Free The Sentinels of Andersonville by Tracy Groot

looked about. “You there! Yes, you   —come over here. What’s your name, son?”
    “Emery Jones, sir. Corporal, 22nd Alabama.”
    “What are you doing, wandering around?”
    “Just got here. Delivered a prisoner.”
    “Headin’ back to Macon?”
    “No, sir.” The corporal looked back at the stockade. “No, I am not.”
    “I’m Keppel. You’re to report to me. This girl’s taken with the heat. Help that boy get her home.”
    “I should let her father know   —” Dance began.
    “I’ll inform the doctor. You don’t bother him. He’s got a horse and buggy in town. Have Swedberg hitch ’em up and get her on home. Stop at the depot and get her some water.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “I’ll get someone to take your place. Get along, boys. Get her that water, first thing. Jones, report back to me this evening, I’ll get you assigned.” He looked once more into Violet’s face. “You just take good care of her. That there’s the daughter of Dr. Stiles.” His voice had the tone of someone who had taken off his hat.
      —
    They were halfway to Americus, an hour on the road, before it occurred to Dance to introduce himself to the corporal from Alabama. Neither had spoken much, and Violet had not spoken at all. The blond fellow drove, perched in the seat in front. He seemed as moodily preoccupied as Dance. It was a good thing Keppel had sent him along. Dance could not have managed both Violet and the horse.
    All the way to the train station for water, and then to the corral for the buggy, Violet clung to Dance as if letting go meant falling off a cliff. Her shoulder just fit under his arm, and both arms circled his waist. It made for awkward walking. Once situated in the back of the carriage, she clutched his arm.
    He knew what this clinging was; all had come apart at the seams, and she ran for safety like a deer from a forest fire, found it in the only familiar place around.
    You are always certain of a dark motive in others, she had once accused him, and she was right. All this time he’d thought she knew how bad things were and had been playing a game of pretty ignorance. How wrong he’d been. The day he made Violet mad, he thought he had gotten to her core; now he knew he had not seen it until this day.
    Sitting beside Violet, even in her disheveled, staring state, he knew things were right for the first time in a very long time. Right for her and right for him. For Violet was genuine. And if the ways and means committee that constituted a genuine Violet was too drum-banging and earnest for his taste, it didn’t matter. The anvil on his chest was gone, because she knew the truth of the prison, and he knew the truth of her.
    “I’m Dance Pickett,” he said to the man with the reins. “And no, I am not.”
    “You’re not what?”
    “Related to George.” People were forever wondering, if not asking outright, whether he was related to the general who had led the ill-fated Pickett’s Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg.
    “Emery Jones, 22nd Alabama Volunteers.”
    “Georgia militia. Feel free to despise me.” The army regulars hated the militia, especially the volunteers. Joe Brown’s pets, they called militiamen. If that was the case, being the son of J. W. Pickett made Dance his lapdog.
    “I don’t despise you,” Emery said absently. “I don’t know you yet.”
    He checked Violet, because her grip had loosened. The carriage, an expensive affair which had splendid suspension, swayed gently on the road. That and the rhythmic clop of the horse’s hooves and the darkened interior had put her almost to sleep.
    “What happened there?” Emery asked, his voice hollow. “That ain’t us.”
    “It’s some of us.”
    “The fellow I was escorting, I told him it wasn’t true, all the rumors about Andersonville. It made a liar out of me.”
    “You weren’t even in the pen. That’ll make Beelzebub out of you.”
    Emery wore a red-checked shirt tucked into brown trousers. His slouch hat sat