Only the Gallant (8 page)

“No drier than I am right now,” another of his friends mused.

The buggy whip cracked. One of the soldiers howled, clutched the seat of his pants, and hop-stepped out of the way. The others scattered as Ophelia attacked. The private by the trunk tried to take a bottle with him.

“Put that back,” Ophelia warned, and nicked the tip of his ear with the whip.

“Yeow!” The private backstepped, lost his balance, and landed on his rump in the dirt. The bottle shattered on a rock.

“Dammit woman!” the private growled. “That’s a waste of good … ” His voice trailed off as the liquid’s distinctively pungent fumes assailed his nostrils. “Brandy, my ass. That’s chloroform! Sergeant Appleton!” The private scrambled to his feet and pointed at the woman. “Train your guns on her, boys. She’s smuggling contraband to her Rebel friends.”

The mood of the soldiers abruptly changed. They were no longer amused by the antics of a defiant young girl. Suddenly she was poison in their midst. Rifle muskets were leveled at her. A soldier caught up the reins to her carriage and kept the mare from wandering off.

Sergeant Appleton, an efficient-looking man with thick black sideburns and thinning hair, emerged from the cluster of tents set just off the road. He headed for the carriage, where the private quickly related his discovery. Sergeant Appleton looked at Ophelia, his features stern.

“Are all those bottles like the one Jones broke?” he asked. The woman remained silent. “I can smash ’em and find out for myself.”

“They contain chloroform,” Ophelia said, resigned to her fate. There was no point in seeing the medical supplies she had hoped to smuggle to Vicksburg needlessly destroyed. No doubt they would find the surgical instruments once the barrels of “salt pork” were opened.

“Then I’m afraid I must place you under arrest, ma’am,” Appleton replied, touching the leather brim of his blue cap. “And I fear it’ll go hard for you, no matter how pretty you be.” The sergeant wagged his head and wiped the perspiration from his face with his forearm.

“Rider comin’,” said Private Jones. Appleton shifted his gaze. Ophelia turned to look and recognized Jesse riding at an easy pace along the Memphis-to-Vicksburg road. Her heart sank. Now she was caught in another lie, pretending to the second lieutenant that she would be staying in Memphis when in truth she had surreptitiously left the city with the disguised load of supplies.

Her cheeks reddened as Jesse walked his lathered mount past the freight wagon and up to the Union sergeant. The rest of Appleton’s men remained by their campfires.

Jesse remained impassive as he took in the surroundings. Ophelia thought it odd that he should pretend not to know her. Her own sheepish smile faded.

“’Morning, sir,” Sergeant Appleton said, saluting.

McQueen returned the gesture. He had left Peter Abbot back along the road, well out of sight of the Union cavalrymen. The major had provided him with crucial information about Ophelia Tyrone, and now Jesse knew what had to be done. Smuggling medical supplies out of a federal occupied city; McQueen admired the young woman’s spunk. From what he knew of Ophelia and had heard of her brother, there was no lack of courage in the Tyrone family.

“What do we have here, Sergeant?”

“We caught this lady trying to sneak medical supplies to the Rebs,” Appleton replied. “I’ll dispatch a couple of men to drive the wagons back and lock her up.” He held up the neck of the broken bottle. “Chloroform. She’s got a trunk of it.”

“And see her shot? Come now, Sergeant. There is precious little beauty in the world as it is. Why diminish it even further?”

“Sir?” Appleton frowned, trying to understand.

“A shipment of chloroform is not going to affect the outcome of this struggle one way or another,” McQueen explained. He doffed his hat and bowed to Ophelia. “Let her pass.”

“Sir? You ain’t serious!”

“I gave you an order, Sergeant.” McQueen slowly looked around and repeated his command in a threatening tone of voice.

“I aim to report this,” Appleton said. He turned to the men around him. “You boys’ll back me.” They nodded, having little use for the sergeant but none at all for officers.

“My order stands.”

Ophelia couldn’t believe her ears. But she wasn’t about to wait and give the Union officer time to reconsider. She returned to the carriage, took the reins from the soldier standing by the mare. At a flick of the reins the animal started forward. Ophelia heard the freight wagon creak on its axles as Dobbs gratefully released the brake and followed after the woman.

Jesse trotted up alongside the carriage as it left Appleton and his men behind. Now he was smiling, and his deep brown eyes seemed to flash and sparkle.

