Read Online Cain at Gettysburg by Ralph Peters - Free Book Online

doors to everyone. He had not expected that, only a decade after a war had raised a foreign flag above them. There had been a storybook goodness to the place, a whispered magic, and it had softened him. He recalled one winter morning when he led out a patrol in the brilliant chill, with the sky overhead as clear as a maiden’s conscience. He had raised up his eyes to the mountains ahead, thinking that it was a strange thing to be so happy.
    â€œI liked Texas all right,” he told Fremantle.
    They had been so in love, despite a loss, and the world had been sweetly, safely routine, interrupted only by an occasional march into the wilderness to show a band of Comanches or straying Apaches that the U.S. Government took an interest in their behavior.
    Then secession had come, with its confusions. His choice of sides had never been in doubt, but nothing was sweet or safe or routine any longer. In the war’s first winter, scarlet fever killed three of their children. Louise waited on the far side of a river of sorrow now, and he knew not how to bridge it or where he might ford it. On learning the children were ill, he had rushed to Richmond, only to sit at home with the curtains drawn, neither he nor his wife able to rise from their grief to attend the burial. So the little ones entered the winter-hard earth alone. He understood war and its savagery, but not the death, so senselessly, of his children.
    In his bleakest hours, Longstreet saw God as a murderer.
    *   *   *
    Sergeant Blake watched the Bunyan twins straggle in. Night had preceded them, but the regiment’s camp lay just beyond the crest of the mountain their march had climbed and the sky overhead held a last hush-a-bye glow. If you knew a man well enough, you could make him out at a distance in such light.
    The Bunyans were strange boys, oxlike and quiet, who kept close to one another. Blake had tolerated it when James, the twin with longer hair, fell out and his brother, John, abandoned the march to stay by him. Another time, with another man, Blake might not have been so kindly. But there was something about the Bunyans that didn’t bear interfering with.
    It was odd, what knocked a man down. The 26th North Carolina had endured many a tougher march, and the regiment had been rested before this one. The heat was cruel, and the route wound uphill, but the distance was short compared to the efforts they had endured of late. And neither Bunyan had ever quit a march before. Yet, this time James had begun to fail early on, dropping at last by the roadside, to the jeers of passing comrades. Sometimes, a man was just weak and there was no reason.
    The twins affected a manly jauntiness as they approached the embers of the cook-fire. They were good boys, ashamed of straggling.
    â€œLookee,” Cobb cawed, “it’s the Bunyan girls come calling!”
    â€œShut up, Cobb,” Art Peachum said.
    Despite the attempted bravado, James still walked with a weakness the dark wouldn’t hide.
    â€œSit on down,” Blake told the twins. “There’s ham and beans.”
    â€œLikker, too,” Cobb said. “Maybe Sergeant Blake will join you for a snort after your eats?” He cackled, ever pleased at another’s misery. “Oh, I done forgot. Sergeant Blake don’t let liquor pass his lips. I wonder why that is?”
    â€œYou can just shut up,” Peachum told him a second time.
    Blake turned to Jack Ireton, sensed close by. “Corporal Ireton? Call out a detail and gather up canteens. Start with the Bunyans’ there. Fill them at the well up top.”
    â€œIf it ain’t drunk dry,” Ireton said. It was an observation, not a protest. The army had emptied a number of wells down to their muddy bottoms, much to the dismay of the local farmers.
    â€œYou all right, James Bunyan?” Blake asked.
    â€œHe’s all right now,” his brother answered for him. When the two boys came down