Chapter 52: A Tory Woman

I saw the slow moving cattle before I spotted the men driving them, three milch cows, a pair of mules and an old, heavy-boned work horse. Then came two Redcoats around the bend in the road, reasonably well mounted, laughing and handing a bottle back and forth. They never noticed me until I was next to them.

"Ho," I said, raising my left hand and putting my right on the butt of my new, twin-barreled pistol, "Whose animals are these?"

They looked at each other, at the pistol and then at me. "Who wants to know, shit-kicker?" asked the corporal, stuffing his flask in his belt and reaching for his short-barreled musket.

I shot him in the face from about five feet. The ball made a very small hole just above his right eye. He fell back out of his saddle, and I turned to the other soldier, recocking the heavy pistol. He looked at me wide-eyed, yanked his horse's head around and dug in his spurs. I shot him in the middle of the back, and he galloped on for a few yards before he fell, kicking and screaming with a dark stain spreading across his shoulders. I guess he had not noticed that my pistol was rifled. I had tested it several times on the road and found it deadly accurate up to fifty yards or so if I held my right wrist with my left hand.

About then an officer appeared from the open place in a well-built worm fence behind me. "What the devil!" he cried, pulling his sword and rising on his stirrups.

I put my empty pistol in the back of my belt, lifted up my musket and told him to drop it. He hesitated and put his blade back in its scabbard. I rode up beside him, pulled the thing out and tossed it into the weeds.

"That's valuable, my father's," he said crossly.

I pulled the pistol from his waist and tossed that away in the same direction. "Where'd these animals come from?" I asked him.

He nodded back, "Up there," he said calmly. "We confiscated them. All proper, give her a paper, we did."

"Get down," I said and the thin man, who was making nervous faces at me after noticing at the bloody body near the edge of the dusty road and the crying man by the treeline who was still flailing about. He dismounted. "Herd these critters back up there," I told him, and after a bit of prodding we got the cows and other animals moving back into their pasture. I walked him and his horse up to the small farm house where a short-haired woman stood in the doorway, wiping her mouth. Her dress was torn open and a shift strap hung from her bare shoulder.

"Those your animals?" I asked her.

She nodded and spat out some bloody saliva. Her nose was bleeding down one side of her mouth, and she had raw scratches on her shoulder.

"What happened?" I asked.

"They attacked me, raped me. He watched 'em do it and laughed."

I got down, loosely tied the young officer and both our horses to a hitching post and went back to straighten up the fence and get the bodies out of the road. The big fellow I had shot it the back was still moaning so I dispatched him with Magda's thin blade. Neither had anything worth keeping. Their horses had wandered off somewhere. I left their bodies in a weedy ditch.

When I climbed back up the hill, the officer was on his knees and his face was a bloody mess, one eyebrow split open, and he was spitting blood and pieces of teeth or bone. His nose appeared to be broken and one ear was almost torn off. The young woman stood near him with a three-legged iron skillet in her hand, breathing hard and disregarding the disheveled state of her clothes.

"Good work," I told her, "but let me talk to him before you break that good frying pan on him."

I threw a bucket of water in the man's face and asked him some of the usual questions. After a bit, I figured out that he and the baby-faced ensign I had killed back at the school were part of the same raiding party. He was evidently the last one left, and he was not going to be alive much longer if the snorting woman behind me had anything to do with it.

"I ought to take him back to Richmond," I told her. She was trembling with rage, spitting mad. "They'll hang him if he's a turncoat."

"You don' need him," she said in a choked voice.

"That's so," I said, patting her shoulder. She was a fine-boned woman, thin, maybe twenty or so and her dress had been torn open. It seemed like a good dress, well-made, fine material. She looked down at her exposed chest and ripped shift when she saw my glance. "We don't kill prisoners," I told her.

"I'll do it," she said, pulling her bodice together and doing up the one button she had left.

"He ain't worth the effort," I told her, trying to shove her back toward her house. "Come on. You can get me something to eat, maybe."

"One more?" she said with a crooked smile.

I stepped away from the man, and she hit him between the legs with the edge of her skillet, a full arm swing with what weight she had behind it. The blow made a crunching sound.

The lieutenant screamed and dropped to his knees, his head almost to the ground. She spat on him and stalked into her house. I followed her quietly while the officer gagged and threw up behind us.

She tossed some food on the table, a small piece of ham and half loaf of bread and poured out mugs of strong cider for both of us. Then she sat opposite me at the crude table and put her head in her hands and let her hair hang over her face, shielding her eyes. She did not cry, she just sat there. I ate, drank my cider and waited.

Finally she looked up and pushed back her hair, the setting sun in her strong face. "They were animals, tore at me, poked me like I was, I don't know, like I was a piece of meat, a dog. Grunting they were and laughing while they did it. He watched, that one out there. They held me down on the floor and took turns. Damn. Damn. Damn." Her eyes widened.

I heard a noise and looked around. The officer stood in the doorway, his bright sword in one hand and a cocked pistol in the other. There was fury in his bleeding face, and he howled at us, cursing, showing his broken teeth. I threw my half-filled mug at him as he lunged into the room and fired the pistol. The ball gouged my forearm and hit the table beside my elbow. My arm and hand felt suddenly numb. I pulled out Magda's blade with my left hand and stood to meet him, wondering how he got loose, while the woman backed away, yelling something.

He dropped the pistol and swung at me, and I dodged back as the blade whistled past tearing my shirt under my bleeding arm. I tripped over the table and sat back on the bench where I had been as the woman screamed and threw her skillet at him. He ducked and then hacked down at me, and I rolled away, hearing his blade thunk into the table. He pulled it loose as I scrambled from the floor. The woman lunged at him, hands clawed, and he cuffed her away, hitting her in the throat. "I'll get to you," he cried as she tumbled into a corner of the room, gagging.

I threw a stool at him, spraying gore from my long wound and charging in behind it, Magda's gutting knife now clasped hard in my right hand. I grabbed his wrist with my left hand and stabbed up under his ribs, concentrating on holding the knife firmly in my numb fingers. He grunted and hit me in the face with his fist a couple of times, but I held on to his arm, beat his sword hand against the door frame and stabbed him again, lower, in the belly and yanked the blade free. "Gahh," he screamed looking down at the flow of blood from beneath his coat.

He dropped his sword as I knifed him squarely in the middle of the chest and drove him back through the open door. He fell to the dirt path beside his nervous horse, rolled over and tried to crawl away, leaving a trail of blood. I felt the woman behind me, but held her back, put a foot on the man's spine, grabbed his hair, lifted his chin and cut his throat, almost decapitating him.