Love and War: The Coltrane Saga, Book 1 (25 page)

Her face was pressed into the horse’s neck. Suddenly she felt hands wrapping around her bottom and swinging her upward and sideways, onto the saddle. Travis didn’t smile as he said, “I’ve had about all I intend to take from you for one day, Kitty.”

Doggedly, she dug her heels into the horse’s flanks and followed the men deeper into the woods. She heard Travis saying something to someone about how they shouldn’t have been traveling in the daylight hours. The snipers could have killed someone. She found herself wishing he’d been the one to get hit, as she glared at his back.

They reached the seclusion of a foliage-concealed ravine. The horses were led off to graze, and the others built a small campfire. Travis signaled to Kitty to prepare some sort of meal, which she silently did, aware that all eyes were upon her, watching every move she made.

Kitty hated the dress. What right did the conceited Yankee officer have to force her to wear it? The clothes she’d been forced to discard were far more comfortable. Right away, it was easy to see that Travis Coltrane was one of those pig-headed men who believed a woman belonged in skirts, sitting at home and sewing and weaving and having a baby every year. And such men infuriated her to no end! Nathan was a lot like that, causing much tension between them. But finally, when he had left for the war, it seemed that he had accepted her, reluctantly, for the person she was—not what social decorum proclaimed she should be.

Coltrane was telling everyone to lie down and try to take a nap; they would be moving out as soon as night fell. Kitty saw Leon Brody giving her a hungry look, but Travis saw it too, and motioned her to bring her saddle blanket to where he sat propped against the trunk of a large pine tree. Anything was better than the beady-eyed glare of that nasty-looking man, she decided. And, anyway, she wanted to work on her scheme to get around Travis’s apparent dislike for her…catch him off guard…and only then she could hope to escape.

Lying down, she stared up at the azure sky. It was pretty here in the foot lands of the Cumberland Mountains. The Shenandoah Valley, it was called. Way up high, a graceful eagle was soaring, swooping—free—the way she had once been…the way she could be again,
if
she was smart.

Propping her head on her hand, she looked at Travis, who was chewing a blade of grass as he stared at her thoughtfully.

“Would you mind telling me where we’re going? I’m curious.” She tried to sound pleasant, not hostile.

“To join Grant. Somewhere on the western bank of the Tennessee. The closer we get, the more Rebs are going to be crawling out of the ground, so we have to be careful.”

He didn’t sound quite so angry, so she pressed. “You know, you don’t sound like a Yankee, but you have a different accent from what I’m used to hearing. Where are you from, Travis?”

He looked at her sharply, suspiciously. Then he seemed to relax as he quietly said, “Louisiana.”

“Then why do you fight for the North?” She sat straight up, surprised.

“The same reason your father does,” he said sharply. “Because I believe in something.”

“Poppa had a personal grudge against his countrymen after they beat him and caused him to go blind in one eye. He didn’t favor slavery, but he wouldn’t have gone to war over it. He was a peace-loving man. Luke Tate spit in his face once when they were having a heated discussion over the prospects of war, and Poppa didn’t lift a finger. He did reach for something to clean his face, though, and Luke thought he was reaching for a gun, so he pulled a knife on him.”

“Then what happened?”

“I shot him,” she said simply, wondering why his eyes were widening, “with Poppa’s musket that was in the wagon. I didn’t try to kill him. Don’t look so shocked. I only wounded him in the shoulder. We also had a nasty scene once when I tried to stop him from beating a slave girl who was in the family way. Poppa was trying to help her and her baby and the baby’s father to escape when the Vigilantes caught them. They were all three murdered.”

She waited for his reaction, but when it came, it was not as she had expected. “Do you shoot well?”

Indignantly, she replied, “Of course I do. Poppa taught me all about guns and shooting. He used to take me hunting with him.”

She stopped talking, watching as he reached to his side and brought his gun up to hand to her. “Have you ever seen a gun like this?” She shook her head that she hadn’t. “It’s a Spencer Repeating Carbine—a breech-loader—and a
damn fine weapon! Do you know how to load it?”

