Jennifer found him there near midnight. The scalding tears had run dry, the mind-dissolving grief had departed. All that he had left was the hollow place in his world that had once held Bobbie Jean. Her knock brought only a muffled response.
“Griff? Are you in there?”
“Go … go away for a while.”
“What’s the matter? Let me in.” She persisted and at last Griff complied. One look told her that some shattering bit of information had come his way.
“Bobbie Jean is dead,” he muttered as he hobbled back to the bed.
“Oh, no! Oh, Griff, how terrible.” Tears formed in Jennifer’s eyes. “Are … are you sure? It isn’t a mistake?”
“No mistake. It was some of Sherman’s Bummers. It happened when they burned Riversend. All these months … chasing a dead woman.”
Jennifer could contain herself no longer. She rushed to Griff, threw her arms around him and surrendered to choking, gasping sobs. Guilt, shame, and overwhelming grief burned in her chest like a raging fire. Her tears wet his collar and he patted the back of her head, speaking soft, soothing words until they stuck in his throat and he could cry again. A clean, healing lament this time. When their tears subsided, Griff laid new plans.
“We’ll go get Jeremy. Then back to Maryland. Next year I can think of rebuilding Riversend. But first my son.”
“The Tuckers?” the gangly, brown-faced man in farmer’s clothes repeated the name. “Naw suh, they’re not here no more. That’s the folks we bought this place off. Evan and Julie Tucker. Right nice couple. Them an’ their li’l boy, Jeremy. Had a daughter, too. Pretty thing. Movin’ west, they said.
“Evan, he come home from the wo’ with his left hand shot off. Said it wouldn’t do for farmin’, but he could still ply his trade as a blacksmith and do a little ‘horse doctorin’ on the side.”
“Do you have any idea where they were going?” Griffin Stark asked earnestly. It had been a long two-day trip to the Tucker farm from Valdosta. The continued brutal August weather had not made it easy.
“Sorry, but I don’t know. He did mention Illinois or some place in Missouri. Saint Louis, I think.”
“Thanks for your help,” Griff returned, his hand extended to be shaken.
Griff headed the buggy on toward Way cross. There more bad news awaited them. At the prearranged mail drop at the local Harmon and Company stagecoach-line office, they found a letter from Damien. Months old now, it told of the murder of Jenny’s father. Everyone, including the law, remained mystified as to the cause or to why the armed assassins had wanted to find Griff, Damien, and Jenny. Griff had no better idea than they.
He wondered, though, how much more tragedy would stalk his trail in search of his son.
… to be continued in the next CONFEDERATE adventure:
BATTLE CRY … COMING SOON!
A Tribute to the Author
by Patrick E. Andrews
Forrest A Randolph, author of The Confederate series, was in reality my friend Mark K. Roberts.
I first met Mark when we were schoolboys in Wichita, Kansas right after World War II. My family had moved from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, to live in that city after my dad transferred from active duty to the Army Reserves. Mark and I hit it off right away. We both liked to read adventure books and go to the movies on Saturday afternoons to watch the western films of Bob Steele, Sunset Carson, Charles Starrett and others.
Later, as we grew older, our interest in literature turned to typing up adventure stories and passing them back and forth to each other. Most of these were westerns, since my family had pioneered in Oklahoma and his in Kansas. All this came to an end as teenagers when Mark's widowed mother remarried and her new husband took her and Mark to live in San Diego, California.
Meanwhile, our devotion to writing grew stronger as we exchanged occasional letters and went about growing into manhood. I enlisted in the Army and volunteered to be a paratrooper, while Mark joined the California National Guard. When I was discharged from the service, Mark invited me out to San Diego to share an apartment and start some serious writing. A few years passed and he made some sales to Pinnacle Books, then I scored with four westerns bought by Manor Books.
Now the good times started as more sales and improvement in our story telling skills developed. After that we saw each other only occasionally. However, we got together in one of our old watering holes for some drinking and jawing. Mark brought up the subject of us writing a western together. Great idea and it would be fun! We decided to make it a cavalry novel since we both had military service experience and our family lore supplied us with a lot of knowledge about cattle ranches and homesteads. The result was Apache Gold, and we had no trouble selling it to Kensington Publishers.
Little did we know that decades later our novel would be picked up as an e-book by Piccadilly Books in the United Kingdom. My primary contact at PP was a savvy Brit by the name of Ben Bridges, who is not only a resourceful publisher but writes damn fine westerns of his own.
In the 1990s Mark inherited some property back in Kansas where his great-grandparents homesteaded, and he moved back to the prairie country. At the same time I followed my wife Julie from California to Florida, and Colorado in her aerospace job. Since I was a writer, it was easy for us to pack up and go elsewhere. When she retired, we moved back to California to be with our son and grandchildren.
Then, thanks to e-mail, Mark and I got back in touch. But it was not a happy occasion. One of the first things he wrote was, “Well, Patrick, I'm afraid I’m not the healthiest man in Dodge.” As the weeks passed, his e-mail activity slowed then stopped. I called the local sheriff and asked him to check on Mark. The next day the lawman called back and said he’d gone to his house and found that he had passed away. Mark was buried homesteader style in a corner section of land that had been used as the Roberts family cemetery for several generations.
Rest in peace, old pardner. I’m in my 80s now, so maybe pretty soon, if you're in a celestial saloon, you’ll see me amble in to join you at the bar We’ll knock back some good bourbon like we did in the good ol’ days.
But the adventure doesn’t end here …
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