At the feet of one, a woman lay partially collapsed on the frozen dirt. She was propped up by one hand. Elsie Altee looked like a rag doll thrown down too hard on the ground. Her hair was in wild disarray, clothes scorched. Beside her, both of the girls, Eudora and Nattie, ages nine and five, crouched weeping, their heads down, hands clasped.
Something popped in the burning house, making the women and girls jump.
Billy rode closer, staring in disbelief. He’d never seen a man hung. Old man Altee, as Josiah was called, had been stripped bare, his flesh torn and filthy, as if he’d been dragged. Now he swayed with the evening breeze that blew smoke off to the southeast. Five feet down the limb, Nathaniel Altee, Josiah’s son, age twelve, swung slightly out of synch with his father’s corpse. Nathaniel was still dressed, but his gray cotton pants were dark down the legs where his bladder had emptied.
Both corpses hung with the heads bent awkwardly, eyes bugged out, tongues swollen and protruding from their slack jaws.
“Dear God … Dear God … Dear God…” Elsie kept blubbering through the sobs. As if catching the horses’ movement, she blinked hard, eyes going wide, and placed a hand to her mouth. Billy had never seen such terror in another human’s eyes.
“No! No! No!” She began scrambling back, reaching out, grabbing the girls to her. As each of the children caught sight of Billy and Danny, they began to shriek hysterically.
“Whoa!” Danny cried as he pulled up and stepped out of the saddle. “Easy! Mrs. Altee, we’re friends. We’re not here to hurt you!”
Seeing no break in her terror, Danny dropped to his knees, arms out. “See? We’re here to help.”
Billy watched in horrid fascination as Elsie Altee collapsed into a quivering pile, the girls clawing their way free of her suddenly limp arms.
Billy took another look at the corpses, stirred again by the breeze to sway and slowly twist back and forth. Then he turned his attention back to the incinerated remains of the house. “Sam Darrow did this?”
At his words, Elsie began to come to, lifting her head. The woman’s eyes were puffy and slitted, her face swollen. “He was our friend! We helped him build his barn! Sent him stew when Esther was sick with the typhoid! He … He…” Her throat worked, expression wild, then she reached up and clawed at her eyes.
“Here now,” Danny soothed, pulling her hands down. The two girls were wide-eyed as tears rolled down their thin cheeks.
Then the wind changed, blowing hot smoke their way.
Billy bent his head, eyes slitted, covering his nose. Something inside the house burned with a sulfurous sting.
Damn! Hell’s done busted loose on earth.
Old Man Altee had kin, three brothers and some cousins, down the other side of Mud Town. Elsie came from the McPhee clan over in Conway County. She was one of the patriarch’s daughters. And if Sam Darrow and his rangers had hit Ben Shockup’s place the way he had Altee’s?
“By God, Danny, you were right. There’s gonna be the devil to pay. This country’s about to bust wide open.”
But what did that mean for him, Maw, and Sarah?
Danny looked up. “Billy? What are we going to do?”
Billy stepped down from his horse. He wasn’t sure how Darrow’s bushwhackers had tied the ropes like they did, but he’d have to figure a way to get them down. Baffled by the intricate knot, he reached for his pocketknife.
“We got to care for the men, Danny. When I cut the rope, this isn’t going to be pretty. Make sure the women look the other way. Then we’ve got to get Mrs. Altee and the girls down to kin just on the other side of Mud Town. And we got to do it before dawn.”
“Why before dawn?”
“’Cause you was right. We don’t want to be seen by neither side, or we get tarred by the same brush. And me, I don’t want my family looking like they’re taking sides.”
32
February 6, 1863
Doc shuffled and stamped as he climbed the rickety steps to the barracks. If anyone but the guards were to see—let alone care—he looked like a bundle of walking rags. He wondered when he’d grown used to lice. Somehow the perpetual burning and itching, the red welts, and constant infestation had just become “the way it is.”
The wind tore his breath away, sending it cold and white to blow along the shoddy clapboard barracks wall. It had been whitewashed originally, but the thin coat of paint had faded and peeled, allowing the boards to warp. Here and there in the widest of the cracks, bits of cloth, mud chinking, and even whittled strips of bone had been used to partially seal the gaps.
Were there any good to come from the miserable cold, it was the ice-and-track-stippled, hard-frozen mud. It made footing treacherous, but stemmed the transmission of disease. Of course, when it melted, it would become a cesslike sea of excrement, thawing urine, and clinging filth.
Doc unlatched the door and hurried in, slamming it closed behind him and securing it against the wind. It should have felt warmer inside. The little tin stove was burning, its pile of sticks already dwindled to less than ten pieces.
A wood ration would be granted again tomorrow, but the small bundle of waste wood—mostly garnered from Chicago’s trash—was barely enough to keep the stove alive for eight hours. Just enough fuel was provided to cook a meal in the “kitchen area” fireplace. Once the gruel was boiled, they’d stuff a dead man’s frayed and pest-infested garments up into the flue to stop the exodus of what little warm air remained.
Their barracks—packed with humanity as it was—should have been appreciatively warmer than outside, but to Doc’s numb face, it didn’t feel like it.
As he passed down the central aisle among the bunks, curious eyes lifted and the coughing
