This Scorched Earth

by William Gear

“Then what’s that crawling across your left sleeve, Doc?” Anthony asked.

  Doc glanced down, spotting the little beast as it scrurried toward a hole in his sleeve.

  “There you are!” Doc cried, pinching the vermin between thumb and forefinger. “Trying to escape, weren’t you?”

  “Not even the most impetuous louse?” Nelson asked slyly.

  “Why, he’s not mine,” Doc replied seriously. “I just borrowed him from my friend James. I use him in my introductory lessons with each batch of Fresh Fish that come in. I want them to be able to recognize a real Yankee louse when they see one.”

  “What in hell are you talking about, Doc?” Anthony asked.

  “Well, Percy, in order to understand Rebels, you need to realize that we’re an egalitarian lot. New prisoners coming in want to share in all the things us canned mackerel—you know, the old-timers—take for granted.”

  Doc lifted the louse that was wiggling between his thumb and forefinger and studied it. “Wouldn’t want them to feel left out or deprived, so I make sure they know just what to look for as they take off in search of their own personal herd of Yankee lice.”

  “Yankee lice?” Nelson asked. “They different than Rebel lice?”

  “Most assuredly, Private. Yankee lice are more industrious. They like to chew on a fella all night long whereas Rebel lice knock off at midnight and don’t go back to work until dawn.”

  And saying that, Doc stuck the vile little creature in his pocket and turned to Nelson. “Now that that’s settled, let’s see if we can’t get some more pus out of this foot of yours.”

  40

  October 29, 1863

  Something was wrong. As Billy rode down the Spring Canyon trail he felt it even before he caught the faint scent of something sour. He knew that smell: the tang of severed and spilled guts. Billy stopped and shifted his old .36 caliber muzzleloader from his shoulder.

  He had taken no more than ten paces down the trail before he stopped short. Tracks in the loamy soil. Maybe six hours old. Two men on horses had descended the steep slope, winding through the trees before taking the trail down the narrow valley.

  Billy’s heart skipped. Two riders? Here?

  Surely they wouldn’t have come cross-country along the White River breaks. Anyone with a lick of sense would follow the Huntsville Road. Or, if they were desperate to avoid notice, would have taken any of the ridge trails that wound up to higher, flatter country. The only reason riders would cut across the ridges was if they were circling to come in behind …

  “Damn and hell.”

  Swiftly, silently, he hurried down the trail, his eyes taking in the brushy spots, the shadowed overhangs beneath the weathered gray limestone, any place a person could hide and watch the trail.

  The horses’ hooves had chipped little crescents from the damp ground. The back hooves printed more than three quarters of the front. These weren’t made by skulkers, but men in a hurry to cover ground. Men who had pushed their mounts at a fast walk.

  Billy could just see the springhouse at the mouth of the canyon. The door was open. Something he, Sarah, and Maw never did in the constant effort to keep pests out. Slowing, he slipped into the trees, familiar with every stealthy approach to the house.

  He eased into the thick rosebushes, saw the wagon wheel. But out in the yard, the wagon itself was gone. The old broken wheel still lay in the dirt beside the tire tracks where the iron rims had cut the soil. Whoever had taken the wagon had brought their own wheel, which meant they had been here before, had planned their raid.

  In the center of the yard lay Fly, his belly torn open, entrails trailed behind him as if he’d crawled to his death.

  A slow-burning rage began to glow in Billy’s gut. Any bastard who’d do that to Fly …

  A man lay facedown in front of the porch, his arms out, legs spread. Blood had dried black on his flour-sack shirt, his boots were missing. But who was he? Who’d shot him? And why?

  And more worrisome, where were Maw and Sarah?

  On the front porch, the warning bucket was missing.

  He tried to think it through as fear began to eat inside him. They’d been raided. Pro-Union jayhawkers would have burned the place after looting it. Maw would have told partisan Rebel guerillas that she had sons in the Confederate army, and while they might have conscripted the wagon with its load of vegetables, they wouldn’t have had to shoot one of their own men in the yard. Nor would they have killed Fly.

