by Harold Keith
Thompson turned inquiringly to Fields. “How many, Sam?”
Fields’ face shone triumphantly. “Two hunnert even, Cunnel. Cartridges come out even, too. It’s all heah. Purtiest sight ah evah seed.”
“When can you let us have the eight hundred additional rifles General Watie sent word to you we would buy?” Thompson asked Clardy.
Clardy swore violently. “In two months, if he’ll lay off our wagon trains so we can get ’em through. But the price is gonna be higher next time.”
There was a moment of deadly silence in the clearing. For the first time Thompson’s voice was edged with hostility. “How much higher?”
As he hefted the heavy saddlebags of gold into the back of the Conestoga wagon, Clardy looked shrewdly at Thompson.
“That’s between me and Watie. That’s why I want to talk to him privately. I want you to bring Watie here to me.”
Thompson stared at him, saying nothing. Bold, insolent, and unafraid, Clardy stared back, a sneer on his thin lips. He knew that he and his twelve thousand dollars in gold were safe as a church. The rebels needed those other eight hundred rifles too badly. And he alone could get them for them.
“Why don’t you come into Boggy with us and wait for General Watie yourself?” Thompson bargained. “You could wait at my tent. It’s next to the general’s. It will be dark, and you’ll be safe. Nobody there will know you. Half our men are wearing Union uniforms. You could start back north later tonight.”
It seemed to make sense to Clardy. He gave a surly nod.
Ignoring his followers, he reached beneath the canvas tarp and pulled out the bulging saddlebags. Staggering a little under their weight, he walked over to his bay horse and buckled the saddlebags on it. He swung into the saddle and, picking up the reins, joined Thompson at the front of the rebel column.
Fields mounted his horse and sat grinning sardonically down at Clardy’s followers, doomed to a long wait.
He snorted with grim amusement. “I see he’s takin’ the loot with him. Don’t trust yuh, does he? Wal, I don’t blame him. So long, you bloody-minded shikepokes. See you again some day.” And turning his horse deliberately, he joined the patrol.
The darker it grew, the safer Jeff felt from discovery. He was alternately elated and depressed. Now the trap was ready to spring. All he had to do was slip through the rebel pickets and ride back to Fort Gibson and tell the Union commander what he had seen and heard. They would catch Clardy red-handed. It was odd how his Union friends back at Fort Gibson seemed almost like strangers.
All the way back to Boggy Depot, he rode tight-jawed and silent, fighting it out in his mind for the hundredth time. He was thinking hard and sweating hard. His hands were shaking as they held the reins. Half a mile from Boggy Depot he relaxed suddenly and let his breath out slowly in one long, weary exhalation. He had finally made up his mind. It was time to leave Stand Watie. He didn’t want to, and he knew it.
At headquarters Fields dismissed them. Jeff walked to the commissary wagon. Heifer was gone. He unsaddled Flea Bite, led her to the creek for water, then tied her loosely to a wheel of the commissary wagon, where she would have plenty of room to graze. Heifer would find her there.
Reluctantly he fondled the little mare’s soft ears, his throat suddenly tight. He knew he would never see her again. He hated to leave her but he couldn’t run off to Fort Gibson on the horse Heifer had given him.
He couldn’t take the saddle, either. Sighing, he lifted it into the back of the commissary wagon, passing his hand fondly over its smooth leather seat. He would take a horse and saddle from the inexhaustible rebel remuda at the camp’s south border and leave two hours after sundown. He would be a long way up the Texas Road before daybreak. He felt like a thief. But he couldn’t explain it to Heifer. Heifer was a rebel.
With time on his hands, Jeff took one last walk uptown. In spite of the dull misery in his heart, he felt calm and relieved at last. He was glad to have the struggle over with.
Boots clopping on the flagstone sidewalk, he neared the hotel. He heard the squeak of a fiddle and the tinkle of gay feminine laughter. Sounded like one of the “starvation” dances the rebels sometimes held. He walked onto the hotel’s plank front porch and looked curiously into the open front door, a rectangle of yellow light. The place was crowded. The dance seemed some sort of celebration of the rebel victory at Cabin Creek.
