Triumph (8 page)

She needn’t have bothered. He didn’t offer any assistance, and when she met his strange gold eyes as she dismounted on her own, she saw that he was fully aware she would have prided herself on her refusal of anything he offered. She felt let down—and furious.

“A hand might have been polite and proper.”

“And you probably would have spit at it. Go, see to your men. Call one of them out and tell them to hold their fire.”

She walked toward the cabin, tempted to run inside, take cover, and see that he was blasted. But she just didn’t dare. Instinct warned her that this man meant business, and no cover would make her, or the boys, truly safe from his intent.

“Jemmy! Jemmy Johnson!” she called. “It’s—” She nearly stated her name, then quickly caught herself. “It’s me! Please, come out!”

The old, weather-beaten door to the cabin opened. Jemmy Johnson, Enfield in hand, stepped out warily. She was glad to see his caution, although it wasn’t quite enough.

“Miss T—” he began carefully.

“Private!” she interrupted quickly. “The enemy is among us, but he has sworn to let us be if we are all that we say we are. Hold your fire. Command the others to hold their fire.”

“But Miss T—”

“Jemmy, for your lives, and for the blessed love of God! Do as I say!” she pleaded. “Weapons down.”

“Hell, Jemmy!” someone bellowed from within the cabin. “I ain’t holding no weapon! I’m trying to keep Stuart here from bleeding to death!”

It might have been a lie; it might not. But the strange Yankee seemed to go by gut instinct as well. He went striding by Tia and straight into the cabin, his Colts secured to the gun belt at his waist, his Spencer held easily in his left hand.

Easily ...

She was certain he could spin it around and fire in seconds flat.

She followed behind him quickly.

No lie had been spoken by Trey McCormack, the eighteen-year-old standing by Stuart Adair, one of the two patients. He had been laid atop a rough wooden workbench where Trey kept shifting to put more pressure on his friend’s bleeding calf wound. Hadley Blake, the second wounded man, had passed out, and lay with his head supported by a saddle blanket in a corner of the dusky cabin. Gilly Shenley, one of the unwounded recruits, searched the cabin for a proper stick with which to form a tourniquet for Stuart’s dangerously bleeding wound.

“Move, boys, let me see the source for that,” the Yankee commanded. They stood dead still, staring at him.

“Move!” he snapped.

And they did.

Tia almost cried out as she watched him grip Stuart’s calf and survey the damage. He stared at her. “Come on, Miss Godiva, you’ve surely had some medical training! Get some bandages ripped, a tourniquet going—”

“Can’t find a sound stick—” Gilly complained.

“Break up that old broom over there. Come on, lad, a young thing like you can surely snap that pine bough!”

Gilly did as told. Tia quickly ripped up her hemline, glad that he meant to do his best to save Stuart’s life, humiliated that he was telling them what to do. Hell yes, she knew her business, and if he hadn’t steered her away from her boys, they wouldn’t be in this predicament! She could have stopped the bleeding; she’d worked with her brother through the majority of the war, and she’d dare say she was as competent and efficient as most surgeons in the field.

Still, he was more efficient, she had to admit. Within seconds, a tourniquet had been fashioned, and the bleeding was slowing. A few seconds more, and it was coming to a halt. And he was telling them how to release it. She was glad she hadn’t stopped him, or made any comments. What mattered here was not who did what, but that a man’s life had been saved.

“Private Gilly, there, is that your name?” the Yankee asked.

“Private Gilly Shenley, sir!” said the boy, a straw blond with a sad little scraggle of chin whiskers. To Tia’s sheer annoyance, he then saluted.

“I need you to go to the brook and bring me back a large quantity of the moss that forms on the stones there. We’ll put some new stitching in here and get a poultice on the wound, and he should heal just fine.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Also, I need some wild mushrooms, the black-tipped ones. Do you know which ones I mean?”

“I can go,” Tia said. “I know exactly what—”

“No, he’ll go,” the Yankee said, his eyes hard on her. “I’m assuming you can do excellent stitches?”

Her needles and a length of surgical thread—supplied to her by her cousin Jerome McKenzie, one of the few men still successfully running the blockade—were in her pocket. She withdrew them, then stared at her needle for a moment, well aware she had no matches left with which to burn the tip. Then she was startled as the Yank withdrew a box of matches from his pocket and lit one.

