“What are you doin’, mister?”
Knight jumped a foot. He swung the six-gun around and hid it behind him as he stared down at the boy who had been working in the stalls.
“I . . . I’m looking for Doc Phillips.”
“Ain’t got no sick animals here. Not today. They’s all healthy and, well, as strong as horses.” The boy smirked at this small joke. “You want the doc, go on to the end of the street until you see a sign carved to look like a horse. Or if you kin read, his name’s on it.”
“Much obliged.”
Knight backed off, kept the drawn six-shooter out of sight, and tried not to make it look as if he fled from the two men just emerging from the stables. He walked with shoulders pulled back and spine straight . . . as if he had every right to be out and about as a free man. If those two had gotten a good look at him the night before, he might find himself exchanging lead with them. The hairs on the back of his neck rippled, then settled down the farther he got from the stables.
Before his heart stopped pounding from the close call with the posse, he saw the horse-shaped sign swinging in the sultry wind. Knight slowed and finally stopped. What he intended was crazy. If not outright insane, then reckless and not a little bit stupid. With a deep breath, he opened the low wooden gate and went to the veterinarian’s door. Two quick taps almost convinced him to leave. Before he could, the door opened and a young man, hardly in his twenties, with mussed sandy hair and bloodshot eyes, confronted him.
“What is it?”
“You’re Dr. Phillips?”
“Am. And you are?”
“I came to see how your patient is doing.”
“The four-legged one or the deputy?”
“Slowpoke. How’s he feeling?”
“Can’t say since he hasn’t recovered consciousness yet. You a friend? I don’t remember seeing you around town before.” The vet’s eyes fixed on the gun belt slung over Knight’s shoulder.
“Passing through when I heard. His family and mine . . .” Knight let the sentence trail off so the vet could draw his own conclusion.
“Come on in. I’ve got him in the back room.”
Knight followed the young man to a small room outfitted like a medical doctor’s surgery. He saw bottles of carbolic acid and a few surgical instruments next to a small library of books on large animal anatomy. One lay open. Knight stood on tiptoe and scanned the pages. The vet hunted for ways he might help the deputy.
“He’s not a sheep, you know.” Knight went to a cot where a pale, unmoving man stretched out under a thin sheet.
“I don’t know squat about fixing people, and he needs help of some sort. I’m trying to figure out what.”
Knight turned Slowpoke’s head slowly and saw how the back of his head had been bashed in. “I’ve seen a wound similar to this. A man was grazed by a cannonball. You’ve got to relieve the pressure from the bone fragments or he will die.” He reached for a sharp knife on the table.
“Not so fast. I can’t let you operate on him. Who the hell are you?”
“The one who’s trying to save his life.” Knight shoved the vet, causing him to stumble. As he tried to right himself, Knight drew the Colt Navy and pointed it squarely at him. “Do I tie you up or do you help me?”
“You can’t take that knife to him. You—”
Moving faster than he thought possible in his condition, Knight stepped up and swung the pistol, laying the barrel alongside Dr. Phillips’s temple. Stunned, the man dropped to his knees. In that condition, Knight easily tied him up with cord he found on the table. Before the vet regained his senses, Knight picked up the knife, tested its tip, and then sloshed carbolic acid over it.
“Don’t. You’ll kill him.”
“I might, but he’s going to die if I don’t do something fast.” Knight dabbed away caked blood, cleansed the wound, and scraped away all the hair on the deputy’s scalp that might get into the wound.
He sucked in his breath and held it as he slipped the knife’s tip under a bone fragment and applied outward pressure. The bit of skull popped free. Pressure using a bandage stanched some blood flow enough to let him get to a second, more dangerous piece of bone driven into the brain. “Do you have forceps?”
“In my kit bag. Behind the table.”
