Drew slapped the blanket down on Shawnee’s back, smoothed it flat with a palm stroke, and jerked his saddle from the platform. He could not stay right here now that Boyd had smoked him out—maybe nowhere in the neighborhood with this excitable boy dogging him.
The scout was driven to his second line of defense. “What about Cousin Merry?” he asked as he tightened the cinch. “Have you talked this over with her—enlistin’, I mean?”
Boyd’s lower lip protruded in a child’s pout. His eyes shifted away from Drew’s direct gaze.
“She never said No—”
“Did you ask her?” Drew challenged.
“Did you ask your grandfather when you left?” Boyd tried a counterattack.
This time Drew’s laughter was harsh, without humor. “You know I didn’t, and you also know why. But I didn’t leave a mother!”
He was being purposefully brutal now, for a good reason. Sheldon had ridden away before; Boyd must not go now. In Drew’s childhood, his father’s cousin, Meredith Barrett, had been the only one who had really cared about him. His only escape from the cold bleakness of Red Springs had been Barrett’s Oak Hill. There was a big debt he owed Cousin Merry; he could not add to it the burden of taking away her second son.
Sure, he had been only a few months older than this boy when he had run away to war, but he had not left anyone behind who would worry about him. And Alexander Mattock’s cold discipline had tempered his grandson into someone far more able to take hard knocks than Boyd Barrett might be for years to come. Drew had met those knocks, thick and fast, enduring them as the price of his freedom.
“You were mad at your grandfather, and you ran away. Well, I ain’t mad at Mother, but I ain’t goin’ to sit at home with General Morgan comin’! He needs men. They’ve been recruitin’ for him on the quiet; you know they have. And I’ve got to make up for Sheldon—”
Drew swung around and caught Boyd’s wrist in a grip tight enough to bring a reflex backward jerk from the boy. “That’s no way to make up for Sheldon’s death-runnin’ away from home to fight. Don’t give me any nonsense about goin’ to kill Yankees because they killed him! When a man goes to war…well, he takes his chances. Shelly did at Chickamauga. War ain’t a private fight, just one man up against another—”
But he was making no impression; he couldn’t. At Boyd’s age you could not imagine death as coming to you; nor were you able to visualize the horrors of an ill-equipped field hospital. Any more than you could picture all the rest of it—the filth, hunger, cold, and boredom with now and then a flash of whirling horses and men clashing on some road or field, or the crazy stampede of other men, yelling their throats raw as they charged into a hell of Minié balls and canister shot.
“I’m goin’ to ride with General Morgan, like Shelly did,” Boyd repeated doggedly, with that stubbornness which seasons ago had kept him eternally tagging his impatient elders.
“That’s up to you.” Suddenly Drew was tired, tired of trying to find words to pierce to Boyd’s thinking brain—if one had a thinking brain at his age. Slinging his carbine, Drew mounted Shawnee. “But I do know one thing—you’re not goin’ with me.”
“Drew-Drew, just listen once.…”
Shawnee answered to the pressure of his rider’s knees and leaped the brook. Drew bowed his head to escape the lash of a low branch. There was no going back ever, he thought bitterly, shutting his ears to Boyd’s cry. He’d been a fool to ride this way at all.
CHAPTER 2
Guns in the Night
There were sounds enough in the middle of the night to tell the initiated that a troop was on the march—creak of saddle leather, click of shod hoof, now and then the smothered exclamation of a man shaken out of a cavalryman’s mounted doze. To Drew’s trained ears all this was loud enough to send any Union picket calling out the guard. Yet there was no indication that the enemy ahead was alert.
Near two o’clock he made it, and the advance were walking their horses into the fringe of Lexington—this was home-coming for a good many of the men sagging in the saddles. Morgan’s old magic was working again. Escaping from the Ohio prison, he had managed to gather up the remnants of a badly shattered command, weld them together, and lead them up from Georgia to their old fighting fields—the country which they considered rightfully theirs and in which during other years they had piled one humiliating defeat for the blue coats on another. General Morgan could not lose in Kentucky!
And they already had one minor victory to taste sweet: Mount Sterling had fallen into their hold as easily as it had before. Now Lexington—with the horses they needed—friends and families waiting to greet them.
Captain Tom Quirk’s Irish brogue, unmistakable even in a half whisper, came out of the dark: “Pull up, boys!”
Drew came to a halt with his flanking scout. There was a faint drum of hoofs from behind as three horsemen caught up with the first wave of Quirk’s Scouts.
“Taking the flag in…” Drew caught a snatch of sentence passed between the leader of the newcomers and his own officer. He recognized the voice of John Castleman, his former company commander.
“…worth a try…” that was Quirk.
But when the three had cantered on into the mouth of the street the scout captain turned his head to the waiting shadows. “Rennie, Bruce, Croxton…give them cover!”
Drew sent Shawnee on, his carbine resting ready across his saddle. The streets were quiet enough, too quiet. These dark houses showed no signs of life, but surely the Yankees were not so confident that they would not have any pickets posted. And Fort Clay had its garrison.…
Then that ominous silence was broken by Castleman’s call: “Bearer of flag of truce!”
“…Morgan’s men?” A woman called from a window up ahead, her voice so low pitched Drew heard only a word or two. Castleman answered her before he gave the warning:
“Battery down the street, boys. Take to the sidewalks!”
A lantern bobbed along in their direction. Drew had a glimpse of a blue-uniformed arm above it. A moment later Castleman rode back. One of his companions swerved close-by, and Drew recognized Key Morgan, the General’s brother.
“They say, ‘No surrender.’”
Perhaps that was what they said. But the skirmishers were now drifting into town. Orders snapped from man to man through the dark. The crackle of small-arms fire came sporadically, to be followed by the heavier boom-boom as cannon balls from Fort Clay ricocheted through the streets, the Yankees being forced back into the protection of that stronghold. Riders threaded through alleys and cross streets; lamps flared up in house windows. There was a pounding on doors, and shouted greetings. Fire made a splash of angry color at the depot, to be answered with similar blazes at the warehouses.
“Spur up those crowbaits of yours, boys!” Quirk rounded up the scouts. “We’re out for horses—only the best, remember that!”
Out of the now aroused Lexington just as daylight was gray overhead, they were on the road to Ashland. If Red Springs might have proved poor picking, John Clay’s stables did not. One sleek thoroughbred after another was led from the stalls while Quirk fairly purred.
“Skedaddle! Would you believe it? Here’s Skedaddle, himself, just aching to show heels to the blue bellies, ain’t you?” He greeted the great racer. “Now that’s the sort of stuff we need! Give us another chase across the Ohio clean up to Canada with a few like him under us. Sweep ’em clean and get going! The General wants to see the catch before noon.”
Drew watched the mounts being led down the lane. Beautiful, yes, but to his mind not one of them was the equal of the gray colt he had seen at Red Springs. Now that was a horse! And he was not tempted now to strip his saddle