by Larry Hunt
Spake
As a
Dragon
(Early Adventures of the Scarburg Family)
by
Larry Edward Hunt
Published in USA
Copyright © 2015 by: Larry Hunt
Cover Design by Laura Shinn Design
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Spake as a Dragon is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. In some instances actual facts and names are interspersed within the fictional account. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. Further note: this IS a work of fiction; it is not intended for use by serious researchers. The author has taken liberty with names – leaving some as history has named, changing others, altered places, events and sequences of event. In short, the author made the historical events fit the fictional storyline.
CHAPTER ONE
. . . DEAD?
With a quick thrust and fast withdrawal of the razor sharp, Yankee bayonet it is over – Sergeant Robert Steven Scarburg slumps to the ground. ‘Am I dead? Surely I must be, but I can still hear the musket fire, and the whine of the cannonballs as they sail overhead. I can smell the acrid smell of the gunpowder.’ He lies motionless.
‘Why am I unable to move?’ He thinks? ‘My boys! Luke and Matthew, I promised Malinda......,’ He can feel something warm and sticky trickling down his chest wetting the front of his old, battered, butternut dyed shirt? ‘Surely it is not blood I feel no pain. It must be water from my canteen. Why is the world moving so slowly?’
A DAY EARLIER - THE FIRST DAY OF BATTLE
Morning comes early this summer day in the month of July 1863; the sun first appears yellow, then bright orange, now it is a brilliant, fiery ball in the eastern sky. The cool air of the night begins to be replaced by the hot, dry air of this tranquil mid-summer morning. High above, white, fluffy cumulus clouds float gently across the azure sky.
The line of gray-clad, rag-tag, collection of Southern soldiers, mostly barefoot, trudge along as quietly as possible through the sparse, hardwood, and pine trees of southeast Pennsylvania. Southern cavalrymen mounted on tired, war-weary horses lumber in front of the haggard Confederate infantry. It is the beginning of the third year of the War Between the States, the War of Secession, Mr. Lincoln’s War; regardless of what it is called, it is the third year of what would forever be referred to as America’s great Civil War.
Sergeant Robert Steven Scarburg of ‘E’ Company, 48th Alabama Infantry, is part of the advancing rebel army this beautiful morning. As he walks along, he thinks of home, and especially his beautiful Malinda. Malinda the wife he left as he marched off to war leaving her and his remaining children alone on their farm in Alabama.
Suddenly his reverie is broken. Luke, marching to Robert’s right turns his head and asks, “Father, do you believe a battle is near?”
“Yes son, I think before the sun has set today we will have ‘seen the elephant.’”
“Are you afraid Father?” His other son Matthew asks from the opposite side, “About the upcoming battle, I mean, when we ‘see the elephant?’ I have to admit Father, I am. I wish I were as brave as you were when you fought those Redskins in Florida.”
It was true Robert is not new to battle. He had, many years earlier, been a participant to the blood, gore and cruelty of the unbearable horror of man’s inhumanity to each other known simply as – War!
Robert did not want to admit it, but he too is scared. He fears for his life and the lives of his two eldest sons, Luke and Matthew, both of who are with him in this Confederate Infantry Company. All three Scarburg men joined up in the spring of 1862 in Guntersville, a small Tennessee River town in northern Alabama. Their enlistment was a little over a year ago.
Malinda had pleaded with them, she even begged them not to enlist, but Matthew was dead set on joining the Confederate Army. He had convinced Luke to go along too, and Robert could not let his sons venture into the War of Southern Independence alone. As an old ex-soldier himself he believed he could best oversee his son’s lives as soldiers, and he promised Malinda he would keep their boys safe and bring them home alive.
