Smolder on a Slow Burn

by Lynda J. Cox

  “My sister often accused me of being disrespectful. She said I would never procure a teaching position if I didn’t learn to bite my tongue.” There was a slight catch in her voice and a distance dulled the chocolate color of her eyes. A.J. had heard that catch many times during the War Between the States, from others much older and self-proclaimed to be a lot tougher than she appeared. Apparently she had never been away from home. Just wonderful. She was expecting a damned nursemaid to hold her hand when she got too homesick.

  She blinked and the distance faded. “I’m Allison Webster, by the way.” Her smile was neither forced nor feigned. In obvious anticipation of his response, she tilted her head, that ridiculous feathered contraption on her crown bobbing with the motion and the warm fall breeze billowing through the windows.

  Something lurched deep in his chest and his throat tightened. Unbidden, the words tumbled from his mouth. “A.J. Adams, ma’am.” Now just how in the hell had she managed to get his name from him that easily, when in the past decade or so he had guarded it zealously?

  Her eyes widened again and her mouth dropped open while her gaze skipped over his frame. He had to give her credit, she recovered quickly enough.

  “The man who stole millions in gold from the Confederacy?”

  A.J. snorted. “As I have told many others, it is rather hard to steal something the Confederacy never had. The most ever lost was several thousand dollars when the treasury moved from Richmond in the middle of the night shortly before Lee’s surrender.” That the Confederacy actually ever had millions in gold at one time and in one place was laughable in its own right, but that he managed to disappear with that kind of money was ludicrous. He was a little more than amazed that better than ten years after the war’s end, that rumor still had life in it. “Frankly, if I had disobeyed a direct order to actually help the authorities find payroll gold and if I had stolen the millions I am rumored to have liberated, would it stand to reason that I’d still be wearing a greatcoat that saw better days a decade ago? Or that I would even be traveling in a public train car? Much less still in this country when I could be living a life of luxury in a foreign land?”

  A small smile dusted her mouth. “All those rumors…they truly didn’t have millions in gold? How did the Confederacy afford to wage war?”

  “Rumors grow exponentially with each telling. Several thousand dollars of stolen gold from a payroll wagon becomes hundreds of thousands and then millions. I can also attest that I know of at least three stolen Confederate payroll wagons which were recovered by the Union Army.” He shifted on the seat, trying to take the tension from his shoulders and relieve the throbbing in his back. He nudged the hat back even more. “As to affording to wage war, it’s amazing what havoc a single idiot can manage to create with an inordinate amount of pride. Put idiots into a parcel and you have a war.”

  “Point well taken about the havoc pride can create.” Her head dipped in acquiescence. “You may correct me if I am wrong, but I was under the impression the United States mint in New Orleans was taken over by the Confederacy.”

  A.J. lifted a brow to her. “You’re well read. Yes, and the approximate half a million in gold and silver coin—the only time the Confederacy ever had that kind of hard currency at one time and in one place—went to purchase ammunitions, arms and to finance building several naval vessels. It was gone so quickly that Davis and his government began selling bonds the very first year to raise funds, and those bonds could only be purchased with gold.” He shifted again on the hard bench seat, his lower back throbbing, radiating pain down his leg. He debated standing and trying to walk the pain out, but also knew when he took that first step, his leg would give out on him. “May I ask why we’re rehashing a war that ended more than ten years ago, Miss Webster?”

  “Asked by a man who still wears his uniform overcoat, and judging by the condition of his denim trousers and boots, not out of necessity.”

  “Touché.” A.J. notched his hat back fully.

  Bright color suffused her slender cheeks, but she didn’t look away from him. “What if I told you I enjoy discussing and learning about history and politics? Would you think less of me? Not to mention, this little book I’m trying to read is nowhere as interesting as this conversation.” She snapped said little book closed and pushed it deep into her carpetbag.

  “Where I’m from, women usually don’t interest themselves in politics, much less anything more historic than the local gossip.” As an afterthought, A.J. added, “Most men I know prefer not to rehash that history.”

