Free The Widow's War by Mary Mackey

Amazon it rains constantly, but here the land can go for days without being thoroughly soaked. When rain does come, the result is a muddy gumbo that catches prints and dries like unfired pottery, so reading a trail isn’t much harder than reading a book of nursery rhymes.
    It takes skill for a band of men on horseback to leave no trace, and Henry Clark and his band of border ruffians not only know nothing about hiding their tracks, they have no interest in doing so. After they massacred my friends and took those I love best captive, they rode toward the Missouri border drunk on arrogance and cheap whiskey. I tracked them to Beau Rivage like an invisible ghost and killed three before they reached the river.
    Yet although I spread terror through their ranks, there were too many for one woman to defeat, so I had to return to Kansas for reinforcements. Clark’s Raiders are afraid of me now, but they still have their hostages. My greatest worry is that they will kill me, take the prisoners to a slave market, and sell them South. If they do, Ni has sworn to follow them to hell and back if necessary.
    Ni is a better scout than I will ever be. His slave name was Toby, but after he escaped from his master, he went to live with the Kaw Indians, whose name, he tells me means People of the South Wind. The Kaw treated him well, and before they were driven off their lands onto the reservation, they sent him on a vision quest. Now he calls himself Ni, which means water in Kaw.
    Like me, he has a special reason for risking his life: His wife, Jane, and his two little daughters are Clark’s prisoners. I say “wife” even though slaves are not legally permitted to marry. Jane is more Ni’s wife than I was ever Deacon’s even though I was fool enough to marry Deacon in church in a white dress, surrounded by flowers and witnesses.
    The courage of Ni and his companions humbles me. Even if I am captured, the slavers probably will not hang me, although the penalty for helping slaves escape is death. It would cause too great a scandal to execute a white woman, particularly the daughter-in-law of Senator Bennett Presgrove. So provided no one can prove I killed three of Clark’s men, I have a chance to survive. But the men who ride with me can expect nothing but execution or re-enslavement. At best they will be sold back into bondage, and they have all sworn to die rather than become slaves again.
    They are fifteen in number, all ages, some nearly as white as their masters, some dark as Africans. Two, Andrew and Charles, are actually African-born “saltwater slaves,” smuggled into South Carolina twelve years ago, although the United States government has outlawed the importation of slaves since 1808.
    John Brown secretly trained them to ride and shoot, and he trained them well. They were going to be the cavalry of his secret army, and he planned to have them lead the slave insurrection that he believes will ignite a second American Revolution. If they make it back from Beau Rivage alive, they may indeed help end slavery in the United States, but in the next few days their aim and mine is to end it on a much smaller scale.
    The oldest of my companions is forty-two; the youngest not more than fifteen. The fifteen-year-old’s name is Spartacus, by which you may deduce he was not named by his master. My friend Elizabeth Newberry named all three of her sons after the leaders of great slave rebellions: Prosser, Toussaint, and Spartacus. Nine days ago, Clark killed Prosser and Toussaint, so although I have pleaded with Spartacus not to ride with us, arguing that he is not old enough, he tells me defiantly that he is not too young to die if it means evening up the score.
    Spartacus and the others are armed with Beecher’s Bibles, those fine rifled muskets that New England minister Henry Beecher supplies to anti-slavery immigrants heading to Kansas. I doubt Reverend Beecher ever imagined his guns would fall into the hands of a guerilla band