I don’t see why she has to get so mad! After all, it was only an old show!”
Tom Majors looked across the field desk at Jeff. Tom had become an aide to his father, had procured a new uniform, and looked very handsome. A week had passed since he’d arrived in Richmond with Leah and Esther, and during that time he had noticed that Jeff was getting grumpier and grumpier.
Putting his turkey-quill pen down, Tom leaned back in his chair and studied his younger brother. “You’ll have to remember that girls have sensitive feelings,” he remarked.
Jeff lifted his heavy eyebrows in a gesture of surprise. “Well, what about me? Don’t you think I’ve got any feelings?”
Tom grinned abruptly. “No, I don’t think boys are supposed to have feelings. They’re like pigs and dogs. They don’t really get angry or upset or get their feelings hurt.”
“What are you talking about? Even dogs get their feelings hurt. I remember the time you fussed at Old Blue for not treeing any squirrels, and he went around for a week with his tail between his legs.”
“Yes, but Blue was an unusual dog. He was far more sensitive than you are, Jeff. You’re supposed to be a tough Confederate soldier, and here you are worried about little things like your girl being mad at you.”
“She’s not my girl!” Jeff said and clenched his teeth. “We’re just good friends, so I don’t see why she has to get mad at me just because I took Lucy Driscoll to an old minstrel show!”
Tom picked up the turkey quill and dipped it into the ink. He stared at the pen and said, “Did you know that right-handed people have to have quills from the right wing of the turkey in order to make the ink flow right?”
Jeff stared at his brother as if he had lost his mind. “Tom, here I am having a crisis, and you’re giving me a lecture on which side of a turkey wing a quill comes out of! Who cares? What I want to know is, how am I gonna talk sense into Leah!”
“Why don’t you give her a present? Some candy or some perfume or something like that would be good.”
Jeff paused and thought about it. “Nah, that wouldn’t work.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I already tried it.”
Jeff stood up and stomped out of the tent, leaving Tom half amused and half troubled over his younger brother’s problems. He wrote steadily for some time, and then his father came in. Tom stood to his feet, saluting him sharply. “Good morning, Colonel Majors!”
“Good morning, Sergeant!” The colonel looked approvingly at his son’s natty new uniform. “That’s probably one of the last new uniforms in the whole Confederacy. It looks a whole lot better than mine.”
Tom looked down self-consciously. “I feel like a fake, really. Wearing a uniform when I know I’m not going to be doing any fighting.”
Nelson Majors sat on a camp chair and looked over the work that Tom was doing. “It takes more than people shooting guns to win a war. You know that, Tom. Somebody’s got to make the guns and the bullets—and get them to the front. You’ve been a great help to me since you’ve come back. It’s going to be a real job to get this army ready to face Grant.” Leaning back in his chair, he brushed a hand over his coal-black hair. “People never think about how hard it is to move ten thousand men from point A to point B.”
“Especially when most of the railroads aren’t working, and we don’t have any horses.”
“Right! Now, Stonewall Jackson, he was a genius at that sort of thing.”
Tom grinned ruefully. “Yep, if he didn’t kill us first, he’d get us to where he wanted us, all right. That man sure didn’t have any patience with anybody who dropped by the way.”
“No, he didn’t. He was tough—but the best general that I ever saw.”
“Better than General Lee?”
“He was General Lee’s right arm. But he couldn’t do what Lee’s doing, like making things smooth with President Jeff Davis. Talk about somebody having sensitive feelings! Our president’s as sensitive as a man without a skin.”
Tom blinked. “Oh, that reminds me. Jeff and Leah are still carrying on with that feud of theirs.”
“They’ll get over it.”
“Sure, I know that, and you know that, but Jeff doesn’t know that. He thinks it’s going on forever. Growing up is pretty hard, Colonel.”
Nelson Majors looked over at his tall son and smiled briefly. “I don’t know if I’ll ever get either of you raised.” He hesitated, then added, “You haven’t said anything about Sarah since you’ve been back.”
“Yes, I have. I told you she was doing well.”
“That’s not telling me about her.”
Tom knew exactly what his father wanted to know, but he did not choose to talk about it. He also knew he would have to sooner or later, but now he just said shortly, “We’re not engaged, Pa.”
“I thought you wanted to marry her.”
“I don’t want her to marry a man with only one leg. She deserves better than that.”
“That’s her decision, Tom, not yours.”
Tom looked at his father with surprise. He respected his father’s opinion greatly. “Well, Pa,” he said lamely, “I just don’t want to handicap her.”
“Suppose she’d lost a leg. Would you still want her?”
“Why, of course I would, but that’s different.”
“It’s not a bit different!” Nelson Majors argued. “Love is more than an arm or a leg. It’s for better or for worse.”
“Well, if an accident comes after marriage, that’s true. But there are lots of men that would like to marry Sarah, and she deserves the best.”
“I think you are the best, Tom, and you ought to give this matter serious thought.”
“Well, I don’t—”
“I’m looking for Colonel Nelson Majors!”
Both men looked up as a woman appeared almost magically at the opening of the tent. She was not a large woman, and she was not more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight, Tom estimated. And she was very pretty. She had bright red hair and eyes a strange shade of blue-green. Her face was oval, and she had a dimple in her right cheek even when she wasn’t smiling—and she wasn’t smiling now. There was an angry look on her face.
The colonel said, “I’m Colonel Majors. May I help you?”
“I want to speak to you—alone!”