Knight relaxed the pressure on the bandage. Blood flowed. If the vet had helped, the deputy would have a better chance of not bleeding to death. He found the bag and dragged it beside the cot. After a few seconds of rummaging around, he found the forceps similar to those he had used to good effect during the war. Applying them to the edge of the bone, he withdrew it with steady pressure, then tossed it onto the floor. Only then did he work to stop the bleeding. After several minutes, he sank back on his heels. His hands shook.
“I think he’ll make it now. He might not be as sharp as he once was but—”
“They call him Slowpoke for a reason,” Phillips said. “You really got the fragments out of his brain?”
“They weren’t too deeply embedded.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“Someone who is going to take your horse, the one I see tethered out back.” Knight wiped blood from his hands, slung the gun belt over his shoulder, then climbed through the window. “Don’t let him thrash about too much. If you have to, give him whiskey to kill the pain if he ever wakes up. That’s all right.”
“If? You mean he might still die?”
“There’re never any easy operations or outcomes with head wounds.” Knight kicked over the ledge and dropped to the ground.
In the small surgery he heard Dr. Phillips thrashing about, trying to get to the knife to free himself. It wouldn’t take such a young, vital, well-fed man long. Knight wanted to be a mile away on the stolen horse when Phillips went to report to the marshal all that had happened—and found out how the town’s lawman had been locked up in his own jail.
CHAPTER 3
Sam Knight shifted uneasily as the horse trotted along the muddy road. He wiped sweat from his forehead, turned to see if anyone pursued and finally settled down, letting the animal set the pace. He had stolen food on his way home, but being a horse thief was new for him. He closed his eyes and forced away the memory of almost stealing a peach pie from a little girl. It had hardly been better breaking into the restaurant to gobble up food and steal money, but that wasn’t a moral low. Not like trying to swipe the cooling pie from the windowsill.
He had done the right thing once. Now he would pay a severe price for what he considered lesser crimes if the marshal caught him.
“Doctor? Nope, horse thief.” He slumped in despair. What had he become? All he wanted was to return home to his wife.
Knight almost turned the horse’s face about to return to the scene of his heinous crimes. Slowpoke needed more help after the crude surgery he had performed. The vet might do just fine with that care now that the danger had passed, but he wasn’t a medical doctor. Complications often arose needing an educated doctor’s skill. Dr. Samuel Knight. Savior.
He owed it to the deputy to give of his experience and battlefield training, but he realized the chance would never happen if he showed his face back there. He’d be stuffed into the jail cell and never allowed out until they strung him up for stealing Dr. Phillips’s horse.
He straightened in resolve. Return to Pine Knob, reunite with Victoria, then he might consider what could be done for the deputy. There was no need for him to personally attend Slowpoke. With some luck, he could find another doctor passing through, perhaps one in dire straits such as he found himself in now, to volunteer a quick checkup of the deputy. The towns were only a hundred miles apart.
Knight found himself smiling and then whistling as he rode. Depression lifted as his plans took form. There was no need to abandon the deputy and—
“I’ll blow yer damn Johnny Reb head off if you don’t stop whistlin’ that song. I hate that song.”
Knight drew rein and looked around in panic. The demand came from thin
air.
“It’s ‘Eating Goober Peas.’ There’s nothing wrong with the tune.”
“I was in a battle where the entire damned Reb line came marchin’ at me singin’ that song. I got shot up and my cousin got hisself kilt dead.”
Knight found himself staring down a rifle barrel almost at eye level poking out from leaves in a tree. Looking carefully, he made out the man holding the rifle squatting on the oak tree’s strong lowest limb. Mixed with the greenery came flashes of brass buttons and a blue woolen uniform.
A Federal’s uniform.
“I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“Were you in the Confederate Army?”
The leaves rustled and then parted to give a better view of the grizzled man drawing a bead on him. Scars crisscrossed the weather-beaten face like lines in a tictac-toe game. The left eyelid drooped, giving an eternally sad, hangdog look. The soldier’s garrison cap had been pushed back, showing a receding hairline. Knight tried to figure out the color of the man’s hair and failed. The top of his head was hidden by shadow. The soldier, in spite of his obvious age, was only a private.
