Chapter 49: Rapists

When the three women came into camp, they looked terrible - ravaged, beaten, distraught, frightened, their clothes in tatters. I have seldom seen the like. The men who brought them in said they found them huddled together in the woods, incoherent and shaking. We got their story from them in bits and pieces, between bouts of tears and shaking. It was an ugly story. They had been traveling on a regular stage toward a relative's home when a group of Hessians waylaid them. The men on the stage, including the driver, were killed outright, and the women tied to the carriage's wheels and repeatedly raped by all of the soldiers including their British officer.

"Poor little Bonnie was a virgin," the older girl told me as I wiped her bruised face and gave her a cool rag to hold against her blackened eye. "The officer did her first. He was British; the rest were Hessians." She shuddered. "He showed mother his bloody cock after he raped her. She screamed and screamed, the poor girl. I'd know him anywhere, with his crooked smirk and the patch on his eye. There were six of them. Bonnie fainted after the first German took her." She collapsed in my arms, sobbing.

The child, Bonnie, required stitches on her small breast, smooth face and between her coltish legs to repair the damage the soldiers had done. Her mother had lost a tooth and had a split lip, but she seemed to recover well after a meal and a night's rest. She told us some details, enough that we could figure out that they were a group of horse thieves who had stopped the stage to take its team and raped the women only because they were there.

"When they tired of us," the mother said, "when all three of us were on our knees, bleeding and exhausted, June and I having been poked and prodded ten or twelve times by those animals, they set fire to the stage coach with the driver's body still draped across his seat. The smell was awful."

"I got my hands free," the older girl said, "cut them on the rim of the wheel. Worked on the ropes to keep from thinking what they were doing to me, to my sister."

"She untied us and pulled us away from the flames," the mother said, looking proudly at her older daughter. The girl's hair was frizzled along one side of her face from the flames, and there were blistered burns on her right arm.

"They thought we would die there, all of us, burn to death," the girl said.

All I could do was shake my head and wonder at their courage. The younger girl said nothing, but kept her face in her mother's skirt, shivering every time she looked up at us.

"While one was horsing me, and I was down on my knees," the older girl said in a matter-of-fact voice, "another tried to force me to take his member into my mouth. When I refused, he hit me." She touched her swollen eye that was purple and red. The doctor had sewed up her eyebrow.

"They were beasts," the mother said. "But June saved us." She patted her older daughter's hand and took her younger child back to their tent.

"Now what happens?" June said, worry in her eye.

"I'm not sure," I told her, trying to avoid the accusing stare of her good eye. "We were getting ready to leave this area."

"Wont you chase them, find them, punish them?" She looked down. "Kill them?"

"Yes," Lt. Foster said calmly from behind her, "that's just what we will do."

I looked up at him, and he smiled and winked at me so I patted the girl's hand and went about my business.

The next morning, Foster sent me and George out, telling us loud enough for the women to hear, that he wanted the Hessians found and found quickly. We both understood it was just a show and rode to a stream where we could rest until sundown.

"That there June girl," George said, "she's a right purty one."

"Hard to tell," I said.

"Then you didn' even look at her. Mother's good lookin' too. Damn shame they was treated that way."

I waved him quiet, and we heard horsemen on the nearby road, just two men it sounded like. George sat where he was, but curiosity drew me to the roadside. And here came a rider in blue alongside one in British red, and the Redcoat was an officer and wore a black patch on his eye. I ran back and got George, and we saddled up and hurried after the pair, staying to the woods as much as we could. When we brought them in sight and were about to stop them or shoot them, four more Germans arrived from the other direction so we got back under concealment.

"Damn," said George, "why'n't I go back and get some reinforcements, an' you keep an eye on them."

I nodded, and he disappeared, riding downhill quickly. The group palavered in the road for a bit and then trooped back in the direction we had just come, looking like they had a destination in mind, riding fast with the Redcoat in the lead. I followed loosely, staying downwind of them, and a mile or so on down the road, they turned into a narrow lane and climbed a hill, riding out of sight. I went around the rise the other way and the land opened into a narrow valley where there was a farmstead with several horses grazing in a pasture. Horse thieves, my mind said, rapists.

By the time I got to where I could watch without being seen, a body lay on the front steps and screams were coming from the house. I could not see any men at all, German or British so I assumed they were all in the house or the red-painted barn. Suddenly a woman ran from the house's back door pursued by two Hessians. They tripped her and fell on her, tore at her clothes, laughing at each other. I debated briefly with myself, drew out my rifle, braced it on a sturdy stone fence, shot one of the men attacking the woman in the barnyard and then set about reloading as fast as I could. I just assumed I had hit him.

As I had hoped the trees and the wind made it impossible for them to spot my position, but there they all were, one kneeling by the fallen man behind the house and the others on the front porch, armed and scanning the woods and hills. The redcoat had a girl by the arm and another of the soldiers was holding a white haired woman. The woman who had run out the back door seemed to have disappeared.