  “If you’d rather not discuss the War, that’s all right, Mr. Adams. My sister told me repeatedly that I’m destined to be a wallflower because men definitely do not like a woman who believes she understands politics, as that is not a woman’s sphere of influence. However, being a wallflower is an advantage if one is contracted to be a teacher.” Her smile altered and looked strained. “My sister is the much more socially adept of the two of us. I’ve always felt like a mule in a horse’s harness.”

  Debating how to answer that, A.J. glanced out the window. The flat plains of Nebraska rolled into the horizon, as far as the eye could see. Those plains had been scorched a burnt yellow-brown by the summer’s searing sun and then frosted with the fall nights. Several long moments passed. Without taking his gaze from the view, A.J. growled, “Your sister is an idiot, ma’am.” He looked over to Allison and allowed a brief nod of his head. “Begging your pardon for my bluntness, but that is the stupidest thing I’ve heard in a long time. I’m not unintelligent enough to believe for one moment that women don’t understand politics. And, I, for one, appreciate a woman with some intelligence.”

  Her gaze drifted to the open windows. “There is nothing to pardon, Mr. Adams. I would like to believe most men prefer a woman with a brain in her head, though I have been proven wrong repeatedly on that point.” Her brows lowered and she leaned closer to the window and by proximity to him. The faint aroma of lavender swirled around her. A.J. twisted on his seat to peer out the window and felt his stomach churning with the sight coming into view.

  Across the landscape massive piles of bones bleached in the unrelenting sun. Next to the bleaching bones were even larger piles, writhing even in death with the black forms of hundreds of thousands of crows and vultures. Five or six men worked on another pile, scattering the carrion birds, only for the scavengers to quickly return.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  “Dead buffalo.”

  “Buffalo?” She turned so quickly to him her feathered hat slipped. An indelicate and rather unladylike huff broke from her and Allison pulled the hat off and set it on the seat next to her. “Those are all dead buffalo?”

  A.J. nodded. “Those men standing on the piles are buffalo hunters…if you want to call what they do hunting. A prime hide, taken in the spring, before the animal starts to shed its winter coat, can bring as much as fifty dollars. Even a poor hide will fetch around a dollar. All they take is the hide, leaving the rest to rot. After about a year, the bones are harvested and ground into fertilizer.”

  Unbidden, the recalled stench of the rotting bodies, the iron-sharp tang of fresh blood, and the pitiful mewling of a fatally wounded buffalo battered his senses. Hot on the heels of that memory was a sharper, clearer, more deeply cutting recollection—the acrid, choking smoke of cannon volleys hanging low on a withering hot summer day, the screams of men and horses in throes of agony, the sharp report of thousands of rifles barking out sentences of maiming and mutilation and death…The memory tightened his throat, forced a knot into his gut. He thrust those images away. “It’s a wholesale slaughter in the way they are just mown down.” He wasn’t sure if he referred to the dead buffalo out on the prairie or the loss of so many young lives, dressed in Federal blue and Confederate gray and butternut.

  “Why are they doing that?” The words sounded as if they were torn from her. She stared out the window. A.J. looked away from the landscape so white with bleaching bones it appear
ed covered with massive piles of snow.

  “Because they can—with the full blessing of our government in a policy of total extermination of the buffalo and the destruction of the natives’ primary food source. Because the capacity of human greed is unequaled and during a good summer, a buffalo killer can make more than several thousand dollars. And, because those men have the most powerful rifles at their disposal and the buffalo can’t shoot back. Pick a reason.”

  “But…but…the Indians who haven’t been moved onto the reservations yet need those animals to live. How will they feed their children if all the buffalo are slaughtered?”

  “Miss Webster, the United States government is very adept at waging a war of complete and total attrition on those who are fool-hardy enough to stand against it.” A.J. didn’t even bother to keep the bitterness from his words.

