Rifles for Watie (31 page)

“Mam, has your family had enough to eat?”

“We haven't had much lately,” Lucy admitted, smoothing her skirt over her knees. “It's almost impossible to buy food here now. Since we lost the cow, we have no milk nor butter. And we have no wheat for bread. Father wants us to live in Texas but Mother hates to leave our home and our furniture. Occasionally, Father sends us a quarter of beef or some side meat. We have our vegetable garden. When the Union cavalry took all our meat, Mother sent word to Father not to send us any more. She says it's too risky. She's afraid he will try to bring the food himself, so he can visit us. The Union army is all around us now.” She looked at him honestly. Jeff liked her for it.

“But that doesn't mean we are starving,” Lucy added, smiling. “We'll be honored if you'll have dinner with us. It will be mostly vegetables, both cooked and raw.”

Jeff said, “Thank you, mam. I'll be happy to.” He stood and, reaching into the saddlebag on the dun's back, produced a gallon sack filled with shelled corn.

“If you've a small grinder, mam, we can have fresh corn bread.” He had swapped a pair of spurs for the corn. Stuart Mitchell had given him the spurs. He had taken them off a dead rebel cavalryman he had shot at Cabin Creek, but Jeff didn't tell Lucy that.

As he went with Lucy to the smokehouse to grind the corn, Jeff felt hungry. He guessed you were always hungry in a war. Although the dinner was plain, he was impressed with the heavy silver tableware, the brown plates of stone china, the yellow linen tablecloth, and the brown linen napkins. Perce, the Negress, was openly nervous every time she waited on Jeff and was always careful to walk far around him when she passed.

After dinner, while Lucy helped Perce wash the dishes, Jeff walked outside. He saw that the windlass over the well was broken and he repaired it. He found hammer, nails, and saw and substituted a new board for a broken one in the small plank walk leading to the smokehouse. He found a sickle and leveled the weeds growing rank around the stone boundary fence. He tied up the tomato vines in the flower gardens. And all the time he worked, he marveled at Lucy's changed attitude toward him. He had never been so happy in his life.

Later, when they sat alone in the parlor, Lucy sewed a button on his shirt and skillfully mended a torn place. As she stitched fast and deftly, she said wistfully, “The thing we miss the most on Sundays is never hearing a church bell. My people are Methodists. But most of the churches have been destroyed and the ministers scattered. Riley's chapel, two miles south of town, has been torn down. The big church at Park Hill burned two years ago. As long as our army occupied the country, we usually had preaching of some kind. Colonel Watie used to send Mr. Slover, his chaplain, across the river, horseback, to preach to us in private homes on Sunday nights. But now it's too dangerous.”

Jeff told her about the rock mission house at Sugar Mound, back in Linn County, and how it was nearly a two-hour drive in the buckboard to the mission from the Bussey homestead. And about his family and about the Missouri bushwhackers stealing the family horses from Bess and Mary, and trying to kill his father. And of his ambition some day to attend the new state university that would be built in Kansas when the war was over.

Lucy took up her knitting and described the seminary at Cane Hill, what she studied, what the school was like. She seemed lonely and anxious to talk. For the first time he felt he was really beginning to know her.

Across the room Lucy's knitting needles clicked busily, her eyes on the brown worsted stocking her fingers were fashioning. “At the Cherokee Female Seminary where my sisters went to school, the students worshiped at the Sehon Chapel, a half mile east of the seminary.”

Curious, Jeff said, “What happened to it?”

With a graceful movement Lucy spread her hands resignedly.

“It's deserted now. We heard that some guerillas stayed there early in the war.” Her eyes lighted up. “Would you like to see it? It's just over the hill. I haven't been there for two years.”

Her eyes glistened with anticipation. She looked like a girl who liked to go places and do things, probably with scores of rebel beaux following her, Jeff thought.

She looked at him challengingly and said, “Maybe Perce will let us borrow her rig.”

The Negress' vehicle, drawn by an old, blind mule, was an ancient cart with one buggy wheel and one plow wheel, and a quilt-covered box for a seat. Laughing at the novel transportation, Jeff and Lucy sat together on the box. It was great fun.

