Chance's Bluff Page 5

  The doctor beckoned to another man, a middle-aged fellow with a wild, graying beard who moved up and down the hospital wing bringing water to the invalids and changing their dressings. “Salve and clean bandages over here, Mr. Whitman.” The doctor smiled down at Ben. “Mr. Whitman is one of our nurse volunteers. He should take good care of you.” Nodding at the bearded newcomer, the doctor moved on to the next bed.

  Mr. Whitman’s touch was gentle for such a rough-looking man, but Ben tried not to jerk his hands away as he smeared thick, shiny ointment onto Ben’s swollen fingers.

  The bearded volunteer nurse looked down with wry but kind eyes. “Captain Marlowe, is it? I hear you’re a hero, that you risked your life to drag a fellow soldier from a raging fire.”

  Ben bit back a yelp and gritted his teeth, but the salve eased the pain somewhat. “I could hardly leave the fellow to roast like a pig on a spit. Anyone would have done the same.”

  “Maybe, maybe not.” Mr. Whitman unrolled a long white strip of cloth. “What did you do before the war, Captain? As an observer of humanity, I ask all my patients that question.”

  Ben lay back against the pillow. It had been a long time since he’d thought of Harvard’s ivy-clad walls or his parents’ mansion on Fifth Avenue. “I studied to become a minister for a while, but I no longer think that’s the career for me.” He could hardly remember life before the war, nor imagine life after. The fighting felt as if it would continue forever.

  “Hmmm. How does a would-be minister become a soldier?” the gray-bearded man wanted to know.

  Ben shrugged. “I was caught up in the excitement when the war started, along with everyone else.”

  The nurse wrapped the bandages around Ben’s sensitive palm. “Yes, my brother was, too. So many young men, all from different places and lives, swept along in the same current.” To Ben’s surprise, the bearded man lowered his voice and recited:

  To the drum taps the young men falling in and arming …

  the old men show them how to wear their accoutrements—

  Outdoors arming—

  indoors arming—the flash of the musket-barrels;

  arm’d! arm’d! the cry everywhere.

  A look of sadness descended on the man’s broad features. “During the first excitement, I watched many of them leave occupations and well-planned lives to take up arms. No one knew what lay ahead or how this war would change everything, forever.”

  Ben thought about the men under his command. They were young, most younger than himself. Some barely more than boys. They came from farms, from towns, from every different background. It occurred to him that although he liked them and cared about them, he did not know them as well as he should. Perhaps it was his own reserved nature that held him aloof, but that was no excuse. When he got back to camp, he would have to try to do better.

  Ben pushed himself up. “What was that you just said, a moment ago? That … whatever it was that you quoted?”

  “It’s a new poem I’ve been working on.” Whitman tied up the second bandage with a neat tuck, his big hands moving expertly. “I never seem to finish it because I’m constantly tinkering with the lines, changing them, adding to them. It’s about the soldiers in this war, you see. It seemed that someone should be writing about them, and who they really are.”

  Ben stared at the male nurse’s placid face. The casually dressed fellow looked like a farmer, or blacksmith, or carpenter—someone who worked with his hands, not an ethereal dreamer like Keats, Longfellow, or Tennyson. “You’re a poet?”

  Humor lightened the man’s features. He rolled up the unused bandages and stored them in his basket. “I’ve claimed a good many other occupations as well, including printer, teacher, and journalist. However, my greatest accomplishment is a volume of poetry called Leaves of Grass. When it was first published a few years ago, the great Ralph Waldo Emerson himself had a kind word to say about it.”

  The lines the man had recited ran through Ben’s head. Poetry? They didn’t sound like anything he’d heard before. The words sounded startlingly immediate, capturing the truth of the early days of the war as honestly as if spoken by a friend.

  “Have you written other poems like that one?”

  “Many. Would you care to read some of them?”

  “I would, but …” Ben looked in frustration at his useless hands lying on his chest like a mummy’s paws.

