by William Gear
“How are you?” he asked.
“Happy,” she told him, a twinkle in her dark eyes. “We will have plenty of meat for the winter. And that rack you made allowed me to dry more than enough of the roots, leaves, and flowers. We had a good harvest of white-bark pine seeds. Best of all are the cactus tunas. A lot of them this year. You’ll like them. Very sweet. Like taipo candy.”
Butler grinned at that. He liked candy. Which made him think back to Doc crashing into the undertaker’s, throwing his arms out and falling to his knees, face tear streaked, as he cried, “Don’t eat that damn piece of candy!”
“You laugh?” she asked.
“And my brother calls me crazy.”
“Tonight I shall make you crazy.” She winked at him and wiggled her hips suggestively.
“And why is that?”
“It has been a half moon since my woman’s blood. I have the tenderness and the craving.” She wiggled her hips again. “This is the best time for your seed to make dudua’nee. A child. I’ve been waiting.”
“So have I,” he told her, standing. “But for the moment I had better climb back up to the trap and haul down another sheep for you to skin. If you’re going to grow a child, you’ll need the meat. And Cracked Bone Thrower already accuses me of being a lazy taipo.”
Butler chuckled to himself, turned, and started up the steep slope to the kill pen.
Glancing toward where the men of Company A lingered, he said, “Reckon you all won’t mind that if it’s a boy, I’ll call him Billy? No? Good, ’cause being crazy, I can do any damn thing I like.”
In the west a line of clouds were bunched on the tops of the Tetons, and he thought he smelled rain on the wind. Somewhere down in the timber, an elk bugled, its sweet high strains carrying on the fall air. The scent of lodgepole, fir, and spruce mingled with the last of the fall flowers. Around him, the mountains seemed to pulse with life.
Once, he would have been a gentleman scholar as his father had wished. Then a war had come and gone, and here he stood, defiant of the odds, a wild man awash in liberty.
He shook his head, lungs straining in the thin air. “And those fool secessionists thought they were fighting to be free? Tom, we had no idea, did we?”
133
October 1, 1868
Sarah lit the lamps and checked the clock. Doc should have been here by now. She walked to the window, peered past the curtains, and checked the dark street below. A misty drizzle was falling, the effect haloed in the streetlamps. The cobblestones reflected lights from the houses lining the street.
Three stories high, of frame construction, her house perched on the hill overlooking the city. On a clear day she could see across the span of San Francisco Bay to the distant uplands beyond. She’d painted her mansion a bright yellow, the windows and trim done in white. Protruding bay windows allowed her the opportunity to enjoy the splendid view, and she enjoyed reading in the light of the afternoon sun, a cup of tea near at hand.
Commensurate with her wealth, she had furnished it with the finest of Oriental carpets, brass lights, and furniture crafted from exotic tropical woods. The entire first floor, she’d given to Philip. One room he had dedicated to his study, another to his growing medical library. And its street access made it easier for him to respond to late-night emergencies at the hospital.
He should have been here by now. And yes, here he came. In the light of the gas lamps, Philip’s tall and lanky frame couldn’t be mistaken as he climbed the sidewalk. On the cobble-paved street, a horse-drawn barouche clattered past, a couple holding hands in the backseat.
Sarah breathed out her relief. When Doc was late, it always worried her. While they lived in one of the better neighborhoods, Philip had insisted on having his surgery down by the wharves.
“There’s no one close,” he had told her. “Besides, I can see to the houses down there.”
“What about a more well-to-do clientele, Philip? You’re a real physician. A mountain and a mile beyond most of the charlatans practicing in San Francisco.”
“Sarah, I do my share of surgeries at the hospital, but I’ve found my calling and place.” He had smiled wistfully. “Once I thought as you do. I wanted to be rich and respected. A man of such prominence I could look down my nose at Paw. I’ve paid the price for my arrogance and pride. My only goal now is to alleviate suffering.”