In the lobby were rebel officers in worn, frazzled uniforms waltzing with girls in patched-up, made-over hoop skirts. The officers wore spurs, and when they danced, the spurs jingled rhythmically with the fiddle music. Everybody seemed to be having a gay time.
“Excuse us, sir.”
Jeff spun around. Behind him, a girl stood smiling. She was a pretty girl. A band of black velvet encircled her brown throat, a brooch swung at her neck. Clad in a hoop skirt with pink crosswise ruffles, she was necessarily taking up lots of room on the porch.
A tall, blond rebel lieutenant stood stiffly at her side. Obviously they wished to enter.
Moving back, Jeff’s eyes followed her in the half-light. At the same time she looked full at him and her small round mouth parted with astonishment. She gave a low cry of pleasure.
“Jeff!”
Jeff was so wonder-stricken he nearly fell off the porch.
The girl standing before him was Lucy Washbourne.
23
The Redbud Tree
“Lucy!”
Jeff breathed her name with a whistling gasp of surprise. She took both his hands tightly in hers.
Then her eyes dropped to Jeff’s clothing. He was wearing what was unmistakably a pair of rebel gray cavalry pants. Moreover, he was roaming free and unmolested in the heart of the Southern Indian military headquarters. To Lucy, that could mean but one thing. She gave a low cry of ecstasy.
Insensible to all else, Jeff could only stand there on the hotel porch and stare at her, his nerves thrumming like a guitar string. Lucy was the first to recover from the shock of their meeting.
Skirts swishing, she spun around lightly, facing her escort. “Lieutenant Chavis, Mr. Bussey.”
For once, Jeff forgot to salute. He only nodded mechanically, caring not a whit for the rebel lieutenant, his rank, nor his presence.
“Lieutenant, could you possibly excuse me for a moment?” Lucy said sweetly. “I will join you later on the floor.”
The rebel lieutenant frowned. Plainly he didn’t like it. But he bowed, mumbled something, and stepped back.
Still holding Jeff’s hand, she led him off the porch and around the side of the building. There the heart-shaped leaves of a small redbud tree screened them from sight.
To his astonishment, she came lightly, eagerly, into his arms and, standing on tiptoe, put up her lovely mouth.
As their lips met and his arms went around her waist, he felt a blissful melting within him, an overpowering rapture that he had never known nor dreamed existed. For a moment there was no sound save that of their quick breathing and the leaves of the redbud tree soughing gently as the warm south wind stirred them. He could feel Lucy’s warm, pliant body trembling.
“Lucy,” he murmured, “I’ve been wild to see you. I’ve thought about you every single day.”
Her soft arms were around his neck and her eyes were shut. He forgot all about the war. He forgot all about Clardy, the repeating rifles, or returning to the Union lines.
“Oh, Jeff,” she whispered, “I’ve been so worried about you. It’s been fourteen months since I saw you last.”
As he held her close, Jeff’s lips caressed her eyebrow, her cheek, her ear. He could feel her heart pounding beneath her bodice. This was something he never wanted to forget, a sweet miracle that couldn’t happen again in ten thousand years. How wrong he had been to think Lucy didn’t like him! Although she had her pick of all the swains and gallants in Watie’s brigade, she was giving her heart to him. And making a rebel lieutenant wait inside while she did it.
Her eyes, soft and brown as pansies,
were bright with emotion. A year and a half ago he would not have dared hope she would even speak to him. And now here she was, in his arms.
Her hands slipped down to his collar, absently tracing the button on his shirt.
“I’ve been worried to distraction about you,” she said, feelingly. “I asked Belle Lisenbee to try to find out from Fort Gibson where you were all this time, but all she could learn was that you had gone on scout and were several months overdue.” Her low, melodious voice, resonant as a deep-toned church bell, was vibrant with concern.
Sighing, she leaned back and looked up at him. “How tall you’ve grown, Jeff. I even asked Father to try to find you at the prisoner camp at Tyler when he went south to Texas several months ago. Then we left Tahlequah and refugeed south ourselves and I lost all trace of you—until now.” Tears were on her cheek.
