The Men of Pride County: The Rebel (2 page)

“Of course, Major. I’ll have them gathered for you.”

For a long while after the lieutenant had gone, Noble stood in the opening at the tent, not feeling the cold, not considering what he’d say.

He was lost in thoughts of retribution. In the unexpected opportunity of discovering who among his own men had betrayed them to their enemy.

“What you’re asking is treasonous, sir.”

“No, sir. We can get along just fine on these bastards’ hospitality.”

“I say we stick it out here. Why should we do them any favors?”

“I ain’t serving under no Yankee, even if it means freezing for another winter.”

“Even if it means none of us seeing another winter?” Noble put in softly.

His men muttered, but agitation and fear trickled under their resentment, a cold sweat, as they huddled together in scarecrow tatters. All of them were afraid what he said was true. That they’d never leave Point Lookout alive. That they’d never see their families, their homes again.

“I’d rather die here for what we believe in than die out there for them.”

Captain Donald Bartholomew’s sentiments were echoed by the others. Noble focused his argument on his second in command, knowing that in swaying him, he’d turn the others.

“Donald, I don’t like this, either, but I don’t want to die here. That’s not going to do a damn thing for the Confederate cause. They’re going to need men to rebuild after this thing is over. If we all die here, who’s going to do that back home? Who’s going to take care of our families? Our vanity? Our nobility?” He shook his head. “What difference does it make if we sit out the war here in this deathtrap or as free men out in the West? Neither is going to make a bit of difference to the outcome of this war. We’re not going to see battle again. The only thing we can hope for now is to see a future once this is over.”

“He’s right.”

Red-headed George Allen was the unit’s chaplain. His words cut through the mumbling, through the grumbles.

“Staying here proves nothing. But by surviving out in the western territories, we can bring honor to ourselves and return home free men. Men with nothing to be ashamed of.”

“As cowards, you mean,” Bartholomew snarled.

“Cowards would choose to sit out the war shivering in tents, being fed like dogs,” Noble
told them. “Brave men would seize their own future, standing with pride.”

No one said anything for a long moment, considering both sides, until a lowly private spoke what they all were thinking.

“I don’t want to die here and be buried on Northern soil without ever seeing my mama again. I guess that means I’ll follow you, Major Banning. I mean, we already done followed you into hell, why not back out again?”

A couple of men laughed halfheartedly.

Noble looked to Donald Bartholomew. “Don? Are you with me, too? I want your word as a gentleman that you’ll serve and serve honorably.”

Bartholomew scowled. Finally he muttered, “Ah, hell, Noble. I’d rather be straddling a horse than one of these frozen latrines for another year. I’m with you.”

Even as he shook each man’s hand, Noble could sense their confusion and divided loyalties. But he knew his men and knew that once they’d given their word, they’d stand by it. They’d follow him even if it went against everything they held sacred. Because none of them believed dying helplessly of cold and scurvy could earn them any glory.

He’d asked for their allegiance to an enemy they loathed. He got it, and he hated himself for having to do it. But one thing convinced him that what he was doing was right in selling out their loyalty to save their lives.

In serving under Crowley, he would find out who among his men had betrayed them all.

He’d find out. And if that man still lived, justice would be done, sure and swift, for the eighteen who’d fallen in the field, for the eleven who lay interred in frozen Northern graves. For the sake of his own tormented soul, a soul that cried out nightly for those twenty-nine men who’d trusted him and put their lives in his hands.

“You’re going to lead Southern troops? Papa, are you mad?”

“I’ve been accused of being crazy as a fox. Is that the same thing?”

Juliet Crowley ignored her father’s teasing, unwilling to be sidetracked from what she considered his sudden lunacy. “You’re taking enemy soldiers with you to Fort Blair.”

“Not enemies, Jules. Just soldiers. Some of the best soldiers I’ve ever seen. Wait until you see them on horseback. Why, half our men sit a saddle like clothespins, falling off at every unplanned turn. We need men—riders—who can match the hostiles on their own terms. Men like these. Then maybe we’ll have a chance.”