Again she shook her head, and he proceeded to show her how to load and fire the gun. She listened attentively, then burst out, “But why do you want me to know how to use the gun? Aren’t you afraid I’ll shoot you?”

Shrugging, he smiled. “That’s the chance I have to take. You’re valuable to us, Kitty.
You
know enough about treating wounds to work in a field hospital alongside a doctor. But we’re heading into a war, and there may come a time when you have to defend yourself against the Rebels. I want you to know how.”

“I could never shoot at a Southerner!”

This time he threw his head back and laughed. “You seem to forget that a Rebel is going to think you’re a Yankee, and he’s going to be shooting at you, so you better be able to shoot back unless your Southern pride means more to you than your life. You may think you’ve known violence, princess, being held prisoner by Luke Tate all these months, but until you’ve been in a real battle, with men dying all around you, legs and arms sprawled about like wildflowers, you don’t know what real violence is. But you’re going to know. I just hope you’ve got the guts to take it.”

“Is that why you put me in a dress?” Anger was bristling uncontrollably within her. “You want me to look like a woman, be humble and gracious, and yet you’re sitting here telling me that one day soon I might be fighting like a man? It doesn’t make sense.”

“Oh, yes, it does. I’m hoping that Johnny Reb will spot that dress and think twice before killing a woman.”

So that was the reason for the dress—not his wanting to put her in her “place”. She felt a warmth spreading through her bosom, but it was quickly replaced by a cold chill when he snapped, “And also I figured if you had a dress on, you might remember you’re a woman and not a man!”

She quickly turned her face away so he would not see the anger that was surely written all over it. If she were to gain his confidence and catch him off guard, then temper tantrums had to be held back. Deciding to change the subject, she asked, “Tell me what you did before the war, down in Louisiana.”

“I was a fisherman on the bayou.”

“Then what brought you into the war?”

Slowly, while she watched curiously, he pulled the poncho over his head, revealing the dark blue Yankee uniform shirt beneath. He unbuttoned it, then removed it. “Look at my skin.”

She stared at the curly dark hairs on the solid, husky chest—eyes moving to the hard, firm muscles of his forearms. He had a beautiful body, and she cursed herself for thinking about such things. Trying to focus her attention solely on his skin, she said,
“You have dark skin. You’ve been in the sun a lot.”

The laugh he gave was bitter. “I’m a French Creole, princess, and we’re naturally dark-skinned people. Some of us are lighter than others, but my family happens to be darker than most.”

“Well, what does that have to do with anything?” She didn’t understand what he was getting at, and she noted that his eyes were clouding, as though something furious was smoldering from deep within.

“My sister was fourteen when she was kidnapped by slave traders,” the words came chopping out. “Our parents were dead. I was trying to make a living from fishing, and I was away when they came for her. She was a beautiful girl—and even at the tender age of fourteen, men were wild for her. I didn’t know
how
wild until I came home to find she’d been kidnapped. I searched for her, ready to kill someone…”

His voice tapered off. He picked up a rock and threw it with vehemence. There was a moment of tense silence, and Kitty finally mustered the courage to ask, “And did you find her?”

“The goddamned bastards sold her into slavery…” He turned to look at her with blazing eyes. “By the time I tracked her down and found her—she’d been raped by a hundred men. She had also killed herself!”

“Oh, dear God,” she whispered, shocked, instinctively reaching out to touch his hand in sympathy.

Shrugging off her touch, he laughed bitterly. “So you can see why I’m anxious to fight against slavery. Those bastards traded my sister off as being a slave!”

She didn’t know what to say. Each man fights his own battles within his own soul—she’d heard her poppa say that often. Each man does what he has to do. Travis Coltrane had his reasons; her father had his…and she had hers.

After a few moments of awkwardness, he said gruffly, “Get some sleep, Kitty. We’ve got a rough night’s ride ahead. And don’t try to escape. I’ve got guards posted.”

He still didn’t trust her, but at least she’d made some progress. They could at least be civil to each other, and that was a start—and a start had to come from something. Lying down and pulling another blanket over her, she closed her eyes and was soon fast asleep—worn and weary from the long ride.

When Kitty again opened her eyes, it was pitch dark. For a moment, she groggily tried to get her wits together and figure out where she was and what was happening. Then she realized that Travis was shaking her, telling her to get up and get ready. They were moving out.

