She stared at him determinedly. Percy knew full well that he could sway her by convincing her that she could save lives. “Percy, I’m not certain that I should abandon St. Augustine.”
“Ah, my dear! You can’t abandon St. Augustine. I will take over Julian’s practice in this house. You must stay here and assist me. There will be a skeletal force of volunteers just across the St. Johns River. We are both well acquainted with a certain cipher. If we can just keep them informed, which we should manage easily enough to do under the guise of medical necessity, we can still continue to serve the Confederacy.”
Alaina hesitated, memories of Ian still very strong within her heart.
And memories of Peter’s words to her. The war needed to end, to be over. And if she could do anything that might hasten the South to victory…
Or defeat?
She was good at espionage, she knew. And she knew her state, and the rivers, and the terrain.
Just as Ian did.
But Ian refused to see the duality of his position. He believed in the Union cause, and he had to fight for it. She believed just as passionately in the Confederacy. He would avoid bullets; she would do the same.
And he would never know anything about her activities.
He was known as the Panther, but very few people knew the identity of the Moccasin.
Yes, she would stay in St. Augustine. Just as she had been told to do.
Chapter 26
The Union had actually not hurried to occupy Florida—even though it had been pointed out frequently enough that the state was scarcely defended—because it was of so little strategic importance. The priority on the South Atlantic coast was Charleston.
But in spring 1862, Union General George McClellan decided that St. Augustine might as well be taken.
The first scout ship arrived off the St. Augustine inlet on March 8, leaving buoys in the channel for the ships that would follow behind. Four days later, Union Commander Rogers left the Wabash, flagship of Flag Officer Samuel Du Pont, in a small boat that flew a white flag.
Abandoned, left completely undefended, St. Augustine surrendered to the Federal forces without a whimper. Perhaps the surrender was made easier by the fact that the city had been down to its knees in financial woes. Without Northern tourists to fill the hotels and keep the merchants in business, it had steadily become almost impossible for the citizens to pay their taxes. City government had come almost to a standstill, and food had become as scarce as medical supplies.
Alaina took the carriage with Lilly and Sean, keeping a distance as Mayor Cristobal Bravo met Commander Rogers at the seawall. Rogers appeared quite dignified and assured the mayor and his council and the Unionists who gathered there that he was anxious to restore St. Augustine to the happy state of affairs it had enjoyed before the South’s rebellion.
Watching the event, Alaina felt her heart sink, because she could remember how Ian had told her all along that the South couldn’t possibly win the war. In St. Augustine that morning, it seemed true—for all the reasons Ian had stated. The Union could tighten a noose around the South. Starve the people. The Union had pharmacies and could produce life-saving drugs, just as the Union had the arsenals and the capability of manufacturing weapons. St. Augustine had been seriously weakened long before it had fallen to Commander Rogers.
She was glad, however, to realize that although the men of the town had given in quietly, a number of the women had chopped down the secession flagpole so that the union flag couldn’t fly from it. And one of the ladies, Hannah Jenckes, called the men who so willingly cooperated with the Union “a bunch of grannies.”
It didn’t matter. Within a few days, the Union had settled into St. Augustine.
And even when, a few days later, Federal troops pulled out of Jacksonville, they remained in St. Augustine.
The Union had apparently come to stay.
The Panther’s men rowed silently through the night, heading toward a landfall against a smooth stretch of beach a good fifty miles south of St. Augustine.
Sam Jones, in the front of Ian’s dinghy, shook his head. “Don’t see you how you’re gonna do it, Major. Can’t see a blasted thing in this darkness!”
“You’ll see. When the clouds lift, we’ve got a full moon,” Ian told Sam. “They’ll have been transporting heavy materials, and there should be a trail through the brush and foliage as clear as an ink line.”
The moon shifted obediently to Ian’s will.
“There!” he exclaimed triumphantly.
Sam stared at him, as if Ian might have had a bit of warlock in him.
