Only the Gallant Read Free Page B

last long. Gerard and a dozen or more of the Creole militia materialized out of the rain, guns blazing as they charged at a gallop and swept past the colonel as if he were standing still.
    “Son of a bitch!” Jesse exclaimed, and drove his heels into the stallion. With a violent tug on the reins, he rounded the corner onto Canal, dodging a hail of lead as he headed toward the river. Behind him, the blue-heeler barked his defiance at the horsemen, then abandoned the field of battle, his defense of the city ended. Jesse chanced a couple of shots with the Walker Colt in hopes of slowing his pursuers, but the Creole guardsmen never lost a stride. They turned onto Canal and loosed another fusillade at the fleeing rider.
    Jesse rode low on the stallion, leaning forward until the mane whipped his face. The gunfire behind him had cleared the street of rioters and merchants and the homeward bound citizenry of French, English, Indian, and African extraction. No one wanted to involve himself in this chase. Let the home guard and Colonel Baptiste handle their own affairs.
    The closer Jesse McQueen came to the river, the worse the stench from the burning docks. Confederate blockade runners, two sleek-looking schooners, had been set afire to keep Commodore Faragut from hoisting the Union flag above the topsail. It was all a man could do to keep from weeping. Jesse would have pitied the populace if some of them hadn’t been trying so hard to kill him.
    Smoke stung his eyes and set them watering. Through blurred vision he recognized Camp Street just ahead. He chanced a glance over his shoulder and saw that Baptiste’s men had lost a little ground. That suited him fine. He slowed the stallion enough to manage the corner on the slick road. A sharp tug on the reins and the stallion took the corner at a gallop. A puddle seemed to explode underfoot, and water slapped the stallion’s belly and drenched McQueen.
    Camp was a dark street, only a few blocks from the waterfront. Night and the smoke from the fires limited the visibility here. Jesse was counting on that as he swung out of the saddle and gave the animal a slap on the rump to keep it on its course. As the sound of Baptiste’s riders filled the narrow thoroughfare, their quarry scrambled behind an abandoned, overturned wagon. The walkway was littered with fragments of shattered barrels. The ground underfoot was sticky with molasses.
    “Oh, no,” Jesse muttered, and then with a sigh, took cover as the guardsmen filled the mouth of the street and swept past at a reckless gallop. The noise of the horses was deafening in the confines of the street, with its Spanish, stucco apartments and walled courtyards rebounding the sound. Jesse McQueen, the length of his body pressed against the long-bed wagon, checked the loads in the cylinder of Charbonneau’s dragoon Colt and found to his disgust that he’d fired the last shot back on Bourbon Street. He lowered his head and silently cursed the weapon and whatever gods were having such sport with him and waited out the din of the departing militia. Eventually the Creoles would discover they were chasing a riderless horse, but by then, Jesse intended to be safe inside a certain lady’s warm, dry apartment.
    His clothes stuck to the walkway as he stood and started down Canal. He grimaced and tried to pull the front of his shirt away from his body, then held his arms out to the rain in hopes of washing some of the molasses from his chin and chest and thighs. Not far away, he could see the wrought-iron gate in the courtyard of the Gascony, an apartment house that had once been home to men like Andrew Jackson and Jean Lafitte. Built around a square courtyard, the structure had once housed several generations of Spanish aristocrats. But the family’s fortune had been lost in the changing times and the estate turned into a collection of handsome apartments run by the last surviving member of the family, Isabella Martinez. Right now those old,