LITMIR.BIZ

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of the cannons. This one was a cut or two above most of the wenches who knew the blackberry clumps and buttercup fields with such easy familiarity. Something inside him answered when she let him see her blue eyes fully, for the first time.

      “I don’t require your thanks.” He smiled, staring at his torn sleeve and blood-spattered shirt. How could he ride to the Hall like this? He said almost unconsciously, “I did it for Ben, if you must know.”

      Her gasp told him he had been rude. He flushed and explained, “At first I did it for Ben, because he hit him. Then, later on—”

      Her chin tilted. There was pride in those blue eyes, he was discovering. “Just the same, I thank you.”

      The big man stirred, groaning, and the girl trembled and stared down at him. She moved closer to Stafford, and now he could sense the fright in her. “He’ll be after me again, soon’s he comes to his senses. After you go, he’ll get me.” The girl put a grimy hand on his wrist. “Please, sir, could I go along with you, for just a little way?”

      “I’ve only one horse. I’m sorry.”

      “I could ride behind you!” she pleaded eagerly. “I’ve done that before. Ridden behind a man on a horse, without a saddle under me.”

      “Yes, I rather suppose you have.”

      Stafford was staring at the big man on the floor, and so he did not see the deep-red flush that slid from her throat into her cheeks. He said reflectively, “He’ll be vicious when he comes to. His kind always are, after a beating. Perhaps you’d best come with me, after all.”

      Her gaze was steady on his face. “You’d take a dog with you, to save him from a beating, wouldn’t you?”

      Stafford was surprised. “Why, I suppose I would. Yes.”

      For a moment, he thought she was about to slap him. Then she whirled on a heel and moved toward the door. For the first time, Stafford saw that she was barefoot. He wondered idly if she wore anything at all under that thin linsey-woolsey thing. He turned to Ben Leap.

      “Get the pistol, Ben. Put it handy when he washes up.”

      “I will, sir. And—it’s good to have you home again.”

      The girl was standing beside the stallion waiting for him, smoothing its nose with a palm, speaking to it in whispers. Grimy though she was, with a trace of the street urchin about her, the sunlight on her golden hair and face seemed to soften the dirt with an earthy honesty. Her slim white ankles made him curious as to the shape of the legs the green homespun skirt hid. His eyes traced her round hips and slim waist, and the firmness of her bosom.

      When she felt his eyes on her, she slid away from the horse.

      “Mount up,” he told her gently. “I’ll walk beside you.”

      “No,” she whispered, letting him see the gratitude shining in her eyes. “No, I won’t let you do that. I’d rather ride behind you.”

      Stafford put on his blue velvet jacket and studied himself. The coat would hide the tears in the shirt and the blood that flecked it. Then his toe jabbed the iron stirrup and he rose easily into the saddle. He bent and grasped the girl by her wrist and helped her swing behind him.

      She straddled the stallion, skirt pulled to mid-thighs. As he turned back, Stafford reflected that the promise of her slim ankles was fulfilled in the shapeliness of the legs she bared by her action.

      “Hold to me,” he told her gruffly, and felt slim brown arms creep about his waist. A toe moved the horse into a canter.

      They rode through the Virginia afternoon with the cry of a blue heron in their ears, with the scents of fall wild-flowers growing in little bunches beside the dusty road touching their nostrils. The sunlight made a haze of the Carolinas to the south, and dappled the forestland stretching as far away as the mountains with golden splinters.

      The girl was warm and soft behind him. His back was aware of her unbound breasts prodding it, and his waist tightened against the occasional tug of her young arms when the stallion broke stride to avoid a rut in the road. Once a thick yellow strand of hair brushed like a soft whip across his face, its perfume faint and disturbing. Against the back of his neck, he felt her soft breath.

      She was a camp trull, though the most attractive one he had ever seen. If he wanted, he could turn the horse aside into the flanking forests that made this southern edge of Virginia a vast woodland and draw her down and enjoy her. She would not put up such a fight as she had with the big man in the ordinary. There was tenderness in the clinging of her arms around him, and a hidden hunger in the sudden hardening of the breasts on his back that told him she might even be eager for the caresses he could give.

      Stafford thought of Laura Lee in the Hall, hoping she was waiting after four years to welcome him home, and put such thoughts from him. He urged the stallion to a faster pace.

      When they came at last to the crossroads between the Dan road and the Carolina settlements, he turned in the saddle and smiled at her. “Where will you go now?”

      “To Charlotte Town.”

      Charlotte Town. That was where Dan Morgan, recently made a brigadier general by the Continental Congress, was gathering the remnants of the army Horatio Gates had allowed the British to smash at Camden. A camp girl like this one, with her pert face and comely body, would find good pickings there. Men from the Maryland and Delaware regiments, mountaineers with their long Deckard rifles, and the army moving south with Nathaniel Greene would furnish her with an unlimited clientele.

      She was very near. An arm hooked about her waist would crush her softness against him. Those full lips, pouting a little under his regard, would taste sweet to his starving mouth. As if sensing the hunger in him, she sat waiting, breathless, her blue eyes locked with his gaze. Four years is a long time, he told himself.

      And then the moment was gone, and she was sliding groundward, her skirt lifting nearly to her hips. She paused on the ground, shaking out her dress, ignoring the fact that her bodice gaped where it had been torn. Her smile was bright as she raised her head, and he fancied that her blue eyes mocked him.

      “I wish you luck, sir,” she said softly. “All the very best of luck.”

      Then she was moving away, with the dust rising in little puffs about her bare feet, her hips twitching to each stride, the long yellow hair falling almost to the small of her back. Stafford stared after her, motionless, until she was gone out of sight around a bend in the road and under the sheltering branches of the towering pines.

      He sighed and toed the stallion to a gallop. Eagerness beat in him with a rising pulse. Less than a dozen miles from here was Laura Lee, and home.

      Ezra Whipple bent to the wash pan, sloshing cold well water onto his bruised face. Fire ate in him, a roaring flame of hate and frustration that called on his pride for vengeance. No man ever before had stood to the thud of his meaty fists. He had fought fair and foul more times than he could remember, with all manner of men. Once his thumbs had gouged the eyes from a Pennsylvania farmer. Once his teeth had chewed off the ear of a New York merchant in a Fly Market tavern.

      He did not like the taste of his bruises. He toweled his face gently, aware that Ben Leap watched from the planked bar, a long-barreled horse pistol primed and cocked in his hand. The old man had taken the pistol from an upper room, from a room that belonged to the man who had beaten him so savagely.

      “A good man, that one,” he said grudgingly to Ben Leap, pretending affability. “At another time, I might have been his friend.”

      Ben Leap spat across the bar. “No friend of yours, you scum. He’s a plantation man, a gentleman. The Staffords have been here in Virginia for near a century.”

      “Still and all, he’s a man. A good man with his fists. He never let me get close enough to hug him once. If he had, I could have snapped the ribs of him like dry sticks. A good man.”

      “They come no better.”

      Whipple

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