“I can sing something more to your liking? ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’?” Knight kept from spitting out the name. The words would burn his tongue, but if it got him on his way, he was willing to belt out whatever this blue devil wanted, at the top of his lungs if that was necessary.
“Climb on down from that there horse so I kin git a better look at you.”
Knight considered his chances. To duck low and put his heels to the horse’s flanks spelled his death. The stolen animal had been hitched to a wagon most of its life and wasn’t suited to riding, much less galloping with a rider hanging onto its neck for dear life.
“Down!”
“I’m getting down. I am.”
Knight made his decision. The soldier had been in the tree for some time. He had no idea about any horse thief coming this way. Whatever mischief was afoot, it had nothing to do with any crime Knight had committed. Considering this was a Union soldier, he probably robbed every traveler who rode past.
A small chuckle escaped his lips.
“What’s so damned funny?”
“I don’t have any money for you to steal. There’s nothing I have, other than the horse, worth anything.”
“You ain’t the sharpest dressed man I ever did see, that’s for certain sure. You jist wait fer me to climb down.”
Knight thought he had finally caught a ray of luck. The soldier fell from the tree rather than shinnying down, but he shook himself and got to his feet. In addition to the sagging left side of his face, he dragged his left foot a mite. A hasty evaluation suggested the soldier had endured a minor stroke. So why was he still in the army?
Knight asked.
“What do you know ’bout my troubles? Captain Norwood didn’t send you out here, now did he? Him and my brother, they don’t git along none.”
“Your brother?”
“Shut up. Head out that way. Into the woods. There’s a clearing beyond the tree line.”
“What would it take to just let me go? There’s nothing I can do or give you—or your brother—that’d amount to a hill of beans.”
“I got my orders. If I want to stay in the army and collect my pay, skimpy as it is, I have to obey.”
Knight got a better idea of the power structure but had no idea how that would benefit him. The man’s brother had managed to prevent the officer, Norwood, from mustering him out because he wouldn’t receive any pension for what many considered a nonexistent injury. The private had no visible wounds, just the impairment to his left side.
“Did you get shot in the head? On the right side?”
“You shut yer tater trap. Keep walkin’.”
Before Knight could figure out a way to convince the private he meant no harm, he stepped out of the woods into the clearing. He sucked in his breath. He thought he had been captured by a wounded soldier who was part of a small detachment, maybe not even a full squad. Two companies’ garrison banners stirred in the sluggish wind. More bluecoats than he had seen since hiking south of the Mason-Dixon line bivouacked here.
“That tent yonder. Hurry up. I gotta git back to my post.”
Aware of the soldier keeping his rifle trained on the middle of his back, Knight marched forward. He tried not to panic when two more soldiers came from inside the tent, rifles rising to cover him. One gestured with his weapon for him to enter the tent. He had to duck. When he got inside, the roof was hardly an inch over his head. Shadows moved endlessly there, remnants of the sun shining past thick treetop leaves.
The officer, a lieutenant, looked up. Knight saw the resemblance to the private and guessed this was the brother. A younger brother who looked after an injured older sibling?
“Stop staring,” the officer snapped. “Why were you brought in?”
“I was out on the road when the sentry stopped me. I don’t know why.” He bit back a denunciation of Federals overstepping the bounds of the constitution and denying rights to the South. That would only land him in irons. “I haven’t seen anything and I’m poor as a church mouse.” He patted his pockets.
“You got yourself a six-gun. We got orders to interrogate anyone packing an iron.”
Knight started to reach for the gun at his hip. He yelped when two rifle muzzles poked into his back. The guards weren’t going to let him touch the six-shooter.
“Take his piece. Check it to see if it’s been fired.”
