Chase The Fire
Wild Western Hearts Series
Book Four
by
Barbara Ankrum
Bestselling Author
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ISBN: 978-1-61417-525-4
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Character is that which reveals moral purpose, exposing the class of things a man chooses or avoids.
—Aristotle
Prologue
Battle of the Wilderness Virginia
May 6, 1864
"For God's sake, man—shoot me!" the grimy-faced Reb screamed, his voice ragged with pain. Clutching the jagged tear in his gut with one hand, he grasped the sleeve of the officer in Federal blue lying beside him and pulled himself closer. A bullet hole in the Reb's upper arm leaked in a spreading crimson stain that merged with the one on his belly. "Don't leave me here to die this way," he begged.
Artillery shells roared around them, pocking the earth from every angle. It was impossible to tell from which side the shells came. It didn't seem to matter anymore.
In the dim light, Major Chasen Turner Whitlaw could see the other man's mouth move, but his screams were swallowed up by the deafening roar of the battle which was being played out fifty rods beyond them—toward Federal lines.
Chase dropped his head wearily against his forearm, the taste of the rusty, crimsoned earth bitter on his lips. A fiery pain branded his right thigh like a white-hot poker. He tried to ignore it. He backhanded the moisture trickling down the side of his face. Sweat or blood? he wondered with vague disinterest. He felt it pool in the hollow of his ear and cut a warm swath down the grime on his neck toward his chest.
How long had he been unconscious before he'd roused to the man's moans and the sounds of battle? Moments? Hours? The ground quaked like violent thunder. The air, acrid with spent gunpowder and smoke from burning trees, seared his lungs and darkened the sky. Razor thin shafts of sunlight shot through the tree branches above him, through the windblown smoke, dappling the ground with shadow.
The dead and dying lay all around him in the tangle of brush. The shallow, body-strewn creek nearby was garnet red in color. A final gift to Southern soil, he reflected perversely. Were they all destined to die in this blood bath they were calling a battle? The hell of it was, he admitted silently, until a few moments ago, he hadn't thought he cared anymore.
Beside him, the Reb coughed and groaned. Chase's fingers curled around the smooth walnut stock of the Army Colt still in his hand. One bullet to put this gut-shot soldier out of his misery. Like he would a horse or dog in pain.
But this was a man.
His enemy, yes. But a man just the same. Killing him in the heat of battle and setting a loaded gun against his temple were two different things.
Closing his eyes to shut out the other man's cries and the searing pain that shot up his own torn and bloody leg, Chase ground his cheek against the earth.
Remembering.
They'd been sighting down the barrels of their respective guns at each other, he and the Reb, preparing to blast one another to Holy hell when a howitzer shell had done it for them. He remembered his Colt kicking in his hand and the exact moment when his body had been flung into the air—as if his mortal essence were a thing apart—weightless, spinning in an agonizingly slow arc back down toward the earth.
In those long ticks of a moment before the ground came up to meet him—before the murderous, crashing pain in his thigh and head hit him like a shore-breaking wave, snuffing out light and breath and all conscious thought—it occurred to him that he wasn't ready to die. In spite of the despicable things he'd been forced to do in the name of the Union, in spite of a soul sickness that clawed at his mind and heart, what he wanted at that moment, and with every fiber of his being, was to live.
He'd felt the life force buck within him like the exploding barrel of a Sharps carbine. Then the light had splintered into utter darkness and had eventually filtered back again.
He clung to it now as he fought back the waves of nausea and pain that threatened to defeat him. Lying side by side in the unclaimed ditch, he and the Reb had crossed some invisible barrier that once separated them. No longer on opposite sides, they were now simply two men straddling the ever-shifting boundary between life and death.
The Reb pulled his knees up to his chest with a groan, his pleading hand still tangled in Chase's sleeve. "Help me...."
God, how long had it been, Chase wondered, since he'd considered the humanity he'd put aside for this damned war? Now, as he looked at the man whose uniform made him an enemy, compassion warred with conscience, mercy with duty.
A sick feeling rose in his throat as Chase pulled the hammer of his walnut-stocked Army Colt back to half-cock and spun the cylinder to check it.
Empty. Bereft of pity. He had known it would be. His last bullet was lodged in the man's shoulder, a good six inches from where he'd been aiming before the explosion.
His hand went to his hip where his cavalry saber should have been. It, too, was gone. Through the haze of smoke, he spotted it along with his ammunition belt lying in a twisted heap twenty feet away, where it had been ripped clear from him in the explosion.
Chase swore and closed his eyes as he silently counted the number of men he'd watched die like this Reb. Hundreds of them. Such deaths were mercilessly slow. Agonizing. Life had become expendable during this bloody war—death a commodity to be tallied in faceless numbers. The up-close stench of it muted the colors of a man's loyalties and made them suddenly... irrelevant.
Chase untied the knotted neckerchief at his throat and pressed it against the soldier's bloody belly. "My gun's empty, Reb."
