Authors: Kerry Newcomb
Only the Gallant
The Medal, Book Three
Kerry Newcomb
For Ann and Paul Newcomb with love
Chapter One
J
ESSE REDBOW MCQUEEN BIT
the hand that tried to hang him. The man with the lynch rope, a Creole by the name of Maurice Charbonneau, was a stocky, thick-necked ruffian with a belly full of whiskey’s false courage. No, he wasn’t afraid of any man whose wrists were securely bound behind his back. Then McQueen clamped down, showing his fangs, and Charbonneau howled in pain, wrenched free, and stumbled back to safety. Jesse McQueen had bought himself a little time, but if he wanted to live through the hour, he’d have to come up with a better plan. He couldn’t believe his luck. One moment he had been hurrying through the storm back to his warm dry room at the Orleans House on Toulouse Street. Suddenly he’d found himself cornered by a gathering of the crescent city’s angry citizenry.
It was the twenty-fourth of April in the year 1862 and New Orleans was aflame despite a drenching downpour that obscured whole blocks from view. The nation was at war, split north and south by men with too many ideals and not enough patience. Cemeteries already teemed with the unfortunate blue-and-gray-clad victims of this tragic conflict. New Orleans had considered itself impregnable behind two mighty bastions, Fort St. Phillip and Fort Jackson. But Commodore Faragut had proved how wrong that theory was. After days of bombardment, the Union fleet had swept past the forts and up the mighty Mississippi and brought their guns to bear upon the city itself. At that point the city fathers surrendered. Word had spread like wildfire and ignited in the populace a sense of betrayal and outrage. As a result of this hysteria, strangers immediately became suspect, labeled as spies to be summarily shot, or in this case hanged. And Jesse Redbow McQueen was just such a stranger, touting a pack of law books and professing a desire to practice in New Orleans.
Jesse focused his dark brown eyes on the two men apprehended with him. One already dangled like a puppet on a string from the hotel’s wrought-iron railing, a poor broken toy discarded by a violent child. The man was E. M. Todd, a fellow boarder at the Orleans House. Jesse knew him as a seller of wine and imported spirits, an Englishman and hardly a spy. The second of the mob’s intended victims was a portly, middle-aged man whose shrill appeals for mercy went unheeded by the bloodthirsty crowd. Rumor had it that Union spies had caused the city’s downfall, and there must be a reckoning. No matter if a dozen innocent folks were slain in the process, the guilty must not escape retribution.
“I’m from Atlanta and loyal to the cause!” the portly man exclaimed. “My name is Robert Wilmont, portrait artist, nothing more!”
“And perhaps I am General Robert E. Lee,” laughed a silver-haired Creole gentleman in the gray-and-red-trimmed uniform of New Orleans’s home guard. He was a dapper, small-boned man with narrow features and blazing eyes. He sat ramrod straight in the saddle, oblivious of the downpour. His hair curled over his hard leather collar. Silvery white side whiskers all but hid his ears. “But you see, in truth, I am Colonel Henri Baptiste, defender of this fair city, and you, sir, are a spy.”
“But I’m not!” the frightened artist cried, and lifted his quivering features to the rain. Rivulets streaked his face like tears.
“Oh, hell! I’m the spy, hang me and let him go,” Jesse spoke up. His horse shifted and he had to grip tight with his knees to keep himself upright. Rain pummeled his head and shoulders and matted his shirt to his wiry frame.
“In good time,” Baptiste remarked, glancing up at McQueen. It was obvious the colonel neither knew nor cared which if either of the men was a spy. They were strangers to him and that was guilt aplenty. “Private Charbonneau, put the noose on that man,” the colonel called out, noticing Jesse’s bare neck. Jesse was clad in nankeen breeches and a loose cotton shirt. The mob had stolen his hat and coat. His unruly black hair was plastered to his neck, and a black beard concealed the strong, clean cut of his jaw.
Charbonneau reluctantly walked his horse forward. Jesse took satisfaction in the crimson-stained bandage that the Creole had hastily applied to his mangled left thumb.
“Hang ’em both!” shouted a voice from the crowd. And the throng, about fifteen men, most of them dockworkers and riverboatmen with a few merchants, heartily concurred. Time was wasting. There were other rainwashed streets to check and other traitors to apprehend.
“C’mon, Charbonneau,” snarled Jesse, his dark stare full of malice. “Put your hand out and I’ll bite it off at the wrist.”
The Creole private hesitated. Then another Creole, a tight-lipped imperious-looking young man whose boyish expression could not conceal the blood lust in his eyes, brushed Charbonneau aside and grabbed the lynch rope from the cowed private. Someone in the crowd shouted, “There’s a lad, Gerard. Show the scoundrel.”
Gerard, handsome and much sought after by the young ladies of the city, blushed and acknowledged his accolades with false modesty. He walked his animal close to McQueen. Up ahead, Henri Baptiste had already thrown the length of rope up to another of the home guard who waited on the balcony. The militiaman quickly tied off the end, stared down at the portrait artist who continued to protest his innocence.
Gerard held the noose up to Jesse while a couple of the men in the crowd steadied his horse and held him about the waist. With a quick flick of his wrist, the handsome young Creole flipped the noose over McQueen’s head and the mob cheered his dexterity. But his face was close and he forgot the lesson Charbonneau had learned: that a bound and cornered panther is still dangerous, still a panther.
