"Wash it off and give it to the skull-thrower," he said.
"That little nigra boy?"
"Yes."
"Why would you be doing that, Kunnel?"
"He's intelligent and brave. You never make a future enemy of his kind if you can avoid it."
"I'll be switched if I'll ever understand you, Kunnel," Hatcher said.
Jamison flipped his reins idly across the back of his hand. The day you do is the day I and every other plantation owner in the South will have a problem, he thought, and was surprised at his own candor.
WILLIE Burke had long ago given up the notion of sleeping through the night from dark to dawn. His dreams woke him up with regularity, every one to two hours, and his sleep was filled with images and feelings that were less terrifying than simply disjointed and unrelieved, like the quiet throbbing of a headache or an impacted tooth. Tonight, as he slept under a wagon behind a farmhouse, he dreamed he was marching on a soft, powdery road through hills that were covered with thistle and dead grass. Up ahead, a brass cannon, its muzzle pointed back at him, flopped crazily on its carriage, and brown dust cascaded like water off the rims and spokes of the wheels.
His feet burned with blisters and his back ached from the weight of his rifle and pack. He wanted to escape fom the dream and the heat of the march into the cool of the morning and the early fog that had marked each dawn since he had begun walking back toward New Iberia from Natchitoches in northwestern Louisiana. In his sleep he heard roosters crowing, a hog snuffing inside a railed lot, horses nickering and thudding their hooves impatiently in a woods. He sat up in the softness of the dawn and saw a pecan orchard that was still bare of leaves, the trunks and branches wet with dew, and the dream of the brass cannon barrel flopping crazily under a murderous sun gradually became unreal and unimportant, its meaning, if it had one, lost in the beginning of a new day.
He got to his feet and urinated behind a corncrib, then realized he was not alone. Between thirty and forty mounted men moved out of the fog in the pecan orchard and formed a half circle around the back of the farmhouse.
They wore ragged beards and bayonet-cut hair. Their elbows poked through their shirts; their pants were streaked with grease and road grime, their skin the color of saddle leather, as though it had been smoked over a fire.
The leader wore gray pants and a blue cotton shirt and a cavalry officer's hat that had wilted over his ears. A sword inside a leather scabbard and a belt strung with three holstered cap-and-ball pistols were looped over his saddle pommel. Even though the morning was peppered with mist, his face looked dilated, overheated, his eyes scalded.
"You Secesh?" he asked.
"I was," Willie replied.
"I've seen you. You was looting the body of one of my men at St. Martinville," the guerrilla said, his horse shifting under him.
"You're wrong, my friend. I won't be abiding the insult, either."
The guerrilla touched his horse's side with his boot heel and approached Willie, leaning down in the saddle to get a better look. His eyes were colorless, filled with energies that seemed to have no moral source. His coppery hair was pushed up under his hat, like a woman's.
"You know who I am?" he asked.
"I think your name is Jarrette. I think you rode with William Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson and helped burn Lawrence, Kansas, to the ground," Willie said.
"You got a mouth on you, do you?"
"I saw your handiwork on the St. Martinville Road. Your men give no quarter."
"That's life under a black flag. We recognize no authority except Jehovah and Jefferson Davis. What's inside that house?"
"A woman with a gun and a three - or four-day-old corpse." The guerrilla leader stared at the house, then looked in both directions, as though he heard bugles or gunfire, although there were no sounds except those of a rural morning and the buzzing of bottle flies inside the house.
One of the guerrilla leader's men leaned in the saddle and whispered in his ear.
"We was here?" the leader said.
The other guerrilla nodded. The leader, whose name was Jarrette, turned his attention back to Willie. "I don't want you walking behind me," he said.
"The war's over," Willie said.
"The hell it is."
Jarrette's face twitched under his hat. He glared into the distance, his back straightening, his thighs tightening on his horse. Willie looked in the direction of his interest but saw nothing but gray fields and a fog-shrouded pecan orchard.
"I gut blue-bellies and fill up their cavities with stones and sink them to the bottoms of rivers. Jayhawkers get the same. You saying I'm a liar?" Jarrette said.