Her little pony cart had already been searched twice by Union soldiers, but they’d stopped their searches after idly glancing in the bags of clothing she was taking with her to stay at her cousins’. It’d taken every bit of restraint she could muster to stay silent during the intrusions. She’d made this trip three times over the last two weeks already. Two more miles and she’d be home free.
Damn the blue jackets and their intrusion into her State. She was glad the war came, it was finally time to teach the Yankees a lesson. She’d have thought the victory by the brave Southern men at Manassas would have had the cowards tucking their tails and running for the hills by now. Perhaps they were too stupid to understand their position. It wouldn’t matter in the end. A real Southern man was worth ten Yankee dogs any day.
And she would help any way she could.
*****
Lieutenant Jeremiah Lodge saw the simple two-wheel farm cart on the road ahead. A slender dark-haired girl in a blue dress guided the pony down the dirt road with an easy familiarity. It wasn’t as unusual as it should have been — many of the local boys had gone South to join the nascent rebel armies at Richmond, leaving women and children to run the errands that they would have normally done.
Jeremiah planned to simply lead his ten-trooper patrol on by; as he came even with her, he touched his hat brim. She nodded stiffly in return — about as much as he could ever expect from one of the local girls in this part of the state.
He’d have passed on, but for a sound caused by the morning breeze. It was a simple sound. The sound of paper moving. It certainly wasn’t the sound of cotton nor crinoline, but the sound of paper.
“Halt”
He turned in his saddle and caught the reins from the girl’s hands.
She glared at him intensely for a fraction of a second, then struggled to bury her hatred under icy disdain. But the icy coolness only lasted until she spoke.
“What do you want, Lincoln pup?”
Jeremiah smiled, as disarmingly as possible.
“Lieutenant Jeremiah Lodge, attached to the Provosts Office station in Sutton, at your service, Ma’am. I’m afraid I am going to have to ask you to come with us to Headquarters.”
Her eyes narrowed and she glared at him. “I’ll be damned if I go anywhere with any foul, abolitionist blue jacket!”
She dropped the reins and leaped from the cart.
Jeremiah was caught flat-footed by her sudden bolt for the woods lining the road, but he still managed to catch her left arm — and was promptly dragged from his saddle for his trouble. She shifted her efforts from escape to attack and he found himself trying — and mostly failing — to control a spitting, hissing, clawing demoness.
Just as he was convinced she was going to claw his eyes out, she was lifted bodily into the air and held between Sergeant MacKay and Trooper Henry, both of whom were laughing so hard they could barely breathe.
Jeremiah picked up his hat and dusted it off as he tried to salvage what dignity he could from the situation. Another trooper handed him one of several sheaves of paper that had fallen from the girl’s dress during her furious assault. It turned out to be a railroad schedule for supplies.
“I suppose this was accidentally pinned inside your dress?”
Jeremiah was expecting denial, maybe some tearful contrition.
The young lady simply exploded with hate. “It’s no accident you damn foul Yankee! I’ll take no condensendin’ from a low-born, gutter-crawling Black Republican thug mercenary!”
Jeremiah stepped back.
“So you admit to being a spy?”
“I admit to being true to my State!” She lunged at him, but the troopers’ firm grip saved him from being bitten.
At that point, she exploded into an obscene diatribe against Yankees, the North, the Union Army and Jeremiah himself. With details on general Yankee anatomical shortcomings and Jeremiah’s ancestry in particular. Her accent was so thick he could barely understand half of what she was saying, and for that, he was truly thankful. What he could understand was enough to make even a hardened sailor cringe. Even Sergeant MacKay looked suitably impressed, and he was a true artist in vulgarity at times.
