Rifles for Watie by Harold Keith Read Free Book Online

and skirting the fort until he encountered the military road leading south to Linn County.
    Jeff resolved not to report him. That way they wouldn’t miss him until after the morning roll call, and he would have at least two hours’ head start toward home.
    â€œI don’t understand why he didn’t wait,” he told John Chadwick. “We were both going home in two more days. I just don’t understand.”

   5
    Furlough
    â€œJeff!”
    His younger sister was the first to see him as he strode wearily into the yard just before sundown. Barefoot, she was sweeping the rock porch. She threw down her straw broom and with a glad shout ran to the house to tell the rest of the family. Then she returned, slamming the door behind her, to throw both arms around Jeff’s waist and hide her brown head under his arm.
    Bess and his mother ran out to join the happy homecoming and found Ring leaping and bounding all over Jeff. The big gray dog was so glad to see his young master that he grasped a cottonwood stick in his mouth and, whining and moaning with pleasure, ran around and around the woodpile with it, scattering the chips and kicking up small clouds of dust.
    Mary shouted with laughter. Emory Bussey hurried up from the barn. Grinning, he held out his hand.
    They sat up that night until nine o’clock while Jeff told them all about his new life in the army. To Jeff’s surprise, his father remembered Clardy from the Mexican War.
    â€œHe had the makings of a good officer, but he was a strange, vindictive fellow whom nobody trusted,” Emory recalled. “He turned very bitter when his own regiment, the Mississippi Volunteer Rifles, elected Jeff Davis colonel. Clardy wanted the job. He had set his heart on it. When they elected Davis, Clardy left the regiment and moved away from the South forever.” Jeff leaned forward, listening carefully. So that was why Clardy hated the mention of anything Southern.
    The family had more news for him. David Gardner wasn’t home. Jeff’s heart missed a tick when he heard that. Had David drowned, trying to swim back across the wide Missouri? Had he been captured by the soldiers or murdered by the bushwhackers?
    For supper that night, Jeff’s mother fried wheat biscuits in a pan and roasted sweet potatoes in the fireplace ashes. Best of all, she baked a delicious green-grape cobbler in her fireplace oven. For breakfast next morning they had “sweet toast,” home-baked wheat bread toasted in a pan over the fireplace coals. There was hot milk to cover it, and butter, salt, and sugar to add for taste.
    â€œMama, the army hasn’t got any cooks near as good as you,” Jeff told her loyally between gulps.
    She looked anxiously at him. “I don’t see how you can tell. You’re eating too fast to taste the food.”
    Jeff said, “I’m tasting it when it goes down.”
    His brief leave of one day and two nights at home passed all too quickly. He spent the morning helping his father thresh the wheat by hand, using two hickory clubs tied together with buckskin and letting the wind blow out the chaff. Early in the afternoon he helped Bess pack the eggs in bran, so they would be ready to take to the trading post. He went to the springhouse with Mary and helped her skim the cream off the cool milk and churn the butter. He helped his mother plait lampwicks and fry refuse pork, out of which to make the fuel oil for the lamps.
    Although all four of them were putting up a great show of being brave, Jeff couldn’t help noticing how they kept stealing pensive sidelong glances at him, as though they didn’t want to forget what he looked like. He wished he had thought to have a daguerreotype made at the gallery in Leavenworth so he could give it to them. Neither he, nor Bess, nor Mary had ever had their pictures made.
    Just before bedtime, Jeff took a short walk outdoors with Ring. He looked thoughtfully at each