  Billy shifted, easing back, circling before slipping up behind the newly harvested corn rows until he could see the front of the house. The door was open, sheets, clothing, a couple of Maw’s chests lying open and spilled on the ground before the steps.

  The anger and panic burned hotter.

  From here he could see where the wagon had been drawn up before the porch, and how it had followed the horses out of the yard and down the lane.

  Billy faded back into the brush, made his way along the wooded slope to the rear of the house. As he eased out of the trees, he cut the trapper’s cabin trail, seeing where a man in boots had led Old Clyde and Swat toward the yard. They’d been hidden a quarter mile up the canyon. So, they’d known to look for the horses, too.

  A quick dash took him to the pines behind the house, and from there he wiggled his way under the boughs until he could see the back door. Open. He could see clear through the hallway, and out the gaping front door.

  He watched for long minutes. Nothing moved.

  A rasping moan came from inside.

  Billy tightened his grip on the rifle, worked his jaw to sharpen his hearing. He could feel the stillness, the aloneness, in a way he’d never felt while at home.

  He sprinted for the back wall, stuck his ear against it and listened. But for the hammering of his heart he could hear nothing.

  On moccasin feet he slipped in the door, rifle at the ready. All the cabinets were open, the clothes, normally on the pegs, were jumbled on the floor. He glanced into Maw’s room to see everything in disarray, even the mattress slit open and shredded. What kind of lunatic would ruin an old woman’s mattress?

  Maw lay curled on her side in the front room. A smeared streak of blood marked where she’d crawled in from the porch.

  “Maw!” Billy cried, rushing to her side.

  He winced at the dark blood matting her blouse. High. Had to be a liver and stomach shot. “Who shot you?”

  “Colonel Dewley.” She swallowed hard, the action pumping blood out through the wound to re-wet the front of her dress. “Took her.”

  “Sarah?”

  “They took her!” Maw said through gritted teeth. “Leaped on him. Clawed at him.”

  “What happened then?”

  She blinked, eyes flicking back and forth as if her vision were blurred. “Went at him … he shot me.”

  Stunned disbelief left him reeling. “Where did he take her?”

  “Don’t know.”

  Maw’s body tensed, the rasping in her throat louder now.

  “They’s a dead man out there, Maw. Who is he?”

  “One of Dewley’s. Tried to stop it. Said he’d be damned to be part of molesting a white woman. Dewley shot him down. Asked if anyone else objected.”

  “Think, Maw. Where would they have taken her?”

  “Get her back, son. Keep her safe. Your responsibility to … see…”

  Maw tensed, eyes opening wide to flutter in her head. They slowed. Fixed. Her breath made a bubbling sound in her throat, her body going limp.

  “Maw?”

  Billy laid his finger on her neck, feeling no pulse. He swallowed a knot of grief and forced himself to touch her still, blue eye. She didn’t blink.

  Billy gathered her into his lap, hugging her frail body to his, feeling her blood as it soaked into his worn trousers.

  By the time he’d cried himself out, sunlight slanted through the west window. Lifting her, he wondered at how light she was and carried her outside. He left her wrapped in a blanket on the porc
h. He and Sarah would bury her after they got back. The same for the gallant man who’d objected.

  Billy stopped long enough to pat Fly on the head, another rush of tears silvering his vision. He and Fly had grown up together. Hunted side by side, played in the forest, gotten in trouble. For most of Billy’s life, Fly had been a best friend. Forever forgiving, a companion without complaint and unstintingly faithful. Right up to the end when the half-blind dog had obviously given his life fighting for his family.

  Propping his rifle over his shoulder, Billy started down the lane at a trot. He still had a couple of hours of light left, and there just weren’t that many places Dewley could have gotten off to. Not with a wagon filled with corn and squash … and an obviously captive white girl.

  The rage was a smoldering heat in his belly when he determined they’d turned south on the Huntsville Road. Seeing the country in his head, he had a hunch where they would go. Down by the ruins of Van Winkle’s mill. Someplace accessible for the wagon, but off the road. Out of sight of Yankee patrols, but close enough they could take the wagon into Fayetteville to sell the produce. It was a gamble, but that’s where Billy would go. To do it smart, he’d have to take the mountain trail.

