The Cowboy MEGAPACK ®. Owen Wister

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СКАЧАТЬ it on triumphantly over a shirt which was a fringe of tatters. He plucked at the front of his own grimy shirt, and then felt around in the pocket he had so laboriously stitched beneath the belt of his breeches, to bring out one creased and worn bill. Spreading it out, he offered it to the man beside him. To loot an army warehouse was fair play as he saw it. Morgan’s command had long depended upon Union commissaries for equipment, clothing, and food. And a horse trade was something forced upon him by expediency. But he still shrank from this kind of foraging.

      “A shirt?” he asked wearily.

      The man glanced from that crumpled bill to Drew’s tired face and then back again. The sneer faded. He reached out, closed the scout’s fingers tight over the money.

      “That’s just wastepaper here, son. Come on!” Catching hold of Drew’s sleeve so tightly that the worn calico gave in a rip, he guided the other into the store, drawing him along behind a counter until he reached down into the shadows and came up with a pile of shirts, some flannel, some calico, and one Drew thought was linen.

      “These look about your size. Take ’em! You might as well have them. Some of these fellows will just tear them up for the fun of it.”

      Drew fumbled with the pile, a flannel, the linen, and two calico. He could cram that many into his saddlebags. But the store owner thrust the whole bundle into his arms.

      “Go ahead, take ’em all! They ain’t goin’ to leave ’em, anyway.”

      “Thanks!” Drew clutched the collection to his chest and edged back along the wall, avoiding a spirited fight now in progress in the center of the store. Mud-spattered men came bursting back, wanting to change their now ruined clothing for fresh. Drew stiff-armed one reeling, singing trooper out of his path and was gone before the drunken man could resent such handling. With the shirts still balled between forearm and chest, he led King away from the store.

      “Ovah heah!”

      That hail in a familiar voice brought Drew’s head around. Kirby waved to him vigorously from a doorway, and the scout obediently rehitched King to another rack, joining the Texan in what proved to be the village barber-shop.

      Kirby was stripped to the waist, using a towel freely sopped in a large basin to make his toilet. His face was already scraped clean of beard, and his hair plastered down into better order than Drew had ever seen it, while violent scents of bay rum and fancy tonics fought it out in the small room.

      “What you got there?” Boyd looked up from a second basin, a froth of soap hiding most of his face.

      “Shirts—” Drew dropped his bundle on a chair. He was staring, appalled, into the stretch of mirror confronting him, unable to believe that the face reflected there was his own. Skinning his hat onto a shelf, he moved purposefully toward the row of basins, ripping off his old shirt as he went.

      Where the barber had gone they never did know, but a half hour later they made some sweeping attempts to clean up the mess to which their efforts at personal cleanliness had reduced the shop, pleased once more with what they saw now in the mirror. They had divided the shirts, and while the fit was not perfect, they were satisfied with the windfall. Before he left the shop Kirby swept a half dozen cakes of soap into his haversack.

      Boyd was already balancing a bigger sack, full to the top.

      “Peaches, molasses, crackers, pickles,” he enumerated his treasure trove to Drew. “We got us some real eats.”

      “Hey, you—Rennie!” As they emerged from the barber-shop Driscoll trotted up. “The cap’n wants to see you. He’s on the other side of town—at the smithy.”

      Boyd and Kirby trailed along as Drew obeyed that summons. They found Campbell giving orders to the smith’s volunteer aides, some engaged with the owner of the shop in shoeing the raiders’ horses, others making up bundles of shoes to be slung from the saddles as they rode out.

      “Rennie”—the captain waved him out of the rush and clamor of the smithy—“I want you to listen to this. You—Hart—come here!” One of the men bundling horseshoes dropped the set he was tying together and came.

      “Hart, here, comes from Cadiz. Know where that is?”

      Drew closed his eyes for a moment, the better to visualize the map he tried to carry in his head. But Cadiz—he couldn’t place the town. “No, suh.”

      “It’s south, close to the Tennessee line and not too far from the big river. There’s just one thing which may be important about it; it has a bank and Hart thinks that there are Union Army funds there. We still have a long way to go, and Union currency could help. Only,” Campbell spoke with slow emphasis, “I want this understood. We take army funds only. This may just be a rumor, but it is necessary to scout in that direction anyway.”

      “You want me to find out about the funds and the river crossin’ near there?”

      “It’s up to you, Rennie. Hart’s willin’ to ride with you.”

      “I’ll go.” He thought the bank plan was a wild one, but they did have to have a safe route to the river.

      “You’ll move out as soon as possible. We’ll be on our way as soon as we have these horses shod.”

      Drew doubted that. What he had seen in the streets suggested that it was not going to be easy to pry most of the company out of Calhoun in a hurry, but that was Campbell’s problem. “I’ll need couriers,” he said aloud. It was an advance scout’s privilege to have riders to send back with information.

      Campbell hesitated as if he would protest and then agreed. “You have men picked?”

      “Kirby and Barrett. Kirby’s had scout experience; Barrett knows part of this country and rides light.”

      “All right, Kirby and Barrett. You ready to ride, Hart?”

      The other trooper nodded, picked up a set of extra horseshoes, and went out of the smithy. Campbell had one last word for Drew.

      “We’ll angle south from here to hit the Cumberland River some ten miles north of Cadiz, Hart knows where. This time of year it ought to be easy crossin’. But the Tennessee—” he shook his head—“that is goin’ to be the hard one. Learn all you can about conditions and where it’s best to hit that.…”

      Drew found Hart already mounted, Kirby and Boyd waiting.

      “Hart says we’re ridin’ out,” the Texan said. “Goin’ to cover the high lines?”

      “Scout, yes. South of here. River crossin’s comin’ up.”

      “No time for shadin’ in this man’s war,” Kirby observed.

      “Shadin’?” Boyd repeated as a question.

      “Sittin’ nice an’ easy under a tree while some other poor hombre prowls around the herd,” Kirby translated. “It’s a kinda restin’ I ain’t had much of lately. Nor like to.…”

      They put Calhoun behind them, and Hart led them cross-country. But at each new turn of the back country roads Drew added another line or two on the map he sketched in on paper which Boyd surprisingly produced from his bulging sack of loot.

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