“Yeah?” Captain Taneyhill pushed back his hat. “What outfit?”
For once, Zeb couldn’t think up a lie. He recalled James’s brief account of the fight, remembered Sergeant Major Engstrand telling stories about the 16th Wisconsin and all the glory they had reaped in what he called some of the most savage fighting he had ever seen.
Zeb swallowed. “Uh . . . the South Carolina Reserves.”
“Really.” Captain Taneyhill’s tone told Zeb that he had been caught in a lie. Yet the captain merely tapped his right shoulder with his left hand. “Took a Yankee ball here,” Taneyhill said. “Still can’t raise this arm past my chest. So I went back to Harris County, went back to freighting.” He jerked his thumb toward his wagons. “Got a load of sugarcane bound for Jefferson.”
“Where’s Harris County?” Petey asked.
“South Texas. Down around Houston was where I hung my hat,” Taneyhill said. “But I left Houston. Moved my operation to Jefferson.”
“Where’s that?” Luansy asked.
“Just over the border. Now, where were y’all bound?”
“Dallas,” Ebenezer said.
“Franklin,” Zeb told him.
Taneyhill reached inside his coat and withdrew his pipe and some tobacco. Ebenezer watched, fascinated, as he managed to tamp tobacco into the pipe’s bowl, using only his left hand. He put the pipe in his mouth, fished a lucifer from a pocket, and struck the match against his leggings, then brought the flame to the bowl, drawing on the pipe stem until he was satisfied.
All with one arm, Ebenezer marveled.
“And you?” Captain Taneyhill stared at Luansy Taylor.
“Somewhere,” she said softly.
What Zeb found peculiar was that Captain Taneyhill never asked where they came from, what they were doing traveling in such country, what the Bristineaus had been to them.
By the Eternal, Zeb realized, he ain’t even asked us our names.
Luansy said, “You know that General Lee surrendered?”
Taneyhill’s nod was short. “I heard.”
At that moment, the black-mustached man walked over to the fire. He wore the fanciest little jacket Zeb had ever seen, black silk, but decorated with red velvet trim and silver buttons. Buttons even went up the side of his pants, which were stuck in leather moccasins, and he wore about the biggest hat likely in the state of Louisiana, with a brace of Navy Colts strapped to his waist.
“¿Señor Capitán? ” he said.
“Sí.”
For a couple of minutes they kept right on talking. It was a pretty language, Zeb thought, though he had no idea what they were saying. Finally the big brown-skinned man bowed slightly, said something else, and turned toward the young travelers.
“This is Amado Chavez y Castaño, my segundo,” Captain Taneyhill said.
Removing that giant hat from his head, the big man gave a gracious bow, said something else in Spanish, and smiled.
Taneyhill said, “I told Amado that we’ll move down the road a couple of miles, get y’all away from this place, and make an early camp.” Captain Taneyhill spoke again to Amado, and the man donned his hat, turned on his heels, and headed back to the wagons.
“He’s a Mexican, ain’t he?” Petey blurted out.
“That he is,” Captain Taneyhill said, tapping the pipe on a rock. “Though he claims Spanish blood. Amado has made room in one of the wagons for y’all.” His head tilted at Luansy and Petey. “Got room in another wagon for you.” This time, he nodded at Ebenezer.
“I can . . .” Ebenezer tried to sit up, but collapsed, and the captain grinned.
“When you’ve mended some,” Taneyhill said, “I might have a job for you. Might be able to get you to Dallas. Pay’s five dollars a week and found, but I pay in gold, not Texas script.” His green eyes landed on Zeb. “And I might be able to get you to Franklin, though that’s a bit off my range, if you don’t mind workin’ up a sweat.”
“I don’t,” Zeb said.
“Pay’s the same. Five dollars in gold a week. You got a problem with that?”
Zeb shook his head.
“Some folks do. Some men I’ve hired don’t find it right that I pay a Mexican or a colored man the same as I pay a white man. Those folks don’t work for me very long. The way I see it, I’m payin’ good wages for hard work, and I don’t care what color the man’s skin is. You’ll find Mexicans, white men, and a colored man, even a Choctaw Indian, as my muleskinners.”
“As long as I get to Franklin, I don’t mind at all,” Zeb assured him.