The movement through the woods, by night, was slow and dangerous. Travis admitted he was not sure where they would meet up with Grant. There was a chance they would encounter the Confederates first, and in all probability they would be outnumbered by the thousands.

It was almost April, and she was still freezing. It surprised her when Travis, riding beside her, noticed and took off his poncho to slip over her head. “Can’t have you getting the fever and getting down,” he said tartly. “We’re going to need you when hell starts raining down on us from Rebel guns.”

They moved very slowly, listening for the smallest of sounds. Suddenly, everyone was freezing, halting the horses. Travis reached out to catch the reins of the horse Kitty was riding, and he whispered for her to be quiet and not make a sound. “There’s something ahead of us.”

Without being ordered to do so, the two men at the head of the line dismounted and walked forward. Kitty tensed, fearful that at any moment there would be the sound of gunfire, and then all of them would be shot and killed.

But instead of gunfire, there came several shouts—excited, urging them to come quickly—and for God’s sake, they screamed—bring the doctor lady.

Someone grabbed her from the saddle, and she knew it was not Travis. He was already charging forward. The soldier beside her pulled her along, and already, in the clearing up ahead, someone was trying to light a fire. There was the sound of moaning…agony…suffering…and then the fire was burning, and she could see, and the horror made her turn her face away for a moment.

There were maybe five or six bodies there—faces torn away, guts hanging from gaping wounds in the stomach. And then she was being dragged along to where a young soldier, perhaps seventeen or eighteen years of age, was propped against the stump of a tree. Right away, she could see that his left eye hung drooling from a bloody socket and there was a gouging wound with flesh and matter oozing out. He was in some sort of stupor, moaning some, but not nearly as much as an alert soldier would cry out.

Kitty examined him quickly. There had been a good deal of bleeding. There was nothing she could do. It was obvious that the boy was almost dead, and she wondered how he could even be clinging to life at this point.

“I…want to talk to…officer…” he gasped out the words, barely audible. Travis stepped forward, knelt, and identified himself as being in charge.

The boy was a Union soldier, and he was more concerned with the plight of his commander than he was his own life. “Get to Grant…quick…we know…tell him Rebels are coming to get him before he gets…help.”

Travis turned to Kitty questioningly. She shook her head. The boy was almost gone. Her heart wrenched as he cried out in a sudden wave of agony, sliding sideways to the ground. She watched as the eyeball fell into the dirt, covering it with little flecks of sand…a strange, awesome sight in the flickering firelight.

“Are you sure?” Travis reached to give her a violent shake that made her head bob to and fro. “Goddamn you, Kitty, don’t you lie to me. Can this boy be treated and recover?”

“No!” She all but yelled. “I’m sorry, but he’s bleeding to death from that wound. He’s almost dead now…”

The soldier twisted in his agony, screamed, and then everyone watched in horror as he reached toward his face, clutching, guttural shrieks coming from his lips as he took hold of his eyeball and finished yanking it from the socket, flinging it out into the vast darkness.

She heard one of the men retching. A fresh gush of blood poured from somewhere inside the Yankee soldier’s head. “I am sorry…” Kitty whispered sincerely. There was just nothing she could do.

“We’ve got to get moving.” A soldier named Sam Bucher spoke anxiously, glancing about at the bodies. “These boys were obviously sent out to get help. Grant must be in trouble, and we need to get to him before he gets pinned down.”

“You can’t leave him here!” Kitty cried in protest as they all began moving back from the dying soldier. “You can’t leave him to just die alone. These mountains are full of wild animals! Do you want him left to be picked to pieces by wolves while he’s still alive? God, have mercy

A shot rang out. The boy’s head snapped forward. His body was still—dead.

Raising eyes to see who had fired the shot to kill him, Kitty was not surprised to see Travis standing a few feet away, a smoking Spencer carbine held in his hand. “No,” he said quietly, sternly. “We won’t leave him here to die.”

While she stood there blinking back tears, hating him for his brutality, Poppa’s words seemed to whisper to her, “Sometimes it takes more courage to live than it does to die.”