Free Sword of Vengeance by Kerry Newcomb Page A

and looked up at the stars. Determined as he was to stay awake, for what might well prove his last hours on earth, he failed. Sleep mercifully overtook him. The night passed without incident.
    Come the first gray hours of morning, Kit was awakened by Sergeant Morales, who told him it was time to die.

Chapter Nine
    T HE SMELL OF BOILING coffee drifted through the clearing and mingled with the aroma of venison steaks roasting over open campfires. Kit was offered neither, though Sergeant Morales apologized with restrained sincerity. Surely, he had said, the Yankee could understand that such a courtesy only delayed the inevitable. And why waste food on a man who would soon be dead?
    Kit didn’t bother to reply. If these were indeed his last moments, he was not about to waste them conversing with the sergeant. As Corporal Galvez led him across the clearing, Kit studied the surrounding woods as if seeing them for the first time. Lavender and yellow butterflies lazily spread their wings upon broad-leaf plants and lichen-covered rock. The moss-draped, twisted branches of a scrub oak were a miraculous display. Field mice underfoot were flushed from hiding as the men trampled a patch of ferns, and scampered off through the grass. Night would bring slithering reptiles and a blur of winged owls in search of such delectable prey.
    Life and death were integral parts of an unfathomable mystery, a mystery Kit McQueen was about to grudgingly embrace if he didn’t do something fast.
    To everything there is a season: a time to reap, a time to sow, a time to philosophize, a time to run like hell. Heaven brought him his opportunity in the form of Father Ramon, his hands still dirty from digging a grave for Alsinop Escovar. He was not about to dig another.
    “No! This is wrong,” the priest cried out, and stepped between Kit and Galvez. Father Ramon looked back at the dragoons halfheartedly attempting to place themselves in some sort of suitable arrangement for a firing squad while Sergeant Morales continued to berate them unmercifully for their ineptitude. “It is wrong before the eyes of God!”
    “God does not see this cursed country. He has forgotten it long ago,” Morales shouted back at the robed man. “I do not hear you anymore, priest.” He waved his hand as if brushing off a bothersome insect.
    “Come along,” Galvez said to Kit. “At least you will have a pleasant place to be buried in. A less charitable man than Morales would dump you in the bayou for the alligators to feed upon.”
    “The sergeant’s generosity touches my heart.” Kit wasn’t smiling.
    Corporal Galvez led the way, his Yankee prisoner falling into step behind him. Father Ramon took up the rear, reciting in a gentle voice a prayer for the dying. And as he prayed, he pulled a knife from his voluminous sleeve and with a quick flick of the wrist sawed through the ropes binding Kit’s wrists.
    The prisoner immediately began to work the blood back into his fingers. Feeling quickly returned, as his arms were more sore than numb. Behind Kit, the padre started back toward the cabin and the hastily formed firing squad, and in so doing masked Kit’s attempted escape. Corporal Galvez continued across the clearing to the newly mounded earth of Escovar’s grave.
    Twenty-five feet from the cabin, where the ground was soft and easy to dig, Father Ramon had placed the earthly remains of the murdered trapper. Another fifteen yards, and the dense forest beckoned with its ancient silence and mossy gloom. Though a forbidding place to the unwary, to the eyes of Kit McQueen it offered sanctuary.
    If he could outrun the dragoons and dodge their first fusillade, he just might elude them. That was the task at hand, to reach the forest without being shot down. There was no time like the present to make the attempt.
    Kit lunged forward. Galvez caught a glimpse of movement and started to turn. Kit drove his hardened fist into the corporal’s left side, staggering Galvez. Kit