  Allison sank even further into the seat, silent. Her brow knit as she looked from the windows to him. Finally, still silent, she pulled her little dime novel from her carpetbag and began to read. He should have been relieved that the questions had finally stopped but he found that, instead, he missed the sound of her voice. Most surprising as he had become very practiced in keeping his own company and avoiding the entanglements of conversation. He settled for covertly watching her as she read.

  Chapter Two

  Tell me thy company,

  and I’ll tell thee what thou art.

  ~Miguel de Cervantes

  Allison shivered with the chill invading the railcar. A half-moon rode high in the sky, dancing in and out of wispy-thin scudding clouds. Stars twinkled in the blackness and more than once, glowing embers from the towering, diamond-stack on the engine sailed past the open window into the night.

  When the train stopped at another tiny station to take on more water and wood, she stood. Her back protested. Goodness, those wooden benches were horribly uncomfortable. She had seen Mr. Adams shifting on the seat more than once, a pinched expression on his face as he tried to find a more comfortable position. She also knew if she had mentioned it, he would have brushed aside her concerns. In just a few hours she had learned that while he had been broken down by the war, he still had the one thing the North hadn’t been able to take from most men who donned Confederate colors: pride. And he apparently had plenty of that to spare.

  She hesitated for a moment and surveyed what she could see of the landscape before she left the car and walked along the tracks. Somewhere in the night, a coyote yapped and yelped and was soon answered by another. The lonely sound filled in the limitless reaches of the blackness. She had comforted herself more than once while hurriedly stuffing her few belongings into her carpetbag that she was setting out on a great adventure, just like the heroes in her favorite books by Dickens and Verne and Blackmore’s Lorna Doone.

  Unfortunately, this didn’t feel like a great adventure. First of all, she was lacking a trustworthy companion who would always have her safety as his priority. Secondly, none of those authors ever truly mentioned how frightened their heroes were by the circumstances they found themselves in. And, lastly, she was cold, and hungry, and thirsty. This was not like anything she had told herself running away from Colton County would be.

  She sighed. As this seemed to be a larger station, perhaps she could get something to drink here. At least at the last stop, there had been an outhouse behind the station where the train passengers could relieve themselves. But when she left the outhouse, a man climbing into one of the passenger cars made her stop. She stared at his back. She was certain she recognized him as the man who had been following her in Omaha and beyond a shadow of a doubt had followed her from Georgia. Very few men were so skeletal thin, and even fewer carried themselves with such a cagey tautness. A shiver that had nothing to do with the cool night rippled over her from head to toe. Allison wrapped her arms around herself, chaffing her upper arms.

  The porter walked from the locomotive, swinging his light from side to side. He stopped a few feet from her. “Might want to get back on the train, Miss. There are a lot of rattlesnakes around here and they like to stay by the tracks. They’re not gone for the winter yet.”

  Rattlesnakes? She wasn’t afraid of many of God’s creatures, but a snake—poisonous or not—could reduce her to a quivering mass. “Yes, I will do that. Thank you.” She jogged to the car and climbed the steps into the carriage. Despite stopping at three full stations to pick up more passengers, she and Adams still had the last car to themselves. Only, he was not in the car. Allison fought the childish desire to look under the seats to be sure no one was hiding under them, ready to jump out and take her back to Colton County. She paused for a moment. Maybe, she did have a trustworthy companion because she felt strangely vulnerable and alone without Mr. Adams’s presence.

  She shivered and her teeth rattled. Even her fingers hurt she was so chilled. Perhaps, if she closed some of the windows, it wouldn’t be so bone-chilling cold when the train began to move again. Allison knelt on the bench and struggled with the window next to her seat. She tugged and pulled on the window but it wasn’t budging. While she battled to close it, she puzzled over which man of the written record was her reluctant traveling companion.

