Under the Stars and Bars Read Online Free Page B

boots.’
    Being a long-serving soldier, although he had always been employed as an officer’s servant, Dusty’s striker, Dick Cody, disapproved of the small Texan’s flouting of the Manual of Dress Regulations. So, to please Cody, he had agreed to wear breeches and boots that conformed with what amounted to the striker’s bible. At that moment, Dusty felt thankful that he had done so.
    Maybe the high heels of Texas range-boots held in the stirrup-irons with extra safety, or could be spiked into the ground when roping afoot, but they were pure hell to wear while walking any distance. The much lower heels on his cavalry-pattern boots would allow him to reach the sympathiser’s home without too much discomfort.
    Yells from the Yankees brought Dusty to a halt. They had only gone about half a mile, according to the sounds, but already knew they had been tricked. Then he heard the crack of a revolver shot, followed by a scream of pain. That sound did not emerge from human lips. For a moment Dusty stood, cold and angry, wondering if one of the Volunteers, furious at the discovery, had put a bullet into the stallion. Then he decided it was not so. Instead the sound reminded him of the squeal a pig made when it felt the prick of a butcher’s knife.
    Putting aside the question of why the Yankees would shoot at a pig, assuming one should be in the woods, Dusty walked on. He remained alert, giving his attention mainly to the area in which his enemies had disappeared. The precaution paid off when he saw two of the Volunteers riding in his direction. Darting into the concealment of a near-by clump of buffalo-berry bushes, Dusty crouched with the right side holster’s Colt cocked in his left hand. Going by their lack of response, the Yankees had failed to notice him walking along, or during his dive into hiding.
    Carefully parting a couple of branches with his right hand, Dusty decided that it would have been surprising if the Yankees had seen him. They rode side by side at a walk, making only the slightest pretence of searching the surrounding woods for the Rebel officer who had eluded them. Instead they talked to each other and, as they drew nearer, Dusty found their conversation enlightening.
    ‘ “Spread out, go back and look for him,” the stupid son-of-a-bitch tells us,’ growled the taller of the pair, a surly-faced hard-case who slouched like a sack of potatoes on his jaded, sweat-lathered horse. ‘ “Find him,” he says. “The peckerwood 7 bastard can’t have gotten far.” ’
    ‘He can’t have, Fred,’ the other Volunteer pointed out, almost apologetically.
    ‘Can’t hell, Simmy!’ spat the big man. ‘He could’ve dropped off his hoss any time ‘tween that valley and where we first saw he wasn’t on its back.’
    ‘I thought we’d got him when the luff 8 threw that shot into the bushes,’ Simmy declared, grinning broadly at the memory. ‘Lord! His face when that damned great critter bust out. What was it, Fred, a grizzly bear?’
    ‘Just you pair keep coming the way you are,’ Dusty breathed, studying the incautious approach. ‘You do that, and I’ll be riding again afore night-fall.’
    If the two Volunteers continued on their present course and without paying a greater attention to duty, they might easily supply him with horses, Bursting out of the bushes, he could throw down on them and either shoot, or make them dismount and surrender their horses. In ‘Fred’s’ case, it would probably have to be the former. There was a truculence about him that might be accompanied by a reckless imprudent nature. To achieve his intentions, Dusty wanted the men much closer before he made his appearance.
    ‘Naw!’ Fred answered. ‘It was a hawg of some kind!’
    ‘I never saw a hawg that size,’ Simmy protested. ‘Why it was as—’
    The ringing notes of a bugle cut off the words. With a feeling of annoyance, Dusty recognised the sound of the ‘Recall’. Reining their horses to a stop at a