“I suppose this means you won’t be joining me for dinner tonight,” he said.

Ophelia glanced at him. Was he making fun of her? Her temper started to rise, then subsided.

“Why did you help me?”

“Because you needed help.” McQueen shrugged. “And besides, who am I to deprive some poor wounded soul a modicum of comfort? Pain and suffering are color-blind. Should I be any less?”

“Will you be punished?”

“Probably.”

“Then ride with me,” Ophelia said. “Come south. Join us. My brother would welcome you.”

“No … I don’t know. Maybe someday. I have to think on it,” Jesse said. He glanced over his shoulder. “For one thing, the sergeant will suspect me of being a Rebel spy and come after us.” He tugged on the reins. Ophelia also stopped.

“If I go back now, he’ll be afraid to disobey my orders,” Jesse told her.

“Then all I can say, gallant sir, is thank you and farewell and—” Ophelia lowered her eyes then looked up at him with a smile full of flirtatious promises.

“And maybe someday … ” She flicked the reins and the carriage rolled on past, leaving Jesse to whistle beneath his breath and wonder what kind of trouble he was getting himself into. Time would tell. If it didn’t run out first.

O
N THE DAY OF
his court-martial, as he was being drummed out of the service, Jesse Redbow McQueen had a dream—or maybe it was a vision. After all, he wasn’t asleep. It happened without warning. The Union officers, the blue-clad soldiers drawn up into ranks, two solemn-faced drummer boys standing at attention, the cooling wind stirring the dust in front of the schoolhouse, the rhetoric and excoriation, everything seemed to blur into a disquieting haze as his sight turned inward. Suddenly he stood once again in the shadow of the bur oak on the McQueen farm and heard the sighing wind that carried the distant song of a meadowlark.

It was sunset, autumn, in the time of the harvest moon, and Jesse was fifteen years old. He had finished his chores, fed and watered the livestock, and secured the barn. He’d just started back to the house and the promise of a hearty supper by a warm fire when he chanced to glance up toward the hill that provided a windbreak north of the house. He spied the figure of his grandmother, Raven McQueen, standing at the summit. She seemed transfixed by the setting sun that painted the clouds gold and pink and bright vermilion against the rapidly darkening sky.

Jesse climbed the hill. Tired as he was from his chores, he felt drawn to his grandmother and could not deny the call. Coyotes had begun their mournful chorus. As a child he had thought the wild dogs were responsible for night, that they sang the sun down with their howling.

It was a fair-sized hill for this part of the country, a mound of earth rising a hundred feet from the rolling prairie floor. The short-stem grasses crunched beneath the fifteen-year-old’s boots as he followed that quiet summons spoken in the stillness of his young soul. When he reached the hilltop, he found not only Grandmother Raven but his younger brother, Pacer.

At thirteen, Pacer Wolf McQueen was already showing the growth that had left him a head taller and a few inches broader than brother Jesse. And yet, in their roughhousing, Jesse had always managed to hold his own. Pacer Wolf had a long face with high cheekbones and straight red hair that hung to his shoulders. Though fair-skinned as Jesse McQueen, Pacer Wolf affected the ways of the Civilized Tribes. A one-eighth Choctaw was no different than a full-blood as far as young Pacer Wolf was concerned.

Even at fifteen, Jesse knew better. He loved his grandmother and his spirit was one with her people, but it was in the white man’s world that he would make his home.

In the fading light Pacer Wolf could see his brother’s accusing glare. Jesse McQueen had handled the chores for two because his brother had not arrived in the barn to share in the work.

“He has been with me,” Raven told Jesse, reading his unspoken question. She smiled and placed her hand on the older brother’s shoulder. “It was more important. Time is the swiftest rabbit, darting away through the grass. My days grow shorter. And when I am gone … ” She shrugged. “There will still be stalls to clean, livestock to feed. There will still be rabbits.”

Jesse’s anger softened and he became alarmed at her words. Was she ill? “Raven?”

“Shh,” she said, placing her fingers on his lips. In her fifties, with her black hair streaked with silver and windblown at dusk, she was still beautiful, still the same figure of kindness and love who had taken her two motherless grandchildren to her heart and shown them the world through different eyes, shown them wonderment and mystery.