  Adams’s rather curt behavior earlier was more in line with the lurid details that had been printed of him after the war by the newspapers Father read to her and Alice. It seemed at the time, newspapers in both the North and South were determined to destroy anyone who had been loyal to the Confederacy and he was one of their favorite targets, seemingly right behind Jefferson Davis.

  According to those papers, Adams was rumored to be in possession of millions in gold stolen from the Confederate States Treasury—a rumor he had very convincingly put to rest. But the papers also reported that while held in a Union prisoner of war camp, he revealed sensitive information which led to the deaths of hundreds of Confederate troops. Several men claimed that while other prisoners died from disease, froze to death, and begged even for the slightest scrap of food, he received preferential treatment at the hands of their captors because of his traitorous acts.

  Allison recalled her father’s dismissive snort when she had asked how Adams could have been evil if he had been aiding the Union. He snapped the newspaper for emphasis and she never forgot his reply. “When a man gives his word, it is his bond. To betray an oath as that man did is to betray his honor. Honor is the only thing which separates us from the beasts and when a man is without honor he is little more than an animal walking erect.”

  Allison shook her head, scattering those memories as if she’d waved her hand through a spider’s web. Yet, she sensed no great love in A.J. Adams for the restored Union. If anything he was deeply cynical and filled with a strong distrust of the federal government.

  The small dime novel she was reading contradicted the newspaper accounts of this supposed traitor to the Confederate States of America. The book’s author claimed Adams had suffered unimaginable indignities in that prisoner of war camp and even recounted an incident when he refused to order his men to fight among themselves for an extra ration of food. His refusal to issue that order led to the summary execution of five of the prisoners.

  She realized she had been just holding the window, staring out in the night while she tried to sort through the enigma of the man. Allison shoved the window up a little more and then tried to drag it down. It wouldn’t budge past its original point.

  “Allow me,” Adams’s deep baritone murmured in her ear.

  Startled, Allison reared away from the window. At the same moment, the train jolted forward, sending her tumbling backwards. Her head slammed into his shoulder. His arms snaked around her, steadying her. The broad chest her back pressed up against was as solid as a stone wall and the strength in the arms circling her waist felt as strong as iron bands. Her heart leapt into her throat.

  “I might begin to think that more than conversation is in your plans if you don’t stop throwing yourself at me. Of course, you can always blame it on your lack of coordinatio
n when the train is in motion.” He spoke barely above a whisper and his breath teased along her cheek, ruffling the stray wisps of her hair. Something deep in her stomach clenched, making it difficult to draw a deep breath.

  “I have no motives other than trying to close this window.” Allison didn’t make any attempt to free herself of his hold.

  “Then, as I stated a moment or so ago, allow me to assist you.” His chuckle sank deep into her, filling her with warmth, brushing over her like the richest of velvets.

  This was going to get her into serious trouble. Allison twisted out of his arms and away from the window, and dropped onto the bench.

  With seemingly little effort, he slammed the window shut. He sank into the corner again and jerked his head at a rolled up blanket and a bottle of sassafras root beer on the bench next to her. “I couldn’t help but notice you’ve been shivering for the past hour or so. And, as I also noticed you haven’t had a thing to eat or drink, I bought you a bottle of something to drink that’s probably safer than the water.”

  “You shouldn’t have bought me anything, but I thank you.” It was so tempting. And, it also was something she knew polite society would frown upon. Allison sighed. He wasn’t the only one with an excess of pride. “Nor can I borrow your blanket, Mr. Adams. It just would not be proper.”

  “Live a little dangerously, Miss Webster.” A grin tugged one corner of his mouth for just a moment. He flipped the metal wire holding the cork stopper off his own bottle of root beer and took a long drink. He lowered the bottle and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “It’s pretty good.”

  This was some kind of torture. “I’m sure it is, but it just isn’t proper.”

  He chuckled and Allison would have taken an oath that sound was the very voice of temptation.

  “And, sitting alone in the same train car with me, without a chaperone, is proper? What if someone had seen me holding you a moment ago, Miss Webster?”