“Sergeant, would you leave us alone?”
“Yes, sir!”
As soon as Tom was out of the room, Nelson Majors said, “Will you have a seat, Miss …”
“It’s Mrs. Mrs. Eileen Fremont, and I don’t need a seat to tell you what’s on my mind!”
Nelson had been admiring the beauty of the woman, for she was indeed very attractive. However, he felt uncomfortable with the anger he saw in her eyes. “What’s troubling you, Mrs. Fremont?”
“I’ve come to complain about the way my brother-in-law is being treated.”
“Brother-in-law?”
“Yes, he’s in Libby Prison here in Richmond. I’ve come all the way from Louisiana to see him.”
“Your brother-in-law was in the Federal Army?”
“Yes, he was!” Eileen Fremont’s chin rose in determination. “There are quite a few of us from the South who have relatives in the Yankee army.”
“I understand, Mrs. Fremont. I come from Kentucky myself, and many of my friends and some of my family decided to stay in the Union.”
“Have you been to Libby Prison, Colonel?”
“No, ma’am.”
“It’s a disgrace! They treat the men there worse than we treat pigs back in Louisiana! Men are sleeping on the ground without a single blanket! The place is filled with lice, and the food isn’t fit to feed a hog!”
Nelson Majors felt definitely ill at ease. “Well, I’m sorry to hear that, Mrs. Fremont. But actually that’s out of my department. You will have to see the head of the prison—”
“I’ve tried to see him, but he won’t let me in!”
“I expect he’s very busy.”
Mrs. Fremont’s eyes glinted. “I saw him at a restaurant. He was eating himself into the grave. He’s fat as a pig, and he looks, more or less, like one!”
“Did you speak to him, Mrs. Fremont?”
“I walked right up to him and told him what I thought, with everybody in the restaurant listening.” A smile touched her lips briefly. “He wouldn’t see me in his office, so I had to see him wherever I could.”
Nelson found the scene amusing but did not allow that to show on his face. “What did he say?”
“He told me to get out of the restaurant. That I was nothing but a Yankee sympathizer. When I refused to go, he asked the manager to take me out. Which he did.”
Nelson hesitated. This was far outside his sphere, and he was burdened with the responsibility of getting men ready to fight. He knew from rumor that the prisons in the South were bad, and he was aware that those in the North were equally bad. He tried to explain this to the woman, but she stood, feet planted, eyes glinting, simply waiting for him to finish.
Finally he said, “So you see, Mrs. Fremont, there’s nothing much I can do to help you. Perhaps I could give you a note to give to the commander of the prisons—”
“And what good would that do?”
In all fairness, he knew that it would do no good at all. “The problem,” he said, “is that we’re having trouble feeding ourselves, Mrs. Fremont. So, of course, we have little food to spare—or blankets either, for that matter. Perhaps I could help your brother-in-law a little. I believe I could scare up a blanket or two.”
His offer seemed to ease some of the fury in her eyes. Still, her lips were tightly pressed together. She said, “It’s going to take more than a blanket. He’s very sick, and he’s going to die if he doesn’t get help. He needs to be in a hospital.”
“I’m sure that’s been considered—”
“Considered? A man’s dying, and you’re considering whether to put him in the hospital?” Eileen Fremont’s eyes lit up again, and for the next five minutes she told Colonel Majors exactly what she thought of him, of the whole Confederate prison system, of Jefferson Davis, and of everyone else. Finally she said, “I’m sure nothing will come of this, so no thanks to you, Colonel!” She turned and stalked out of the tent.
As soon as she disappeared, Tom came back in, his eyes wide with astonishment. “That lady sure knows how to say what she means, doesn’t she?”
At that instant Lieutenant Logan stepped inside, a grin on his face. “I caught the last of that one, Colonel. I think I’d rather face Yankee cannons than a lady like that!”
“The woman’s unreasonable!” Colonel Majors said. His feelings had been scraped raw by her accusations. “What does she expect me to do? I expect she’s just a Yankee sympathizer.”
“No, I know a little bit about her,” the lieutenant said. “She’s been waiting around the prison. I was there the other day talking to one of the guards. He told me about her.”
“What did he say?”
“Actually, it’s pretty sad. Her husband joined up at Bull Run, and he got killed at Shiloh, so she’s a widow. I guess she and her brother-in-law were pretty close. She’s for the South all right, but she’s one pretty tough lady.”
“I never could stand a woman with a temper,” Colonel Majors said.
“Well, sir, you’d better get used to this one because she’ll probably be back.”
“I hope not! If she does, just tell her that I’m kept pretty busy, will you, Sergeant?”
“I’ll tell her, Colonel,” Tom said. “But she doesn’t seem to me like the kind of woman that would listen to a lowly sergeant.”
Nelson Majors looked at his son quickly to see if he was being ridiculed, but he could see nothing on Tom’s smooth face. “Well, I’m sorry for her, but there’s nothing I can do. If she comes back, try to shift her off to somebody else, all right?”
“Yes, sir, I’ll do all I can.”
Later, when he was explaining all this to Jeff, Tom said, “I never saw Pa so shook up. He can face a charge with bare bayonets, but that little red-haired lady sure did shake him up.”
“I’d like to have seen that.” Jeff grinned. “Maybe he’d understand my problems with Leah a little better.”
“I don’t think Leah ever loses her temper like this woman did. I’ll tell you what—she came in there looking like a bear. A pretty bear, I must admit, but all the same I hope she doesn’t show up again.”