The Fire Within. Lynda Trent
let me see what you have wrong with you,” she said in the gentling voice she used with hurt animals. She peeled off his uniform and tossed it into the corner. His chest was thick with muscles but his waist was lean. Under his pants he wore white cotton underlinen, now soaked with blood. She cut it away above the wound and studied it for a moment. “Gunshot,” she informed him. Gently she reached beneath his leg. “Thank goodness it went all the way through. I wouldn’t want to have to dig for it.”
She examined the long cut on his upper left arm. “Must have been a sword. That’s my guess. It looks too long for a knife wound as hard as you must have been fighting.” He gave no sign of having heard her at all, but she was talking as much for herself as for him. “You know? I think you really might live after all.” Until now she hadn’t been all that sure.
Going to the pump in the kitchen, she drew water in a pail, then went back to him. “I need to get you cleaned up. I’ve seen small cuts go bad if they’re not tended properly. I guess large ones would be worse.” She dipped a soft rag into the water and began to sponge the wound. “At least you’ve stopped bleeding.”
She glanced at his face. His eyes were closed and he seemed to be unconscious again. “It seems to me they should have looked harder for you since you’re the captain. I guess that means your side lost. My family would be glad about that. Papa is about as Confederate as they come.”
She paused. “Papa. What on earth am I going to tell my papa?” She went back to cleaning battle grime from the soldier. “I just won’t tell him,” she said to assure the wounded man as much as herself. She just hoped Mama or Bridget didn’t decide to pay her a visit any time soon.
As she washed him, she couldn’t help but notice how well built he was. Even relaxed, his muscles were strong and firm, and his hands were large and capable. There was a virility about him that reminded her of the pumas that occasionally wandered near the settlement. He might be equally dangerous. Megan wondered if her father would shoot a man in his condition, and decided it wasn’t worth taking a chance. After working this hard to save him, she wasn’t going to lose him now.
After hesitating, she cut off the other leg of his underlinen. Short pants on such a large man looked odd, but she couldn’t get him clean with them on and she was reluctant to cut them off completely. She tore up a sheet to make fresh bandages and went into the kitchen to make a poultice of herbs to place on the wounds. Then she bandaged him again. By shoving and pulling, she managed to get the soiled slicker out from under him. The quilt hadn’t fared badly so she left him lying on it and pulled another one over him.
“I’ll be back,” she said in case he could hear her. “I have some butchering to do.”
Although she was already tired, she went back to the clearing and finished the job she had gone there to do. She beat her family to the scene by minutes.
“I was hoping you’d know to come get some meat,” Jane Llewellyn called from one of the other carcasses. “This will taste just like beef once it’s cured.”
“Not to me it won’t. I hate doing this.” Megan wondered what her mother would say if she had any idea what she had been doing only minutes before.
“We won,” Bridget said as she helped Jane with the horse. “Papa saw the Yankees running for all they were worth and our boys chasing after them. I wonder if Patrick was one of them.”
“If our Patrick, or Seth for that matter, were within a mile of here, he’d come see us all,” Jane said. “He’s likely in the next state.”
“I sure hope he’s safe.” Bridget looked over at the stained grass. “You think he’s safe, Megan?”
“Sure he is. We would have heard if he wasn’t.” Megan tried to sound positive for her sister’s benefit. There was no one to send word to her prisoner’s family that he was alive. It was odd to think she had a Yankee prisoner at her house. At the time she hadn’t thought of it that way.
“Be sure and wash this meat before you hang it up to dry,” Jane reminded Megan. “It’s not like butchering a hog where we hang it off the ground to dress it out. You can’t keep it clean like this.”
“I know, Mama.” She glanced around the clearing. Some of the other women from the settlement were arriving and gathering meat for themselves. Megan hoped they would be able to get enough to feed them through the winter. “Once mine is fully smoked, I’m going to hide it in the woods. I’m not taking any chances on losing this, too.”
“Those Yankees will take anything,” Bridget said angrily. “Can you imagine our soldiers stealing from people that don’t have enough to eat as it is? They wouldn’t ever!”
Megan wasn’t sure this was true so she didn’t comment. She had been hungry often since the war started and she didn’t think a soldier would be all that particular if there was food for the taking. Bridget just couldn’t bear to think Patrick would do such a thing. And, knowing Patrick as well as she did, Megan wasn’t sure that he would. Patrick was as good a man as the Hollow had ever produced.
“Hurry and get through, Bridget. The soldiers might come back and we don’t want trouble from them.”
“They’re long gone from here,” Megan said quickly. “There’s no reason for them to come back.” She wondered if that was true. She didn’t know all that much about soldiers, but wouldn’t someone come looking for a missing officer? But, she reasoned, their side wouldn’t know he was missing and the other would assume he had been killed or captured. Maybe no one would come looking for him at all.
When she had all her tow sacks full, Megan started carrying them to the smokehouse. On each trip the grade seemed steeper. The other women had finished, by the time she made the last trip, and a few of their husbands or sons had come to help them carry the bounty home.
As her mother had taught her, Megan washed the meat, then packed it in salt. Fortunately they still had salt in the settlement. She had heard of a family beyond Raintree that ran out of salt and had to scoop dirt off the smokehouse floor to pack around the meat. The dirt had salt in it from other curings but she couldn’t see how the meat would ever lose its gritty flavor.
She hung the meat onto the iron hooks that were suspended from the ceiling, then brought some hickory wood from the woodpile. Taking care not to make the fire too large, she started one burning in the pit in the center of the tall building. Stepping out into the fresh air, she saw the room fill with silver smoke, then she shut the door and latched it against marauding animals.
When she went into the house, she stripped off her clothes and bathed by the cabinet. Putting on a wrapper, she went in to see about the soldier.
He lay just as she had left him, but she could see the gentle rise and fall of his chest. He wasn’t dead. Every hour he lived through put him that much closer to his recovery, assuming the wounds didn’t turn septic. His skin was hot to the touch so Megan got a bowl of water and a cloth and sponged his forehead. A fever wasn’t unlikely in such a situation and she wasn’t worried. All the same, she sponged him until he was cool to her touch.
She sat in the ladder-back chair and studied him. He was a big man and almost filled the bed. What would he be like when he awoke? It suddenly occurred to her that she was quite isolated from the others and that he might be dangerous if he wasn’t unconscious. She shook her head in her own answer. He had lost too much blood. It would be a while before he would give anyone much trouble.
After a while she went into the kitchen and lit a lamp. The glow filled the cabin and turned the log walls to warm gold. She started a fire in the fireplace and soon the chill was gone. Since she had left the bedroom door open, she knew the man would be warm enough even if he kicked off the cover. The cabin wasn’t that large.
Megan frowned slightly. The cabin wasn’t large at all. Where was she going to sleep? The soldier was on the only bed. She went to the back room and opened the door. It was used to store the things she didn’t need every day. The mattress from Seth’s bedroom was tied into a roll in one corner. He had brought