She held the tip of the needle in the flame to sterilize it, then threaded the needle, and proceeded very carefully to mend the tear ripped around the young man’s wound during their forced flight.

She felt the Yankee watching her for a while, and when she was done, she looked up and saw the first light of approval in his hazel eyes.

“Perfect,” he said.

“I’ve had experience,” she told him dryly.

“You’ve been in Florida the whole war?”

“I have, and I assure you, we’ve had a constant flow of injuries and disease.”

“I wasn’t suggesting that your talents were wasted here. I was just thinking how appreciated they might have been during the really tragic battles when tens of thousands of men fell in a single day.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know what good I would have been elsewhere. I learned everything I know from ...” She hesitated, not wanting to give herself away in any manner.

“She learned from her brother, the best surgeon in the field!” Trey McCormack provided.

Still watching her, the Yank slowly smiled. “The best surgeon in the field! And who might that be, Private?”

“Don’t you tell him, Trey! I don’t want this man knowing my name, and certainly not that of my brother. I don’t want my brother—”

“Or yourself?” the Yank suggested, interrupting her.

“I don’t want my brother jeopardized in any way!” she finished.

“But Miss Ti—”

“Trey!”

“Yes, ma’am.” The Yankee didn’t force the point, but still she felt uneasy, aware that he was studying her, perhaps seeing more than she wanted him to see.

“What now?” she asked him.

“We wait for Gilly to get back with the poultice.”

“I can make the poultice. I’m as familiar with the healing qualities of mosses and molds as most physicians.”

“More so than most, I imagine,” he said.

“Are you a physician yourself?”

He shook his head, hesitating slightly. She realized he had decided not to reveal too much about his own identity. “I have a witch doctor or two in my background.”

“What?”

“Never mind. Like you, I’ve learned from experience.”

Gilly came back in then, breathing hard, but carrying the moss and the mushrooms in his mess plate.

“They need to be mashed together ...” the Yankee began.

“Truly, I do this well. Let me make the poultice,” Tia said. “Gilly, you can help me. Bring them just outside. Bring your mess plate.”

Gilly did as she had ordered. He knelt down by her side when she found a fallen log to use as a worktable.

“Gilly, don’t turn around and look back as I talk to you, do you understand?”

“Don’t turn around?”

“Gilly, we’ve got to take him by surprise somehow.”

“Take him by surprise? But he hasn’t come to hurt us.”

“Gilly! He’s a Yankee officer—he isn’t coming through to applaud us on medical technique!”

“But Tia, he just saved Stuart’s life.”

“Yes, and I’m grateful for that, though if we hadn’t been running, Stuart might not have ripped his previous stitches so badly! The point is, Gilly, we can’t chance letting him leave, going for help, and bringing a score of men to take us in.”

“A score of Yankees—”

“The state is riddled with them now, Gilly! They’ve decided that we are to be taken, that we are a danger. Troops are amassing to the north of the state, west of Jacksonville and St. Augustine. We know that they’ve decided on making a real movement against us here. Trust me, please, Gilly, if he leaves here, he might come back with plenty of reinforcements!”

“And how do we stop him?”

“By surprise, somehow by surprise!”

“Have you taken note of his weapons?”

“Yes, of course, and I’m sure he’s adept at using them. We need to divert his attention, and you’ll have to take him from the back. It will be our only chance.”

“You want me to shoot a man in the back? I don’t care if this is war, Miss Tia. That’s cold-blooded murder. There are still such things as honor in this world, and if we survive the war, no matter who wins it, I’m still going to have to live with myself.”

She stared at the very young man who seemed to know his own purpose so well. “I understand. I’m really not suggesting cold-blooded murder, though how our actions out in the field aren’t murder, I don’t know. You don’t have to kill him. Taken by surprise, he can be knocked out. We can leave him hog-tied and immobile and we can move west again, hook up with Dixie’s troops, and then, our wounded will have a far better chance of survival!”

“Leave him tied? There’s varmints aplenty out here, Miss Tia.”

“I’m sure he’ll untie himself. I can only pray that it will take him time.”

“But how will we divert him?”

“I don’t know yet!” she admitted, exasperated. “Be ready for my signal. When you get the chance, warn Jemmy and Trey.”

“Miss Tia, we can move Hadley now; but if we were to try to move Stuart, I’m afraid the bleeding would start up again.”

“Have we got any food on us?”

“What?”

“Food, Private, food. To eat!”

