Free The Raging Hearts: The Coltrane Saga, Book 2 by Patricia Hagan

probably hadn’t heard the rumors yet, either, about how if the Yankees won the war, they were going to take the land away from the Rebels and give it to the slaves. He prayed they didn’t take her land. Lord, her daddy had loved that land almost as much as he loved that girl. Miss Kitty would die if she lost that land, he mused, walking on down the street shaking his white head. Yes, Lord, she would lay down and die.
    The soldier facing the amputation of his right leg was young, perhaps sixteen or seventeen. He screamed as soldiers tied him to the blood-soaked table. Kitty stepped forward and placed her hand on his brow. “God, don’t let them do this to me, lady,” he shrieked, seeing her through fevered eyes. “I’ve got to have my leg. God almighty, what good is a man with just one leg?”
    She had heard the same plea so many times in the past four years that she knew by heart every word that would come from his trembling lips. Her eyes went to the exposed flesh of his gangrene-infested leg. It was amputate or die. There was no other way. “We want to save your life, soldier,” she said, and pushed his damp hair back from his forehead. “Why, they make wooden legs nowadays that are just as good as real legs. You’ll be dancing to a banjo in no time at all. God wants you to live, or He would have let you be blown to heaven, instead of just wounding your leg.”
    “I’d rather die than lose my leg.” He arched his back, the veins in his neck nearly bursting as he screamed, “Don’t…don’t let them do it…”
    Someone handed her the chloroform. At least the Yankees still had some of the precious drug. So many times she had been forced to amputate with no anesthesia at all, just other soldiers to hold a man down until he mercifully passed out from the excruciating pain.
    She administered the drug, placing a folded cloth over his screaming lips, letting it drip down, a bit at a time. It didn’t take long. Soon he was out of his misery. She turned her head away as the sound began, steel cutting into flesh, blood dripping to the floor, the whining of bone being severed. “We’ll leave him a good stump,” Dr. Holt was saying. “He’ll have enough for a nice wooden leg. So many times, there’s just not enough left.”
    The smell of hot tar being slapped against the wound to close it. Then he was lifted from the table and carried to lie on the floor with the others. Soon, he would awaken to scream in agony throughout the long night, the sound echoing with hundreds of others who had been through hell along with him.
    Dr. Holt wiped his bloodied hands on his apron and reached for the cup of water someone handed him. “I heard that General Grant was as anxious to end this damned war as Lee,” he said to Kitty, who was trying to rinse the blood from the table in anticipation of the next poor soul. “I heard it said once that Grant believed the whole point of the blasted war had been an effort to try and prove that the North and South were, and always would be, neighbors. And he thinks as soon as the fighting is officially over, they should start acting that way—like neighbors. God knows, that’s not going to happen. Not in my lifetime, anyway. I’ll never live to see the day that Yankees and Rebs don’t hate each other. And as for acting like neighbors, what meaning does that have? Look at the way your neighbors treat you!”
    Dr. Holt sighed. “The story I get is that Grant told Lee to just have his men lay down their arms and go on home, and it’s even in the terms of surrender that if they’ll do just that, they won’t be bothered by the Federal authorities. Thank God, the man did that. Think of the Northerners who want to see General Lee hanged. Now they can’t do it, not by the terms of the surrender. And if they can’t hang General Lee, by God, they damn well can’t hang a lesser Confederate. That’s some comfort.”
    “Then, if they don’t intend to force their authority upon us, how