Only the Gallant (16 page)

Baptiste noticed the difference in her tone of voice. And he liked it. The Creole, in his liquor-clouded judgment, did not have enough sense to be suspicious. Her sudden capitulation made perfect sense. She was a woman and by nature weak. Faced with the prospect of execution, she had broken like a twig. He reached in his coat pocket and removed a silver flask, unscrewed its top, and drew closer to his prisoner. The iron links chaining Caitlin’s wrists clinked when she reached up to place her hand over Baptiste’s. The colonel tilted the flask to her lips and poured a measure of brandy into her mouth. Her eyes were pools of invitation.

“Bascomb,” the Creole officer said. “Join Pike outside. You’ll be warm enough. The platform’s out of the wind.”

“But, Colonel … ” the Rebel protested.

“This won’t take long,” Baptiste said.

“Oooh, I hope it will, darlin’,” Caitlin whispered. A droplet of brandy spilled from the flask onto his knuckles. She ran her tongue along his finger, licking the brandy trail from the back of the colonel’s hand. Baptiste gulped and glanced sharply at Bascomb, who withered before his stare.

“I gave you an order, Private, now get the hell out!”

Bascomb grumbled a halfhearted “yes, sir” and beat a hasty retreat toward the backdoor. He grabbed the latch and angrily yanked. At the same instant Jesse McQueen, on the platform outside, gave the door a mighty shove. The door flew open and crashed against the back wall. Jesse barreled off balance into the car, black cape fluttering and gun in hand. He slammed into Bascomb and both men crashed into the Franklin stove and went down.

Baptiste stared with his mouth agape at this strange apparition, momentarily dumbfounded. Caitlin was as shocked as her captor.

Bascomb smacked against the cast-iron stove with the back of his head and went limp. Jesse struggled to untangle himself. He was blind! The damn mask had been twisted off center as he fell. Through a corner of an eyehole he glimpsed Henri Baptiste, galvanized into action. The colonel leveled his Colt revolver at this would-be rescuer. Caitlin lunged forward, caught Baptiste’s wrist, and chomped down, burying her teeth into the flesh at the base of his thumb.

Henri Baptiste howled and fired. The gun thundered in the confines of the rail car. A bullet ricocheted off the stove and burrowed into the ceiling. Jesse pulled off the cumbersome flour-sack mask and rolled out from behind the stove in time to see the colonel wrench free of Caitlin. Blood oozing from his hand, he turned the weapon on her.

“Baptiste!” Jesse shouted, and fired through the billowing powder smoke. Baptiste staggered against the door that opened onto the coupling between the cars. He steadied himself and snapped off a shot as Jesse fired again. The two guns, both .36-caliber navy Colts, roared simultaneously. Jesse felt death fan his cheek. The Creole jerked to the left, taking a second slug in the chest. He raised his hand, determined to kill his attacker, but he no longer held a gun. He shoved clear of the door and staggered toward Caitlin, dropped to his knees, and steadied himself against the desk. Blood pumped from two black holes in his chest. A shadow fell across him. He looked up into the solemn features of Jesse McQueen. The man from the Indian Territory opened his shirt at the neck to reveal the white-puckered ridge of scar tissue around his neck.

“The next time you hang a man, Colonel, you’d better be sure the job gets done,” Jesse said through clenched teeth.

A look of recognition swept over Baptiste’s features.

“You … ” he said weakly. “You.” Fainter still. There wouldn’t be a next time. His eyes glazed over as the life ebbed from him. Jesse took the key from the dead man’s pocket and tossed it to Caitlin where she lay, sprawled on the hardwood floor.

“Free yourself. I’ll uncouple the car.”

Without further ado, Jesse holstered his gun and opened the door now marked by a smear of blood and a lead slug buried in the wood panel. He stepped out on the coupling. The roar of the locomotive and the rush of the wind filled the mail car.

Caitlin unlocked her iron bracelets and, as an afterthought, fished through the pockets of the dead man until she found the tintype. She heard a loud clank and felt the car immediately slow down, the noise of the train gradually diminishing. Jesse stepped inside and closed the door.

“They won’t notice the car’s missing until the train pulls into Edwards,” he explained, blowing into his hands.

“You bastard, look what you did to my picture.” Caitlin held up the tintype—or what was left of it after Jesse’s first shot blew half of it away while mortally wounding Colonel Henri Baptiste.

“You’re welcome. Don’t bother to thank me. Just stay here till Johnston sends some soldiers back from Edwards.” He crossed to the side door of the mail car and slid it open. “It’s slowed enough to jump. You coming?”

