And One Wore Gray by Heather Graham Read Free Book Online

in the yard. Even her hair, so fiery with its auburn highlights, seemed too bright for this late afternoon.
    There, before her, hanging from the old oak, the big whitewashed swing miraculously remained. As if some spirit touched it, it drifted back and forth in the gray mist.
    The oak itself, to which the swing was tied, was riddled with bullets.
    Callie stepped from the porch. Her gray eyes were almost silver with the glistening of tears that covered them as she looked at the lawn, heavily laden with soldiers. She was horrified. She lifted her skirts and then swung around. It seemed that something had grabbed her hem.
    And so it had. There lay a hand, upturned. And the hand was that of a very young Confederate soldier. His eyes remained open.
    Atop him, as if caught in a last embrace, lay another soldier.
    This one in blue.
    Both so very, very young. Perhaps at peace, at last, entwined in blood and death.
    Where was the soldier she had held so briefly before? she wondered, gazing around the yard. She knew that she had touched life, something warm and vibrant in this field of cold damnation. And it had seemed so important that something, someone, survive the carnage. Trembling suddenly, she remembered his face. It had been a striking one despite the smudges of mud and black powder on it. Ebony dark, thick, arched brows, and lines clean and stubbornly strong. In death, his very strength and masculinity had held a haunting and gallant beauty.
    Perhaps the handsome cavalry officer lay beneath his fallen enemy, just like the two young soldiers near her feet.
    “Oh, God!” Callie whispered. Shaking, aware that more than the powder was bringing tears to her eyes, she sank low upon the balls of her feet and tenderly closed the eyes of both soldiers. She fought for some words, to mouth a prayer. She felt numb.
    She straightened and tried to look out across the mist of powder and the coming dusk.
    Where once the fields had been covered with near sky-high stalks of corn, they now were cleared, the corn literally mown down by bullets and cannonballs and canisters.
    Everywhere she looked, all over the beautiful, rolling countryside, there lay the lost. The strength and beauty of two nations—their youth. Their fine young men, their dreamers, their builders. All lost …
    The sound of hoofbeats brought her swirling around again, her heart seeming to leap to her throat. Out ofthe mist emerged a horseman. Who had taken the battle? Who was coming now?
    The horseman wore blue. Behind him rode others.
    The man saluted her. “Captain Trent Johnston, Army of the Potomac, miss. Are you all right?”
    She nodded. Was she all right? Could anyone stand in the midst of all this carnage and be all right? “I’m—I’m all right, Captain.”
    “Is there anyone else in the house?” he asked her.
    She shook her head. “I live alone. Well, I’ve three brothers. They’re all in the West.”
    “Union army?” Johnston asked her sharply.
    Callie felt a wry curl come to her lip. Maybe it was natural. A lot of soldiers had little faith in the loyalty of Marylanders. There was tremendous southern sympathy here. There had been riots in Baltimore when Lincoln had come through on the way to his inauguration. But she resented her loyalty being questioned when she had just spent two days hiding in her basement, and when both her father and her husband lay in the family plot down by the creek.
    “Yes, Captain. My brothers are with the Union. They asked to join up with companies fighting out West. They didn’t want to fight our immediate neighbors to the south here.”
    The captain’s eyes narrowed. He rose slightly on his horse, his heels low in his stirrups, and called out a command. “Jenkins, Seward, take a look at the men on the ground here. See if we’ve any Billy Blue survivors.”
    Two men dismounted and quickly looked to the fallen men.
    Callie stared at Trent Johnston. He wasn’t an old man. But time—or the war—had etched deep lines of