The irony was that, as her brother, he had that standing—though he had yet to recognize it. Every time he escorted her to the opera. Or the theater. Or a musical production. San Francisco’s greatest would stare speculatively at the man upon whose arm Sarah’s hand rested, and say, “There go Dr. Hancock and his lovely sister, Sarah.”
And she was lovely, dressed in the latest of high fashion from London, Paris, and Italy. As the richest woman in the city, she made it a point to be among the best dressed. Of course the men came flocking, only to find her politely intimidating, and forever disinterested in their favors.
Another ultimate irony. She was surrounded and desired by the kind of men Paw would have salivated to have her marry. Men for whom she had no interest or desire.
If there was one thing Sarah knew, it was men. In all of their guises, strengths, and weaknesses.
She had loved, and been loved, by a real man. Once. Which was good enough for any lifetime.
She arched an eyebrow, stepped back from the window, and hurried to the kitchen. There, she pulled the roasted salmon from the warming shelf above the stove. A puff of steam rose, carrying scents of curry, saffron, and cilantro as she lifted the lid on the roasting pan.
She was just pouring the wine when Philip entered, hanging his hat on the rack and shrugging out of his black wool coat.
“Interesting day?” she asked.
“Quite,” Doc told her, slapping the newspaper onto the table by the foyer. “Sorry I’m late. Had a last-minute patient. Man with a crushed foot.”
“Supper is ready. Wash up. Water’s on the stove.”
“Where is Molly?”
“I let all of the servants go home early.”
She arranged her crimson satin dress with its bustle-holstered revolver, and seated herself. She lifted the roaster’s lid and began spooning out sweet potatoes. Another of the wonders they’d found in San Francisco: foods available nowhere else. Things like fresh fruits and vegetables brought in by ship from South America. Remarkable fish, oysters, and clams. Epicurean delights and spices from the Orient. After the deprivations in Arkansas and Denver, it was culinary magic.
Doc dried his hands and seated himself. “I was thinking of Butler all day.” He gestured to the paper. “Do you remember General Tom Hindman?”
“Butler’s commander?”
Doc nodded. “After the war he escaped to Mexico with a lot of the other Confederates. It didn’t work out, and he went back to Arkansas. Was making a political comeback. A couple of nights ago he was sitting in his parlor easy chair. Someone shot him through the window. He died a couple of hours later.” He paused. “I wonder what Butler would think?”
She studied him in the lamplight, seeing the lines in his face—as if they were scars from his wounded but poorly healed soul. Lost love, dead friends, shot-mangled bodies, the hell of prison camp and disease, and then his struggle through the ruins of their world. It had left her brother a fragile and cracked human being.
“Butler would cry for him, Philip. You know that. Some souls are too good for this world.”
“If they’d just left him alone. Let him be a professor of history. Maybe we’d still have him.” Guilt tightened his expression. “Poor deluded soul, what do his wild Indians give him that we couldn’t?” He knotted a fist. “Damn that war for what it did to him.” A pause. “For what it did to all of us.”
In the following silence, she thought back to Pea Ridge, to the boys dying on the farmhouse floor. To starvation and Dewley, Billy, and her flight to Fort Smith. She smiled at the memory of Bret’s eyes, and of the desperate flight to Colorado. And everything
that culminated in Billy’s body hanging from a bridge.
“If I could go back”—she balanced her fork—“I would throw the secessionists like Hindman, Jeff Davis, and the rest right into hell. And just as soon as they’d dropped into the flames, I’d shovel John Brown, Abe Lincoln, Grant, and the rest of the Black Republicans straight in after them. Let them scream and burn together.”
Doc’s gaze went distant. “So much could have been so different if the Federals had just let the Southern states go. James would be alive. So much suffering…” He shook his head. “Water under the bridge.”
“Slavery is gone.”
“And the murder of a half million men, and the maiming of millions more, the destruction, the looting, and burning of half the country was the only way we could find to end it?” He gestured with his butter knife. “That’s the best we could do? As a species we’re condemned to self-immolation.”
