The Andre Norton Megapack - 15 Classic Novels and Short Stories

then found himself irritated at being so drawn from the main argument. “And I wouldn’t care if you had Gray Eagle, himself, under you, boy—I’m not taking you with me. Let us be snapped up by the Yankees, and you’d be in bigger trouble than I would.” He gestured to his shirt and breeches. “I’m in uniform; you ain’t.”
    “No blue bellies could drop on us,” Boyd pushed. “I know where all the garrisons are round here—all about their patrols. I could get us through quicker’n you can, yourself. I ain’t no green kid!”
    Drew slapped the blanket down on Shawnee’s back, smoothed it flat with a palm stroke, and jerked his saddle from the platform. He could not stay right here now that Boyd had smoked him out—maybe nowhere in the neighborhood with this excitable boy dogging him.
    The scout was driven to his second line of defense. “What about Cousin Merry?” he asked as he tightened the cinch. “Have you talked this over with her—enlistin’, I mean?”
    Boyd’s lower lip protruded in a child’s pout. His eyes shifted away from Drew’s direct gaze.
    “She never said No—”
    “Did you ask her?” Drew challenged.
    “Did you ask your grandfather when you left?” Boyd tried a counterattack.
    This time Drew’s laughter was harsh, without humor. “You know I didn’t, and you also know why. But I didn’t leave a mother!”
    He was being purposefully brutal now, for a good reason. Sheldon had ridden away before; Boyd must not go now. In Drew’s childhood, his father’s cousin, Meredith Barrett, had been the only one who had really cared about him. His only escape from the cold bleakness of Red Springs had been Barrett’s Oak Hill. There was a big debt he owed Cousin Merry; he could not add to it the burden of taking away her second son.
    Sure, he had been only a few months older than this boy when he had run away to war, but he had not left anyone behind who would worry about him. And Alexander Mattock’s cold discipline had tempered his grandson into someone far more able to take hard knocks than Boyd Barrett might be for years to come. Drew had met those knocks, thick and fast, enduring them as the price of his freedom.
    “You were mad at your grandfather, and you ran away. Well, I ain’t mad at Mother, but I ain’t goin’ to sit at home with General Morgan comin’! He needs men. They’ve been recruitin’ for him on the quiet; you know they have. And I’ve got to make up for Sheldon—”
    Drew swung around and caught Boyd’s wrist in a grip tight enough to bring a reflex backward jerk from the boy. “That’s no way to make up for Sheldon’s death-runnin’ away from home to fight. Don’t give me any nonsense about goin’ to kill Yankees because they killed him! When a man goes to war…well, he takes his chances. Shelly did at Chickamauga. War ain’t a private fight, just one man up against another—”
    But he was making no impression; he couldn’t. At Boyd’s age you could not imagine death as coming to you; nor were you able to visualize the horrors of an ill-equipped field hospital. Any more than you could picture all the rest of it—the filth, hunger, cold, and boredom with now and then a flash of whirling horses and men clashing on some road or field, or the crazy stampede of other men, yelling their throats raw as they charged into a hell of Minié balls and canister shot.
    “I’m goin’ to ride with General Morgan, like Shelly did,” Boyd repeated doggedly, with that stubbornness which seasons ago had kept him eternally tagging his impatient elders.
    “That’s up to you.” Suddenly Drew was tired, tired of trying to find words to pierce to Boyd’s thinking brain—if one had a thinking brain at his age. Slinging his carbine, Drew mounted Shawnee. “But I do know one thing—you’re not goin’ with me.”
    “Drew-Drew, just listen once.…”
    Shawnee answered to the pressure of his rider’s knees and leaped the brook. Drew bowed his head to escape the lash of a low branch. There was no going back ever, he thought bitterly, shutting his ears to Boyd’s cry. He’d been a fool to ride this way at all.
    CHAPTER 2
    Guns in the Night
    There were sounds enoughin the middle of the night to tell the initiated that a troop was on the march—creak of saddle leather, click of shod hoof, now and then the smothered exclamation of a man shaken out of a cavalryman’s mounted doze. To Drew’s trained ears all this was loud enough to send any Union