Captain Taneyhill smoked his pipe for a moment. “Before you sign on with me, you best get one thing clear,” he said after he had removed the pipe. “What happened here ain’t nothin’. If we run into trouble in Texas, and we lose, we’ll all be deader than that man and woman we just buried.”
Amado Chavez y Castaño strode back into camp. This time, he held a rifle in his hands.
“Let’s see if you can shoot.” Captain Taneyhill pushed himself to his feet, took the rifle, and tossed it to Zeb.
The rifle was a Sharps carbine, .52-caliber, a breechloader that Captain Taneyhill said could be fired six times in a minute. “I’ve heard some folks claim they could shoot it nine or ten times in a minute, but that sounds more like Texas brag than fact. All I want you to do is put a bullet as close as you can to that piece of paper Amado stuck on that sycamore tree yonder.”
“Is it loaded?” Zeb asked.
“My weapons are always loaded,” the captain said.
The Sharps felt heavy for a carbine, and the hammer was difficult to pull back to full cock, but Zeb took a deep breath as he found the target, perhaps fifty yards away, and slowly let out the breath. When he squeezed the trigger, that carbine sounded like a mortar round going off in his ear, and it kicked so hard, Zeb figured his shoulder would be bruised come morning. He saw nothing except thick white smoke. Almost immediately, Amado said, “¡Demonios! ”
Zeb knew he hadn’t come close to that paper. He had drilled it plumb center. Butting the stock of the carbine against the ground, he looked up at Captain Taneyhill.
“Where’d you learn to shoot like that?” The captain took the Sharps, handed it to Amado, and told him to reload it.
“Sergeant Major Engstrand said it was a gift,” Zeb answered, wanting to rub his shoulder, but not daring to, not in front of Captain Taneyhill. “Said I was a natural.”
* * * * *
That was likely the only reason Zeb got away with replacing James in the 16th Wisconsin. When he had showed up at Camp Randall in Madison, a lieutenant, who looked no older than James had been, stared at the paper Zeb had given him—the one Zeb had taken out of James’s pocket—and shook his head.
“You are not James Hogan,” he said.
Zeb cursed his own bad luck. First soldier boy I run into happens to have known James. “I’m his brother,” he said. “James taken sick, and died.”
“Died?” the officer asked coldly. “Or deserted?” He raised his voice. “Did he send you in his place, boy? Has he turned yellow?”
Zeb whipped up his right hand, would have slapped that miserable excuse of a Union officer then and there, would have ended any chance he had of escaping Madison, when a rough hand grabbed his wrist and jerked him back.
“Easy there, lad,” the deep voice said behind him. To the officer, who was taken aback that he had almost been slapped by a kid, the voice said, “Lieutenant, sir, I had the privilege of serving with Private Hogan, and he was no coward, sir. If this boy says the Almighty has called James away, you can bank on it, sir.”
“Well, we can’t replace Private Hogan with him.” The lieutenant pointed a shaky finger at Zeb. “He doesn’t look twelve years old.”
“I’m . . .” Zeb stopped, felt two massive hands squeezing his shoulders.
“Lieutenant Thorstad,” the voice said, “let’s see if the lad can shoot before we kick him out of this man’s army.”
By April, Zeb was wearing a blue
uniform, a bit too big, and had won three shooting contests, placed second twice, third once. Sergeant Major Engstrand called him the pride of the 16th Wisconsin, so when the soldiers boarded a train for Prairie du Chien, Zeb was with them. Zeb was with them on the steamers they took down the Mississippi and Tennessee Rivers, and finally he was marching, rifle slung over his shoulder, three hundred and seventy-five miles to Ackworth, Georgia, to get into the war.
Chapter Eighteen
By the time they reached Texas, Ebenezer Chase could walk, sometimes, without wincing. Captain Taneyhill’s muleskinners knew that Ebenezer couldn’t shoot as well as Zeb Hogan. In fact, he couldn’t shoot at all. They learned this when Captain Taneyhill had Ebenezer fire a musket at a paper target Amado Chavez y Castaño had put on a tree at the edge of the woods. When Ebenezer pulled the trigger, the kick of that old musket almost knocked him on his hindquarters.
“Criminy,” Taneyhill said, “he missed the entire forest.”
Amado sniggered. Standing there, Ebenezer felt ashamed, holding the musket in his arms, feeling his ribs, head, and shoulder throbbing.
