The Rebels: The Kent Family Chronicles Read Online Free PDF

George Rogers, gone now three years, and the tad, William, still at the farm, only five.
    Why in hell wasn’t I born with red hair? he thought fuzzily as he rode. It was certainly a convenient excuse to relieve misery of the sort he’d encountered in Lottie Shaw’s cabin. And the different kind of misery he found along the dark, earth-smelling roads. Roads alive with memories of the friend who possessed some intangible quality of which he, Judson Fletcher of Caroline County, Virginia, had been unjustly deprived.
iii
    Judson had ridden the roan so hard, the animal’s flanks were lathering. A measure of sobriety returned when he noticed it. He reined in, dismounted at the roadside. He wandered aimlessly while the roan blew and stamped.
    Judson belched, scratched his crotch under his fine gray trousers. Be just his luck to catch the pox from Lottie.
    Suddenly he stumbled across something propped against the rail fence. He crouched, uttered a surprised oath, fingered a crude dummy of white rags and straw stuffing. A fragment of slate lay in the dummy’s lap.
    He carried the slate out from under the tree branches. Turned it this way and that. He finally made out the word scrawled on the slate. His spine grew cold.
    “Buckra,” he said. And again: “Buckra.”
    The West African word for white man.
    He dragged the dummy into the road. By the light of the moon and a thousand summer stars, he saw what he’d missed before. A wooden stake driven into the dummy’s chest. The hole was smeared with something dark.
    Judson knelt, fingered the smeared cloth and whittled stake. Little sweaty places formed on his neck and behind his ears. He tried to still his alarm by talking aloud:
    “Has to be chicken’s blood. Or pig’s—where’n hell you suppose it came from?”
    Abruptly, he heard hoofbeats down the road. He whipped his hand to his right boot, where a discreet scabbard in the Russian leather accepted a slim dagger. A gentleman’s protection. He retreated to the shoulder, unpleasantly sober—and cautious.
    He saw lanterns bobbing around a bend. Half a dozen riders. He stepped into the road, hailed them: “It’s Judson Fletcher—”
    The horses reined in. It was the patrol that kept constant watch on the roads for runaway slaves, rotating its personnel nightly. Mounted on a fine sorrel at the head of the patrol was slender, gentle-looking Seth McLean. Behind him, shabbily dressed, a gray failure, Tom Shaw slumped on a sore-ridden nag.
    Tom Shaw spoke first, pathetically polite:
    “Evenin’, Mr. Fletcher.”
    Judson’s profile, lantern-limned, was sculptured arrogance. “Evening, Shaw.” The reply was so brusque, Shaw looked visibly hurt. Judson accented the social difference by greeting the others more cordially: “Mr. Wells—Mr. Squire—Seth.”
    “Taking the air again, Judson?” Seth asked, his smile innocent.
    “That’s right.” Ah, this was rich! The man he cuckolded regularly, and the one he wanted to cuckold above all, and never would. “I found something down here you gentlemen should see.”
    He led them to the stabbed dummy and the slate. Concern was instantaneous.
    “I knew them niggers was up to somethin’,” Tom Shaw exclaimed. “My Lottie, she sweared she heard a drum two, three nights ago. That way. From the river—”
    “Impossible,” Seth McLean said. “You know there’s not a planter in the district who allows his nigras ownership of a drum. Too easy to signal with them. My hands get nothing but dried beef bones—those, they can rattle all they please.” He addressed the others: “Gentlemen, would you continue the patrol without me? I’d like to speak privately with my friend Judson. He may be able to assist us.”
    In what way, Judson couldn’t imagine. But the others seemed to understand, and readily agreed. Judson fetched his roan, mounted up, and was soon jogging beside Seth back along the road by which the horsemen had arrived. The patrol’s lanterns vanished in the