Gilly shook his head. “First you want me to shoot him down. Now you want to invite him to dinner, Miss Tia?”

She sighed, losing her patience. She was dealing with children here! Children already shot up in the defense of their native state, she reminded herself.

“I’m simply trying to buy time.”

“We’ve spent a lot of time out here already,” Gilly commented, “is the poultice done?”

She looked down where she had been busy mashing mushrooms and moss together. It was amazing to see how mechanical her actions had become. The war had so inured her that she could function without thinking. She didn’t know if that was good or bad.

Moss and mushrooms were now one pulpy mass, ready to be applied, and bandaged onto the wounded limb.

“Let’s go in. And yes, we’re inviting him to dinner. We’re buying time.”

Tia brought the poultice in; Gilly followed behind her. In the cabin, the Yankee was busy with Trey and Jemmy, seeing to the comfort and well-being of their other wounded man, Hadley Blake. The Yank had carried a small bottle of some kind of liquor in his frockcoat pocket. He was in the process of bathing Hadley’s wound, this one in the lower arm.

Though he didn’t turn around, Tia knew that he was instantly aware that they had returned. His eyes were fixed on the wound. “Your brother is one hell of a surgeon, all right—if he’s the one who worked on this boy.”

“He is.”

“This arm should have been lost.”

“He’s excellent at saving limbs,” she murmured, and she couldn’t quite keep the pride from her voice.

The Yank stood. “The poultice?”

“Here.”

“Go ahead. Tend to the other boy. I’m sure you know your business.”

She stared at him, then walked on over to the worktable where Stuart lay, twitching restlessly now and then.

The boy was very young. Perhaps only fifteen or sixteen. The youngest of this sad little band, she thought, though he had certainly lied his way into the militia. She smoothed the hair back from his forehead. “Help me, Trey.”

Trey came to her side.

“Think a splash of that whiskey would do well here?” she asked the Yank.

“Indeed.” He stepped forward, bathing her fresh stitchery. Stuart Adair groaned and twitched again. Already, though, his face had more color.

Whiskey often seemed to be the best cleanser they had. Julian had commented that the wounds cleaned with whiskey often seemed to heal the best as well. She dabbed the wound dry, quickly and expertly applied the poultice, then bandaged the leg neatly.

“There’s the remains of an old straw bed over there; let’s get him on it,” the Yank said.

With tremendous care, they moved the wounded boy. When both the injured lay in deep sleep, Trey asked, “Think they’ll make it?”

“Half of it is in the spirit, boy,” the Yank said. “Yes, I think they’ll make it.”

“How about joining us for some hardtack stew?” Gilly suggested. “Yank, you are most welcome to anything we’ve got.”

“Well, you can melt down some hardtack with that clean brook water—I’ll pick out the maggots. And maybe I can come up with something a bit better. Give me what’s left of that broomstick, son.”

Gilly found the broken broomstick and handed it to the Yank. He exited the cabin, not seeming to care that his back was to them. And yet it wasn’t the right time to strike—Tia knew it. She shrugged to Trey, and followed him out.

The Yankee walked down to the brook. He stood curiously poised over the water.

“What the hel—sorry, Miss Tia. What on earth is he doing?” Jemmy demanded.

“I don’t know ...” Tia murmured, and she felt uncomfortable again, watching the Yank. As if she knew him. Or should understand something about him that she hadn’t quite placed in her mind.

Suddenly, like lightning, he moved. When he straightened, he had a huge catfish dangling from the broomstick.

“Hell, yes!” Jemmy cried, delighted. “Oh, sorry, Miss Tia—”

“Quit apologizing for swearing!” she said with a sigh. “This is a war.”

“Yes, ma’am, sorry, ma’am. I’ll get the cooking fires a-burning!”

“Now, wait ...” Tia began uneasily. She didn’t want any gifts from the strange enemy.

But they weren’t waiting. They hadn’t really eaten in almost forty-eight hours, and they hadn’t had a decent meal in months. A fire was quickly lit. Gilly was an expert at what was called hardtack stew, a meal made by boiling hardtack and adding in bacon grease—or real, smoked bacon, which the Yank had in his saddlebags, and in this case, the hardtack stew made a filling side dish for the main course of the very delicious, fresh fish. The Yankee stranger supplied coffee as well, and laced each cup with a sip of the whiskey. To Tia’s alarm, by the time the moon had risen high in the night sky, the boys were looking up to the Yank as some kind of god.