Jeff drove. Dixie explored the brush on each side of the narrow, rocky road that zigzagged through the hills. Overgrown with bluestem and protruding dogwood, the road obviously had not been used for some time. The old cart rattled and creaked as it rolled down gullies and over washed-out sections, listing frightfully as they passed over a root or stump. Finally the boney mule pulled the squeaking cart into a small clearing and halted.

On top of a green knoll nearby, Jeff saw the old chapel, standing in lonely solitude. It was a small church built of red brick. Most of its stained blue window glass had been broken out. Jeff decided that while it would have looked well in any spot, here it was beautiful. A small grove of black locusts grew around it. From the ruins of an outdoor arbor nearby, the intoxicating smell of wild pink azalea was on the air.

Jeff helped Lucy from the cart and tried to imagine what the chapel had looked like before the war had scattered its communicants and hastened its ruin.

“There's a gallery inside where the colored people worshiped. Most of them were slaves of the congregation,” Lucy explained.

She glanced upward at the belfry where the bronze-surfaced bell was still visible. “They rang it to summon the seminary students. Many Tahlequah people attended services here. Lee and I used to come often together.” Her low voice had grown quiet, almost hushed.

Finally they turned back toward the cart.

And so the day they had spent so pleasantly together flashed by like a meteor and like a meteor would be gone forever—the simple dinner, the talk, the ride in the old cart. With a war going on, he had so little time. It wasn't right. A fellow who might get shot tomorrow shouldn't have to wait a whole year to call a girl by her first name or tell her that he loved her.

Silently he helped her into the rickety cart and turned the old mule homeward. Lucy was very quiet. They started back to Tahlequah, the wheels turning silently as they passed over sandy spots. The sun sank low, throwing long black shadows across the road. Jeff was busy piloting the mule around the rough spots. As he drove, he was thinking.

Thinking that he wouldn't see Lucy Washbourne again for a long, long time. Might not ever see her again, if the rebels began shooting straighter. He figured he had stretched his luck about as thin as it would go. He knew Blunt's carpenters had almost finished the log rafts they were building to ferry the infantry and the artillery across the river. The new campaign against Cooper would probably start tomorrow.

It was almost dusk. When he saw the lighted windows of the Washbourne home, his heart fell. He wished it was a thousand miles away so he could prolong his ride with Lucy. He looked at Dixie trotting alongside the cart, her nose sniffing out the grass ahead.

He said, “Mam, I've a favor to ask. Now that I'm in the cavalry, it's hard for me to keep my dog. Would you want to keep her for me until I get back? You'd find her an excellent guard around the house.”

Lucy said quietly, “I'd like to keep her.”

“Thank you, mam.”

As they approached the house, the dun heard the old cart's axles creaking. Raising his head, he looked at them and nickered softly.

Jeff stopped the cart by the gate and, climbing out, walked around behind it to help Lucy out. He didn't want to go back to the camp on the Illinois or anywhere else. He didn't want to go back to war.

Lucy stood and put her hands on Jeff's shoulders. As he lifted her lightly to the ground, she looked at him. Her eyes softened as she read the dejection in his face. Passing her left arm around Jeff's neck and rising on her toes, she kissed him gently on the mouth.

Looking up at him with quiet amusement, she said in her low, drawling speech, “I like you, Jeff Bussey. But I warn you: I haven't changed my mind about the war. I'm still a rebel—to the backbone.” But she smiled when she dropped her arms.

Jeff was thunderstruck. You could have knocked him over with a feather. Lucy Washbourne had kissed him! Shaken clear to his toes, he could still feel the pressure of her cool lips on his. He knew he would never forget it, as long as he lived.

Later, when Jeff untied and mounted the dun, Lucy sat on the wooden stile in the twilight, her arm around Dixie's neck. Behind them, the Washbourne home was etched blackly against the red sunset. Dixie started to get up and follow Jeff.

“No, no. You stay here,” Jeff told the dog gently. Puzzled, she sank back obediently on her haunches.

Both the girl and the dog watched him until he rode out of sight. . . .

