Chapter 19: The Procurer

I did not know exactly what I had when I came upon the big, empty carriage. The traces lay dangling; the horses grazed at the roadside still linked together. Some cases and boxes had been torn open and clothing and other goods scattered about, so I tied my horse and went on, cautiously, seeking an answer. Screams led me to it.

I crested a wooded hill and was nearly run down by a woman who was running pell-mell toward me, howling and waving her arms in her tattered clothing. Behind her, laughing and trotting came a brace of Germans, uniform jackets hanging loose, foreflaps undone. I quickly knelt as the woman skittered past and shot down the nearest man at ten yards or so, blowing him spinning off the trail and into a tree. The second disappeared into the woods as I quickly reloaded.

As the sound of my shot died away, I could hear more screams from in front so I tried to forget about the half-clothed female somewhere behind me in the trees, clamped on my bayonet and trotted on down the barely visible track. Three Germans had a girl stretched over an old stump in a small clearing and were tearing her clothes from her small body. One stood stroking his very turgid member while the other two laughed and pawed the small form kicking before them. I charged.

In short order all three unarmed Hessians were dead, torn open and spouting blood into the dirt. Then an officer, young and lean, appeared at the cabin door, a young girl's arm in his hand, his eyes glazed. The girl was a mirror image of the one at my feet, just as blonde, young and tidy. "Vas?" he asked. I shot him in the head and he fell back into the small house with its ruined roof and tumbled chimney, his feet spread on the doorsill.

I knelt, reloaded and comforted the sobbing girl at the wide stump, patting her back. I saw a bright trickle of blood running from her nose. I left her and stood as another young man stepped from the cabin, looking down, careful not to step on the dead man, a pistol in his hand, fright on his face, his mouth slack.

He gaped at me as I drove my thick blade all the way through his stomach and pinned him to the door frame. The pistol fell from his hand, and he grasped my musket and screamed. Blood bubbled from his mouth as I pulled my bayonet loose and let him fall on his face.

"There's still one out there someplace," said a voice, and I turned to face the woman I had first seen. She now seemed calm, a mature female of perhaps thirty-five or so with a strong body and a mop of chestnut hair. One breast gleamed whitely from her torn shift and I tried not to look at it.

"These girls yours?" I asked, nodding at the two tangled together by the stump.

"Yes, well not really," she said quietly, "we were traveling with their uncle, my husband's brother. They killed him and then they raped us, the beasts."

The youngest girl, the one who had been in the house stood and came to embrace the woman while the other youngster remained on the ground, weeping, her whole body bent and shaking.

"They didn't do me," the little blonde said. They were, I decided, surely twins and barely nubile.

"Me neither, Ann," said the girl at the stump, wiping her eyes with her knuckles. "But I'm scared."

"We should get away from here," I said, turning over in the two bodies in the doorway with my foot. Neither had a purse. "Can you find some clothes?" I got the sniveling girl to her feet, her face red-eyed and swollen from her ordeal, her young body barely covered in tattered rags.

'Yes," the woman said, "back at the carriage. Our trunks are there."

We walked back the way we had come, the still-weeping girl clinging to my arm while the aunt held her niece's hand. They seemed to ignore the bloody bodies we passed. I was alert for the missing German, but was still surprised when he stepped out from behind a tree in front of us and fired. The woman was driven back on me by the force of the shot which struck her in the middle of the chest. I charged forward and caught the retreating German on my blade and tore him open, ripping through his ribs from the back. He tumbled into the underbrush, legs kicking.

When I retraced my steps I found the two girls kneeling beside their dying aunt, trying to comfort her, both weeping. She only lasted another minute and then I pulled them up and helped them away from the bleeding body.

We found the uncle's body in the ditch by the road, and I wrapped it in a tarpaulin and stowed it in the luggage rack behind the carriage. Then I did the same for the girls' dead aunt, being as tender as I could with her corpse and laying it on the floor of the carriage. I helped the girls repack their few belongings and got the trunks and boxes atop the rig, hitched up the team and with a stricken girl on either side of me, got started down the track in the woods.

About ten miles later we stopped at a tavern, fed the horses, ate a quick meal and were approached by a foppish man of middle years. He was dressed in an outlandish manner and wore a deep-bottomed wig that was brownish-red. His hands glowed with rings and he produced a single-lensed spectacle of some sort.

"Pardon, sir," he said to me in an unctuous manner. "I could not help noticing these lovely youngsters here. He touched both girls on the shoulder briefly, giving each a small squeeze. "Are they yours?"