“Jeff—to find you here in the army of the South is a pleasure I never hoped to see! Tell me—what made you decide to join us?”
A cold, chilling breeze blew through him. He looked at her and felt the blood surging to the roots of his hair. What a fool he had been. Lucy believed he had switched to the rebel side. No wonder her greeting had been so ardent.
He released her, his pulses pounding dully with despair. Tired of the subterfuge he had been living, he decided to tell her everything and get it over with.
“Lucy, I hate hurting you—but now I’ve got to. I’m not in the Southern army the way you think I am. I’m a Union scout—out of uniform—behind the lines.”
She stiffened and, in the yellow half-light of the window, regarded him with dazed wonder.
He told her how Bostwick’s spur-of-the-moment remark had unwittingly enrolled both of them in the Watie cavalry, and how Bostwick had been killed at Honey Springs. He told her how, despite his illness, he had warned Blunt that Steele and Bankhead were moving on Fort Gibson.
Plunging resolutely on, he spoke of his own illness, and the Jackmans, and about Clardy’s clandestine sale of the smuggled rifles. He described his enforced service with the rebel Cherokee cavalry, what fine comrades they were, and how much he had grown to like them. And when he told her of his fierce inner struggle, whether to go back to the fort or cast his lot whole-heartedly with Hooley, Heifer, and all his new friends, the color came back a little into her face and her dark eyes kindled with hope.
Earnestly she put her hand on his arm. “Then join us, Jeff,” she implored. “We’re going to win, Jeff. I feel sure of it. We have been winning lately, you know.”
There it was, as plain as though this strong, intense rebel girl had written it herself on a blackboard. If he stayed with the South, he would have Lucy. If he returned to Fort Gibson, he would probably never see her again.
Now he had his decision to make all over again. And this time it was more agonizing than ever. He had to decide for all time between having Lucy or staying with his country. And he had to decide quickly. The thoughts tumbled wildly through his mind. His chest felt heavy. He saw that she was waiting, her face white.
“Lucy, I’m going back to the fort. I know my country has been wrong about a lot of things and that your people are fighting for their national existence. But Lucy, I’m just like you. I can’t go back on my country or my state. In Kansas we’re fighting for our existence, too. We’re fighting to clean up the murders and bushwhacking over slavery and for the right to decide the kind of a state we want without the ballots being rigged by thousands of Missourians crossing the line to vote, or steal from us, or shoot us down. It’s a nation-wide fight now and I think the only way it can ever be settled is for the North to subdue the South.” He guessed it sounded oratorical but he had said it the best he could.
He looked miserably down at her. His voice grew soft with longing. “I’m crazy about you, Lucy—you know that. I wanted us to be married some day and live together always. I know this means I’ve probably lost you forever. But it’s the thing I’ve got to do.”
Lucy’s small, oval chin lifted proudly. She stepped to one side, so he could pass.
Stricken, Jeff looked once at her, then walked quickly away.
“Jeff!”
She ran lightly to him. Crying softly, she came again into his arms, hiding her head against his breast. When her emotion had subsided and she raised her face, Jeff saw she had surrendered completely. All her fierce pride and violent patriotism was gone. For the first time in her life, she forgot the war and all its issues. She loved him, and that was all that mattered.
Swiftly she kissed him. Her eyes were large with fright.
“Good-by, Jeff. I hope you get away. Please be careful. I’ll think about you every day until I see you again.”
“I’ll come back and get you after the war, Lucy. Will you wait for me?”
“I’ll wait,” she promised.
“It may be kind of a long wait. In the morning they may figure out why I left. If they do, they’ll be after me. If they catch me, they’ll hang me so high I could look down on the moon.”
He looked at her fondly. “Good-by, Lucy,” he said, kissing her cheek.
For a moment she clung to him. Then she let him go, watching his straight young body disappear from sight in the darkness. Even when she couldn’t see him any more, she waited until his quick footsteps died away completely on the flagstone sidewalk. Then she turned and walked slowly back into the hotel.