Jesse lowered his head and butted the Creole square in the middle of his face. Gerard groaned and clasped a hand to his broken nose. When he felt the blood flow and saw the droplets work their way through his clenched fingers to be spattered by the rain and splotch his greatcoat, he could stand no more. He grabbed the noose and wrenched it tight about McQueen’s throat.
“Damn you!” Gerard cursed. He nearly dragged Jesse from the saddle, the rough hemp tearing the flesh on either side of his throat. Colonel Baptiste at last intervened and walked his mount between his captive and Gerard, forcing the young Creole with the broken nose to release his hold.
“Each man in his turn,” Baptiste said. Rain poured from the brim of his gray hat whenever he tilted his head, splashing his horse’s neck. “This must be a proper execution, with as much dignity as time permits.” He stared at his two subordinates, one with a cloth-wrapped thumb, the other cupping a hand over his disfigured features. The colonel glared at Jesse. “You, sir, are most troublesome.”
“I’ve never been lynched before,” McQueen rasped. “I am ignorant of the proper behavior. Why not take my place and I’ll study you?”
His reply elicited grudging laughter from the less rowdy of the mob, who were patiently enduring the downpour in order to see another enemy of the Confederacy receive his proper dispatch.
“Study me?” Baptiste replied in a silken tone. “Study him!” He slapped the end of the hangman’s rope down across the rump of the mare directly ahead of Jesse. The animal bolted forward, and the mob cheered as Robert Wilmont, lately of Atlanta, danced death’s jig.
Jesse closed his eyes, his heart full of pity for the poor little man. The stench of smoke and death clung to the rain-drenched air. Throughout the city, warehouses of dry goods and cotton had been torched to keep these supplies out of Union hands. The city had turned on itself like a mad animal, destroying itself and its own people. Jesse looked into the faces of the men surrounding him. There was no reason here. Hatred and fear had reaped a bitter harvest among men of conscience. One death begot another, there was no stopping them. Two men twisted in the rain. It was time for a third.
Jesse Redbow McQueen struggled to free his wrists. The rope that bound him was soaked, and in another few minutes he’d be free. But Colonel Henri Baptiste wasn’t going to allow him a few minutes. The mob was eager for blood and so was the Creole colonel. Jesse would have to stall them somehow. He closed his eyes and focused his thoughts. In his mind’s eye, he drifted out over the bedlam of the city and soared above the burning warehouses and the smoldering bales of cotton to the branches of a magnolia in a garden apart from the destruction. And there among the ancient limbs, he imagined that a raven waited, fluttering its wings and preening its feathers. The bird’s bold, keen stare revealed an uncanny intelligence. The trickster spirit of all ravens that had invaded his thought? “Raven, Grandmother Spirit, help me,” he shouted in Chocktaw, the language of his grandmother’s people.
Jesse glanced around him and saw that his strange outburst had momentarily held the belligerent crowd at bay. Even Colonel Baptiste seemed taken aback. He and the other two Creoles, Gerard and Charbonneau, blessed themselves as protection against whatever demons this stranger had attempted to summon.
But it was no demon or hell-spawned sprite that came to McQueen’s rescue; it was instead a pair of frightened runaway mares hitched to a wagon whose load of hay was a pyre on wheels. Flames leaped from the bales of dry grass and singed the rumps of the frenzied horses, who raced down Toulouse at a reckless gait, desperate to escape the burning load to which they were hitched.
Jesse alone saw the wagon as it careened along the narrow street, trailing orange streamers of fire through the pouring rain. The attention of the mob was riveted to this next man to dance at the end of the colonel’s rope. “I’ll silence your hoodoo talk,” Baptiste declared, and tossed the lynch rope up to the man on the balcony. The line slipped from the guardman’s grasp and dropped to the street. A pair of rough-looking boatmen broke from the crowd. Each man fought to claim the rope as if it were some sort of prize.
“Tie off the end,” came a shout.
“Raise him up with the others!”
Jesse ignored them. He tensed as the burning wagon bore down on the assemblage. It was close now, only a matter of seconds. At last the rattle of the traces, the pounding hooves, and the clattering wheels on the puddled surface of the street attracted the attention of the men on the fringe of the crowd. Their outcries alerted the rest. And the rabble that had called for another hanging suddenly lost its taste for death.
The runaway mares, mad with pain, plunged head-on into the mob, trampling one man and scattering the rest.
Jesse drove his heels into the flanks of the horse beneath him. The bay mare, already made skittish by the crowd, needed no prodding to escape the burning wagon and the terrified team. The bay plunged forward, away from the Orleans Hotel and out into Toulouse Street. Riding bareback, Jesse gripped the mare with his knees and bent forward, lowering his head into the rain. Behind him the team of mares swerved to avoid the hotel porch and the bodies dangling from the balcony. The wagon careened to one side as the mares lunged in the opposite direction. The wagon toppled over, its axle cracking under the strain. The singletree snapped as the burning bales spilled onto the porch of the hotel, crashing into chairs and setting the columns ablaze.
“The rope!” shouted Baptiste, dodging a fiery death and fighting to control his steed. Gerard leaped from horseback as the frazzled end of the hangman’s rope slipped past. It flopped and bounded along the street just out of reach. If the rope snagged even for an instant, the man at the other end would have his neck snapped. Jesse McQueen had escaped the frying pan only to jump into the fire.