  Whitman laid a big, gentle hand on his shoulder. “I’ll bring you a copy of my book after your hands recover. A gift from a grateful fellow American.” With a nod of farewell, he ambled down the aisle, stopping to put his palm on one invalid’s head in a gesture of comfort before lifting a cup of water to another soldier’s lips.

  Chapter Ten

  Chance

  Virginia

  Spring, 1865

  “Private McInnes?”

  Chance stopped playing his harmonica and squinted into the sky. The bandages on his visitor’s hands revealed the other man’s identity before Chance saw his features, and he quickly sat up from his pallet on the ground outside the hospital tent. “Captain Marlowe! Why on earth are you here? I heard they sent you to Washington.”

  “I had a dispatch to deliver and, having delivered it, I thought I’d stop by and check on your progress.” Eyebrows rising, the captain looked around at the dozen other men lying on the ground around Chance. “Is there no room in the hospital tent?”

  Chance shrugged. “I’m too tall for one of their cots anyway.” It was true his head and shoulders stood above the other men’s. His feet would have stuck out several inches beyond the bed. It was better outside anyway, farther from the howls of men writhing from fresh amputations and where cool breezes carried away the stench of pus, vomit, and gangrene.

  In fact, Chance counted himself lucky in lots of ways. The bullet wound in his thigh had knitted up nicely without festering, and the burns, while painful, were minor. Best of all, he’d sat out several bloody battles without being shot at.

  He tucked away his harmonica, which he’d been playing for the youngster lying on the pallet next to his. The fourteen-year-old volunteer from Maryland with a port-wine birthmark across the left side of his face was suffering from shell shock. The youth didn’t speak much, but music seemed to cheer him up.

  “It’s good to see you looking so fit, Private.” Captain Benjamin Marlowe touched his wide-brimmed hat and pulled up a camp chair. His black hair was combed back over his ears, and his dark eyes were thoughtful. The officer appeared to be in his mid-twenties, although Marlowe’s bearing and confidence made him seem older. “I guess my efforts in that Shenandoah barn were worth the trouble.”

  He returned the other man’s faint smile with a grin of his own. “God sent you to save me. I made a deal with him while I was lying there that if he let me live, I’d give up cussing. And he did! Thanks to you, the doctors were able to stitch my leg up fine as a young girl’s sampler.” He paused and his eyes fell on Captain Marlowe’s bandaged hands. “I hear they had to send you to a hospital in Washington afterward, for your burns. Thank you, sir.”

  Captain Marlowe shrugged. “While at the hospital in Washington, I met someone who made me realize how little I know about some of the men who serve under me. If a fellow saves another’s life, he ought to know something about him, don’t you agree?”

  “Ain’t much to tell,” Chance said, startled. “I’m a pretty ordinary fellow, sir, and that’s about all there is to it.”

  “I see nothing ordinary about a man who chases down a sniper without orders, saving the lives of countless troops.” Captain Marlowe stretched out his legs, absentmindedly massaging his bandaged hands. “Where are you from, soldier?”

  “Iowa, sir.” Chance brightened at the thought of home. “Got a girl back there waiting for me.” The thought of Betty Cuthbert’s blue eyes and yellow locks caused his stomach muscles to knot with homesickness and longing. “We’re getting married when I get home, soon as I build us a new house in town.”

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nbsp; “Lucky fellow.” Marlowe spun his brimmed hat with his bandaged hands. “What’s your girl’s name?”

  “Betty.” Before knowing it, Chance found himself describing his fiancée, his abolitionist mother, and the small town where he’d lived his entire life, while Captain Marlowe listened with apparent interest. “My grandfather built our family’s farm nearby on a bend in the Missouri River, and it boasts the richest, deepest topsoil a man has ever seen. I can’t wait for this war to be over so I can to go back and till it again.”

  “We all want this war to be over. Is your father working the farm now?”

  “No, sir, my father died when I was seven. A horse’s kick to the head. I was the one running the farm.” Chance grew subdued, remembering how from that young age he had worked hard and done what was needed to keep things going. He didn’t dwell on it much. A man took what life threw at him without complaint.

  Ben Marlowe’s eyebrows rose. “You signed up to fight for the union with no one at home to run the farm?”

