Rebel (49 page)

Even if he had the sinking feeling that she might well be involved in it still. The Moccasin. The name haunted him. He was afraid. Anxious to return to St. Augustine, and assure himself that all reports he had heard were true: His wife had remained in the city. She’d accepted no social calls from Union officers, but she had remained in the home his brother had rented, working with Dr. Percy, and neither had ever refused medical care to the occupying Union soldiers.

Still…

Ian knew Dr. Percy. He’d been a military physician in Washington in the days before the war, before his resignation, and he believed that every man owed his life to his country.

His country was now the Confederacy.

And Alaina was working with him, which could well mean that…

He didn’t dare dwell on the edge of suspicion and fear that had so recently come to haunt him.

“Major!”

He jerked up, looking at Sam, who had come creeping
toward him. “Major, Billy just heard some noise … I think we’ve got our cache of weapons.” “Get the men,” Ian ordered.

Within seconds, his company of eight was awake and in formation and moving silently through the brush. Billy led the way, pointing out the wagons in a copse just ahead. They fanned out into the brush, watching, waiting. But it seemed that there was a lone sentry on, guarding the wagons, pacing back and forth, as if anxious to know himself why he’d been left alone so long.

“We rush him?” Sam asked.

Ian shook his head. “We want him alive. Get me Reggie.”

Reggie was his best sharpshooter, so precise with his aim that the men said he could knock the eye out of a mosquito at a hundred feet.

“Make him drop his weapon; I’m not trading his life for yours, but we’ve got to talk to him, find out why he’s hidden here—and how many other Rebs are near.”

Reggie nodded, dropped, took aim. He nicked the fellow cleanly in the upper arm. The man howled, dropping his rifle, gripping his arm, and looking around wildly. Ian moved in, Colt aimed at the man’s heart.

Man—he was little more than a boy. Ian felt a sudden sickness that his beloved state had been so ravaged by the war that now children were fighting. Thank God he hadn’t had to kill the youth.

The boy, tall and lanky but no more than twelve, stared at him with wide eyes.

“What’s a boy doing with a cache of weapons?” Ian asked him.

“I’m not a boy. I’m Private Elisha Nemes, Florida Volunteers!” the youth announced proudly. He had brown eyes, freckles, and wore a ragged slouch hat and huge brown overcoat. He lifted his chin, but he looked scared.

“Private Nemes, you must be a fine soldier to be trusted so,” Ian said, watching the boy shake, “but you’ve been captured now, by—”

“McKenzie,” the boy spat out. “You’re the Panther.”

Ian nodded. “I need to know where the rest of your party is, Private.”

The boy’s eyes darted nervously along the trail toward
the north. “I ain’t telling you. I ain’t telling you nothing,” he said firmly. “Am I going to lose my arm?” he asked, face twitching.

Ian looked at Reggie. Reggie shrugged, then walked to the boy. “Major, how could you doubt me?” Reggie queried, smiling. “I gave him a flesh wound, no more. You just take care of that wound and you’ll be fine, young man.”

“Yeah,” Sam said softly. “He’ll live to lift a rifle again, and maybe die next time he’s fired on.”

“Where’s your party?” Ian insisted.

The boy stared at him, tremendous conflict raging through his eyes. Then he seemed to make a decision; not that he liked Ian, but that Ian might be better than some other evil that threatened him now.

“They went northward, yonder,” he said.

“How many?”

“Just three. They went…” he hesitated, then spat. “They went to decoy some Yanks away from the guns. Animal Yanks, beast Yanks! Fellows walked just down the next trail from us, saying as how all Rebs should be hanged, all of them. They think we were the ones shot up some Yanks out of St. Augustine last week; they think we’re a whole party of spies.”

“Are there spies in your party, Private?” Ian asked, his mouth suddenly very dry.

The boy hung his head. “Patriots, sir!” he said, lifting his head again. “Just patriots.”

“Simon, Billy, Gerald, secure the arms,” Ian said, “and take them and the boy back to the boats.”

“Am I going to a prisoner-of-war camp?” the boy asked.

“You’re going to St. Augustine,” Ian told him.

“It’s in Union hands.”

“From there, someone is going to find your mother.”