“But who’s the more dangerous? The Indians or the men who’ll be in your own command? I prefer to trust an enemy I can see, not one that poses as my friend.”

“Jules—”

“Et tu Brute?”

John Crowley shook his head. “‘Tis my own fault for providing you with an education—now you can best me in an argument.”

Juliet brightened. “Does that mean you see my point?”

“Of course, I do, my dear. But that doesn’t mean I’ll surrender to it.”

“Oh, Papa, you are so vexing!”

Then her father flanked her with an attack against which she had no defense. “If you are so against it, perhaps it would be better if you stayed here in the East.”

Juliet shut her mouth with a snap. Her glare decried an unfair advantage taken, but when she spoke, her tone was demure.

“My place is with you, Papa. Whether I think you are foolish or not does not matter.”

Crowley smiled. “So like your mama. Even in your concessions, you act the victor. What am I to do with you, child?”

“Take me with you.”

“I would not have it otherwise, Jules. If I’ve never said so before, I depend upon you for your strength and counsel. I’ve missed you sorely while in the field of this civil war. I look forward to returning to the West, where we know, even if we don’t understand, our enemies.”

Pleased by his words, Juliet embraced her father, but her misgivings didn’t lessen. “At least I’ll be there to watch your back, should any of your own men try to stick something in it.”

“I am comforted in that knowledge.”

Later, Juliet paced her Maryland hotel room, fretting over the situation. She was a born campaigner, taking up where her mother had left off. She knew no other life than the hard one she led, accompanying her father to isolated posts on the frontier. She didn’t think to complain of the loneliness, the difficulties, or the continual danger. She considered those a part of daily living. What worried her was the men her father would command for the next year or two, men he’d faced in battle and had secured in a Northern prison—men her father would have to trust to follow his instructions and not desert at the earliest opportunity.

She had no fondness for Southerners. There had been a few in her father’s last command in Texas before the war began. She thought them vain, arrogant, and more than a little lazy. The were used to lackeys doing their work and to women who’d fawn and faint to earn their favor—pompous fools, all of them, severing the Union for their own selfish purposes at the cost of innocent soldiers’ lives, and forcing her to spend three long years in a prison of her own while her father was pulled from her life to fight in the Western Theater.

She’d hoped to put all that behind her when her father was reassigned to Fort Blair in the New Mexico territory. She had more tolerance for Indians defending their land than for
beaux galants
defending their self-indulgent ideals. How could her father trust such shallow aristocrats
to cover his flank when under hostile fire?

She had a very bad feeling about the whole thing.

Juliet’s feeling only worsened when she got her first glimpse of the recalcitrant troops.

They formed a ragged line just inside the gates of Point Lookout Prison, shivering with cold in thin uniforms. Mere skeletons, less than men, she thought—until she saw their eyes. Those eyes burned with a fever of pride and indomitable will.

Her father was going to have his hands full.

And it didn’t take more than a second to figure out who was going to cause the most grief.

He wore the insignia of major, but even without it, there could be no mistaking him for anything but the Confederates’ leader. Even weakened by the harsh conditions of the camp, he braced the blustery weather with a posture as stiff as a Stars-and-Bars-bearing flagpole. His ice-blue stare was fixed upon her father with an unblinking intensity, his look not one of arrogance or hostility, as it was with many others, but with a wary gauging, a careful studying. This man was no soft Southern fop. She read intelligence in those unswerving eyes, confidence in his rigid stance, and authority in the way the others deferred to him as her father spoke.

“I am Colonel John Crowley. From what
you know of me, I’m sure it’s a name you’ve cursed since your incarceration in this … facility. From what I know of you, you are men deserving of more respect than this place allows you—a respect you have already earned by your cunning and valor in the field. It’s my wish to put you in that field again, not here in this theater of brother against brother, but in the West, where we can all rally together against a common foe.”

He scanned the impassive troop, looking for a reaction, finding none. Juliet wondered if he’d expected any from these hard and hostile men.

