“Good.” Major Sherrard smiled now. Of course he smiled-he’d got his way. “Progress on this front, I am sure, will improve because of them.”
“I’m sure of that myself,” Custer said. Now Dowling did look at him, and sharply. He was sure of something, too-sure his boss was lying.
Reggie Bartlett glanced over at Senior Lieutenant Ralph Briggs. Briggs no longer looked like a recruiting poster for the Confederate States Navy, as he had all through his stay in the prisoner-of-war camp near Beckley, West Virginia. What he looked like now was a hayseed; he was wearing a collarless cotton shirt under faded denim overalls he’d hooked off a clothesline while a farm wife was busy in the kitchen. A disreputable straw hat perched on his head at an even more disreputable angle.
Reggie looked down at himself. By his clothes, he could have been Briggs’ cousin. His shirt, instead of hiding under overalls, was tucked into a pair of dungarees out at the knee and held up by a rope belt in lieu of galluses. The straw hat keeping the sun out of his eyes was even more battered than the one Briggs wore.
Catching the glances, Briggs clicked his tongue between his teeth. “We’ve got to do something about our shoes,” he said fretfully. “If anyone takes a good long look at them, we’re ruined.”
“Sure are, Ralph,” Bartlett said in his not very good rendering of a West Virginia twang, an accent altogether different not only from his own soft Richmond intonations but also from the Yankee way of talking Briggs had tried to teach him. His brown, sturdy Confederate Army boots were at least well made for marching. Briggs’ Navy shoes, both tighter and less strongly made, had given him trouble after he and Reggie and several others tunneled their way out of the prisoner-of-war camp. Reggie went on, “Hard to steal shoes, though, and no promise they’ll fit once we’ve done it.”
“I know,” Briggs said, unhappy still. “Wish we could walk into a town and buy some, but-” He broke off. Reggie understood why, all too well. For one thing, they had no money. For another, in these little hill towns they were strangers with a capital S. And, for a third, showing himself in Confederate footgear was the fastest ticket back to camp Reggie could think of.
Way off in the distance behind them, hounds belled. The sound sent chills running down Reggie’s spine. He didn’t think the hounds were after Briggs and him; they’d been free for several days now, and had done everything they knew how to do to break their trail. But other pairs of Confederate prisoners were also on the loose. Every bunch the damnyankees recaptured hurt the cause of the CSA.
And besides-“Now I know what niggers must have felt like, running away from their masters with the hounds after them,” Reggie said.
“Hadn’t thought of that.” Briggs paused for a moment to take off his hat and fan himself with it. He set the straw back on his head. His expression darkened. “I’d like to set the dogs on some niggers, too, the way they rose up against us. They ought to pay for that.”
“Way they lorded it over us in camp, too,” Reggie said, full of remembered anger at the insults he’d endured.
“Damnyankees set that up,” Briggs said. “Wanted to turn us and them against each other.” Reggie nodded; he’d seen the same thing himself. The Navy man went on, “I will say it did a better job than I ever thought it would. Those niggers had no loyalty to their country at all.”
He would have said more, but a bend in the road brought a town into sight up ahead. “That’ll be-Shady Spring?” Reggie asked doubtfully.
“That’s right.” Ralph Briggs sounded altogether sure of himself. It was as if he had a map of West Virginia stored inside his head. Every so often, when he needed to, he’d pull it down, take a look, and then roll it up again. Reggie wondered how and why he’d acquired that ability, which didn’t seem a very useful one for a Navy man to have.
Whatever the name of the town was, though, they had to avoid it. They had to avoid people and towns as much as they could. U.S. forces paid a bounty on escaped prisoners the locals captured. Even had that not been so, West Virginians weren’t to be trusted. When Virginia seceded from the USA, they’d seceded from Virginia, and made that secession stick. They had no love for the Confederate States of America.
