“Wait!” Butler cried, laying his pipe to one side. He shot his hand out. The spider dropped into his palm, then skittered to the underside as Butler shoved his chair back and made for the door. The entire time he kept turning his hand so the spider couldn’t drop off.
Hurrying outside, Butler let the spider drop at the edge of the porch. It hit the ground, then skittered into the dark safety under the planks. Billy’s old dog Fly didn’t even wake up where he was sleeping in the dust.
“Be just like you to get your hand bit, have it swell up, and fall off.” Paw was giving him a scowl as Butler reseated himself.
“Spiders are good luck,” Butler replied, glancing at John Gritts and winking. A smile spread on the big Cherokee’s lips. Cherokees and spiders had a special relationship going back to the creation of the world. “And it’s not like she was trying to hurt anything. Put yourself in the spider’s position. Once she was in my hand, she just wanted to get away. Hard to fault a little soul for that.”
“You’ve always worried me, boy,” Paw muttered. “You’d go out of your way to save a rattlesnake when its fangs are stuck in your leg.”
“I’m not as sensitive and delicate as you think. Believe it or not, scholars who read history and literature are a backstabbing and bloodthirsty bunch.”
Paw sighed. “When I was young, a man I admired opened a whole new world to me. Taught me the value of education and scholarship. But Butler, when you spout Shakespeare, Plato, and Aquinas, it’s like you are in their heads. I reckon that’s a special gift.” He pointed with his pipe. “Just don’t lose track of this world.”
Billy was making strangling noises.
John Gritts was still smiling.
Paw pointed with his pipe again. “Now, Isaac, finish your story. What happened at the secession convention?”
“I was the only one,” Isaac stated dully. “The others, Bollinger, Campbell, Gunter, and the rest of the Unionists finally gave in. On the last vote, I was the only one who voted against secession. They cried, ‘Traitor!’ ‘Get a rope!’ ‘Hang him!’ Honestly, James, I thought some damn fool would walk up and shoot me on the spot.”
Butler noted that Billy was finally paying attention. The mere idle mention of shooting something always brought Billy fully alert. John Gritts simply sat with his elbows on the table, fingers laced, and his thumbs touching. His head was down, as if in prayer. But from long association with him, Butler knew the Cherokee was listening, thinking, keeping his own counsel.
“After Lincoln’s blunder over Fort Sumter, from the moment he called for Arkansas to provide troops to put down the rebellion, the result was a foregone conclusion,” Paw told him. “And it’s just what our idiot governor down in Little Rock has been waiting for. Ever since seizing the federal arsenal, he’s been on pins and needles to command an army.”
“Oh, Governor Rector’s already issuing orders. It’s a swirling confusion, James. The convention is issuing its own orders. And there’s a call to convene the legislature so yet more people can issue orders. There’s a Confederate army being enlisted, an Arkansas state army being sworn in, and then there’s the local militias. Three armies … and no one knows who’s what!”
“What’s the word on the abolitionist jayhawkers up in Kansas?” Butler asked.
“As of the moment I left Fayetteville”—Murphy gave him a clear-eyed look—“no one had heard anything. That firebrand Senator Jim Lane and his Kansas raiders, and that bastard Colonel Montgomery, could be marching on us at this very moment.” He grunted. “Maybe we should wish he would. Settle this whole mess before it gets started.”
“You don’t want that kind of trouble,” Paw said evenly. “And if Lane or Montgomery march their raiders anywhere, it will be into Missouri. If Missouri votes for secession, that’s where the real fight will be. Arkansas is only famous for being an obstacle dropped smack in the way of anyone with ambition who’s trying to get west to Texas.”
“And our dysfunctional politics.” Butler gestured with his pipe. “Even in Pennsylvania people have heard how corrupt Arkansas politics are.”
“Careful about the politics, boy,” Maw called from the kitchen. “Them’s Paw’s good friends, all them Johnsons and Conways and Boudinots and Danleys.” She turned toward the table and raised her wooden spoon, aiming it like a scepter. “You can dress a jackass in silk breeches, but he’s still a jackass.”
At that moment Sarah stepped in from the springhouse, two pails of water hanging from a shoulder yoke. She shot Butler a flushed smile as she artfully maneuvered the buckets past the seated men. With locks of her pale blond hair loose, her cheeks flushed with exertion, and her blue eyes alight in her triangular face, to Butler she looked ethereal.
Isaac Murphy stopped in mid-thought, a look of wonderment on his face as he watched her pass behind the table.
After lowering her buckets, Sarah arched her back, resettling her gray cotton dress. The way her perfectly proportioned breasts rounded the fabric and how it clung to her full hips would have tantalized a dead man. She was going to be a sensation when Paw took her to Little Rock in the fall. Butler fought down a smile. His little sister apparently had no idea how her tall, ripening body affected Murphy.
Billy, however, had narrowed one eye to a slit, his jaw hardening as he fixed a lethal blue stare on the Irishman. Paw, having missed nothing, pulled on his pipe, eyes twinkling as he asked, “How soon are they figuring to fight this war?”
Murphy manfully forced himself back to the subject at hand, glancing wistfully down at his whiskey. “If Arkansas were Virginia or the Carolinas, I’d say they’d have a sort of army by the fall. But Arkansas is Arkansas. Given our own divisions over slavery we’ll be
