Free Triumph by Heather Graham

might not. But the strange Yankee seemed to go by gut instinct as well. He went striding by Tia and straight into the cabin, his Colts secured to the gun belt at his waist, his Spencer held easily in his left hand.
    Easily ...
    She was certain he could spin it around and fire in seconds flat.
    She followed behind him quickly.
    No lie had been spoken by Trey McCormack, the eighteen-year-old standing by Stuart Adair, one of the two patients. He had been laid atop a rough wooden workbench where Trey kept shifting to put more pressure on his friend’s bleeding calf wound. Hadley Blake, the second wounded man, had passed out, and lay with his head supported by a saddle blanket in a corner of the dusky cabin. Gilly Shenley, one of the unwounded recruits, searched the cabin for a proper stick with which to form a tourniquet for Stuart’s dangerously bleeding wound.
    “Move, boys, let me see the source for that,” the Yankee commanded. They stood dead still, staring at him.
    “Move!” he snapped.
    And they did.
    Tia almost cried out as she watched him grip Stuart’s calf and survey the damage. He stared at her. “Come on, Miss Godiva, you’ve surely had some medical training! Get some bandages ripped, a tourniquet going—”
    “Can’t find a sound stick—” Gilly complained.
    “Break up that old broom over there. Come on, lad, a young thing like you can surely snap that pine bough!”
    Gilly did as told. Tia quickly ripped up her hemline, glad that he meant to do his best to save Stuart’s life, humiliated that he was telling them what to do. Hell yes, she knew her business, and if he hadn’t steered her away from her boys, they wouldn’t be in this predicament! She could have stopped the bleeding; she’d worked with her brother through the majority of the war, and she’d dare say she was as competent and efficient as most surgeons in the field.
    Still, he was more efficient, she had to admit. Within seconds, a tourniquet had been fashioned, and the bleeding was slowing. A few seconds more, and it was coming to a halt. And he was telling them how to release it. She was glad she hadn’t stopped him, or made any comments. What mattered here was not who did what, but that a man’s life had been saved.
    “Private Gilly, there, is that your name?” the Yankee asked.
    “Private Gilly Shenley, sir!” said the boy, a straw blond with a sad little scraggle of chin whiskers. To Tia’s sheer annoyance, he then saluted.
    “I need you to go to the brook and bring me back a large quantity of the moss that forms on the stones there. We’ll put some new stitching in here and get a poultice on the wound, and he should heal just fine.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Also, I need some wild mushrooms, the black-tipped ones. Do you know which ones I mean?”
    “I can go,” Tia said. “I know exactly what—”
    “No, he’ll go,” the Yankee said, his eyes hard on her. “I’m assuming you can do excellent stitches?”
    Her needles and a length of surgical thread—supplied to her by her cousin Jerome McKenzie, one of the few men still successfully running the blockade—were in her pocket. She withdrew them, then stared at her needle for a moment, well aware she had no matches left with which to burn the tip. Then she was startled as the Yank withdrew a box of matches from his pocket and lit one.
    She held the tip of the needle in the flame to sterilize it, then threaded the needle, and proceeded very carefully to mend the tear ripped around the young man’s wound during their forced flight.
    She felt the Yankee watching her for a while, and when she was done, she looked up and saw the first light of approval in his hazel eyes.
    “Perfect,” he said.
    “I’ve had experience,” she told him dryly.
    “You’ve been in Florida the whole war?”
    “I have, and I assure you, we’ve had a constant flow of injuries and disease.”
    “I wasn’t suggesting that your talents were wasted here. I was just thinking how