“You can’t shoot.” The captain took the musket, and tossed it to Amado.
Ebenezer could have told him that. The only weapon he had ever fired had been back in Alabama the night the horse rolled over on Zeb, and he didn’t believe he had even come close to hitting anyone—thank the Lord.
“What can you do?” the captain asked. The other muleskinners chuckled. Even Taneyhill seemed bemused.
While Ebenezer tried to think of an answer, Zeb Hogan replied, “He can read and write.” He spoke defiantly, as if defending the runaway slave, and Ebenezer looked across the campsite at Zeb, standing there as if he would fight every last one of the captain’s men.
So help me, Ebenezer thought, I can’t figure that white boy out. Half the time he’s about to thrash me, or leave me, and other times he’s like the best friend I’ve ever had. What else could I do? Pick cotton . . . crop tobacco . . . noodle catfish?
Captain Taneyhill’s brilliant green eyes bored through Ebenezer for the longest while before he reached inside his vest pocket, pulled out a big gold watch, and opened the cover, holding it out for Ebenezer to see. “Read the inscription,” he said.
Ebenezer looked at the letters. Some of them made no sense, and he knew he couldn’t pronounce them right, but he tried his best: “‘To Livingston. Ad augusta per angusta. Your loving wife, Christina.’”
With a sad smile, Taneyhill snapped the watch’s case shut and slid it back into his pocket. “That’s pretty good, Ebenezer.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It’s Latin. Supposed to mean . . . ‘To high places by narrow roads’ . . . or something like that. There’s a place in my crew for a young man who can read and write.”
“I didn’t know you had a wife,” Ebenezer said, thinking of Lizzie and Tempie, and suddenly, feeling tears well in his eyes, he blurted out, “I got a wife. And a baby girl. They’re in Dallas.”
Taneyhill just stared into the woods.
“That’s why I’ve got to get to Dallas,” Ebenezer said. “I’ve got to find them.”
Taneyhill blinked, and seemed to shudder.
“You have any children, Captain Taneyhill?” Ebenezer didn’t know why he asked that, why he was talking so much, prying into the captain’s personal affairs, when the captain hadn’t even asked his name—Ebenezer had volunteered that—or what he was doing traveling with two white teenagers and a four-year-old white boy. Ebenezer suspected that he was talking to keep from crying.
“I had two daughters,” Captain Taneyhill answered, but without looking at Ebenezer. “Diphtheria claimed them both. And Christina.”
Ebenezer’s head dropped. Should have kept my mouth shut.
“That’s another reason I left Harris County.” Taneyhill took a deep breath, slowly exhaled, and sighed.
“Not much need for reading and writing out here, though, Ebenezer,” the captain said, forcing a smile. “But maybe we’ll make a muleskinner out of you.”
* * * * *
Murphy wagons, Captain Taneyhill called them. He had ridden up to Missouri to buy them. The wagons had high wooden sides. The exterior blue paint was flaked and chipped, the insides were painted red, chains and irons all black, but scarred from heavy use. With a heavy canvas cover, each wagon was about ten feet long and had a tool box in the front, a feed box for the mules in the back, grease and water buckets hanging from the rear axle.
In all, Captain Taneyhill’s train comprised sixteen wagons, each loaded with five thousand pounds of sugarcane, double-hitched with a rear caboose. Ten wheels, twelve mules hitched in pairs, with a muleskinner riding what Taneyhill called the left- wheeler, the jack closest to the front left wheel of the lead wagon. The driver held a brakeline and a jerkline, and most of the muleskinners could, and would, cuss up a storm. Ebenezer had never heard such language. He felt sorry for Petey and Luansy having to listen to the men.
When the muleskinners had to turn a wagon, it was pure disorder. Most of them would give the jerkline a yank, holler out some prime curses, and the mules would start jumping every which way. Somehow, the wagons managed to turn, and the mules would get back into line and head on down the road.
It was truly something to see, though Ebenezer never quite understood how either man, wagon, or mules managed to do those jobs.
“You’ll learn,” the captain said when he deposited Ebenezer with a gray-bearded Mexican named Gonzales. Ebenezer had figured Captain Taneyhill would put him with the head-shaven Negro named Jerome, but that big man kept to himself, hardly said a word except when he was screaming “gee,” “haw,” or “yay” at the mules in his team, punctuating those words with the foulest cusses Ebenezer had ever heard.
