The Tinsmith Read Online Free PDF Page B

know, neither army’s going anywhere just yet. Your dead horses will stay dead.”
    The civilian, a squat man in English riding breeches, glared out from under his slouch hat. He had a scruff of reddish beard, like a tilted crescent moon, running from ear to ear, framing what to Anson was one of the ugliest faces he’d ever seen. The cleft in the chin was dark and thick and gave the whole jaw a cloven hoof quality. The eyes were black and shining, tiny patters of grease. Briefly, the man curled his thin lips back and revealed a pair of sharp incisors. Then, with a curse, he savagely spurred his mount and charged straight at Rawley.
    To Anson’s amazement, his superior officer didn’t move out of the way. He simply widened his stance and leaned forward slightly, as if about to whisper a secret. With a wild, pealing neigh, the horse rose up, mud flinging off its hooves. Its rider’s grin almost split his face in two. Anson imagined the top of the skull was about to tear off at any second.
    Once the horse quieted and dropped to a standing position, its graceful white head yanking from side to side and up and down without rest, Rawley spoke.
    â€œIf you’re not careful, sir, your property, if you find it, will be gathering up your fine charger with all the other poor beasts. I suggest you water the animal.”
    The civilian leered out of his half-oval of beard as if out of a ring of fire. His voice came like a shout smothered by gunshot.
    â€œAnd if you’re not careful, I’ll have my niggers dump you in a trench with all the rest of this rotting Yankee flesh.”
    With a sharp snap of the reins, he reared the horse around and sped off westward. For a half-minute, Anson watched the man sink on the darkening horizon like a stone. Then a familiar voice brought him around.
    â€œCome on, back to it now.” Rawley buried his right shoulder into a scattering group of civilian onlookers, many of whom appeared to believe that their contribution to the Union cause amounted to standing around and gawking. There were at least a dozen of them, and they’d likely come down from the surrounding hillsides after the battle, as nonchalantly as if they’d chosen to stroll after a picnic. But the ladies, at least, in their feathered hats and wide-hipped gowns, were shocked enough to hold perfumed handkerchiefs to their noses. Anson could hardly abide the presence of civilians, but then, the war was still new to most people, still a matter of romance to be followed like a theatrical production. Try as he might, however, he could not appreciate the civilians’ looks of horror, for in these lay only the common sense human response to misery and death. To anyone, surely even to a general, the battlefield now was horrifying.
    He approached one of the men, a particularly delicate-seeming fellow in a clean linen suit and straw boater whose pinched face wore a curious mixture of superiority and disgust.
    â€œAs long as you’re here,” Anson said, “you might as well pitch in. You could take water to the men, at least.” He pointed to the ever-growing group of wounded lying flat on their backs or seated at the edge of the barnyard.
    The man’s nostrils dilated as he glanced at the wounded.
    â€œThank you, no,” he said. A crack of a rifle sounded in the far distance. The near-simultaneous loud groan of a soldier who was being lifted onto Anson’s table made it seem as if the man had been struck again. The sound backed the civilian away. He spoke softly to a pretty young woman with long flaxen hair who stood near him, her eyes wet, her chin trembling.
    â€œCome, Dora, I’ve seen enough to write my article.”
    A journalist! As far as Anson was concerned, there was no lower breed. But as he was about to call the man a scavenger, the pretty woman stepped forward, pushing back the ruffled sleeves of her gown.
    â€œI . . . I would like to help. I had