Their dinghy beached, Ian lifted a hand, indicating that his men should come ashore quietly. The men moved quickly to hide their boats. He led the way, moving swiftly across the sand toward the patch of sea grapes and low brush that lined the beachfront. With such foliage, there would have been no way to move any number of men and materials without leaving a flattened trail.
Ian had seen it from the water.
“I’ll be damned, I’ll be damned,” Sam said.
“Wish we had the horses, Major,” Simon Teasdale complained with a sigh. “A cavalryman—walking the beaches. Sir, I ask you, what’s this war coming to?”
The men laughed.
“Quiet, men,” Ian warned. “There’s a mighty slim possibility of us running into other Union troops here. They have been saying that folks east of the St. Johns River are sympathetic to the Union now, but there still is a damned good chance of us coming upon a company of Rebs, so keep it quiet.”
“Yessir!” he heard in the night.
“Whichever side we come upon, I hope they’ve got some horses,” Simon grumbled.
Once again, they moved in silence.
They were after the goods taken off of the Stalward, a Union ship trapped by the Reb raiders just three days ago. The Stalward had been sunk; her cargo of ammunition, on its way to Key West, had been taken. They’d heard about the ship’s fate through her sailors who’d been set off in dinghies by the captain of the Rebel boat who had attacked them. Apparently the captain had admitted to knowing about the plans of Stalward, which had anchored off St. Augustine before starting her ill-fated journey south. Intelligence reports had named a Rebel spy who was somehow slipping information to the Confederate volunteers in the interior of the state—the east side of the St. Johns—and then to the blockade runners. Three ships had been lost since the Union had taken St. Augustine. The spy was called the Moccasin; Ian had seen broadsides posted in Union-held towns and bases. There was a reward out for the Moccasin—dead or alive.
Ian and his men had already been shipboard, heading north for a consultation with General Brighton, when word of the Stalward’s demise had reached them. A large cache of arms had been taken, and they’d been close enough to attempt to do something about it. There might be little opportunity to bring the weapons back, depending on the size of the Rebel forces they came up against, but if they couldn’t reclaim the arms, they could at least see them destroyed.
They followed the trail through the night, not a man complaining about the insects, the sharp foliage along the trail, the bog they traveled at one point. Near dawn, he called a halt for two hours, allowing his crew to catch an hour’s sleep, taking turns at guard duty.
Ian didn’t sleep at all himself. They were so close to St. Augustine, he felt that he could almost smell Alaina’s perfume, feel her flesh, taste her….
He lay in the darkness, eyes open, staring upward at the heavens and feeling as if beasts gnawed at his heart. This was war, and he had his part in it. But God knew, there were times when he wanted nothing more than to forget the conflict, times he prayed that someday, somewhere, he’d have a peaceful home and family again. The one night he’d slipped into St. Augustine seemed little enough to survive by now. Yet he’d held her, and in that time, whether he’d been a fool or not, he’d believed in what lay between them, in what strange bond had been forged by time and passion. He’d believed that she loved hi
m.
Even if he was equally certain that she’d damn well been guilty of some sort of espionage in Washington. And even if…
Even if he had the sinking feeling that she might well be involved in it still. The Moccasin. The name haunted him. He was afraid. Anxious to return to St. Augustine, and assure himself that all reports he had heard were true: His wife had remained in the city. She’d accepted no social calls from Union officers, but she had remained in the home his brother had rented, working with Dr. Percy, and neither had ever refused medical care to the occupying Union soldiers.
Still…
Ian knew Dr. Percy. He’d been a military physician in Washington in the days before the war, before his resignation, and he believed that every man owed his life to his country.
His country was now the Confederacy.
And Alaina was working with him, which could well mean that…
He didn’t dare dwell on the edge of suspicion and fear that had so recently come to haunt him.
“Major!”
He jerked up, looking at Sam, who had come creeping toward him. “Major, Billy just heard some noise … I think we’ve got our cache of weapons.” “Get the men,” Ian ordered.