“Wait,” Caitlin grumbled. She hurried across to the Franklin stove and tossed the tintype into the firebox. Then she scooped her dress up over her head and helped herself to Bascomb’s coat and pants. The unconscious Rebel never stirred as she undressed him. As an act of kindness she covered him with her dress and then pulled his gray trousers on over her pantaloons. Dressed for travel, or for that matter, leaping from trains, she joined Jesse at the door.

“Thank you,” she grudgingly managed.

“You’re welcome.” Jesse grinned.

“That was quite an entrance,” she added.

“It’s the exit that counts.” They leaped from the freight car and hit the embankment running. Bascomb’s boots were too big for Caitlin and caused her to stumble and scrape her hands and knees. She cursed her clumsiness in a most unladylike fashion.

“Why, Miss Brennan … I’m shocked,” Jesse said, helping her to stand. The mail car continued on past them and vanished in the moonless night. Icy rain stung the woman’s face and hands, and she pulled her stolen coat around her ample bosom. McQueen draped his cape over her shoulders. He had worn his woolen greatcoat underneath.

“Now what? We’ll freeze before we’ve walked a mile,” Caitlin complained.

“We aren’t walking. We’ll ride to a barn where I’ve hid out provisions and a horse to carry you to Memphis.” Jesse raised his hands to his mouth, cupped them, and whistled, softly at first, then louder. Three times he whistled, waited, blew three more notes. Caitlin looked at him askance. She was thinking he’d no doubt taken leave of his senses when a roan stallion materialized out of the gloom and obediently approached Jesse, who caught up the animal’s reins.

Caitlin watched him with newfound respect. He leaped aboard trains, engaged in fisticuffs and gunfights, rescued fair maidens, and now summoned a saddled mount out of thin air.

“How did you do that?” she asked.

“Something my grandmother taught me,” Jesse said. He climbed into the saddle and reached down for the woman in the cape.

“And my granny only taught me to bake custards,” Caitlin wistfully added. She caught his hand, swung up behind him, and wrapped her hands about his waist.

Jesse walked the stallion across the tracks and down the embankment. He headed north toward a gap in the trees barely visible in the dark.

“Are you sure you know where you’re going?” Caitlin said, her breath tickling the back of his neck.

“Hell no,” he answered. Then he added with a morose laugh, “Do you?”

Caitlin fell silent.

T
HE BARN STOOD LIKE
a lonely sentinel on the edge of an abandoned cotton field. Its boards were weathered and gray and the structure leaned to the left as it waited for owners who would never return. The front doors were propped shut but the loft door hung from one worn leather hinge, leaving a gaping hole that looked for all the world like an empty eye socket. Despite its sinister appearance, the ramshackle structure seemed a work of art to Jesse and Caitlin as they walked the stallion across a patch of blackened earth where a dogtrot cabin had once stood. Snow had begun to settle on the two riders and the weary roan, but the wind had died down, and save for the crunch of the stallion’s hooves on the soot-blackened remains underfoot, the world had become a place of peace and serenity. Jesse wondered how long it would last. The answer came all too soon.

“You hold it right there,” a youthful voice called from the barn loft. “This shotgun I’s holdin’ gotta smooth trigger, filed off real fine. Y’all even breathe wrong and I’ll shoot your lights out.” What looked like a gun barrel poked out of the black loft.

Caitlin stiffened as Jesse reined in his horse. “Now what?” she muttered.

Jesse didn’t know. But a night full of close calls, quick timing, and desperate plans had taken its toll. Just ahead was a haven from the bitter cold and no one was going to keep him from it. He had left provisions in the stalls and two horses, the extra mount he had taken from Vicksburg and the solid-looking gelding that had belonged to Jed Burlock, the slaver.

Burlock! Of course
, Jesse thought. He felt Caitlin reaching for her gun.

“No,” he told her. Then he called to the youngster in the barn: “I aim to come on in. There’s bacon and I figure on cooking it up and some biscuits, too, and boiling a little chicory coffee. I packed a jar of plum preserves that ought to go mighty good with those biscuits.” Jesse started the roan forward, taking his time, giving the youth inside the chance to consider his options. “Talk it over with the girl. I’ll bet she’s hungry.”

“How’d you know … uh … there ain’t no gal hereabouts.”

“Sure, and that shotgun isn’t a piece of that firewood I gathered all on my lonesome not two hours ago.”

