She was in her early twenties and moderately attractive, with an almost pretty face and a figure that was slimly built and hinted at, rather than emphasized, her sexuality. She had large green eyes and long dark hair and her complexion was pale with the merest touch of make-up. Her name was Jeannie Fisher and she had once followed Hedges from Parkersburg to Washington; looking for a boy and finding a man. Now she had found that man for a second time and as Hedges lowered the glasses and she looked into his face her smile told the world how deliriously happy the discovery made her.
The wheels of the flatbed skidded and as the rig slid to a dust-raising halt, Rhett leapt to his feet and threw up an elaborate salute.
"Trooper' Rhett reporting for, duty, sir," he slurred. "Fit and good as new again."
Hedges responded to the salute without looking at him. He hadn't taken a woman before Jeannie found him in Washington and there had not been one since. As she sat primly beside the swaying Rhett, she was dressed in a modest, high-necked gown, its whiteness streaked with the dust of the trail. But Hedges could recall what lay beneath the concealing fabric and his lower stomach burned with the need to renew his knowledge.
"Hello, Jeannie," he said softly.
"Hello, Captain," she answered.
The men who had crowded around the wagon were grinning stupidly from out of their discomfort. What should have been a bantering reunion with a wounded comrade was smothered by the strangely tender coming together of the officer and the girl. Rhett's New England drawl injected relief into the tension.
"I bring gifts for everyone," he announced. "Whiskey for the rabble and the Captain's lady for the Captain."
Hedges moved forward and held up a hand to assist Jeannie to the ground. "Glad to have you back," he lied to Rhett, then turned to Forrest. Quarter him, Sergeant. And make sure they don't drown in that redeye."
As Forrest grinned and saluted, Hedges reached up and swung Jeannie's valise off the wagon. Then, as she rested a frail hand on his arm, he walked her off the camp, through the hectic activity of unloading the wagons and assigning the new men to their quarters. There were two hotels in the town, neither of them entirely suitable for an unchaperoned girl. But one was not openly a brothel and Hedges got Jeannie a room there. He specified a double and when they had been shown up he kicked the door closed and took her roughly in his arms. She remembered him well from Washington and made no protest, submitting meekly, then with an ardor equal to his own as their bodies pressed together and their mouths became fused in a passionate kiss.
"You haven't changed, Joe," she said breathlessly as they at last parted, Hedges dictating the end of the embrace.
"Did you expect me to?" he asked, holding her away from him at arms length so that his hooded eyes could rove over the length of her body.
"I thought there might have been other women," she said, and it was as it had been before: she both loved and feared him at the same time. Loved the complete man that he was, but trembled inwardly at the latent enjoyment of violence that lurked just beneath the surface of his outer shell.
"There weren't," he said.
She smiled, filled with happiness. "I'm glad."
"There wasn't the time," he told her flatly.
The joy was shattered and threatened to spill out as tears. He released her and began to unfasten his uniform buttons. "Don't you want to know how I came to be here, Joe?" she asked, not looking at him.
"Later maybe," he replied, shrugging out of his tunic. "I know why you came."
"Like Washington, you think?" Her voice was soft and infinitely sad.
He nodded and began to remove his shirt. "Like Washington. To get laid."
She flinched. "Isn't there anymore to it than that, Joe?"
"Maybe," he allowed. "But everything's got to start someplace. I'm a man and you're a woman. Screwing is a good place for us."
Deep in her heart she had known what it would be like. But on the long journey south from Washington she had not been able to prevent her mind conjuring up romantic fantasies of their meeting: of soft moonlight and gentle courtship, poetic phrases and tender persuasion. But because she loved him so dearly, she surrendered to the reality and shed her clothing with a sudden willingness in the bright, sunlit room. And as she spread her slim, pale nakedness upon the bed and opened her body to his driving hardness, the circumstances ceased to have significance. When she folded her arms and legs about him and he caressed her and thrust into her she loved him with a fierce intensity that was generated by every throbbing fiber of her physical and spiritual being. And as his warmth flowed into her it filled her with a glowing pride because she knew that at that moment in time she owned and had tamed this man. But then it was gone, as he withdrew from her and rolled on to his back, transforming into the complete man, sufficient to himself.