Jeff decided to go first to his tent on the camp’s outskirts and put food in his saddlebags. Hurrying, he saw ahead the headquarters tent with its fire blazing and its Betty lamps flickering brightly outside it. He would have to pass that way, but there was no risk because the sentries knew him.
Nobody knew he was leaving. And when they missed him in the morning, they still probably wouldn’t know why he had left or where he had gone. He clenched his fists with satisfaction. If he stayed on the Texas Road and kept his eyes open, he shouldn’t have any problems. He should be north of Limestone Gap by daybreak. Then he could cut straight across, riding into the fort by nightfall of the second day.
He didn’t see the lone, fretful figure pacing the darkness outside Thompson’s tent until he almost collided with it. Startled, the man gasped and cursed.
“Excuse me, sir,” Jeff stammered, the light full on his face.
“Bussey!”
Jeff recoiled and felt the blood draining from his cheeks. It was Clardy. His mind busy with plans for his flight, and with sweet thoughts of Lucy, he had forgotten all about the Union captain.
Instantly he knew all his plans had collapsed and his life was in danger. Clardy would tell Thompson that he was a Union spy. Thompson would check with Fields. Fields would remember that Jeff had been with the patrol that saw Clardy unload the rifles. In a few short moments the rebels would be after him like forty hen hawks after a setting quail. They had to take him before he reached Fort Gibson or they’d never get their eight hundred rifles.
Desperate, Jeff put his hand on his pistol. He had a lightning impulse to kill Clardy on the spot. Instead, he ducked into the hazel brush and began running toward the horse lot, two hundred yards away. Behind him, he could hear Clardy shouting for the sentries.
From the rack outside the horse lot, Jeff grabbed up a saddle, a bridle, and a blanket. Aware of his deadly peril, he tried desperately to salvage what he could from the disastrous situation. Carrying the saddle, he ran awkwardly and felt his riding boots chafe his feet. Now the whole camp was in an uproar. Jeff heard Fields bawling orders. Weighed down with the heavy saddle, Jeff tried to run faster.
Suddenly he heard hoofbeats approaching at a gallop. Somebody—probably Fields—was thinking lightning fast in the crisis. Digging his boot heels into the ground, Jeff slid to a stop. They had cut him off from the horses.
Frustrated and panting, he looked wildly around him in the dark. Of all the rotten luck! Now he was on foot with the whole rebel camp alarmed and looking for him. And Fort Gibson was 125 miles away.
Fighting down his panic, he dropped the sadd
le and the blanket but kept the bridle. Maybe he could find or take a horse on the way. If not, he would have to walk, and his riding boots would be useless. He spun around and, sprinting back to his tent, grabbed up a pair of old infantry shoes.
He scooped up two handfuls of shelled corn and filled his pockets. There wasn’t time to take anything else. Hearing voices and the sentries’ running footsteps approaching, he ran from the tent into the timber, thankful for the darkness that would hide him until dawn.
24
Flight
Tying his shoes around his neck, Jeff hurried toward the thickest part of the woods. He knew there would be fewer pickets there. His eyes quickly became adjusted to the darkness. Staying in the heavy timber, he soon put the noise of the aroused camp behind him.
He tried to calculate where his pursuers would look for him first. Probably the last direction they would expect him to go would be south, toward Texas.
So he headed south, walking fast. After he had gone a mile or two, he planned to cut straight east ten or twelve miles, toward Arkansas, then head northeast across the Gaines Creek Mountains and the Limestone Mountains to the fort. They would be after him at sunup from all directions. Without a horse the odds were heavily against him. He had to have a horse.
His feet began to hurt and he stopped and changed to his shoes. All he could hear was the whippoorwills cooing softly from the trees. Circling to the east, he came into a clearing and saw the red glow of the moon rising through the dark timber. It reminded him of the prairie fires he used to watch in Kansas at night. Now he could see everything more plainly. He was carrying his boots and the bridle. In his belt he wore the hunting knife and double-barreled pistol Heifer had given him.
After he had walked south a couple of miles, he bore straight east toward the rising moon, which had now cleared the treetops. He knew he had passed the last of the rebel pickets and had nothing to fear the rest of the night.