In all the time they’d been with Elisha Nemes, he hadn’t looked quite so scared. Ian smiled. Once his mother got her hands on him, Elisha Nemes was probably safely out of the war for the next several years at the very least.

He turned to the rest of his men. “Let’s find out what the hell else is going on here.”

His men fell into step behind him and they started
north, as Elisha Nemes had directed. They moved quickly, and within a half hour they started to hear the men ahead.

“Bloody Reb! Cut him, Captain, cut him. Hell, we’re going to hang and bury the bastard anyway. Who the hell’s going to know the difference? This is God’s will.”

Ian looked back at Sam and the others. They pulled out their guns, ready to slip silently into their fan formation around the copse ahead.

Ian ducked low against the brush and moved forward to stand behind a thick pine. He leaned against the tree, quickly counting the Union soldiers in the group. Ten of them. They’d been on horseback, but now three of their horses were lined up beneath the huge overhanging branch of an old oak—and there three Rebel prisoners were seated atop the horses, hands tied behind their backs, nooses around their necks. The Federals were so busy urging their leader to torment their prisoners that they were oblivious to the men encircling them.

“God’s will?” Ian murmured. Because the Union men were behaving despicably.

He nodded to Sam, then stepped from the tree, his Colt aimed at the sergeant, a middle-aged man with graying hair and a cumbersome gut.

“Sergeant! What in God’s name is going on here?”

The captain’s company spun about, all reaching for their weapons, then hesitating as they saw him and the rest of his men stepping from the brush.

“It’s Yanks!” someone called with relief.

Ian approached the sergeant.

“I’m in charge here, Major!” the sergeant called out, sounding both aggravated and wounded.

One of his enlisted men stepped forward. “These Rebs murdered a bunch of our fellows just last week. Why, the boys had been asked to a dance at the Framington plantation, and they were shot down in cold blood on the way back, and these are the bastard Rebs who did it.”

“How do you know that?” Ian demanded.

“ ’Cause the fellow on the third horse admitted it.”

Ian walked around. Two of the prisoners had their heads down. The third, a man of about thirty with a gaunt, dignified face, returned Ian’s stare.

“Is that true?” Ian asked the man.

The man sighed. “Major, I’m not a murderer, and I’ve never shot anybody down in cold blood. We’re Rebs, sir, and that’s a fact, and we engaged fairly with those boys when they left the Framington place. They were killed.”

Ian nodded, turning to the sergeant.

“Cut them down.”

The sergeant stiffened. “You’re not going to just let them go.”

“No, sir, we’ll bring them in as prisoners of war.”

“Major, you don’t understand what’s going on here. We took them fair and square, just like they took our fellows.”

“We’re soldiers, not the law!” Ian spat back.

“Damn it, Major—”

“That’s damned right—I’m
Major
McKenzie, and I’m giving you a direct order.”

“Major,” the sergeant protested, “the skinny one at the end there—the pretty-looking, girlish fellow—is a spy and we know it! Corporal Ader over there is the one survivor from the dance, and he saw the fellow slinking away from the party right before our folks were ambushed. We’re
allowed
to hang spies, sir. In fact, I have direct orders to do so! I’ll show you, sir!” He walked toward Ian, producing a frayed paper from his coat pocket. Ian took the orders and saw that they had been written by a Colonel Hirshhorn. There was a statement within the orders saying, “The capture of all spies engaged in direct action against any member of the United States military may be punishable as seen fit by the officer in command, not to exclude an instant death penalty for those whose actions directly involved the death of U.S. military men.”

Ian shook his head, handing the paper back. “Sergeant, I’m now the officer in charge here, and there isn’t going to be any hanging done by a damned lynch mob of rowdy soldiers. Now I’m telling you one last time to cut these men down!”

“Yessir!” the sergeant said, saluting stiffly.

But then a gun suddenly discharged.

Ian swung around to discover who had so recklessly
disobeyed his order, but he could see nothing because the frightened horses beneath the oak reared and bolted. The Reb prisoners began to swing…. “Cut them down!” Ian roared, with such a fury that even the sergeant’s men scurried to obey, scampering up the oak to slice the ropes. Reggie, with Ian, took aim and shot through the farthest rope, and the skinny fellow fell limply to the earth. A second later, all of the men were down. Ian first approached the man he’d spoken with, but there was no saving him; his neck had been cleanly broken. The next fellow was equally dead.