Within seconds, his company of eight was awake and in formation and moving silently through the brush. Billy led the way, pointing out the wagons in a copse just ahead. They fanned out into the brush, watching, waiting. But it seemed that there was a lone sentry on, guarding the wagons, pacing back and forth, as if anxious to know himself why he’d been left alone so long.
“We rush him?” Sam asked.
Ian shook his head. “We want him alive. Get me Reggie.”
Reggie was his best sharpshooter, so precise with his aim that the men said he could knock the eye out of a mosquito at a hundred feet.
“Make him drop his weapon; I’m not trading his life for yours, but we’ve got to talk to him, find out why he’s hidden here—and how many other Rebs are near.”
Reggie nodded, dropped, took aim. He nicked the fellow cleanly in the upper arm. The man howled, dropping his rifle, gripping his arm, and looking around wildly. Ian moved in, Colt aimed at the man’s heart.
Man—he was little more than a boy. Ian felt a sudden sickness that his beloved state had been so ravaged by the war that now children were fighting. Thank God he hadn’t had to kill the youth.
The boy, tall and lanky but no more than twelve, stared at him with wide eyes.
“What’s a boy doing with a cache of weapons?” Ian asked him.
“I’m not a boy. I’m Private Elisha Nemes, Florida Volunteers!” the youth announced proudly. He had brown eyes, freckles, and wore a ragged slouch hat and huge brown overcoat. He lifted his chin, but he looked scared.
“Private Nemes, you must be a fine soldier to be trusted so,” Ian said, watching the boy shake, “but you’ve been captured now, by—”
“McKenzie,” the boy spat out. “You’re the Panther.”
Ian nodded. “I need to know where the rest of your party is, Private.”
The boy’s eyes darted nervously along the trail toward the north. “I ain’t telling you. I ain’t telling you nothing,” he said firmly. “Am I going to lose my arm?” he asked, face twitching.
Ian looked at Reggie. Reggie shrugged, then walked to the boy. “Major, how could you doubt me?” Reggie queried, smiling. “I gave him a flesh wound, no more. You just take care of that wound and you’ll be fine, young man.”
“Yeah,” Sam said softly. “He’ll live to lift a rifle again, and maybe die next time he’s fired on.”
“Where’s your party?” Ian insisted.
The boy stared at him, tremendous conflict raging through his eyes. Then he seemed to make a decision; not that he liked Ian, but that Ian might be better than some other evil that threatened him now.
“They went northward, yonder,” he said.
“How many?”
“Just three. They went…” he hesitated, then spat. “They went to decoy some Yanks away from the guns. Animal Yanks, beast Yanks! Fellows walked just down the next trail from us, saying as how all Rebs should be hanged, all of them. They think we were the ones shot up some Yanks out of St. Augustine last week; they think we’re a whole party of spies.”
“Are there spies in your party, Private?” Ian asked, his mouth suddenly very dry.
The boy hung his head. “Patriots, sir!” he said, lifting his head again. “Just patriots.”
“Simon, Billy, Gerald, secure the arms,” Ian said, “and take them and the boy back to the boats.”
“Am I going to a prisoner-of-war camp?” the boy asked.
“You’re going to St. Augustine,” Ian told him.
“It’s in Union hands.”
“From there, someone is going to find your mother.”
In all the time they’d been with Elisha Nemes, he hadn’t looked quite so scared. Ian smiled. Once his mother got her hands on him, Elisha Nemes was probably safely out of the war for the next several years at the very least.
He turned to the rest of his men. “Let’s find out what the hell else is going on here.”
His men fell into step behind him and they started north, as Elisha Nemes had directed. They moved quickly, and within a half hour they started to hear the men ahead.
“Bloody Reb! Cut him, Captain, cut him. Hell, we’re going to hang and bury the bastard anyway. Who the hell’s going to know the difference? This is God’s will.”
Ian looked back at Sam and the others. They pulled out their guns, ready to slip silently into their fan formation around the copse ahead.