  “Well, my ma had the hands to do the work. She’s the one who made me enlist, you see. Ma always hated slavery like a mule hates a tick. The hands will be all right without me. They’re all good men, able-bodied and willing, excepting the young half-wit, Sam. The poor fella does his best, and I guess that’s all you can ask of anyone.”

  Marlowe straightened in his camp chair, pushing back his hat. “Why on earth would you hire a half-wit?”

  Chance shrugged. “Poor fella can’t help the way he was born, and he needed a job. I figured Sam couldn’t do no harm on the farm sloppin’ pigs. Ma laid into me pretty good when she heard about it.” He grinned. “I told her someone had to take Sam in, so it might as well be us. It’s the Christian thing to do, right? That shut her up.”

  All the talk was making Chance more and more homesick. If not for the blasted war, he thought, he’d be digging long straight trenches through black Iowa soil with a plow, creating life instead of taking it. Betty would be waiting for him in their new house, the gold ring on her finger, her yellow hair curled into ringlets.

  Chance belatedly realized he’d been doing all the talking. “What about you, sir? What do you plan to do when this war is over? Got a girl of your own to settle down with?”

  Captain Marlowe blinked as if caught off guard. “Settle down? That’s the last thing I want to do. I figured I’d ride west, see San Francisco, then catch a ship to the Orient and the Pacific Islands.”

  “You’re welcome to ride with me after the war wraps up, sir, though I can’t think why you’d want to go any farther than Iowa.”

  Marlowe smiled. “Based on the dispatch I mentioned earlier, that might be sooner than you think.” He stood. “Take care of that leg, Private.” Saluting, the captain strode toward his waiting horse.

  The thought of Baker’s Crossing caused a fresh wave of homesickness to rise. Chance turned to the youth next to him and reached for the battered deck of cards, forcing his voice to be hearty. “Hey there, Emmett, how ’bout a game of pinochle?”

  Captain Marlowe’s prediction of an early end to the war was correct. Chance returned to his corps in time to help them defeat Pickett’s division at Five Forks, and after that the war seemed to speed up. At the cost of much sweat and blood, Union soldiers gained possession of the invaluable Petersburg and Lynchburg Railway, and shortly after, Grant broke through Lee’s lines and drove the rebel general back to the outskirts of Petersburg. Finally … surrender!

  Chance was cleaning his rifle when the news of victory came. Already men were dancing about, hugging each other, slapping backs, and cheering, while the scattered report of rifles echoed through the camp in celebration. Captain Marlowe surveyed his men’s eager faces with a broad smile. “Congratulations, soldiers. It won’t be long until you muster out.”

  That evening, when the men sat around campfires singing and breaking out hidden stores of spirits, Captain Marlowe joined Chance’s group. The men moved over to make room, and someone passed the newcomer a bottle of whiskey. As he waved it aside, one of the soldiers got up on unsteady legs and lurched toward the latrine, waving a mug in the air and boozily singing “Aura Lee.”

  The captain turned to Chance. “Remember your invitation to ride west together after the war?”

  “Yes, sir. The offer still stands.”

  “Good.” Marlowe paused. “Maybe I can talk you into going to San Francisco with me. You ought to see some of the world before settling down with that yellow-haired girl of yours.”

  “No, sir, I seen plenty,” Chance said firmly. A thought occurred to him. “Ain’t you going home to New York, sir? The men say that’s where you’re from.”

  Marlowe drained his tin cup. “I don’t have a home, Corporal.” Seeing Chance’s puzzled face, the captain added, “My parents moved to Oregon before the war started. There’s nothing in New York for me now.”

  Chance seized on this. “Well then, Oregon’s your home now, ain’t it? Home’s where your folks is.”

  Ben Marlowe looked at him for a long moment. “You are a lucky man indeed if life is that simple for you.”

  Chance didn’t know what the other fellow meant, but he stuck out his hand anyway. “I’m glad we’ll be traveling together, sir. I never did like to ride alone, and if I get into any more scrapes, I already know you’re a good man to have along.”