One bluecoat plucked the six-gun from the holster. Knight had to grab to keep the gunbelt from sliding off around his hips and dropping to his ankles. He needed to punch an extra hole far up into the leather so he could cinch it down tight to accommodate his scrawny frame. Taking time for that had been a luxury he dared not enjoy, since getting away from the marshal and any posse on his trail mattered more.
“Ain’t been fired, sir. Not recently. In fact, it’s got a spot of rust disgracin’ the barrel and needin’ to be polished off.”
“So how is it you are dressed like that, without any money or gear so you ride along bareback, but you still have a six-shooter?”
“It’s a family heirloom. My pa’s,” he lied. “It’s all I got left to remember him by now that he’s gone.”
“Killed in the war?”
Knight held back the easy lie. He shook his head.
“He got kicked in the head by our jenny mule.” If he had claimed it was a war relic, the lieutenant would have accused him of being a rebel soldier. That was true, but not the way the officer would accept. They were looking for outlaws, probably former Rebs.
“You see anybody else on the road today?”
“It’s been mighty lonely out there, sir.” Knight wanted to bite off his tongue for giving that small bit of respect. The guards at Hellmira had given no respect, either to captured enlisted men or officers. Their leaders had been the worst.
The lieutenant sniffed, shuffled through papers spread on a wooden plank resting on his knees, then finally looked up as if seeing Knight for the first time.
“You look familiar.”
“I—” Knight clamped his mouth shut before he blurted out that he was just passing through. Anything that aroused suspicion meant his chances of getting away unscathed were diminished. “I work for a farmer down the road a ways. I had delivered a message for him and am on my way back. Chores pile up when I’m not there because there’s no one else to help out.” Knight knew he ought to let the lie stop there but nerves kept him babbling. “His entire family’s dead. All his boys, at least. He needs me to help out.”
“He doesn’t feed you too well, from the look of it.” The officer pawed through a stack of papers. Without looking up again he asked, “What’s the farmer’s name?”
“Johnson.” It was the first name that came to mind.
“I don’t see any farmers named Johnson on the list of land deeds.”
“He just—”
“Corporal!” The lieutenant l
ooked up, his eyes flinty. “Let’s investigate this matter further. Lock him up, find out where Mr. Johnson’s farm is, and verify his employment.”
“Yes, sir!”
Before he could protest, Knight found himself herded out of the tent toward a small corral at the edge of the clearing. He balked when he saw how the Federals had nailed shackles to tree trunks. They intended to chain him up like an animal while they investigated his lie.
“There’s no need for this. I—”
He staggered when the soldier slammed the rifle butt into the middle of his back. A few stumbling steps took him to the crude prison. The sun was setting, and the camp plunged into darkness. Here and there cooking fires flared. Otherwise, they were cloaked in darkness. Knight knew he had to act now or remain a prisoner. Even if there had been a farmer Johnson nearby who vouched for him, he imagined he heard the thunder of a posse closing in on him. He had to keep riding or the law would catch up with him. Either was bad, but at the moment the town marshal was more likely to string him up.
“Set yerse’f down whilst I fasten the cuffs on your wrists.”
“You know where the farm is, then?”
“Whatcha mean?”
“I need to draw you a map so you can ask my boss about me. Finding the farm’s going to be hard without a map. There aren’t many landmarks to help you get there.”
“Draw it in the dirt. Use a stick.”
The guard stayed back. Knight picked up a twig and slipped a large rock into his left hand.
“See here? This is where we are. The road runs like this. Now the farm’s about here, down by the river.”
“There ain’t no river nearby. We scouted the area. There’s a lake.”
“You’re wrong. See? Here’s the lake, but the river comes along like this to feed it.” Knight made a muddled mess of the fake map. The corporal stepped closer to see in the twilight. As he bent over, Knight swung his left hand as hard as he could. The shock of the rock hitting the man’s head jolted all the way to his shoulder. He cocked back for a second blow, but there wasn’t any call for it. The soldier lay facedown in the dirt.
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