''How did you get tied up with the fag?" he asked suddenly, staring up at the ceiling, through the floating dust motes spinning in the shaft of sunlight from the window.
''I was working in a recruitment office in the city," she replied, her eyes moving up and down along the brown, toughened flesh of his body. "It handled the assigning of the previously wounded, too. When I heard Mr. Rhett was being sent back to your troop, I asked him to bring me with him. Was it as good as before?"
She turned her head on the pillow and he was drawn to look into her face. He could see she desperately wanted him to need her and his lips curled back in a smile. Because she was searching so hard for it, she was able to see a flicker of warmth through the cold blueness of his eyes.
"Like I said," he told her softly, reaching across to rest his forearm atop the warm mounds of her breasts. "It was a good place to start." This simple contact was enough to arouse a response from deep inside her and there was a complete abandonment of modesty as she sought an intimate meeting point with him. Her expression remained sad.
''When there's a start, there's often an end," she said.
He continued to smile as he fitted his body against hers. "So let's get the end away," he murmured.
They spent the remainder of the afternoon together and he didn't leave to return to the camp until darkness had settled over the town and oil lamps had begun to burn in windows and from within the regular lines of tents. Because of the large size of the resting army and the smallness of Murfreesboro the town was off-limits to the vast majority of men, with the lack of privilege arranged on a rota basis. But each night the town was alive with gaiety as those men with freedom of movement relieved the boredom of camp life by drinking at the three saloons and emptying their lust into the imported whores and those local girls who considered it acceptable or necessary to fraternize with the occupying army.
On the night of the day when Jeannie Fisher came to town, there was a social arranged to be held in the meeting house at the other end of Murfreesboro from where the camp was set up. It was not sponsored by the army, but by the local Presbyterian Church, under the auspices of an idealistic preacher who planned it as a means to combat the degradation of vice and drinking that had gripped Murfreesboro since the soldiers came.
Hedges went to the meeting house with Jeannie for the simple reason that he was not a hard-drinking man and their lovemaking of the afternoon had left him in need of a respite before taking her again. The preacher, a middle-aged man with a rotund build and a round, anxious-looking face had, with his church workers, done the best he could to offer the guests a cheerful environment for their relaxation. There was a three-man band on a stage at one end of the hall, a table loaded with food, another supporting bowls of fruit punch arid a third, close to the door, where men were asked to leave their guns. The ceiling was hung with decorations of colored paper, and fresh flowers sprung from vases fixed around the walls.
When Hedges and Jeannie arrived the festivities were already well underway, with both soldiers and local civilians whirling laughing girls in time with the syncopated music supplied by the three sweating musicians.
"Welcome Captain!" the preach
er greeted enthusiastically, with a slight bow towards Jeannie. "We're so pleased you could come. We would appreciate it if you will leave your arms with us." He used the plural because, while he was in front of the depository table, his vacantly smiling wife stood behind it. Hedges' hooded eyes surveyed the hall and saw the potential trouble. There were not enough girls to go around and the bulk of the female guests were, either middle-aged or elderly. Those civilians not dancing with their women watched the luckier soldiers with jealous eyes. And many of the unattached soldiers were clustered in groups, surreptitiously lacing their glasses of punch with stronger liquid from hip flasks.
Hedges unbuckled his saber belt. "You have this," he told the preacher. "I'll keep my side iron."
The preacher blinked. "Everybody else has been most co-operative, Captain," he urged.
"You say a little prayer they keep being that way, reverend," he muttered, and treated the man to a hard stare.
Jeannie gave the preacher a sympathetic smile, then scuttled after Hedges as he made his way around the edge of the dancers towards the food table.
"Can you dance, Joe?" she asked after watching him munch hungrily at a cold beef sandwich.