  They joined a flood of soldiers in faded blue and gray traveling in all directions. Using most of his remaining pay, Chance bought a roan mare and a fine pistol from a starving Confederate officer with mournful eyes and a full white beard. Both purchases were lucky finds; he’d had to turn in his army-issue revolver while mustering out, and good horses were nearly impossible to come by.

  The Reb stashed the cash in the breast pocket of his faded uniform coat, but lingered near the mare, while Chance loaded his gear into the saddle bags. “Take care, Sally,” he said to the animal, his voice that of a father bidding farewell to his child. “You’ll be all right, don’t worry.”

  Chance mounted and looked down from his perch on the saddle, worn smooth as butter from the other man’s skinny shanks. He felt an unexpected stab of pity. A few days ago, he’d have shot the ragged fellow dead without thinking; now he was the old man’s customer. With an uncharacteristic flash of imagination, he pictured the Reb returning to find his livestock stolen or driven off, his land in ruins, and his dreams and hopes, however misbegotten, dashed forever. And before that … a heckuva long walk to Georgia.

  On impulse, he felt in his pocket, found a piece of hardtack, and handed it over. As his mount trotted off, Chance glanced back to see the Reb officer cramming the hard biscuit into his mouth, gnawing like a dog on a bone.

  Ben Marlowe found an even better horse for himself, a tall bay gelding with long slender legs and a glossy coat. The tight-lipped innkeeper who sold it did not explain how he had come by such a beauty, and the former officer did not ask. The innkeeper knew the animal’s worth, and when Ben pulled a thick roll of bank notes from his pocket, Chance’s eyes popped. He’d never seen so much cash in his life. It was true, then, that Ben Marlowe came from a wealthy family.

  Chance congratulated himself on his good fortune. Only two weeks of travel separated him from his farm and the girl he loved, and he could talk of nothing else as they rode. When he paused for breath, Ben said, “It sounds like you’ve got your life all laid out, like a book that’s already written.”

  “Yup,” Chance said happily. “I can even tell you what’ll happen as soon as I get home. First I’ll see Betty, then Ma will cook me a big dinner with fried chicken, gravy, and the trimmings. After that, Ma can sit in the old rocker on the porch and watch the sun set over the fields every evening, takin’ her ease like a woman her age should.”

  He tried to picture his mother placidly rocking on the porch and failed. Hecuba McInnes never sat down without a piece of mending or knitting in her hands, and she’d think it was sinful to moon over sunsets. “Maybe she’ll still worry about ho
w the cows are calving,” Chance amended, “or fret if it don’t rain and the crops are suffering. But running a farm ain’t no job for a woman. As for Betty, I figure the poor lass has been pinin’ for me long enough. The first week I’m home, we’ll pay a visit to the preacher.” The new house in town could wait till later, he thought.

  As they rode on, Chance told Ben more about his grandfather, Preston McInnes, one of the first settlers to farm the rich land on the edge of the Iowa River, and his red-haired bride, Mabel Rose, spirited daughter of one of the greatest men to settle Ohio. “And one day,” Chance finished dreamily, “I’ll pass the farm along to my own son, same as my pa did to me.”

  “What if your son doesn’t want to be a farmer? What if he wants to become a sailor instead, or a clergyman, or a poet?”

  Chance guffawed before realizing with a start that his companion wasn’t joking. Quickly, he erased his grin.

  “The McInneses have always been farmers,” he explained. “His grandfather was Thomas Westerly, one of the first farmers in Ohio. He owned land near Zanesville. My ma said he got so famous he even traveled back east to Washington, DC, to advise President Thomas Jefferson on growing crops. Yes sir, I know what I was born to do just as surely as this horse does.” He patted the withers of the well-behaved roan mare that he’d bought from the hungry Confederate. The horse had carried him patiently hundreds of miles, and he had grown quite fond of her. “Nope, no McInnes would dream of becoming a sailor or a poet any more than Sally here would stand up on her rear legs and sing ‘Lilly Dale.’”

  Chance laughed heartily at his own joke, and after a moment Ben Marlowe chuckled quietly as well.