“Give me your hand,” she said, and placed it on Pacer’s, until brother clasped brother.

Jesse and Pacer Wolf looked sheepishly at one another.

“The blood of the McQueens runs hot, pride is deep. But fire comes to divide, to tear apart the bond. If it is weak, the bond will break.” She shook her head. Pity in her voice gradually turned to determination, and as the red sunset bathed her in its glow, she raised her arms to the horizon.

“I see a time of fire and sword. It will test you, yet you must remain strong. And the bond must not be broken though you walk different paths.”

Pacer Wolf, already a strapping lad at thirteen, tightened his grip. He and Jesse had had their quarrels the same as any siblings, but they always stood united against enemies or threats from outside the family. There was nothing and no one the McQueen boys couldn’t defeat.

Sensing the urgency in Raven’s voice, the brothers locked hands and shared each other’s strength while the blazing sun stained their clasped hands crimson.

Jesse faced the far horizon. Above the molten gold sun, a single cloud trailed its gossamer vapors like wings above the prairie, a plumage of fire and shadow, purple sky and iridescent streams of light. He wasn’t sure what any of it meant, but it was important to his grandmother and Jesse could sense the power here, the presence of something beyond what he had ever experienced before. It frightened him a little, and left him awed, too. Then the light dimmed, colors died with the sun, and in the darkness the brothers released their handclasp.

Raven removed a small buckskin pouch from around her neck and placed it over Pacer Wolf’s head. The thirteen-year-old boy looked puzzled. He started to open the pouch and Raven stopped him.

“You must never look inside,” she said. “It is a medicine pouch, a spirit bag.”

Pacer Wolf glanced down at the bag and cradled it in the palm of his hand. It certainly couldn’t hold much.

“What is in it?”

“I will not tell,” Raven said.

“Why, Grandmother?”

“So that your life will have mystery,” she told him. Then she turned to Jesse. Even in the deepening dark, by the starlight, she could tell he felt awkward and left out. Raven smiled and embraced him, and the night flowed around them like raven’s wings as she spoke softly, for him alone to hear.

“Your father will give to you that which you must bear with honor and courage. It is powerful medicine and holds the history of your people, and it will make you one with all who have gone before.” Raven stepped back and looked at the two boys and perhaps she wondered where the years had gone. At least that was what Jesse thought, watching her.

“You aren’t going to be … uh … leaving us or anything, are you, Grandmother?” he asked, still uncertain.

“You mean am I dying,” she said, and laughed. “No. It is only a sunset, not the last sunset.” The wind swept over them, a night wind that howled with the coyotes and then was gone. “But do not worry, my young pups,” she added. “Even when I am dead and my bones return to this good earth, I will never leave you.”

A night of stars, the fading whisper of an autumn breeze, and mystery, the images shattered like broken glass as a drumroll brought Jesse back to the present. A soldier roughly stripped him of his brass-buttoned blue coat and his army-issue hat.

“Jesse McQueen,” one of Sherman’s officers, a major, droned on. Jesse braced himself. “You are hereby ordered out of this encampment. If you are found within the confines of a federal post or barracks, you will be arrested and summarily hanged.” The major glanced over at a nearby captain standing before a rank of troopers, none of whom seemed to be enjoying these proceedings. “Captain Elys, start this civilian toward town.”

“I know the way, you son of a bitch,” Jesse retorted, and spun on his heels. He marched from the schoolhouse and past the soldiers ringing the front yard. One of the federals, a freckle-faced private, stuck out his musket stock and tripped Jesse as he walked by and sent him sprawling in the dirt. Rough laughter followed by a chorus of cheers swept through the assembled soldiers. They considered this ex-second lieutenant a turncoat and were only too happy to show their contempt for him. Jesse stood and dusted himself off. A trickle of blood oozed from a scrape on his cheek where a jagged stone had cut him. He stared at the private. The young soldier tried to meet Jesse’s eyes but lasted only a few seconds before averting his gaze. The men around him were veterans, though, seasoned at Wilson’s Creek and a half a dozen nameless skirmishes that would never make their way into the history books.

“Get along, Reb lover,” one of them growled. “We’ve buried many a friend since leaving Illinois and we ain’t got no use for your kind.”

“Seems he’s been wearin’ the wrong color uniform,” another of the soldiers shouted from the ranks.