The Reb groaned and pushed the cloth back. His teeth chattered uncontrollably and his whole body was gripped by a tremor. "N-no..." he said, squeezing his eyes shut against the agony. His breath whistled past clenched teeth and his Adam's apple bobbed in his throat. "I'm gut-shot... let it be, Yank. I'm a dead man, only I'm still breathin'."
Chase watched him reach for the simple silver chain around his neck, give it a tug, and break it free. Emotion bunched on the soldier's features as his bloody dirt-encrusted hand squeezed around the square-shaped locket that dangled from the chain. He pressed it to his chest.
"M-my wife." The man slurred the words. "I tol' her... God forgive me... I tol' 'er I'd be... comin' home."
Another widow, Chase thought darkly. How many others had this war
made? Hell, how many had he personally made? He was suddenly grateful he had no ties. No woman to mourn him when he went under. No wife to make his dying all the harder.
The man pressed the locket into Chase's hand, "Please... git it to her, bluebelly. I wouldn't ask ya, but I got no one else. Tell her... I loved her." He squeezed his eyes shut tight. "I'm such a... bastard. I always... meant to say it... more."
Chase rubbed the back of his sleeve across his face, wiping the blood from his eyes. "You got a name, Reb?"
"Honeycutt... Lee Honeycutt, P-Private with... the Georgia 4th. It's... it's all there, inside the locket. Everything you need to find her. She's—"
The rest of his words were lost to the explosion that rocked the ground and peppered them with sharp clods of dirt and stones. Chase threw his arms over his head and flattened himself on the earth, closer to the Reb. The sharp movement cost him, the pain shooting up his leg nearly causing him to pass out. He lay still for a long minute, regaining control.
When he dared to move, he looked up to see Honeycutt, who had made no move to protect himself, now bled from a dozen tiny lacerations on his face and hands. For a moment, Chase hoped the explosion had finished the man. Only the trembling movement of fingers above his wound betrayed the awful truth.
"Christ!" Chase swore under his breath, brushing shards of dirt and rock from the other man's face. "Oh, Christ..."
Honeycutt gasped, his breath rattling in his throat. "I gotta... Oh, Gawd, help me git up. I can't... I can't breathe..."
Chase slipped his arm beneath Honeycutt's shoulder and lifted the other man until the private's head rested against his chest. That was as far as his own fast-draining strength would take them. He felt Honeycutt's hand tighten around his wrist.
"My... my wife..."
"I'll get the locket to her, Honeycutt. If they don't kill me, too, I swear I will." A tremor quaked through the other man, and then Chase felt the Reb slowly relax against him.
Chase coughed and squeezed his eyes shut against the fire in his leg. The staccato barrage of gunfire and artillery drowned out the screams and shouts of the panicked, desperate soldiers nearby. Smoke drifted over them, redolent with the scent of death. How long he and Honeycutt lay unmoving before he heard someone shouting his name, Chase didn't know.
"Major! Major Whitlaw!"
Chase tried to turn to the voice, but his body responded with sluggish indifference. He blinked at the vaguely familiar face of the stocky soldier in blue looming above him in the haze.
"Major! Thank God you're alive. We gotta get the hell outta here," the soldier shouted. "They're pushin' us back, sir. You hurt bad? Gimme your hand, Major, I'll help you up."
Chase looked back down at the Reb, and his arm tightened around him. "Wait—"
The sergeant ignored him and shoved the body of the Reb from his arms. Chase bit back a scream as the sergeant threaded an arm beneath his and hauled him to his feet. Fighting back the gulf of darkness that threatened, he steadied himself against the other man.
"That bastard's dead, Major Whitlaw," the sergeant shouted above the din of cannonade and gunfire. "He was a Butternut, sir. Nothing but a goddamn Reb."
"Yer wrong, Sergeant," Chase slurred, as the soldier dragged him toward Federal lines. Tightening his fingers around the silver locket, he slipped it inside the rough wool pocket of his uniform. "He wuz... a man. Just a man."
Chapter 1
New Mexico Territory
May 1866
Leaden clouds, heavy with the promise of a drenching rain, scudded along the snow-capped granite peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and gathered wraithlike in their craggy hollows. Overhead, vultures lingered, wings tipped to the fickle air currents, awaiting their share of the spoils.
Libby rammed a brass-tipped paper cartridge into the breech of her Smith Carbine rifle, slapped the gun shut, and cocked the hammer back. She fit the walnut stock against the curve of her shoulder and aimed it at the ruff of sand-colored fur darting between the rocks some thirty feet distant. The gun's recoil jammed her shoulder backward as she squeezed off the shot. A puff of dirt erupted beneath the coyote's feet, evidence of her unfortunate aim. The creature was just moving too darned fast to hit.
"Damn!" she muttered under her breath, rubbing her tender shoulder.
"Damn!" echoed the eight-year-old towheaded boy beside her, his eyes trained on the retreating animal.
Chagrined, Libby couldn't help the smile that crept to the corners of her mouth at the perfect inflection he gave the word. Mercy! The word had slipped past her own lips smooth as butter. What was getting into her anyway, swearing like one of the men?