Ian ducked low against the brush and moved forward to stand behind a thick pine. He leaned against the tree, quickly counting the Union soldiers in the group. Ten of them. They’d been on horseback, but now three of their horses were lined up beneath the huge overhanging branch of an old oak—and there three Rebel prisoners were seated atop the horses, hands tied behind their backs, nooses around their necks. The Federals were so busy urging their leader to torment their prisoners that they were oblivious to the men encircling them.
“God’s will?” Ian murmured. Because the Union men were behaving despicably.
He nodded to Sam, then stepped from the tree, his Colt aimed at the sergeant, a middle-aged man with graying hair and a cumbersome gut.
“Sergeant! What in God’s name is going on here?”
The captain’s company spun about, all reaching for their weapons, then hesitating as they saw him and the rest of his men stepping from the brush.
“It’s Yanks!” someone called with relief.
Ian approached the sergeant.
“I’m in charge here, Major!” the sergeant called out, sounding both aggravated and wounded.
One of his enlisted men stepped forward. “These Rebs murdered a bunch of our fellows just last week. Why, the boys had been asked to a dance at the Framington plantation, and they were shot down in cold blood on the way back, and these are the bastard Rebs who did it.”
“How do you know that?” Ian demanded.
“ ’Cause the fellow on the third horse admitted it.”
Ian walked around. Two of the prisoners had their heads down. The third, a man of about thirty with a gaunt, dignified face, returned Ian’s stare.
“Is that true?” Ian asked the man.
The man sighed. “Major, I’m not a murderer, and I’ve never shot anybody down in cold blood. We’re Rebs, sir, and that’s a fact, and we engaged fairly with those boys when they left the Framington place. They were killed.”
Ian nodded, turning to the sergeant.
“Cut them down.”
The sergeant stiffened. “You’re not going to just let them go.”
“No, sir, we’ll bring them in as prisoners of war.”
“Major, you don’t understand what’s going on here. We took them fair and square, just like they took our fellows.”
“We’re soldiers, not the law!” Ian spat back.
&nbs
p; “Damn it, Major—”
“That’s damned right—I’m Major McKenzie, and I’m giving you a direct order.”
“Major,” the sergeant protested, “the skinny one at the end there—the pretty-looking, girlish fellow—is a spy and we know it! Corporal Ader over there is the one survivor from the dance, and he saw the fellow slinking away from the party right before our folks were ambushed. We’re allowed to hang spies, sir. In fact, I have direct orders to do so! I’ll show you, sir!” He walked toward Ian, producing a frayed paper from his coat pocket. Ian took the orders and saw that they had been written by a Colonel Hirshhorn. There was a statement within the orders saying, “The capture of all spies engaged in direct action against any member of the United States military may be punishable as seen fit by the officer in command, not to exclude an instant death penalty for those whose actions directly involved the death of U.S. military men.”
Ian shook his head, handing the paper back. “Sergeant, I’m now the officer in charge here, and there isn’t going to be any hanging done by a damned lynch mob of rowdy soldiers. Now I’m telling you one last time to cut these men down!”
“Yessir!” the sergeant said, saluting stiffly.
But then a gun suddenly discharged.
Ian swung around to discover who had so recklessly disobeyed his order, but he could see nothing because the frightened horses beneath the oak reared and bolted. The Reb prisoners began to swing…. “Cut them down!” Ian roared, with such a fury that even the sergeant’s men scurried to obey, scampering up the oak to slice the ropes. Reggie, with Ian, took aim and shot through the farthest rope, and the skinny fellow fell limply to the earth. A second later, all of the men were down. Ian first approached the man he’d spoken with, but there was no saving him; his neck had been cleanly broken. The next fellow was equally dead.
The third, brought down so quickly by Reggie’s well-aimed shot, might stand a chance.
Ian hunkered down by that Reb, whose face was now in the dirt. He frowned as he saw clipped, blue-black hair, uneasiness churning in his gut even before he turned the fellow over.
The Reb had been wearing a huge slouch hat and an encompassing coat. Now the hat was gone. And the Reb’s face was fully visible.