Rifles for Watie by Harold Keith Read Free Book Online Page A

well-known object as it lay sleeping in the bright Kansas moonlight: the little creek where he had trapped skunk and muskrat, his duck blind on the riverbank, the big oak tree where he had twisted the rabbit out with a forked stick. Now they seemed unimportant and far-away, like a child’s toys.
    A coyote’s melancholy wail floated in from across the river. Jeff saw the hair rise on Ring’s back. The big dog growled deep in his tawny throat, then whined and looked inquiringly at Jeff. But Jeff just reached down and patted him, then turned back toward the house. There wasn’t time for a hunt now.
    Next morning at sunup he was back on the military road, headed for Fort Leavenworth. As he passed John Chadwick’s place, he saw gray smoke curling from the chimney.
    Old Man Chadwick and one of his boys were yoking the oxen to the tar-hubbed wagon. Probably getting ready to go to the trading post, Jeff thought. He stopped a minute to tell them how John was getting along.
    John’s mother was anxious for news and gave Jeff a big drink of cold clabber milk. But the rest of the family seemed to regard him coldly, as though he had persuaded John to join up. He was glad to be back on the road again.
    Then the road became rockier, and the soil lighter and thinner. He was approaching the Gardner place. The brown corn had made a fair stand and was nodding in the warm wind. But the rows were so crooked you could tell that a woman had done the planting. Jeff glanced at the mean one-room log house and thought he heard voices. Then he stopped in surprise.
    David and his mother were standing in the yard. Mrs. Gardner looked tired. Apparently her faded blue sunbonnet failed to protect her plain, florid face from the sun. Like David and all the rest of her homely brood, she was red-haired, with splashes of orange freckles running over her face, neck, and arms.
    Glad that David was home safely, Jeff ran beneath the trees toward the house. As he came closer, he saw that David’s face was dirty and tear-begrimed, and his clothing torn, as though he had been living in the brush. Apparently he had just arrived.
    Mrs. Gardner was looking fiercely determined. Her red face was flushed, her mouth a tight line. Two of her children stood behind her, listening with curious concentration. Bobby was playing in the mud by the horse trough. Nobody paid any attention to Jeff.
    Mrs. Gardner said to David, “You walked sixty miles away from me to enlist and now you come crawlin’ back to tell me thet you’re tired of it and thet you wanta come back home. Well, it’s too late now to come back home. You’re in the army. That’s what you always wanted, so go on back to the army.”
    David’s blond brows wrinkled with anger.
    â€œI won’t go back,” he almost screamed. “I’ll go up into the hills an’ live before I’ll go back to the fort again.”
    His mother put her hands on her hips and stared at him with disgust. “You’ll go up into the hills!” she mimicked him scornfully. “You couldn’t live a week by yoreself up there. You’d starve or you’d get homesick. Or somebody’d turn you in as a deserter jest to make the thirty dollars the government would pay to anybody turning you in. Or the bushwhackers’d find you an’ kill you like a dog.”
    David sniffed and wiped his red eyes with the knuckles of both his dirty hands. His manner changed from defiance to pleading.
    â€œPlease let me stay here, Ma,” he begged. “I don’t wanta go to war. I git too homesick.”
    She shook her head and pointed to the road. “If yore brave enough to leave us and run off an’ join the army, then yore brave enough to go on back to the army. There’s the road. Take it.”
    The wretched boy looked at her incredulously, then broke into a fresh torrent of tears.
    â€œYou’re agin me, Ma,” he bawled bitterly. “I