"Tad..."
The boy shrugged. "We're down to our last ten cartridges," he supplied in self-defense.
"I know." She let out a long sigh and ran a hand over her son's hair. More and more, he was the image of his father; the same fine silvery blond hair, the same willful brown eyes and stubbornly set jaw. He was growing up too fast. Too fast for a boy without a man to keep him on the straight path.
Releasing the catch on the top of the barrel, Libby broke the rifle open at the hinge and ejected the spent cartridge. She reached into her pocket and slipped a fresh one into the breech, then snapped the rifle shut. Resting the stock against the sandy soil beside her, she reached down to stroke the velvety muzzle of the newborn foal whose head lay on her son's lap. The filly's breath was warm and moist against her fingers. She was one of Diablo's foals. Libby could tell by the fine shape of her head and her distinctive ebony color.
Hours ago, she had considered and dismissed the most practical solution to their problem: putting the weak, abandoned foal down and leaving her to the pack of scavengers in the distance. Her fingers found the silken fur behind the foal's ears. Sometimes practicality had nothing to do with the right and wrong of things.
Lee would have argued that point with her—called her an emotional female. She admitted there was undoubtedly some truth in that. He'd always considered emotions something of a liability, a character defect women were saddled with—like the monthly curse.
Shrugging off her thoughts of him, Libby tipped her face up to the darkening sky. "Rain's coming. Fast."
"I'm going, Mama."
"No." Libby clamped a hand on her son's arm.
"What else are we gonna do?" Tad argued, sitting back on his heels. "Sit here all night until they come for us?"
Libby had been asking herself the same question for the past hour. After picking off three of the scavengers, she'd thought the gun would eventually scare the coyotes away. She'd been wrong. Apparently, they'd decided her aim didn't warrant an all-out retreat. They were waiting her and Tad out, holding them in siege; slinking around just beyond the rocks, taunting them.
"It's not safe," she argued. "What if they chase you? What if you fall off your horse?"
Tad screwed up his mouth and looked at her with all the indignation an eight-year-old could muster. "Ma, when was the last time you saw me fall off a horse?"
He had her there. "I-I just don't want anything to happen to you...."
"Okay, then," he replied with a logic annoying in a boy his age. "You go. I'll stay here with the foal."
"No!"
"Well, then? She's too heavy to haul up onto—"
"I know, I know." She let out an exasperated sigh and tossed her flaxen-colored braid back over her shoulder. They'd already tried to lift the filly atop Libby's horse, but had found it impossible between the two of them without risking injuring her. "Can you get the team hitched up to the buckboard by yourself?"
"Early taught me," Tad replied eagerly, hope sparking anew in his eyes.
Libby prayed she wouldn't regret this. "All right then. Bring Straw back with you if he isn't three sheets to the wind by now. First help me collect some rocks. When my ammunition runs out, I'm going to need something to hold them off 'til you get back. I'm afraid a fire'll be a waste of time with the weather that's coming."
She and Tad co
llected two armloads of rocks, in the process pitching a few at the overly brave scavengers. They set them in a pile on the ground beside the foal. Libby laid a soothing hand on her spooked dun-colored mare, whose brown eyes rolled backward with fright at the sound of the coyote's yipping. She tied the horse's reins to a branch of the scrubby mesquite tree behind her and pulled her India-rubber poncho from behind her saddle. Gently, she slid it over the foal to keep her dry. The black filly nickered softly and raised her head up off the ground for a moment, too weak to protest more.
"There, little one. You'll be all right," Libby soothed, stroking her behind the ears. "We'll take care of you."
She turned to Tad. "Be careful, darlin'," she whispered, and pressed a kiss on his forehead. "You hear?"
Tad squirmed under her mothering, anxious to prove himself worthy of her trust. "Don't worry," he assured her, climbing up into the saddle of his white-tailed sorrel. "I'll get back as soon as I can."
She swallowed her fears and smiled back at him from behind her fingertips as he kicked the horse and tore off across the darkening landscape.
The rain started a few minutes later. Fat droplets plopped against the weathered brim of her hat and slapped against the poncho covering the foal with the sounds of popping corn. The pungent smell of damp sage and creosote bushes filled the air.
Libby tucked her long mane of golden hair up under her hat, pulled her trouser-covered knees up to her chest, and tightened the worn, wool coat around her, cursing the timing of the storm. Why did it have to come on a Saturday night when all the hands had headed into town for their regular weekend blowout? Only Straw remained back at the ranch. No hope of him hearing the gunshots, she thought miserably. Straw was only a thimble shy of being deaf as a doorknob.
In the dusky darkness, the coyotes set up a mournful yipping that sent a shiver straight through her. The sound no longer came only from in front of her. It seemed to surround her now. She gathered the gun to her, tightening her finger on the trigger. "Come on, you flea-bitten hunks o' mange," she growled low. "Just try and sneak up on me. I'll give you a taste of gunpowder even if I can't blow your heads off."
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