Read Online Chase the Dawn by Jane Feather - Free Book Online Page A

dawn. At least, that was how she had heard it had begun, and in the years following, the fighting continued in the North, neither side winning a decisive victory.There had been no fighting south of Delaware. No, that was wrong. Something had been said….
    She frowned, struggling to place the echo of a voice, to grasp elusive threads, knowing that they were somehow important. All she had were the bare bones of a story, but she could not find the flesh. She could not even remember why there was fighting. Benedict could tell her about the war. There could be nothing secret about that. Or could there? Was this dangerous business that he pursued tied up with the struggle?
    She went to the door, intending to sit in the sun and worry at those facts she had, in the hope of elucidation. But at the door, she froze, her heart thudding against her ribs. An Indian brave stood in the trees at the edge of the clearing. He carried a musket and was clad in a pair of britches made of the same doeskin as her tunic. He was standing quite motionless, almost as if his body were an insect’s antenna picking up signals from the warm, summer air. A low whistle sounded as Bryony ducked behind the door, peering through the crack. Two more braves slid out of the trees.
    There had been no Indian trouble for years, she told herself in an effort to quiet her pulse. But there were always renegades. She crept to the window at the back of the hut, stood on tiptoe to peer through. She could see no sign of life in the trees from here. But that didn’t mean that the Indians weren’t there. The forest was their home, an environment in which they blended without trace. Perhaps they were not interested in the cabin. Perhaps they would just disappear as soundlessly as they had come. And perhaps pigs could fly.
    Bryony had climbed through the unglazed aperture and dropped to the ground beneath almost before thisthought had come and gone. As she cowered against the back wall, she heard the squeak of the door and then the slight shuffle of a moccasined foot on the earthen floor. Her tunic, she noticed, seemed to blend into the earth as she wormed toward the trees on her belly, expecting any second to hear a shout or feel a clutch at her ankle. But she reached the green, shady refuge safely. She did not get to her feet, however, until she had crawled on pine needles several yards farther. Trembling, filthy, and wearied by that unaccustomed mode of progression, she stood up and set off on tiptoe through the trees.
    “Tod, you will take your men to the right wing.” Benedict’s forefinger jabbed at the spot on the map spread out on the long oak table in the farmhouse kitchen. “Joe, to the left. I will take the front. There are sentries posted at each entrance, shifts changing every four hours. We make the raid one hour into the night shift, at one o’clock. That should give us time enough to be well away before the shift change.” He glanced up at a dour, heavyset farmer whose corncob pipe filled the already stuffy atmosphere with acrid fumes. “You’re responsible for the wagons Joshua.”
    “Aye.” Joshua nodded phlegmatically. “Three of ’em should do it.” Sun poured through the two glazed windows that pierced the walls whose plaster of oyster-shell lime shone dazzling white under this illumination.
    “Knives only?” said Tod, upending a rum bottle into his tankard.
    Benedict nodded bleakly. “Absolute silence, or we’re lost.” He sliced into the raised crust of a giblet pie andcarried the pewter spoon to his lips. “My compliments to your lady, Joshua. This is a fine pie.”
    “We’ll all be lost if the British take Charleston,” muttered a young man with a shock of bright red hair and an educated voice. “Georgia was lost as soon as they took Savannah. South Carolina’ll go the same way, you mark my words. And what’s the South to do without its major seaport?”
    “Don’t be such a pessimist, Dick.” Benedict spoke briskly, pushing