The third, brought down so quickly by Reggie’s well-aimed shot, might stand a chance.

Ian hunkered down by that Reb, whose face was now in the dirt. He frowned as he saw clipped, blue-black hair, uneasiness churning in his gut even before he turned the fellow over.

The Reb had been wearing a huge slouch hat and an encompassing coat. Now the hat was gone. And the Reb’s face was fully visible.

With her crudely cropped hair, Jennifer could be taken for a very pretty boy.

Ian almost cried out loud. Dead or alive, he couldn’t allow Jennifer to be taken by anyone other than himself. He thought briefly that he would rather die on the spot than have to let his uncle know that his daughter had been hanged by Union forces as a spy. And that she was dead….

With a furious strength he wrenched the rope free from around her neck and stood, hiking her over his shoulder. “Bury those two!” he commanded harshly. “And Sergeant! Don’t think that this will go unreported, by God. I’ll take it straight to Lincoln myself!”

“They killed good Union soldiers!” the sergeant protested in return. “They killed our boys! Damn, sir, but you are one of those Johnny Rebs yourself at heart. Why, everyone in hell knows your kin are killing us all over, Major.”

Ian spun around, staring at the man. He fell silent. He turned blood red.

“Someone ought to shoot him and put him out of his misery!” Sam said audibly, staring at the sergeant. “Yeah, someone should,” Reggie said smoothly.

“Burial detail!” the sergeant ordered hoarsely.

Ian turned. Carrying Jennifer, he strode quickly down the trail.

Away from the others, he shifted her into his arms, seeking a pulse, some sign of life, as he moved.

Her eyes opened. Liquid and dazzling against the handsome contours of her face, beautiful despite her ragged hair and muddied complexion.

“Ian!” she mouthed. She had no voice.

She almost smiled. She tried to touch him.

But then…

Her eyes closed.

A
laina continually expected Ian to arrive. He didn’t.

As the weeks passed, she found herself growing more and more nervous. He had come when the city was Confederate; now it was Union, and he hadn’t made an appearance, nor had he written to her.

The spring of 1862 had brought several bitter defeats to the Confederate troops, one of the worst being the loss of New Orleans. Alaina discovered through Captain Willoughby, a kindly old Union gentleman—liked by even the most bitter Rebels of St. Augustine—that her husband had most probably been involved. The Union had made use of a cover plan in which it appeared that the main attack would be against Pensacola or Mobile. Joint army and navy forces had taken the strategic Southern city, and Captain Willoughby told Alaina that she should be very proud; her husband’s intelligence frequently kept the Union well abreast of Confederate troop movements.

Alaina returned from surgery one day to find that she had a guest. Walking exhaustedly toward her little guest house, she was startled to hear voices—Lilly’s and another soft, feminine voice. And Sean, shrieking with laughter.

Frowning, she hurried to her door and threw it open.

“Risa!” she exclaimed.

Risa, who had been down on the ground wrestling with Sean, stood, smiling.

“Hello.”

Alaina stared back at her blankly. Sean cried out a happy little “Mum” and came running forward on his short but sturdy legs, throwing himself at her. She picked
him up and he kissed her cheek, then shimmied back down and flung himself against Risa’s skirt again.

“Alaina—is everything all right?” Risa asked, since Alaina continued to stare at her blankly.

“I—I—”

A dozen thoughts sped through her head. She liked Risa, really liked her, respected her for her frankness, honesty, courage, and loyalty to her own beliefs. She was also grateful to Risa, and certain that Risa’s intentions had really been the best when she had helped Alaina flee Washington.

But if Risa had come to St. Augustine…

She would have to be more careful than ever. It wasn’t good. She was already a nervous wreck, worried that she would be gone from the city when Ian did decide to make an appearance. But now, every time she made a move, she would have to worry about Risa as well.

Yet Risa’s smile as she faced Alaina was genuine, just as her affection for Sean was sincere. She stood with her beautiful aquamarine eyes alight, her dark hair wild after her play with Sean.

“I’m fine! Just so … so surprised!” Alaina said at last, and she smiled and hurried forward then, hugging Risa with warmth.

When she drew away, however, she thought a strange light touched Risa’s eyes—if just briefly. And it nagged at her a moment as she wondered if Ian had sent her.