There had been plenty of good clothing—the right sort for a Mattock grandson—and the usual bounteous table set by hospitable Kentucky standards. Just as there had been education, sometimes enforced by the use of a switch when the tutor—imported from Lexington—thought it necessary to impress learning on a rebellious young mind by a painful application in another portion of the body. Education, as well as a blooded horse in the stables, and all the other prerequisites of a young blue-grass grandee. But never any understanding, affection, or sympathy.
That cold behavior—the cutting, weighing, and judgment of every act of childish mischief and boyish recklessness—might have crushed some into a colorless obedience. But it had made of Drew a rebel long before he tugged on the short gray shell jacket of a Confederate cavalryman.
Drew had forgotten the feel of linen next to his now seldom clean skin, the set of broadcloth across the shoulders. And he depended upon the roan’s services with appreciation which had nothing to do with boasted bloodlines, having discovered in the army that a cold-blooded horse could keep going on rough forage when a finer bred hunter broke down. But today the famed dinner table at Red Springs was a painful memory to one facing only cold hoecake and stone-hard dried beef.
He had circled back to the brush screening the brook and the tree house. Now he stood very still, his hand sliding one of the heavy Colts out of its holster. The roan was still grazing, paying no attention to a figure who was kneeling on the limb-supported platform and turning over the gear Drew had left piled there.
The scout flitted about a bush, choosing a path which would bring him out at the stranger’s back. That same warm sun, now striking from a different angle into the tree house, was bright on a thick tangle of yellow hair, curly enough to provide its owner with a combing problem.
Drew straightened to his full height. The sense of the past which had dogged him all day now struck like a blow. He couldn’t help calling aloud that name, even though the soberer part of his brain knew there could be no answer.
“Shelly!”
The blond head turned, and blue eyes looked at him, startled, across a bowed shoulder. Drew’s puzzlement was complete. Not Sheldon, of course, but who? The other’s open surprise changed to wide-eyed recognition first.
“Drew!” The hail came in the cracked voice of an adolescent as the other jumped down to face the scout. They stood at almost eye-to-eye level, but the stranger was still all boy, awkwardly unsure of strength or muscle control.
“You must be Boyd—” Drew blinked, something in him still clinging to the memory of Sheldon, Sheldon who had helped to build the tree house. Why, Boyd was only a small boy, usually tagging his impatient elders, not this tall, almost exact copy of his dead brother.
“Sure, I’m Boyd. And it’s true then, ain’t it, Drew? General Morgan’s coming back here? Where?” He glanced over his shoulder once more as if expecting to see a troop prance up through the bushes along the stream.
Drew holstered the revolver. “Rumors of that around?” he asked casually.
“Some,” Boyd answered. “The Yankee-lovers called out the Home Guard yesterday. What sort of a chance do they think they’ll have against General Morgan?”
Drew moved toward the roan’s picket rope. As his fingers closed on that he thought fast. Just as the Mattocks and the Forbeses were Union, the Barretts were, or had been, Southern in sympathy. Most of Kentucky was divided that way now. But what might have been true two years ago was not necessarily a fact today. One took no chances.
“You come back to see your grandfather, Drew?”
“Any reason why I should?” The whole countryside must know very well the state of affairs between Alexander Mattock and Drew Rennie.
“Well, he’s been sick for so long.… Didn’t you know about that?” Boyd must have read Drew’s answer in his face, for he spilled out the news quickly. “He had some kind of a fit when he heard Murray was killed—”
Drew dropped the picket rope. “Uncle Murray…dead?”
Boyd nodded. “Killed at Murfreesboro in sixty-two, but the news didn’t come till about a week after the battle. Mr. Mattock was in town when Judge Hagerstorm told him…just turned red in the face and fell down in the middle of the street. They brought him home, and sometimes he sits outdoors. But he can’t walk too good and he talks thick; you can hardly understand him.”
“So that’s why Aunt Marianna’s in charge.” Drew thought of Uncle Murray swept away by time and the chances of war as so many others—and no emotion stirred within him. Murray Mattock had firmly agreed with his father concerning the child who was the result of a runaway match between his sister Melanie and a despised Texan. But Uncle Murray’s death must indeed have been a paralyzing blow for the old man at Red Springs, with all his pride and his plans for his only son.
“Yes, Cousin Marianna runs Red Springs,” Boyd assented, “she and Rafe. They sell horses to the army—the blue bellies.” He used the term with the concentration of one determined to say the right thing at the right time.
Drew laughed. And with that spontaneous outburst, years fell away from his somber face. “I take it that you do not approve of blue bellies, Boyd?”
“’Course not! Me, I’m goin’ to join General Morgan now. Ain’t nobody goin’ to keep me from doin’ that!” Again his voice scaled up out of control, and he flushed.
“You’re rather young—” Drew began, when the other interrupted him with something close to desperation in his voice.
“No, I ain’t too young! That’s all I ever hear—too young to do this, too young to be thinkin’ about things like that! Well, I ain’t much younger than you were, Drew Rennie, when you joined up with Captain Castleman and rode south to join General Morgan—you and Shelly. And you know that, too! I’ll be sixteen on the fifteenth of this July. And this time I’m goin’! Where’s the General now, Drew?”
The scout shrugged. “Movin’ fast. Your rumors probably know as much as I do. They plant him half a dozen places at once. He might be in any one of them or fifty miles away; that’s how Morgan rides.”
“But you’re goin’ to join him, and you’ll take me with you, won’t you, Drew?”
The lightness was gone from the older boy’s eyes, his mouth set in controlled anger. “I am not goin’ to do anything of the kind, Boyd Barrett.” He spoke the words slowly, in an even tone, with a fraction of pause between each. Men of the command had once or twice heard young Rennie speak that way. Although difficult to know well, he had the general reputation of being easy to get along with. But a few times he had erupted into action as might a spring uncoiling from tight pressure, and that action was usually preceded by just such quiet statements as the one he had just made to Boyd.
Boyd, however, was never one to be defeated in a first skirmish of wills. “Why not?” he demanded now.
“Because,” Drew offered the first argument he could think of which might be acceptable to the other, “I’m on scout in enemy-held territory. If I’m taken, it’s not good. I have to ride light and fast, and this is duty I’ve been trained to do. So I can’t afford to be hampered by a green kid—”
“I can ride just as fast and hard as you can, Drew Rennie, and I have Whirlaway for my own now. He’s certainly better than that nag!” With an arrogant lift of the chin, Boyd indicated the roan, who had raised his head and was chewing rather noisily, regarding the two by the tree house with mild interest.
“Don’t underrate Shawnee.” For an instant Drew rose to the roan’s defense and then found himself irritated at being so drawn from the main argument. “And I wouldn’t care if you had Gray Eagle, himself, under you, boy—I’m not taking you with me. Let us be snapped up by the Yankees, and you’d be in bigger trouble than I would.” He gestured to his shirt and breeches. “I’m