The Bloody Border Read Online Free

manner than many of her contemporaries. While receiving instruction in the normal womanly virtues and subjects, her education extended beyond those bounds. Possibly to make up for being unable to have a son, her father taught her many boyish skills. Being something of a tomboy, Belle became an accomplished rider—astride as well as on the formal side-saddle—skilled with pistol, shotgun, rifle or sword and very competent at savate, the combined foot and fist boxing of the French Creoles.
    Probably the skills would have been put aside and forgotten had it not been for the coming of the War. Shortly before the attack on Fort Sumpter occurred, a drunken rabble of Union supporters raided the Boyd plantation. Before the family’s ‘downtrodden and persecuted’ slaves drove off the mob, Belle’s father and mother lay dead and the girl was wounded outside the blazing mansion. Nursed back to health by the Negroes, Belle learned of the declaration of war and sought for a way to take her part. Her parents’ murder left a bitter hatred for Yankees that could not be healed by sitting passively at home—not that her home remained. So she eagerly accepted the invitation of her cousin, Rose Greenhow, to help organise a spy ring for the Confederate States.
    At first there had been considerable opposition to Southern ladies sullying their hands with such a dirty business as spying, but successes and the needs of the times gained their acceptance. While Rose concentrated on gathering information, Belle took a far more active part. Often in the early days she made long, hard rides through enemy territory to deliver messages and won the acclaim of old General Stonewall Jackson himself. More important missions followed, while Pinkerton and his U.S. Secret Service fumed, raged impotently and hunted Belle. Despite all efforts to capture her. Belle retained her liberty and struck shrewd, hard blows for the South.
    Standing in the darkness, Belle tried to study the two men who had saved her life and would be working with her on the mission that lay ahead. She knew little about them except that the Grey Ghost, Colonel John Singleton Mosby, claimed them to be the, best men available for her aids.
    Sam Ysabel belonged to that hardy brotherhood of adventurers who pushed into Texas and helped open up that great State. Objecting to the taxes levied by distant Washington on the import of Mexican goods, he became a smuggler running contraband across the Rio Grande. Then War came and he joined Mosby’s Raiders, to be returned to Texas for the purpose of resuming his old business when the Yankees took Brownsville. Many a cargo of goods brought in through the blockade and landed at Matamoros found its way to Texas, then on to the deep South, by Ysabel’s efforts.
    While none of the trio guessed it, young Loncey Dalton Ysabel was to achieve a legendary status equal to the Rebel Spy’s in the years following the War. 2 Left motherless at birth, the boy grew up among the people of his maternal grandfather. His mother had been the daughter of Long Walker, war chief of the Pehnane Comanche and his French Creole pairaivo , head wife.
    With Ysabel away on man’s business, the boy was raised as a Comanche and taught all those things a Pehnane brave-heart must know. 3 Under skilled tuition, he learned to ride any horse ever foaled, and get more out of it than could any white man. Ability with weapons, always a prime subject, took a prominent part in his schooling. While good with his old Dragoon Colt, he relied mostly on his bowie knife for close range work and called upon the services of a deadly accurate Mississippi rifle when dealing with distant enemies. In the use of both he could claim a mastery equal to the best in Mosby’s Raiders. Few white men matched his ability in the matter of silent movement, locating hidden foes or hiding undetected where such seemed an impossibility.
    All in all the Ysabel Kid—as white folks knew him— would prove as great