“Captain Morgan! The flag!” a voice shouted beside him.
Caleb looked up to see the flag bearer stagger and fall. He spurred his horse forward and caught the flag before it could hit the ground. He wouldn’t allow the enemy to capture it. His men shouted approval and one grabbed at the wooden pole. Caleb released it and went back into the thick of the battle.
He had no idea how long he fought. He was beyond tired. His arms and legs were numb from exhaustion and his breath came in short gasps. Suddenly he felt his horse tremble and stumble. He looked down to see a wound gaping in the animal’s shoulder. The horse tried to lunge, but Caleb could tell he was finished. He looked up to see a Rebel soldier aiming another shot at him. Although the horse tried to dodge at his command, Caleb felt the thud of the bullet into his own leg. At first there was no pain and he watched the spreading blood as if it had nothing to do with him.
A Rebel ran toward him, sword raised and Caleb slashed at him, but not before the enemy’s blade sank into his arm. Caleb shouted in anger as much as in pain. The bullet wound started throbbing at the same time. Caleb reeled in the saddle, marveling that his horse was still on his feet and that he was in the saddle. A curious lightness was making his head spin. Caleb shook it to clear it, this was no time for weakness.
“Captain! Should I sound retreat?” The bugler was a young boy. Too young in Caleb’s opinion.
“Sound retreat!” he commanded. The day was lost. He wondered why he couldn’t hear the sound of the bugle as the boy put it to his mouth. A glance at his leg told him he was losing blood fast, but somehow it didn’t seem to matter to him. “Retreat!” he shouted to his men. He reined his horse aside to let the men pass before him.
At the edge of the woods his horse stumbled again and Caleb knew he would never be able to carry him to safety. He roared his anger at losing such a precious fighting mate. He had no love for this particular animal, but he respected his strength of heart. Another bullet sang past his ear and he felt the horse stagger. He was shot again.
The animal traveled several yards into the woods, then fell heavily to one side. Caleb felt himself falling with the horse, but it was as if it were happening to someone else. In slow motion, the floor of the forest came to meet him and he tasted dry leaves. Then nothing.
The autumn air felt crisp on Megan’s face as she bent to hoe up the last of the year’s potatoes. Her garden was small but filled most of the level space between her house and the slope of the mountain. She had spent all her life in Black Hollow, Tennessee and she felt as much a part of the tan earth as were the potatoes she was digging for the root cellar.
Far in the distance she heard the sound of a rifle, then another. Megan straightened and listened. It was too late in the day for her father to be hunting. Besides, he rarely took two shots to bring down game. As she listened, several more shots rang out. These seemed closer than the others. The next were closer still. Megan gathered the potatoes into her apron and ran toward the house.
For four years the Civil War had raged. Her mountain had been taken first by one side, then by the other, back and forth. It all meant little to Megan as long as she and the ones she loved were safe.
She closed the door behind her and crossed the room to put the potatoes on the table. Even with the shutters closed she could hear the sounds of the battle. It was taking place in the clearing where her father had shot the bear the summer before. That was too close for safety. Megan went around her small cabin, barring the shutters and doors with the iron straps her brother-in-law had made for the purpose.
The cabin was dim with the door and windows closed but she didn’t waste lamp oil by making a light. Oil was too precious, as was everything else, to be used by day.
She sat in the rocker Seth’s uncle had made for a wedding gift and rocked slowly. The chair’s rockers were slightly uneven so its gait was jerky and it edged across the floor if she rocked for long. Still, it was a rocking chair and it was her own so she didn’t mind. The Brennans had never been much at making furniture.
The cabin was snug and strong. Anything less than a direct strike from a cannonball would bounce off its sides. She told herself that as she listened to the battle, the sounds muffled now by the thick logs. Her father had made the cabin, and Samuel Llewellyn was thorough in everything he did. Once he set his mind to a thing, he didn’t rest until it was accomplished.
At times like this, Megan disliked being up here in her cabin and away from the rest of her family and the small settlement nearer the bottom of Black Hollow. It wasn’t a town and likely never would be. They built their own cabins and the furniture to go in them and planted the food they needed. Patrick Cassidy knew enough about blacksmith work to keep the horses and mules in good shape, but that was as far as they were willing to go. If Black Hollow became a town, strangers would eventually move there, and no one in the settlement welcomed change.
The last stranger to move to Black Hollow had been Megan’s mother, Jane. She had come there as Samuel’s bride, her language still filled with the lilt from her native Ireland. Bridget had taken her bright red hair from Mama’s side of the family. In Megan and Owen it was a darker red, like mahogany.
Samuel had met Jane, courted her and won her during one of his brief visits to his cousins who lived in Oak Ridge. That had been more than twenty-two years ago. Megan knew because her older brother, Owen, was twenty-one and he had been born within a year of their marriage. For a forbidden moment she thought about Owen and wondered if he was well. Since Papa had disowned him, Owen wasn’t to be discussed or even thought of.
Next had come her own birth when Owen was two, then two years later, their sister Bridget. Bridget was a duplicate of their mother and their father’s favorite, just as Owen had been their mother’s. No one had favored Megan, but she understood why. She was much too outspoken and rebellious to suit the settlement. The only boy who ever showed interest in her was Seth Brennan.
She sighed and wondered when Seth would come home. He was impetuous. That was the word her father used, at least. In her opinion, he was simply bullheaded. More than a year ago, Seth had drunk too much whiskey from the still at the bottom of the Hollow and had enlisted in the Confederate army. Unlike Owen, he had chosen the side the settlement favored, but he had chosen to do this the week before they were to be married. Megan had spent the next few months being angry, but her temper had had ample time to cool and now she was just lonely.
Samuel had built the cabin in a pretty spot up the mountain from the others, on the only place flat enough to build one. In some ways Megan enjoyed the privacy. Or at least she did when army troops weren’t passing by or fighting in the clearings. The cabin’s remote location gave her a chance to do the one thing that her family disapproved of most—read.
Books were Megan’s passion, and she had loved them ever since one of her aunts had taught her to read. It had been during a hard winter when there was nothing else to do. Her aunt had meant to teach only Owen, but Megan and Bridget learned as well, by looking over Owen’s shoulder and borrowing his book. Bridget rarely read anything but Megan read everything she could find. When she had a rare bit of money of her own, she would walk to the nearest town, Raintree, and buy a book.
Since she moved to the cabin, she had brought her books out of their hiding place in the barn and had hidden them in the cabin. Seth was no fonder of her reading than was her father, so she didn’t plan to let him know she was still doing it.
That Megan had moved into the cabin at all had been a matter of convenience. It was expected that the war would end soon, and it had been time to put in the garden that would see her and Seth through their first winter together. The cabin was remote enough from her parents’ house for it to be inconvenient for Megan