"I ain't never seen any point in it," he said, surveying the hall again and spotting Forrest and several of the troop openly passing, around a whiskey bottle. "Man can't get his arms around a girl any other way, then he's probably the fag he looks tripping around out there."
His face showered scorn on the dancers,
"Then why'd you come?" she asked.
He almost spat on the floor, but held back. "Food's better than the cookhouse gives out, and it's free."
"I didn't think you were a mean man, Joe."
"Most of what 1 get, I send to my brother," he told her. "He's building up the farm."
Jeannie took a deep breath, preparing to tax Hedges on his plans for after the war and whether she could figure in them. But the sudden movement out on the floor and the raised voice stopped her before she could begin.
"That's my wife you're pawing, soldier!"
The music continued for a few chords, then faded. The dancers fell back, leaving three figures in the center of the floor. One was a large man of middle age who looked like a farmer in his Sunday best. Another was a small, frightened-looking woman about the same age who was holding together the front of her dress where it had been torn. The third was an infantryman who was so drunk he could hardly stand up now that the big man had parted him from the woman he was young enough to be the woman's son.
"Oh, dear," the preacher's wife said into the sudden silence.
The guilty infantryman grinned stupidly. "I weren't doing nothing," he slurred.
"He touched me!" the woman said shrilly.
"She feel good, Luke?" a voice called.
The infantryman giggled. "All I touched was whalebone," he answered.
"You oughta stayed with it," came the response as, the woman's husband launched a haymaker towards the infantryman.
Cries of alarm and yells of anger were suddenly strident in the hall as the soldier took the punch on the point of his chin and reeled backwards, his arms flailing. Hedges reached for his gun and when Jeannie tried to hamper him, he shoved her roughly away, crashing into the food table. Soldiers and civilians turned to face each other and prepared to emulate the violence that had just occurred. Hedges aimed high over the heads of the crowd and squeezed the Colt's trigger. But at the same instant the revolver cracked, a louder report sounded, synchronizing with the shattering of glass and a man's scream of agony.
The soldier was seventeen years old and had a passionate belief in the cause of the Abolitionists. He had come in with the new recruits that afternoon, firmly resolved to fight for the liberty of all who were not oppressors. He died in the process of drinking a fruit punch, the bullet smashing the glass and imbedding splinters over his face then entering the roof of his mouth and gushing out with a spout of blood at the back of his neck.
As Hedges whirled towards the window through which the bullet had entered, a dozen other panes smashed under the impact of bullets which whined into the crowded hall and found their marks on Union soldiers. Hedges got off a shot and dived for the floor as the screams and shouts rose in volume and there was a great rush towards the table loaded with weapons. Civilians and women dropped to the floor and scuttled on all fours towards the hall entrance as more bullets whined over their heads and the Union men grabbed the first gun that came to hand and began to return the fire. Tables and chairs were overturned to provide inadequate cover against the murderous crossfire.
"Damn Yankees!" a man taunted from beyond one of the broken windows.
"You want entertaining?" cried another.
"We'll give you a show!" called a third.
Another fusillade of shots rang out. The infantryman knocked down by the civilian tried to stagger to his feet. One bullet shattered his right knee and another took him in the left elbow. He fell to the floor, writhing and screaming. A third bullet gouged a great furrow across his forehead and as the blood curtained down into his eyes his jugular vein was punctured. A soldier who had been cowering in a comer made a sudden run towards the gun table and began to slide frantically in the spilled blood, arms failing to keep his balance.
"Slide, man, slide!" a rebel voice yelled in delight.
The soldier began to fall, and was helped on his way by two bullets crashing into the back of his head. There were perhaps twenty dead in the meeting house, their bodies sprawled in a variety of blood-soaked attitudes. The preacher also looked dead, sitting upright in a corner by the door, one side of his face covered with shiny scarlet. The surviving soldiers were crouched in cover, those who had reached the table firing out the windows, the others trying to make themselves as small as possible.
