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

from the hills and joined up, a wag had nicknamed them “Pilgrim” and “Progress,” but the labels had not stuck, except in memories. Blake, too, had been given a nickname. Besides the inevitable “Quaker.” For a brief time, he had been known behind his back as “Lost Lenore,” until the men agreed among themselves, without much talking, that it went beyond the bounds of fair amusement.
    â€œI didn’t ask you,” Blake said to the private. “I asked James.”
    â€œIt was just a dizzy spell, weren’t nothing,” an unsteady voice reported across the thickening darkness. No one wanted light badly enough to restoke the cooking fire in the heat.
    â€œGoing to have to carry us smelling salts for these girls of ours,” Cobb announced.
    This time, everyone ignored him.
    The Bunyan twins were anything but girlish. Hulking—although not as tall or strong as Blake—they had defied their father to come down from Hawk’s Hollow and put on gray coats. Old Charlie Bunyan and his elder boy, Reese, went off to join the Federals. Last time anyone back home had heard of them, they were riding with a bad lot in western Virginia. When newspaper folk wrote high laments about brother against brother, they didn’t know how rough things got in the hills. Blake didn’t doubt but that the Bunyans would kill their own kind, if the chance came. Kill, then mourn.
    A jug of farmhouse whiskey made the rounds. No one passed it to Blake. They knew better. Cobb needled him briefly, but the other men let things be.
    There was no fairness to any of it. Blake had become a sergeant not because he was too hard-raised to skedaddle at New Bern, but because he was the strongest man with the biggest fists in the company. And there was no sense to those endowments, since, after his grandparents sent him down from Virginia, most of the work he had done had been in Mr. Curran’s store, while each of the men gathered by him had fed themselves and their kin by working fields on which a low-country planter would not have wasted one nigger. They had toiled, while he, at most, shifted sacks of flour. Yet, he could have beaten any man in the company in a fight. It never had come to a test, but they all sensed it, these lean men with muscles of harness leather.
    The camp conversation shifted toward home, as men compared the mountain on which they sprawled to the highlands they knew, insisting the resemblance was uncanny. But that was a lie, if one they yearned to believe. In Pennsylvania, even the mountains promised a fertility that would have been the envy of any bottomland farmer in North Carolina.
    For his part, Blake had no wish to be back home. Not anymore. The store, which hard work and Mr. Curran’s age—and kindliness—had made half Blake’s when he was twenty-three, meant nothing now. He had labored toward a dream of respectability. But, thanks to one wretched, accidental meeting, that dream was dead.
    Masked by the dark, Blake allowed the hard expression he kept up to twist into bitterness. The truth was that his dream had died before that. The men over whom he had charge had joined because they believed in something, even if they were not certain what it was. No slaveholders, they had come down from the glens as their ancestors had, as if at a war horn’s call. Men who sat so near him their smells had names—Tam McMinn, Hugh Gordon, and Pike Gray—had rallied to a cause they could not have explained had they been granted eternity to find words. And he, Thomas Fox Blake, had joined for a woman.
    He had been a fool from the start, he saw that now. But Lenore Hutchinson had been favored not only with beauty, she was the daughter of a family of high position, by mountain standards. Calling upon her at her square-built home, he had known desire, but saw respectability. And she had preferred him over his closest rival. He was sure of that. But Lenore never