The Choctaw muleskinner was named Pitchlynn, but everybody called him Pitch. He was short, with a barrel chest and long salt-and-pepper hair that fell to his massive shoulders. His arms looked like oak trunks. The other Mexican muleskinner was Severo, who had a beautiful baritone voice and would sing each night in camp while one of the white muleskinners, a rangy, blond-haired man in his twenties called Riley, sawed a fiddle. Ebenezer couldn’t understand any of the lyrics to the songs Severo sang, but they sure were pretty tunes.
The other muleskinners were white—Carter, Sweazy, and Pruden—men who were hard and tended to their mules and kept to themselves, though they appeared to enjoy Severo’s singing and Riley’s fiddling. Amado wasn’t a muleskinner. As Taneyhill’s segundo, he was the assistant wagon master who rode alongside the wagons or scouted out ahead.
That shoulder wound might have put Livingston Taneyhill out of the Confederate Army, but he ran his train like a general. They were up before dawn, washing down sourdough biscuits and fried salt pork with bitter coffee, on the trail before the sun was up, stopping between 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. to water the mules, and then driving on till nigh sundown. They covered twelve to fourteen miles a day.
Zeb and Ebenezer had made better time walking. Ebenezer figured that Zeb would want to quit the wagon train since they were traveling so slowly, but after what had happened to Uncle Bristineau and his wife, Zeb might have feared traveling alone. There was power in numbers, and although Captain Taneyhill’s train had only ten men, they were ten of the toughest-looking men Ebenezer had ever seen. Each of them carried a rifle, musket, or shotgun near the tool box in the front of the wagon, and wore a brace of pistols tucked inside a sash or holstered on a belt. Sweazy and Pruden also had knifes—Pruden sheathed his in his right boot and it looked practically as big as an Army saber. Gonzales called them Bowies, and said Sweazy and Pruden kept theirs sharp as razors.
* * * * *
“Hop onto the pole mule,” Gonzales told Ebenezer one morning.
Ebenezer stared at him with a comical expression, until Gonzales put his hands on his hips and demanded: “Muy pronto, Señor Ebenezer, before Capitán Taneyhill begins bellowing like the devil.”
Tig
htly bandaged ribs prevented Ebenezer from hopping, but he climbed into the saddle on the left-wheeler, and Gonzales handed him the jerkline, which was strung through harness loops on what Gonzales called the swingers all the way to the near leader, where the line was affixed to the bit. Ebenezer’s right hand was sweating, but Gonzales did not seem to notice. He put the brakeline in Ebenezer’s other hand.
“Remember what I told you, Ebenezer?” he asked.
Ebenezer feared he had forgotten everything. His mouth felt drier than cured tobacco.
At that moment, Captain Taneyhill’s shout sent Ebenezer up straight in the saddle, and he heard himself yelling, “Yay!” To his amazement, the mules started straining, and the double-hitched wagons and caboose behind him began moving, rolling along. He heard the other muleskinners shouting brutal curses, heard the cracks of whips, but he remembered what Gonzales had told him: “Cursing shows a ’skinner’s ignorance, and a whip is for oxen, not mules. All you need is a strong voice, and the know-how to handle a jerkline.”
Gonzales walked beside Ebenezer, in case the kid got into trouble. When Ebenezer saw Amado up ahead on his high-stepping black horse where the road forked, pointing down the right lane, he glanced at Gonzales, but the Mexican merely smiled.
Wetting his lips, Ebenezer gave the line three quick jerks, and yelled—“Gee!”—and watched the chaos. Some of the swingers jumped over the tongue in one direction, the leaders in the other, and the wagon turned easily to the right. Ebenezer shot a frightened glance behind him, but the two wagons and trailing caboose turned easily, and when he swung around to look ahead, he caught a glimpse of Amado nodding his head with approval, grinning like a beaver.
“Yay!” Ebenezer shouted. The mules jumped back into position, and they were going straight.
Three short jerks and “gee” meant turn right. A steady pull and “haw” meant turn left. “Yay” meant keep going straight. Sounded easy, but it was anything but. Ebenezer had seen six-mule teams pulling wagons loaded with cotton or tobacco back at Hall Plantation in South Carolina, but this team had twelve mules, pulling two wagons and a caboose, and he was leading Captain Taneyhill’s train.
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