Hedges could see no women left inside the building and noticed that Jeannie was gone. The shooting from outside seemed to have ceased and in a few moments the trapped men stopped shooting. The silence was suddenly oppressive, menacing in its solidity.
"Hey, Captain?" a voice called.
"What is it, Seward?" Hedges answered.
"This cruddy town off-limits even when the cruddy rebs come in and shoot it up?"
"Just like the goddam cavalry," an embittered infantryman yelled. "Always expect more goddam cavalry to help you out."
"Yeah, don't you know they're always late!"
"Cut out the smart mouth!" Hedges ordered, as hoofbeats sounded outside, then several shots and the high-pitched screams of frightened women.
"They're taking them!" a man yelled. "They're taking the..."
His words were cut off by a shot and a wet groan. Hedges came out from behind the table and went at a crouching run across the body-littered floor. When he made it without drawing fire, the others streamed after him, out into the warm, early summer night. Two men lay dead in the dusty street, one of them the man whose wife had been molested. Several elderly women were sitting on the sidewalk or squatting in the street, wringing their hands and weeping. Two men looked with terror into the night which was swallowing up the sound of retreating horses. From the other direction came the din of noisy saloons which had effectively screened the sounds of the raid from the camp, no more than dots of fire and lamp lights in the velvet black of the darkness at the far side of town.
As Hedges looked frantically around for Jeannie, one of the civilians turned to confirm his suspicion.
"They took the women," the man said, tears coursing down his cheeks, "They took my daughter."
Anger was a hard weight in Hedges' stomach. His mouth formed into a snarl and his eyes narrowed to the merest slits. He reached out a rock-steady hand and grasped a bunch of the man's shirt front. "Who took the woman?" he demanded, his mouth spitting the words as if they were pieces of jagged metal.
"Terry's Raiders," the man spilled from trembling lips. "Bill Terry and his gangsters."
"Army?" Hedges demanded.
He was holding the man's shirt
so tightly the civilian was beginning to choke.
"They wear uniforms," he croaked.
"How many?" "Dozen of them, including Terry."
"Eleven of them, Captain," Forrest said from the alley at the side of the building. "One of us got in a lucky shot." The sergeant emerged from the dark mouth of the alley. Behind him were Rhett and Douglas, supporting between them a young man clad in disheveled Confederate grey. The prisoner looked dazed and the side of his head was dark with congealed blood from a bullet graze above his right ear. Hedges pushed the civilian away and moved across to stand before the injured raider. The look of cold evil on Hedges' face forced the man to gather his senses.
"I ain't gonna talk," he said in a deep, Southern drawl.
There was absolute silence as Hedges pushed the Colt into its holster, his hands moving in slow, measured movements. Even the women ceased their weeping and looked with bated breath towards the group at the mouth of the alley, gripped by the tension.
"There's a war on," Hedges said softly. "Man can't be that definite about anything."
Suddenly, the action a blur, he reached his right hand up to his neck and brought it down again, the blade of the razor flashing in the meager lighting from the meeting house doorway. The raider drew back against the grip of Rhett and Douglas as the razor slashed within a hair's-breadth of his wan face.
"Close shave," Hedges muttered, and reached out to rest the flat of the blade against the bridge of the raiders' nose. It was quite a large nose.
"Cut him, Captain," Rhett urged with high excitement.
"Shut up," Hedges snarled.
Rhett continued to grin drunkenly as Hedges leaned close to the raider. "I'm a prisoner of war," the man pleaded.
"You're a hunk of meat on two legs," Hedges corrected. "Where are your pals holed up?"
"I ain't gonna tell you that," the man said, then gave a high-pitched scream.
The razor sliced under the flesh and travelled down to the tip. Blood spouted and a broad strip of skin fell forward and dangled in front of the man's mouth. One of the women fainted and nobody went to her aid for all attention was riveted upon the agonized face of the prisoner.
The Blue, the Grey and the Red Page 5