She arched an eyebrow. “Maybe my next investment should be in matches?”
“Mark my words.” Doc cut a bite of salmon. “Tom Hindman won’t be the last. If I know my brethren, the smoldering hatred in Southern hearts is going to burn for generations. They’ve been humiliated. They’re going to make the freed blacks suffer for it in the end, no matter what kind of promises the Yankees make.”
She shook her head. “God, Doc, just once, can’t you be wrong?”
He stared absently at the lace-covered table. “I think we’re all crazy. We believe in impossibilities. Not even so much as a touch of sanity. Fools for the impossible. Invest in those matches … and I’d stock enough coal oil to go ’round as well.”
“What would you change if you could go back?” she asked.
His smile flickered and died under his mustache. “Me, I could have stopped it all. He told me. Just before it started.”
“Who did?”
“A crazy man in a New Orleans brothel. If I’d known so much hung in the balance, I would never have cut off that lunatic’s leg.”
BY W. MICHAEL GEAR AND KATHLEEN O’NEAL GEAR FROM TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES
NORTH AMERICA’S FORGOTTEN PAST SERIES
People of the Wolf
People of the Fire
People of the Earth
People of the River
People of the Sea
People of the Lakes
People of the Lightning
People of the Silence
People of the Mist
People of the Masks
People of the Owl
People of the Raven
People of the Moon
People of the Nightland
People of the Weeping Eye
People of the Thunder
People of the Longhouse
The Dawn Country:
A People of the Longhouse Novel
The Broken Land:
A People of the Longhouse Novel
People of the Black Sun:
A People of the Longhouse Novel
People of the Songtrail
THE MORNING STAR SERIES
People of the Morning Star
Morning Star: Sun Born
Morning Star: Moon Hunt
THE ANASAZI MYSTERY SERIES
The Visitant
The Summoning God
Bone Walker
BY KATHLEEN O’NEAL GEAR
Thin Moon and Cold Mist
Sand in the Wind
This Widowed Land
It Sleeps in Me
It Wakes in Me
It Dreams in Me
BY W. MICHAEL GEAR
Long Ride Home
Big Horn Legacy
The Athena Factor
The Morning River
Coyote Summer
BY WILLIAM GEAR
This Scorched Earth
OTHER TITLES BY W. MICHAEL GEAR AND KATHLEEN O’NEAL GEAR
The Betrayal
Dark Inheritance
Raising Abel
Children of the Dawnland
Coming of the Storm
Fire the Sky
A Searing Wind
www.Gear-Gear.com
www.gear-books.com
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
WILLIAM GEAR is an international, New York Times, and USA Today bestselling author who holds a master’s degree in archaeology. This Scorched Earth is his magnum opus, a riveting family saga that combines his passion for the subject with his expertise in research, historical record, and archaeology. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 1
12
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
Chapter 119
Chapter 120
Chapter 121
Chapter 122
Chapter 123
Chapter 124
Chapter 125
Chapter 126
Chapter 127
Chapter 128
Chapter 129
Chapter 130
Chapter 131
Chapter 132
Chapter 133
Also by W. Michael Gear and Kathleen O’neal Gear from Tom Doherty Associates
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THIS SCORCHED EARTH
Copyright © 2018 by W. Michael Gear
All rights reserved.
Cover design by Michael Graziolo
Cover image by Steinar Engeland
A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
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Forge® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: Gear, W. Michael, author.
Title: This scorched earth / William Gear.
Description: First edition. | New York: Tom Doherty Associates, [2018] | Identifiers: LCCN 2017039671 (print) | LCCN 2017051019 (ebook) | ISBN 9781466886933 (ebook) | ISBN 9780765382368 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Fiction. | Families—Fiction. | Domestic fiction. | GSAFD: Historical fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3557.E19 (ebook) | LCC PS3557.E19 T48 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017039671
eISBN 9781466886933
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