Next morning, Jeff awoke early. The morning gun crashed noisily, echoing against the neighboring hills and rumbling and reverberating across the distant flats, but Jeff didn't hear it. The starry new flag Blunt had brought from Fort Scott was run to the top of the mast and, unfurling slowly and gracefully in the morning breeze, caught the rays of the rising sun. But Jeff didn't see it. His mind was too busy reliving his day with Lucy.

Lucy was all he could think about until he ran into David Gardner on the picket line. An expression of urgency on his florid face, David led him off to one side, out of earshot.

“Jeff, are you goin' out agin today with the scouts?”

“I don't know. They haven't told us yet.”

The big orange freckles on David's face and neck seemed to pale. “Goshallmighty, Jeff, don't you dare ride anywhere nears the Watie outfit.”

“Why?”

David's eyes blinked with fear. “We went swimmin' agin last night with the rebel pickets. They know all about Clardy havin' Lee Washbourne shot. The whole rebel army is sore about it. Their pickets said the Watie men have sworn that the first Clardy man they capture behind their lines will go before a firin' squad before he can say God with his mouth open.”

Jeff felt that cold, flat statement clear down to the toes of his boots. He was the only Clardy man in Blunt's scouts, now that Noah had been put back in the cavalry to improve his horsemanship.

David cocked his head in a listening attitude. “Hear them hammers goin'? Blunt's flatboats is nearly done. We hear there'll probably be a big battle tomorrey or next day. Maybe they won't need to send out the scouts.”

Jeff swallowed uneasily. He had never heard of an attacking army that didn't send out scouts. After watering and feeding the dun, he returned to his quarters.

“Bussey.”

Jeff froze. Just as he feared, it was the orderly sergeant summoning him to an emergency meeting with Orff and the scout patrol. First, the sergeant took them to the ordnance department, where they exchanged their blue uniforms for ragged butternut attire, careful to divest themselves of any article that might identify them with the Union cause. Then Orff led them to a vacant room in the fort, where they wouldn't be overheard.

His pipe in one hand and a sulphur match in the other, Orff explained their mission. “The general wants to know if the rebel General Steele is bringin' reinforcements up from Texas to join Cooper. Soon as it gets dark, we're to cross the river, ride in behind the reb lines and, mixin' with the reb civilians, teamsters, anybody we run into there, try to find out when Steele is expected and how many men he's got.”

Jeff squirmed nervously. It didn't sound a bit good to him. Orff dragged the red tip of the match across the seat of his corduroy pants and, holding the tiny flame in midair, gave them a level look.

“I don't have to tell you that this patrol is on probation. We didn't do so good two days ago. If it hadn't been for that haversack Bussey got, we'da been blanked. The general's watchin' us close this time. Le's don't bumble it.” Frowning, he touched the flame to the bowl of his pipe.

Throwing his match away, he blew a puff of gray tobacco smoke toward the ceiling. “We're to split up in pairs. This is Monday. If ever'thing goes well, the general says he will start movin' down the Texas Road Tuesday. He says soon as we git the information he wants, we are to hit for the Texas Road and identify ourselves to the Union pickets, who will be told in advance to expect us. They'll take us back to Blunt.”

They started at midnight. There was a full moon. This time they went west instead of east. Avoiding the fords again, they swam the Arkansas six miles west of the fort. Although the river was falling, Jeff gasped once as the water rose to his knees and spilled into his boots when the dun stepped into a deep hole and had to swim. But they got across safely. On the rebel side, Orff divided the patrol into pairs. With a brief handshake, they separated, riding in different directions.

Jeff's companion was Jim Bostwick, a big, easy-going Missourian who drank black coffee by the quart, and now that he was to be absent for two or three days, filled his canteen with it to the brim. Bostwick had been a Union scout for General Curtis ahead of the Battle of Pea Ridge.

“Better let Bostwick do the talkin' if you get in a jam,” Orff suggested. That was all right with Jeff.

As Bostwick and Jeff rode through the moonlit countryside they were careful to skirt roads where rebel sentries might challenge them. They wanted to avoid all contact with enemy military forces, if they could. But that was not to be.

Two hours before daybreak they splashed across a small creek and, wading out upon the opposite bank, ran squarely into several dark figures.

“Halt or we'll fire!” a thin, high-pitched voice snarled.