Rebel Wench. Gardner F. Fox

she was turning and running for the door, reaching out for its iron knob. The man who had been with her in the bed stood up now, and Stafford saw that it was Colonel Emerson. His right hand held a pistol that he had snatched from a little bedside table, and he trained it on Stafford, an inch above his belt buckle. The Colonel said triumphantly, “I told you he’d be back, Laury! I win our little bet! Now unbolt the door and summon the guards I posted below.”

      “Laura Lee! As you love me, leave the door alone!”

      He was not aware that he cried out so, with the bitterness alive in him and the numb shock and disbelief raging. Behind him his hand fumbled, and his fingers closed on a covered compote glass. Even as his grip hefted it, he remembered the day he and Laura Lee had bought it in a Charles Town chinaware shop.

      Then he was darting sideways and hurling the glass, seeing the cover fly off as it hurtled across the room. Startled, Colonel Emerson fired. A spit of flame ran at Stafford. He heard the ball whistle past and shatter a window glass behind him. Then he was lunging forward, following the glass, taking Emerson about the knees and hurling him backward onto the bed.

      Stafford was a madman for a few minutes. The hell light in his eyes was alive and leaping, and the frenzy rose up into his throat, shaking him with its power.

      His fists thudded home on jaw and belly. He rode the man’s middle, hunting for his throat with hard hands. As his fingers tightened on that throat, the door opened and a shaft of yellow candlelight from a wall sconce came in and showed him the purpling face, the bulging eyes and protruding tongue.

      Laura Lee was screaming at the doorway.

      Heavy feet were pounding up the spiral staircase. Men were shouting, and the noise of their shouting was growing louder.

      Remembering her nakedness, Laura Lee ran to a chest of drawers, snatched up a thin night robe, and slipped her arms into it. As if that were a signal, red-jacketed soldiers of the Thirty-third Foot came swarming through the door and raced for the men grappling on the bed.

      Stafford whirled back to sanity as a rifle butt came stabbing through the pool of yellow candlelight at him. He rolled from the musket, taking the man who held it in the middle with a hard fist. As the man fell, Stafford shoved him sideways and dived for the open window.

      Beyond the window was a big cypress. He bunched his legs under him and aimed for the branches. Then the air was cold on his face and the tree was coming nearer and there was nothing between him and the ground, thirty feet below. His hands went out and closed on bark. He slipped and slid, and then his hands caught purchase.

      A musket spat at him from the bedroom window. Another musket joined it. He heard the balls bury themselves in the tree bole.

      A numbness of spirit made him cling there, with his back offering a splendid target for the British soldiers. In this moment of stark heartbreak and agonized despair, he did not care whether he lived or died. What he had seen in that big bed as he came through the window, the contorted positions of Laura Lee and the British colonel, had put a disease in his brain.

      He wanted to die, hanging here, with a branch under a leg and bark cutting into his palms. What reason had he to fight for life? What did life hold out to him now? His former love for Laura Lee, which was all that had been left to him after the earlier happenings of the night, was a bitter taste in his mouth. Let her have her British colonel, if she wanted him so badly! By dying here, he could give her that much.

      The thought of the Colonel did what nothing else could do. It turned the bitterness in him to anger, and the anger into a need for vengeance. Live! his mind cried out to him. Live so that you can make them pay for this moment! As another musket ball grazed his cheek, he swung down and to the far side of the great tree bole. Feet feeling for branch crotches, he went down. Ten feet from the ground, he jumped.

      The gelding sidled nervously as he came at him. Scorning the stirrups, he went up over his rump in a hand-propelled leap. As his weight settled hard in the saddle, the big black lunged forward into full gallop. For the second time that night, Billy Joe Stafford rode away from his family home with death only half a step behind him, with musket balls whistling in the air and a curious deadness settling in his middle.