, arrogant grin that she hated. “Hey, Sam, did you hear the lady? She said ‘us’—like she’s one of
us
now.”

“Well, damnit, Captain, she just saved your leg. Don’t that mean she ain’t mad at us anymore?”

They both laughed, and Kitty stiffened, glaring down at Travis as she said, “It only means that I don’t hold to cutting off a man’s leg,
any
man’s leg, if it can be saved. I still hate you with everything within me, Travis Coltrane, and don’t you forget it.”

“And I still don’t give a damn
how
you feel!” He snapped back at her. “Just get me out of here before you decide to show your true colors and cut my throat…”

She was able to laugh, to taunt him. “You aren’t going to be giving anybody orders for quite a while, Captain, because that wound is going to keep you down. If the Confederates do come you just might be left behind and taken prisoner, and then you’ll know how I’ve felt all these months.”

“Maybe the other Southern women will treat a Yankee kinder than you. Maybe they aren’t so hypocritical about their feelings.”

“Hypocritical? I’ve never made any pretense of how I felt about you.”

The stretcher-bearers arrived. They lifted Travis up, and he gritted his teeth against the pain. “No need to be gentle with him,” Kitty quipped, following along behind. “You couldn’t hurt him if you tried.”

Travis raised his head, trying to look back at her. “Just wait till I get on my feet. You need a good sound thrashing, Kitty Wright, and I’ll see that you get it.”

Sam chuckled, and Kitty shot a sideways glance at him. “Just what do you think is so funny? You saw how I saved his leg. That young doctor’s assistant didn’t know what he was doing. If I hadn’t been around, he would have cut that leg right off, and what thanks do I get? He threatens to beat me!”

“I’m laughing because the two of you are ridiculous. Both of you are so goldarned headstrong and stubborn that you refuse to admit that you fell in love with each other a long time ago.”

It was Kitty’s turn to laugh. The idea was absurd. No one could possibly know how much she hated that man moaning on the stretcher. No one could realize how she wanted to slap that smug, arrogant grin right off his face. Love? The idea was absurd—ridiculous.

When they reached the hospital area, Dr. Gordon was waiting for them, the angry assistant standing beside him. “Just who in hell gave you the authority to override my assistant?” he roared indignantly. “He said amputate, and that’s what should have been done. You have no right…no authority. I understand you’re a Confederate prisoner. I think it’s time you were sent to prison.”

“I think it’s time everyone shut up and let me have some peace,” Travis snapped as the stretcher-bearers set him down on the ground. “It’s my leg, and I said it wasn’t coming off. As for her, she’s
my
prisoner, and don’t
you
go thinking you’ve got any right to say what’s to be done with her. Now if you want to examine my leg, I think you’ll find she did the right thing. And I’m going to ask General Grant to look into your assistant’s qualifications, because there’s no damn telling how many arms and legs he’s chopped off because he was too stupid to know of anything else to do to try and save them.”

Sam seemed to be able to do more to calm Travis Coltrane than anyone else. He talked both to Travis and to the surgeon, and finally it was agreed that Kitty would go back into the tent and work as an assistant. The battle was raging. There was no time for arguing among themselves.

The air hung heavy with the odor of sulphur. It was a cloudy day, and made worse by the sun being shrouded from view by smoke and gas. The Confederates were bombarding. Many of the Federals, Kitty noted, were walking around dazed, eyes glassy, unable to speak except in monosyllables. Some were so addled by the horrors they had witnessed that they could not speak at all, merely sat and stared straight ahead, not seeing anything. Many men were lost from their regiments. Everything was a mass of confusion.

Day turned to night, then Kitty lost track of time. She wondered vaguely how Travis was getting along, not because she cared, she told herself, but merely to reaffirm the correctness of her diagnosis in the field that his leg should be saved. It didn’t matter otherwise. Sam Bucher was out of his mind. Love Travis Coltrane? She’d sooner love the devil himself.

Word had come that General Robert E. Lee’s army had broken the Federal lines at Gaine’s Mill. McClellan ordered his army to retire to Harrison’s Landing, the Federal supply base on the James River. Kitty was moved along with the retreating forces. Lee’s troops tried again and again to destroy the entire Federal army, but after hard fighting at a place called Savage Station on June 29, 1862, and Frayser’s Farm on June 30th, White Oak Swamp the same day, and Malvern Hill the first day of July, McClellan was able to safely reach Harrison’s Landing and the protection of a Federal river fleet. The dream of the north capturing Richmond had ended.

