The Andre Norton Megapack - 15 Classic Novels and Short Stories

from another, drag it on triumphantly over a shirt which was a fringe of tatters. He plucked at the front of his own grimy shirt, and then felt around in the pocket he had so laboriously stitched beneath the belt of his breeches, to bring out one creased and worn bill. Spreading it out, he offered it to the man beside him. To loot an army warehouse was fair play as he saw it. Morgan’s command had long depended upon Union commissaries for equipment, clothing, and food. And a horse trade was something forced upon him by expediency. But he still shrank from this kind of foraging.
    “A shirt?” he asked wearily.
    The man glanced from that crumpled bill to Drew’s tired face and then back again. The sneer faded. He reached out, closed the scout’s fingers tight over the money.
    “That’s just wastepaper here, son. Come on!” Catching hold of Drew’s sleeve so tightly that the worn calico gave in a rip, he guided the other into the store, drawing him along behind a counter until he reached down into the shadows and came up with a pile of shirts, some flannel, some calico, and one Drew thought was linen.
    “These look about your size. Take ’em! You might as well have them. Some of these fellows will just tear them up for the fun of it.”
    Drew fumbled with the pile, a flannel, the linen, and two calico. He could cram that many into his saddlebags. But the store owner thrust the whole bundle into his arms.
    “Go ahead, take ’em all! They ain’t goin’ to leave ’em, anyway.”
    “Thanks!” Drew clutched the collection to his chest and edged back along the wall, avoiding a spirited fight now in progress in the center of the store. Mud-spattered men came bursting back, wanting to change their now ruined clothing for fresh. Drew stiff-armed one reeling, singing trooper out of his path and was gone before the drunken man could resent such handling. With the shirts still balled between forearm and chest, he led King away from the store.
    “Ovah heah!”
    That hail in a familiar voice brought Drew’s head around. Kirby waved to him vigorously from a doorway, and the scout obediently rehitched King to another rack, joining the Texan in what proved to be the village barber-shop.
    Kirby was stripped to the waist, using a towel freely sopped in a large basin to make his toilet. His face was already scraped clean of beard, and his hair plastered down into better order than Drew had ever seen it, while violent scents of bay rum and fancy tonics fought it out in the small room.
    “What you got there?” Boyd looked up from a second basin, a froth of soap hiding most of his face.
    “Shirts—” Drew dropped his bundle on a chair. He was staring, appalled, into the stretch of mirror confronting him, unable to believe that the face reflected there was his own. Skinning his hat onto a shelf, he moved purposefully toward the row of basins, ripping off his old shirt as he went.
    Where the barber had gone they never did know, but a half hour later they made some sweeping attempts to clean up the mess to which their efforts at personal cleanliness had reduced the shop, pleased once more with what they saw now in the mirror. They had divided the shirts, and while the fit was not perfect, they were satisfied with the windfall. Before he left the shop Kirby swept a half dozen cakes of soap into his haversack.
    Boyd was already balancing a bigger sack, full to the top.
    “Peaches, molasses, crackers, pickles,” he enumerated his treasure trove to Drew. “We got us some real eats.”
    “Hey, you—Rennie!” As they emerged from the barber-shop Driscoll trotted up. “The cap’n wants to see you. He’s on the other side of town—at the smithy.”
    Boyd and Kirby trailed along as Drew obeyed that summons. They found Campbell giving orders to the smith’s volunteer aides, some engaged with the owner of the shop in shoeing the raiders’ horses, others making up bundles of shoes to be slung from the saddles as they rode out.
    “Rennie”—the captain waved him out of the rush and clamor of the smithy—“I want you to listen to this. You—Hart—come here!” One of the men bundling horseshoes dropped the set he was tying together and came.
    “Hart, here, comes from Cadiz. Know where that is?”
    Drew closed his eyes for a moment, the better to visualize the map he tried to carry in his head. But Cadiz—he couldn’t place the town. “No, suh.”
    “It’s south, close to the Tennessee line and not too far from