Jesse thought he heard a girl’s muffled cry of alarm, and the make-believe gun was pulled inside the loft. Jesse rode up to the front door. He and Caitlin dismounted and tugged open the doors. The bottom of the doors scraped the ground and the brittle leather hinges threatened to split. Jesse led the stallion out of what had become settling snow. Caitlin, still suspicious, kept to the side nearest the first stall. She took comfort in the Colt revolver tucked in her belt.

Jesse maneuvered through the darkness until he found the carpetbag he had left just inside the door, buried under a mound of brittle grass and decaying hay. He removed a thick beeswax candle from the bag, lit it, and walked into the center of the barn. There wasn’t much to the structure, just four stalls, a narrow loft whose floor was missing several planks. A bin for oats at the rear of the stall looked as if it hadn’t been opened in years. Jesse spied a field mouse scurrying out through a hole in the wall near the bin. No doubt the tiny rodent was only one of many. Spiderwebs hung from beams supporting the loft. A dust-covered cast-iron stove set between two stalls off to the right offered the only chance at surviving the night. Jesse had already filled the firebox with kindling. Using the candle, he lit the dried wood, and in a matter of minutes the flames from the stove cast a cheery glow into the center of the barn.

“Jesse … ” Caitlin spoke his name as a warning. He turned and saw what had alarmed her—bits and pieces of straw showered down from the gaps in the loft flooring. A board creaked, then two dark-skinned faces peered over the edge of the hayloft. The boy might have been eleven, the girl a couple of years older, her homespun garments spattered with snow and clinging to her budding figure. They were cold and frightened. But the boy still held the red oak limb he’d tried to pass off as a shotgun.

Jesse noted that the back stalls still held the horses he’d left for Caitlin. Evidently the runaways had themselves just arrived, else his provisions would have been ransacked and the horses stolen. He couldn’t blame them.

“Don’t be afraid. You can come down,” Jesse said.

“Stay where you are, Beckah,” the boy said, placing a hand on the girl’s arm. But the fire in the stove was mighty inviting.

“It’s all right,” Jesse said. “Mr. Burlock is dead.”

He could have fired a shot at them and had the same reaction. Both youngsters flinched. The girl stifled a scream of terror. The boy’s eyes widened in his ebony face, and though he tightened the grip on the branch, his eyes grew moist.

“Tommy Lee, you hear what he done said,” Beckah whispered hoarsely.

“I heard,” the boy replied. He glanced down at Jesse, his expression mirroring his mistrust. “I don’t believe you, Reb.”

“Take a look yonder. You know Burlock, you ought to recognize the dun in the stall.”

Boy and girl shifted their focus to the dun gelding in the back stall.

“That his horse all right,” Beckah said.

Tommy Lee raised up. He wore a coarse cotton shirt several sizes too big for him. The loose folds of the shirt he’d tucked in his overalls, which hung by a single strap across his shoulder. He studied the animal while Caitlin joined Jesse. Beckah seemed to brighten at seeing a woman.

“Come on down, honey. You must be nigh frozen,” Caitlin said.

“Yes’m,” Beckah said, and started to crawl toward the ladder. Tommy Lee had yet to be convinced.

“The horse don’t mean nothin’. How come you know ol’ Massa Burlock? How come you say he dead?”

Jesse shrugged. His expression hardened. “Because I killed him.”

Morning broke clear and cold and as white as a virgin’s wedding veil. A pristine carpet of powdery snow had settled over the meadow and the barn and drifted against the remains of a split rail fence. As the doors to the barn opened, the hinges on one side gave way, and with a silence-shattering crash, the door toppled to earth.

Jesse McQueen emerged from the shadowy interior. His breath clouded the still air. His boots sank into the snow. He guessed that about two inches of powder had fallen overnight. There were patches of ice under some of the snow and a rider would have to be careful.

Night had passed quickly enough. After serving up three helpings of biscuits and bacon for the young runaways and watching them polish off the entire jar of preserves, Jesse had bedded them down and then unrolled his own bedroll and fallen asleep. Sometime during the night, Caitlin had joined him for warmth. He awoke with her nestled beside him. It was a nice feeling but one he had not pursued with children present. In the morning, while Caitlin heated coffee and the last of the bacon, Jesse saddled the horses and readied them for the long ride to Memphis. There were few patrols during such weather, so Caitlin and the children would be safe enough. Caitlin had connections with abolitionists in Illinois and she assured both Tommy Lee and Beckah that she would find a home for each of them.