“Let ’im loose!” shouted Jackson, struggling to be released from the arm locks of two men from the southern regiment. “He’s just a kid! Let ’im go!” His legs were tired and felt hot and weak. His arms were lashed tight behind his back and he thought for a fleeting moment that he could feel warm blood oozing down his wrists.
The first sergeant had Eddie by the top of his head, with a grip of hair in his fist, while another soldier held the boy’s legs off the ground. Eddie was struggling with the pain, but they would not hear a sound from his lips.
“I told ya to tell me who you are, kid,” snarled the sergeant. “Don’t you talk none, or is you just a scair’t Yankee squirrel? Ya know, a hungry southern man loves hunt’n squirrel. Loves to roast it slow over an open fire and then strip the meat right off the bones, slow and easy like.”
Eddie’s eyes were rolling back in his head. Jackson knew it was not from fear but with pain.
“Hey!” Jackson shouted. “Talk to me! I’m the one you want—not some scared kid. Come on over here, you stinking pig, and I’ll tell you what you want to know.”
The first sergeant, his face bloated with many nights of drinking bad alcohol, spit a mouthful of old, soggy, and mashed tobacco out to his side and looked sideways at Jackson. He let go of Eddie’s hair, and the other dropped the youth’s legs. The boy fell to the ground and rolled on his side, still not uttering a sound.
Ten war-weary and seasoned men were circling and milling around the scene, nervous with their knowledge of the officer’s bitter attitude and mean temper, but no one dared speak up against the uncalled-for roughness of the two boys not yet out of their teens.
With the back of his hand the sergeant wiped a damp smear of tobacco juice off the three gold stripes on his right sleeve, walked over to within a sour breath of Jackson, and stared through bloodshot, rheumy eyes. Jackson stood still and stared back. And then—Whack! The slap across Jackson’s face echoed through the quiet woods. A crow lifted from a high branch and fluttered away. Another fist lit into Jackson’s jaw with a muffled crack. One of the younger soldiers felt a bit of bile come up at the sight of Jackson’s bloodied face. Thurump! The sergeant’s huge fist armed with hardened white knuckles found its way into Jackson’s tight but empty belly, and the boy bent over with the pain despite being held up by his elbows. He struggled to find enough breath to spit out the blood in his mouth. The soldiers holding him shoved him to the ground, his face in the dirt. The sergeant walked up to Jackson’s side and laid a hard kick to his ribs.
Before Jackson even tasted the dirt in his teeth, a soldier with one eye patched and riding on a large, chestnut-colored, battle-weary horse, rode up to the tense group. The men in the clearing rustled their feet and looked to him with relief and alert respect. His good eye, pale and the color of a clouded, lonely summer sky, its lid heavy with caution and hiding his intentions, scanned the scene with a fleeting, covert glance.
“You don’t need to get so deep into the man, Watkins,” he said without demand or even much perceived interest.
He pulled his horse to a halt between the sergeant and Jackson. The horse settled its hooves, hoping for rest. The mounted soldier removed his soiled, wide-brimmed, black hat with its dirt-matted feathery plume, lieutenant’s braid, and tassel darkened with wear. He wiped his sweaty forehead with a tattered sleeve of his gray frock coat that was decorated with two black shoulder bars edged gold and one golden braid draped on his shoulder. Then slowly, as if it really didn’t matter much to him, he put his hat firmly back on his head, wiggled it until it sat right, and snubbed up the red sash around his waist. He leaned forward, relaxing his crossed arms on the saddle horn for a moment, before taking off his leather military gloves. He held both gloves in his right hand and slapped them on his thigh, releasing a slight rise of dust.
“But Lieutenant …” protested the sergeant.
The lieutenant stopped him with a lift of his gloves. “You’ve got him. Let it go now. The boys can handle ’em. They’ll get them under guard with the other prisoners. We’re getting up a fire over there.” He gestured again with his gloves. “About a hundred yards past that old locust patch. Come on over. I got a little hooch left in the medicine trunk, and if you can get yourself over there before thirsty old Petterson drains it all down himself, there might be a little left for you and me. How ’bout it?”
Eddie looked up at the rider in amazement. The first lieutenant, with a Georgia State Seal on his brass-plate belt buckle, looked back down at Eddie with a set jaw and an eye that drove deep into the boy with a clandestine warning not to speak.
Jackson rolled onto his side and struggled to see up into the face of First Lieutenant Cully Ingram.

***

"You’ll always have a place with us at Galway Farm,” he said.
What she wanted had become crowded and unclear in her mind. For as long as she could remember, she had dreamed of a sheep farm, Jackson, and children. But with all that she had experienced in the past three years her outlook had widened, her interests expanded. She yearned to stay involved in Washington, the city she had grown to love, and what it had to offer; theatre any night, art and history museums and art studios, many dress and millinery shops, bookstores full to the ceilings with wonderful old volumes, new books and magazines and newspapers from all over the world.
She had filled six volumes of her own journals and had just finished writing her first short story, addressing it to Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book, and sending it off to New York for possible sale. With writing each day she’d grown confident in her journalistic skills.