  The thought of their dirty hands on her soft skin, of them throwing her down and exposing her. Of an unwashed man grinning as he drove himself into her …

  Billy threw his head back, throat swelling in rage as he screamed his pain up at the evening sky.

  41

  October 30, 1863

  The midday sun shone behind a haze of high, thin clouds. They looked like finely drawn feathers stretched across the blue. Billy Hancock, weary, almost stumbling from fatigue and hunger, worked his way down the old deer trail that descended a steep and thickly wooded slope. The trail wound around outcrops of weather-grayed limestone, the footing rocky and loose.

  It had been a couple of years since Billy had taken the mountain trail, and then he and John Gritts had been on horseback. He hadn’t realized how long the thirteen-mile loop would take on foot, let alone at night, where—to his self-disgust and frustration—he’d gotten lost in the dark and had to backtrack.

  He worked his way through colorful autumn forest as he descended the ridge trail, easing down slopes that were barely covered by the newly fallen leaves.

  What if I’m wrong? What if I took too long?

  The very thought of it left him sick to his stomach. If he were too late … No, trust to God and Cherokee spirit power, he would find her. She had to be all right!

  Men didn’t treat a girl that way. Even the worst of the guerrillas maintained a code of honor when it came to women. He had to believe that.

  Desperation built until he wanted to explode.

  Struggling to keep his feet light, he stepped from stone to stone as he made his way down a water gap that led to a sheer drop-off in the limestone rimrock.

  He’d been here before. From the rim he could look down into the War Eagle Valley, and more specifically into the cove where Angus McConahough had had his little farm and distillery, with its corn, barley, and wheat fields.

  If the raiders were Colonel Dewley’s, they’d been in the country long enough to know this place. It was close enough to the main road that they would have arrived here at dusk the night before, and the road in and out was passable by a wagon.

  Billy dropped to his belly and slithered out on the limestone outcrop where it overlooked the rounded hollow.

  In McConahough’s little pasture, eight horses were grazing. The cabin, however, was a charred shell with weeds growing up through the fallen-in roof. McConahough, a known Union sympathizer, had burned his house, loaded up his still, and followed in Curtis’s tracks when the victor of Pea Ridge took his army away.

  A campfire sent a single wreath of blue smoke up from before a stand of pines. It was just back of the willow-filled creek bottom and the spring that had once provided water for McConahough’s famed whiskey. Four men were seated around the fire, looking relaxed. A man dressed in brown with a shapeless felt hat and a rifle in his hands walked past an opening in the trees on his way to check the horses.

  But there was no wagon.

  Is this the right place?

  He heard distant male laughter, the clink of metal.

  One way to find out.

  Billy eased back, stood, and made his way to the steep trail. Most of the way it wound down through square limestone boulders tumbled from the rimrock above. Scrubby oaks, chinquapin, and gnarly-looking maples, all densely wound with honeysuckle, grape, and bindweed, were losing their orange, red, and yellow leaves.

  He took his time, fighting against his desperate urge to hurry.

  “Done teached you better than that,” John Gritts’s voice echoed in his head.

  He tried not to think of Maw’s blood where it stained his pants, of her dying in his arms. Or Sarah, and what she might be enduring. The thought of men sucking on her breasts, crawling between her legs brought a hellish bile to the base of his throat.

  At the sudden whiff of tobacco, Billy froze short of a great, square, moss-covered boulder broken off from above.

  Sniffed.

  Caught it again.

  Close.

  He lifted his rifle. The sound of a shot would spoil everything. But where was the guard?

  The trail led down around the wagon-sized rock. Again the tobacco’s aroma filled a curl of breeze.

  Billy eased forward and stopped short when a booted foot scuffed dirt and was followed by a man clearing his throat. Then came the sound of the dottle being knocked out of a pipe.

  Billy peeked around the boulder’s edge.