“I don’t expect you to thank me. In fact, I am certain you’ll have even more cause to curse me. A U.S. soldier on western duty has little to be grateful for. I have heard it said that where we are going, everything that grows pricks and everything that breathes bites. You will be facing an enemy tougher and more ferocious than you can imagine, and if you are foolish enough to think of them contemptuously as simple savages who are no match for our military acumen, they will be wearing your hair on their lances. The danger is ever-present. The pay is rotten, a miserly sixteen dollars a month for most of you, and you’ll earn every nickel of it ten times over. So don’t thank me for taking you out of this hellhole. You haven’t seen hell yet. But you will. You will.”

A rousing speech sure to win these sullen
troops over. Her father was not one to sugar-coat any given situation. He was forcing them to swallow a bitter pill while saying it was for their own good as they choked on it. She found herself studying the Rebel major, watching for any sign of response. His whiskered features might well have been slashed from stone. Juliet smiled. He probably thought, just as his men must think, that they’d endured the worst life could offer. How quickly they’d discover they were wrong!

As if he felt her interest, the major’s steely gaze cut over to where she sat, bundled in a rented hack. Though protected from the weather, she felt vulnerable to the sudden penetrating cold of his stare. A tremor raced through her, but instead of a chill, she was suffused by heat, a confusing warmth of response and unbidden reaction.

Confusing because she wasn’t one to be intimidated by a man. She’d grown up in the army and considered herself the mental and in many cases the physical equal of a man in uniform. Not understanding her own emotions, she looked away, embarrassed, then back, angered that she should feel guilty. But she no longer had his attention. It was riveted on her father. A strange shiver rattled her sensibilities. The man unsettled her. And for that reason, she disliked the Confederate officer before they’d exchanged a single word.

“I’ve told you what you have to look forward to,” her father said with his typical
brusqueness. “Now, there’s something I want from each of you. I would have you swear allegiance to our United States of America and will take your word as gentlemen that you will not raise your hand against her for the duration of this war and that you will carry out the duties placed upon you by our Federal government, for which, in return, you will be paroled from this prison.”

Juliet expected the Southerners to balk and they did. Rebellion, resentment, and open defiance flared in their hollowed eyes, in the tight flexing of their stubbled jaws, in the fisting of their hands.

Her father ignored the signs of approaching mutiny with a calm demand. “Major Banning, I would have an oath from you and your fellow officers, then you may turn the task over to your sergeant to relay to the rest of your men.”

He wasn’t going to do it. Juliet read refusal in the prideful narrowing of his glare and knew a moment of relief.

“Major?”

At her father’s prompting, other emotions played over the lean and dangerously set features, strong emotions that challenged and humbled an inherent arrogance. She saw in that raw moment the cost of bowing to her father’s command: a sacrifice of conscience, the crushing of loyalty and honor beneath the heel of desperate circumstance, the bending of an independent will for the good of many.
And for just that instant, she felt sympathy for the proud soldiers and their conviction-torn leader.

“Major?” her father repeated.

A tense pause was followed by the reluctant lift of Banning’s right hand. The gesture was repeated by his two captains. Clearly, fiercely, they spoke the words binding themselves to the very nation they’d parted from with bloodshed and bitterness. Then the same oath was spoken by the enlisted men, their sentiments more apparent, their phrases more grudging. Juliet listened. And didn’t believe a word.

They were traitors. They would go back on their vows the first chance they got.

How on earth were they all going to survive the trip to New Mexico?

But her father appeared satisfied with the pledges of loyalty, for he turned to his aide and ordered, “Secure the release of these men from the prison commandant. I want them bathed, clean shaven, issued uniforms, and fed all they can hold. Is that understood?”

“Yes, sir, Colonel Crowley.”

Then, in a lower aside, the colonel said, “And don’t take your eyes off them for a minute.”

Chapter 2

Nothing felt as good as washing off three months of captivity. Noble scrubbed until his skin was as raw as his emotions and stinging like his conscience.