The hillsides surrounding Shady Spring weren’t too steep. Forests of oaks and poplars clothed them. So Ralph Briggs said, at any rate; Bartlett, who’d lived all his life in Richmond, couldn’t have told one tree from another to escape the firing squad.
When he and Briggs came to a rill, they stopped and drank and washed their faces and hands, then splashed along in the water for a couple of hundred yards before returning to dry land. “No point making the dogs’ lives any easier, in case they are on our trail,” Reggie remarked.
“You’re right about that,” Briggs said, although hiking through the water soaked his feet and did his shoes more harm than it did to Bartlett’s taller boots.
Here and there in the woods, sometimes by themselves, sometimes in small clusters, sometimes in whole groves, dead or dying trees stood bare-branched, as if in winter, under the warm spring sun. Reggie pointed. “What’s wrong with them?” he asked, having developed considerable respect for how much Bartlett knew.
And the Navy man did not disappoint him. “Chestnut blight,” he answered. “Started in New York City ten, maybe twelve years ago. Been spreading ever since. Way things are going, won’t be a chestnut tree left in the USA or the CSA in a few years’ time. Damnyankees let all sort of foreign things into their country.” He spat in disgust.
“Chestnut blight,” Reggie echoed. Now that Briggs mentioned it, he remembered reading something about it in the newspapers a couple of years before. “So these are chestnuts?” He wouldn’t have known it unless Briggs had told him.
“These
Reggie’s stomach rumbled. It had been doing that right along, but this was a growl a bear would have been proud to claim. Reggie went through his trouser pockets. He came up with half a square of hardtack: the last of the painfully saved food he’d brought out of camp. Even more painful was breaking the fragment in two and offering Briggs a piece.
“We don’t get our hand on some more grub, we’re not going to make it out of West Virginia whether the damnyankees catch up with us or not,” Reggie said.
“You’re right.” Briggs sounded as if he hated to admit it. “We’re going to have to kill something or steal something, one or the other.”
They tramped on through the woods. Bartlett’s nostrils twitched. “That’s smoke,” he said. At first, he thought it came from Shady Spring, but they’d gone west to skirt the town, and the breeze was blowing into their faces, not from their backs. “That’s a farm up ahead somewhere,” he added.
Briggs was thinking along with him. “Lots of chances to get food from a farm.” He sniffed. “That’s not just smoke, either. Smells like they’re smoking meat-venison, or maybe ham. Hell, in these back woods, maybe even bear, for all I know.”
Reggie knew nothing about bears. The thought of there being bears in these woods hadn’t occurred to him till the Navy man mentioned it. He looked around, as if expecting to see black, shaggy shapes coming out from behind every tree. Then he sniffed again. Smelling meat after months on camp rations made him ready to fight every bear in the USA for a chance at some-or to eat one if the farmer had done the fighting for him. “Let’s follow our noses,” he said.
Carved out of the middle of the woods were some tiny fields full of corn and tobacco. A couple of children fed chickens near a barn. A woman bustled between that barn and the farmhouse. No man was visible. “He’s probably in the Army,” Briggs whispered as he and Bartlett stared hungrily from the edge of the forest at the hollow log mounted upright over smoldering hickory chips. From the top of the log issued the wonderful smell that had drawn them here.
“We’ll wait till dark, till they’ve all gone to bed,” Reggie said. “Then we grab it and get the hell out.”
“Liable to be a dog,” Briggs said. “Meat’s liable not to be smoked all the way through, either.”
“I don’t see any dog. I don’t hear any dog. Do you?” Bartlett asked, and Ralph Briggs shook his head. Reggie went on, “And I don’t care about the meat, either. Hell, I don’t care if it’s raw. I’ll eat it. Won’t you?” When Briggs didn’t answer, he presumed he’d won his point.
And the thievery went off better than he’d dared hope. A couple of kerosene lanterns glowed inside the farmhouse for half an hour or so after sundown, then went out. That left the night to the moon and the stars and