  The man was standing. In the act of slipping his pipe into a pocket. He was big, maybe six feet. An old jacket hung on his shoulders, elbows out of the sleeves. But the color blended into that of the weathered stone. A fine slant-breech Model 1855 Sharps dangled from his left hand as he stepped forward to a drop-off and scanned the small cove.

  Billy’s mouth had gone dry. He didn’t dare shoot. Could he take him? Did he even dare try?

  Debts have to be paid.

  On silent moccasins he crept forward, collected himself. With all the strength in his work-toughened body, he grabbed the old muzzle loader by the barrel and swung.

  As he did, the man turned. Billy had a momentary glimpse of his face: lean, almost like a living skull, with shocked wide brown eyes and a scraggly beard that was darker than his dirty blond locks.

  The stock caught the blond man full in the face. The power of the blow popped the hat up off his head. A muffled crack could be heard over the snap of bone as the maple stock split.

  The man fell back into a currant bush, but Billy was on him. Gripping the barrel like an iron bar he swung the lock down into the man’s face, gratified with the meaty thunk. Again and again he swung. Each impact sent a tremor through the man’s body, causing his arms and legs to jerk.

  Panting, every muscle in his body on fire, Billy stopped, gasped, and wiped his sleeve across his face.

  What if this ain’t the bunch? What if he was just a guard for a family or something?

  The moment of horror filled him, sent a shiver through his bones. He turned, staring anxiously down into the cove. Saw no movement, heard no shouts of warning. Heard only the rattle of the dying man’s lungs.

  God!

  I killed a man.

  Beat him to death.

  Billy swallowed hard, realized he was shaking, and sat down. “What if he wasn’t one of Dewley’s?”

  Too late. The milk’s done been spilt.

  “Got to find Sarah.”

  He stared at his broken rifle, the stock cracked off at the wrist, the hammer broken off the lock, the nipple and metal streaked with gore.

  Still shaking, he got up, searched the man’s pockets, finding a roll of Confederate bills, a couple of gold coins, the pipe and tobacco, a pocketknife, and a beautiful gold watch.

  From the dead man’s belt, Billy took the cartridge
box, opening it to find fourteen paper cartridges for the Sharps. A quick check showed half a roll of caps in the rifle’s Maynard primer.

  The dead man had a Colt .44 Dragoon stuffed in his left waistband. Billy pulled it out and found five cylinders loaded and capped, hammer resting on an empty. The right grip on the revolver was charred, as if it had been in a fire. Finally, in the back of the dead man’s belt hung a long-bladed Bowie fighting knife in a hard leather scabbard.

  What if he’s not one of Sarah’s abductors?

  He started to shake again.

  “Better get your tail down to that camp and see,” he told himself.

  He wanted to scream, to run home to Maw, and let her hug him. Make him safe. She’d know what to do. Tell him if it were all right or not.

  He glanced down, seeing her blood, now gone black on his fingers. It clung in his cuticles and under his fingernails. Tears came welling again. He thought of the still form he’d left wrapped in the blanket on the porch. She’d be stone-cold by now, stiff with the rigor.

  Taking the dead man’s belt, he strapped on the Bowie, stuck the Dragoon down into the waistband, and picked up the Sharps.

  Got to go Injun now.

  The fatigue and stumbling weariness was gone. Muscles charged, he crept down the trail, keeping low as he sneaked from one patch of cover to the next. At the bottom, he eased left behind the stand of willows and heard the loud laughter, the clinking of tin pans. He was close enough now to hear their talk.

  “Dewley ought to be back any time now. Then what?”

  “Think we ought to be shut of Benton County, that’s what I think. Hancocks has friends hereabouts. They’s gonna be talk.”

  “I tell you, should’a buried that old woman. Women disappear. No one knows but what they just up and left the country. Leaving a woman shot like that? In her own yard? And the daughter missing? I tell you, that be a calling card fer trouble down the line.”

  Billy’s blood ran cold.

  He knew the instant he changed. Felt it. Like a spigot being turned on. One instant he’d been scared, confused, and grieving. The next, he was filled with clarity. His senses—honed by years of hunting—now focused. He might have become a cougar: silent, deadly, his only purpose distilled down to the essence.