Read Online The Storm Before Atlanta by Karen Schwabach - Free Book Online

She pressed the cut against the hem of her apron.
    She was in a forest, dense with underbrush. She started walking in the dark, pushing her way forward against twigs and stickers that caught at her clothes and jabbedher face and eyes. She meant to be going the same way as the railroad tracks had gone, but she couldn’t see the sky, nor the ground beneath her feet. She couldn’t see anything, and fighting against the clinging branches made her tired. She almost wanted to sit down on the ground and cry. But she wouldn’t give up. There was no way they were going to catch her and take her back to Missus to be whipped two hundred times. No way in the world.
    Somewhere above her a bird sang, and another answered back. Dawn was coming—Dulcie couldn’t see it, but the birds always knew. Imperceptibly the woods grew lighter, and Dulcie could see the trunks and branches all around her, and the sharp holly leaves that had made scratches all over her skin during the night. A flying squirrel glided past right in front of her face, making her jump.
    Then she heard voices ahead of her. She froze. Men’s voices. She smelled mules, and wood smoke. She saw flickering orange firelight through the trees. Surely this was an army encampment. But was it Mr. Lincoln’s soldiers, or the Secesh?
    She meant to go just close enough to look, but the woods ended suddenly and Dulcie tumbled right out into the camp.
    A white man in a gray uniform and kepi hat looked up at her without much interest. “What are you doing in there, girl? Go get me some water.” He nodded at a bucket that sat next to a white tent.
    Secesh. All that running and hiding and she’d fallen right into a Secesh camp.
    There were hundreds of white canvas Sibley tents. Thousands of people moved among them, busy cooking breakfast around hundreds of campfires that sent orange sparks upward into the dark dawn sky. The tents and the men seemed to go on forever. The murmur of conversation mixed in with the neighing of horses and mules, and somewhere someone was singing.
    We are a band of brothers, and native to the soil
,
    Fighting for the property we earned by honest toil
.
    And when our rights were threatened, the cry rose near and far
,
    Hurrah for the bonnie blue flag that bears a single star!
    Hurrah! Hurrah! For Southern rights hurrah!
    Hurrah for the bonnie blue flag that bears a single star!
    “Hurry up with that water, girl,” the soldier repeated. “We’re moving out in an hour.”
    Dulcie picked up the wooden bucket and put it on her head. She didn’t know where the water was to be found, but she knew a good disguise when she saw it. She walked off, in the casual, no-hurry fashion in which masters expected to see their orders obeyed. Most masters believed that slaves were afflicted with the slows and couldn’t move fast even if they wanted to. And that was fine, because a slow-moving slave wouldn’t run far.
    Dulcie walked deeper into the camp, looking around her. There were many black men and women moving about—slaves, Dulcie knew—toting firewood, hauling water, tending the mules and horses, hitching up the teams to the wagons.
    Dulcie held the bucket steady on her head with one hand, her eyes cast down, and walked as if she knew exactly where she was going. She looked down at herself. Her dress, which had been threadbare to start with, was torn nearly to shreds. There were bloodstains on her apron from her various cuts, and red dust coated her all the way down to her sore and dusty feet. She would have liked a bath, as well as something to eat and something to drink, but all of that was less important than getting through the Secesh camp and finding the Union side.
    The smells of cooking made her stomach growl. Nobody around the tents and campfires seemed to notice her. And then, to her horror, she felt someone tug at her sleeve. Dulcie froze.
    “Whoa, there, little sister.” A man’s voice.
    Slowly Dulcie looked up from under the bucket at a tall black