Read And One Wore Gray for Free Online Page B

could have done so.
    That meant only one thing. They had to be retreating. He would have to get through Yankee lines to return to them.
    He pressed his temples together hard for one long moment then managed to make it to his feet.
    As he staggered, it seemed that he was alone in the world.
    Alone in the world of the dead, he thought wearily.
    He looked to the house, then remembered the woman. The one with the amazing gray and silver eyes and the flow of hair like a deep rich sunset.
    He wasn’t alone.
    His Yankee angel was in there somewhere, very near. The sweet little beauty who had cradled him so tenderly until she had been reminded that he was the enemy.
    Pretty soon, Yankee patrols would be around to search for their wounded and to gather their dead.
    And capture any stray Rebs for their notorious prison camps.
    His fingers clenched into fists. He wasn’t going to any Yankee prison camp.
    He looked back to the house, and his lips slowly curved into a smile, wistful, bitter—determined.
    “Well, angel,” he whispered softly, “it seems that we are about to meet!”
    Slowly, silently—very carefully—he made his way toward the battered and bullet-riddled farmhouse. He kept low as he approached the porch. She might well have a loaded shotgun in there, and from the snatches of conversation he had heard, she was definitely on the side of the blue.
    He’d best go in by the back. He’d need to take her by surprise, and to have her understand that he very much intended to stay alive.
    He touched his head and winced. Had it hurt this badly before she cracked it down on the ground? And then kicked him?
    She’d looked like such an angel. He’d been sure that he’d died and gone on to the hereafter.
    He smiled wryly. His angel was going to keep him from the certain promise of hell!

————  
Two
  ————
    The last drumbeat had sounded. The shrill call of the bugle had ceased to blare. The battle was over.
    It was over, all but for the acrid smell of powder and smoke in the air, all but for the wages of war left strewn across the once green and fertile and peaceful farmland.
    For two days Callie Michaelson had sat down in her basement and listened to the horrible sounds of war. Once before she had heard the curious sound of silence, and she had ventured out, but there had only been a lull in the fighting, a shifting of the troops, and as she had been ordered, she had hurried back inside.
    How strange it had been to discover that the officer concerned for her was Eric Dabney! He came from a small town about twenty miles northeast of her. He had stood up for Gregory at their wedding, and the two of them had always been close friends. She had lost track of him since the war. He’d gone to military school as a very young man, and with Lincoln’s call to arms, he’d won himself a commission in the cavalry.
    Union cavalry had died here, she thought pityingly. Just as Confederate cavalry had died. And the only thing she had been able to do was to wait down in the basement.
    There had been nothing she could do for the men beyond her door. The men in blue, or the men in gray.
    Not once had it come again. That sound that was even more horrible, the sound of silence.
    But now, the battle was over. The ravages of war would be all that were left behind.
    When she emerged from her basement at last, she was first aware that the black powder from the guns and cannons still hung upon the air, thick and heavy.
    When she walked through her parlor and out on the porch, an anguish like nothing she had ever felt before came rushing around her heart. There were so, so many dead.
    The powder stung her eyes as she looked around her yard. Standing there, she felt a chill sweep her, for she seemed such a strange being in the midst of the carnage. She was dressed in a soft blue day gown with a fine lace bodice and high neckline. Her petticoats, a snowy white that showed when she walked, seemed incongruous against the blood and mud