Kitty remained behind the lines, working in the hospital, but the news drifted in, along with more and more casualties, that General John Pope was moving overland from Washington with a newly formed army—his target was Richmond. Then Lee shifted his army northward to block him, and on August 9th, Jackson was able to check Pope’s lead elements at Cedar Run, a few miles south of Culpepper, then he swept around the Federal right flank and captured Pope’s all-important supply base at Manassas.

“We’re getting out,” Sam came to Kitty one night and told her. ‘We’re getting our pants beat off, and we’re pulling back. The Captain isn’t in any shape to stand and fight, and he refuses to be moved with the other wounded men to Washington. Besides, Grant and McClellan both know that Travis is the best danged scout they got, and as soon as he’s on his feet again, he’ll be out again. We’ve had some new men assigned to us, and as soon as we can get our gear together, we’re moving out.”

“I’d rather stay with the hospital wagons,” she protested. “I don’t want to go with Travis and his band of cutthroats.”

“Now, Kitty,” he chided her. “There’s no point in arguing about it. Travis sent me to get you ready to go, and you know when his mind’s made up, there’s no changing it. You ought to know how it is, because you’re just as stubborn. Now let’s go.”

“Only if Andy goes, too.”

“He’s already with the Captain, helping to load him into a wagon. Now get moving.”

There was nothing she could do but go with him. But where? To what wilderness were they headed now? Why couldn’t Travis stay and fight with the regiment? Why did he have to have a special band of men assigned to him just so they could get out and roam the countryside?

There were fourteen of them sitting on horses around the small wagon. And Kitty did not like the looks of any of them. Burly, grizzly, rough, mean—there was nothing nice she could say about any of them. None of their uniforms matched, and they were all dirty and blood-stained. And she didn’t like the way their eyes raked over her, either, resting insolently on her breasts. She was glad she wore a loose-fitting shirt and baggy trousers.

Andy was loading water barrels onto the back of the wagon, and one of the men yelled, “Hurry it up, Johnny Reb, you want to get shot and left behind?” The others laughed, and Kitty bristled. She didn’t like this—any of it. These men were hard, cold, cruel.

She had been riding behind Sam, and she slid off the horse and hurried to the wagon and climbed inside. Travis lay on a stretcher, his head resting on a blanket roll, and he frowned as she entered. “Just what kind of animals do you have traveling with us now? Do they assign the muck to you because they feel more at home?”

“I believe the Generals feel that I can control the more unruly soldiers better than they can. I’ve tamed you, haven’t I?”

She stamped her foot, crying, “Oh, why can’t you leave me and Andy behind, damn you! This is no place for us.”

He ignored her protest, threw back the blanket that covered him. “I want you to check my leg, see if it’s healing properly.”

“You mean no one has checked it lately? Are you mad?”

“No. I didn’t want McClellan to hear about it if it was worse than anyone thought. He’d send me to Washington with the others, and I want to stay in the war.”

“Till you’re killed?” She leaned forward and started unwrapping the messy bandage that Sam had obviously put on the wound. “What will happen to you if you
are
killed, Captain? Neither heaven nor hell would let you in, because you don’t belong in either—not good enough for one, and too mean for the other.”

He started to comment but instead howled with pain as she jerked off the last of the bandage. The wound was healing. The leg was still in a splint. In time, perhaps a few months, he would be s good as new. She said as much, and he nodded. “Then I suppose the thing for us to do is head into winter quarters. It’s almost September, and cold weather will soon be here. I think we’ll be safe in the mountains of Tennessee, and come spring, we’ll be ready to fight. I’ll use these months to whip my men into the toughest cavalry unit in the whole Federal army.”

Sam came in, and Travis told him his plans. “Head for Tennessee. By the time the snows come, we’ll be set for the winter.”

Sam took a seat in the front of the wagon and picked up the reins, with Andy right beside him. The other men fell in line behind the wagon, and they started moving.

“I think I’d like to ride a horse,” Kitty said quietly, staring straight ahead. “I don’t think I want to be here with you.”

“Well, those men back there would love to have you riding a horse with them, Kitty,” he grinned in the manner she detested. “You just go right ahead. You tell Sam to stop and let you get on a horse.”

And she did. And within a half hour, she was off the horse and back in the wagon beside Travis, who laughed at her. “They’re animals,” she said, furiously. “They have no respect for a woman. One of them even reached over and touched my breast!”

“And you slapped his face, of course…”