“When we heard the shots, I should have ordered the drivers to turn the wagons around. We should have gone back and looked for another way out of the city. It really wasn’t wise of me to risk our cargo just to see what was happening to the two of you.” The colonel shrugged. “But everything seems to have worked out all right. Just don’t expect me to keep on pulling your fat out of the fire, Jensen.”
“No, sir, I won’t.” Luke managed to keep the irritation he felt out of his voice. He’d just been following orders when all hell broke loose.
“We’d better move quickly now,” Lancaster went on. “There are probably more Yankee patrols in the area. They would have been expecting to hear an explosion, but when their men don’t come back, they’ll start to wonder what happened. We don’t want to be here when they come to find out.”
Luke knew that was true. He started looking for his horse and found the animal grazing peacefully on the grass at the side of the road.
He couldn’t do anything about his wet clothes except wait for them to dry. That would be miserable, but he could put up with it. He found his hat on the bridge where it had fallen off when he tackled the Yankee.
The Confederates hastily helped themselves to guns and ammunition from their fallen foes. They were trying to catch some of the Yankee cavalry horses when Lancaster said, “No, leave them here.”
“It never hurts to have extra mounts, Colonel,” Stratton suggested, unknowingly echoing what Luke had said earlier to Remy.
“Those horses have U.S. army brands on them,” Lancaster pointed out. “If we’re captured, it’s unlikely we’ll be able to talk ourselves out of a firing squad, but it would be even more difficult if we were in possession of Yankee cavalry mounts.”
“The colonel’s got a point there,” Luke said. “It might be better if we just make do without them.”
Nobody put up an argument. A short time later, the group was on the move, following the road into the rugged, wooded countryside of northern Virginia.
Riding on the wagon with Dale again Luke looked over at Wiley Potter, who rode alongside the vehicle. “Thanks for coming to help me back there.”
“Well, sure, Jensen,” Potter said. “What else could we do? We’re all on the same side, ain’t we?”
CHAPTER 5
After the fight at the bridge, the scouts didn’t run into any more trouble. A couple times they heard hoofbeats coming along the road and quickly found places where they could pull the wagons off into the trees. Yankee cavalrymen galloped past without even slowing down, never realizing how close the Confederates were.
The riders could only be Yankees. Nobody else would be out and about at night. The people who lived in the area were huddled in their houses and cabins, hoping and praying they wouldn’t be slaughtered before morning by the northern invaders.
Luke thought about his ma and Kirby and Janey back on the farm. There had been fighting in Missouri, although not as much as in the east, and widespread bloody raids by guerrilla forces on both sides. He hoped none of the violence had come near the Jensen family farm.
By morning the Confederates were several miles north of Richmond. As the sun came up, Potter and Casey found a cave-like opening under a rugged bluff topped with trees, and Dale and Edgar drove the wagons into it at Colonel Lancaster’s command. There was room for the horses under the bluff, too.
“We’ll stay here today,” the colonel said. “Traveling in daylight is too risky while we’re still this close to Richmond. When we swing west and then south we’ll be less likely to run into the Yankees, so we can stay on the road more and make better time then.”
Based on what he had seen so far, Luke had doubts of Lancaster’s ability to be in charge of the mission, but he agreed with the colonel’s decision. They were all tired and needed some rest, and it would be better for them to lie low for a while.
They made an unappetizing breakfast of hardtack and salt jowl. No coffee. Luke wasn’t sure how long it had been since he’d had real coffee, but it hadn’t been anytime recently, that was for sure. They took turns sleeping while two men stood guard at all times.
When it was Luke’s turn to watch, he was paired with Ted Casey. They hunkered in some brush near the wagons, and the first thing Casey did was reach for a tobacco pouch and papers in his shirt pocket.
Like stopped him with a hand on his arm. “You can’t roll a quirly.”
“Why not?” Casey asked with a frown.
“Because the smell of tobacco smoke can travel a pretty good distance. The road’s only about a quarter mile away. You don’t want some smart Yankee coming along, smelling your smoke, and getting curious enough to come over here and take a look around.”
Casey let out a disgusted snort, but he shrugged and put away the pouch. “If they was smart, they wouldn’t be Yankees.”
“They probably think the same thing about us Confederates,” Luke pointed out.
“Don’t start talkin’ about how they just think they’re doin’ the right thing and how we shouldn’t hate ’em because of that.”
“They’re
“What are you talkin’ about?” Casey asked.
“Did you know that more than twenty years ago, some congressmen from the South were already talking about ending slavery? Their plan was to get rid of it in stages, so the southern economy wouldn’t be ruined in the process. If the northern politicians had just gone along with that idea, by now a lot of the slaves would be free, maybe even all of them, and there wouldn’t have been any need for this war. But the Northerners turned it down flat. They’d already started making speeches about how all the slaves had to be freed at once, or they wouldn’t go along with it.”
Casey gave him a dubious squint. “I never heard nothin’ about anything like that. You’re makin’ it up.”
Luke shook his head. “Nope. I read about it in an old newspaper I came across once.”
“You know how to read, eh?”
“My ma saw to that. And once I learned, I had a liking for it.”
That was true. As a boy and a young man, he had read every book and newspaper he could get his hands on. Unfortunately, in the part of the country where he’d grown up, reading material wasn’t all that common.
But some of the settlements had schools, and whenever he could, Luke would ride over to one of them, sneak in, and “borrow” whatever books he could find. He always took them back once he’d finished reading them, so he didn’t consider it stealing. He was just doing whatever he had to in order to feed his thirst for knowledge.
One of the few good things about the war was that churches across the South had donated Bibles for the troops, so Luke got the chance to read the Good Book from cover to cover, more than once.
Sometimes he came across other books, usually in abandoned houses. He’d nearly always had some sort of volume of prose or poetry tucked away in his gear, and he read them until they fell apart from exposure to the elements.
He didn’t have a book with him at the moment, but maybe once they got to Georgia he could scrounge up a few. He had read some plays by an Englishman named Shakespeare, and he had a hankering to read more.
“I don’t understand it,” Casey said. “I thought those Yankees were so all-fired anxious to have the slaves freed, and now you’re tellin’ me they turned down a chance to have that happen and went to war instead.”
“The politicians in Washington raised a big stink about slavery because they didn’t want folks up north thinking too much about the way we were starting to develop more industry here in the South. All those rich men who own factories up there didn’t like that. They didn’t like the contracts our businessmen were starting to make with businesses in England and other places in Europe, either.”
Luke grunted disdainfully, then went on. “The way they saw it, we weren’t supposed to do anything except grow the crops. They’d do everything else the country needed and rake in all the money. They stirred up a bunch of well-meaning people who had real doubts about slavery and got them to fight a war over it. But if you want the truth, all you have to do is look around. You don’t see any factories still standing in the South, do you?”
