The Bride of Texas Read Free Page B

of this brought so much as a blush to the bride’s cheeks.
    It was still raining on the sycamores.
    At last the blushing groom kissed his pale bride, and the best man kissed his sister and spoke aloud, but in Czech: “Well,Lidunka, you’ve humped your way into the upper classes after all!” Now it was the bride’s turn to blush, and cold fire flashed in her blue eyes. She turned her back on him and planted a kiss right on the mouth of the diminutive general. Kilpatrick flushed. The sergeant thought it over. That evening, at the campfire, Shake said, “So Kil was one of her …?”
    “But he didn’t pan out, he couldn’t have,” declared Kakuska. “He’s the biggest wick-dipper in Sherman’s army. He’ll never get hitched.”
    “That’s what I can’t figure,” said Stejskal. “Ugly runt like him, practically a hunchback, and women —”
    “He ain’t a runt where it matters,” said Kakuska. “Believe me, I saw it with my own two eyes.” The sergeant had heard the story before — how, one November night, little Kil had come galloping up to the house by the train tracks leading another horse bearing two black girls mounted like men. A platoon of the Twenty-sixth Wisconsin was marching past, led by Corporal Gambetta, and the sight of those dark thighs in the moonlight drew an almost unanimous whistle of appreciation from the unit. Laughing, Kilpatrick hopped down from his saddle and helped the two beauties dismount.
    Kakuska saluted and said, “A good night to you, general, sir!”
    Kilpatrick’s smile flashed in the gathering darkness. “And to you, corporal.” He turned and ushered the two young women to the other side of the building, where the door was. Soon the upstairs windows were filled with light and Kakuska could hear the tinkling of glass and the sounds of girlish giggles. Later on, silence fell, bedsprings creaked, and conquered women moaned. Then several shots rang out in the distance. Apparently Braxton Bragg’s sharpshooters were practising over near Augusta, or maybe Wheeler’s cavalry had brushed up against Kil’s skirmishers. Kakuska felt horny, and he cursed his general,though it wasn’t his fault. In the end he relieved himself and fell asleep.
    He was awakened by a terrible racket. From the barricades on the other side of the train tracks he could hear the ringing of horses’ hoofs, the clash of metal on metal, shouting, the crack of pistols. He jumped up as someone tossed a burning torch over the fence onto a woodpile near a chicken coop. Terrified chickens flapped and cackled loudly as they shot out the door. Kil’s cavalrymen, who had been sleeping in blankets around the dying fire, woke up. The horses strained at their tethers in panic. On the other side of the house someone slashed at the door with a sword, and an upstairs window flew open. In the moonlight a group of riders carrying a banner with two crossed bands of stars galloped around the fence. Kakuska untied his horse but, before he could mount, a figure in a white nightshirt jumped out of the upstairs window, the nightshirt ballooning, and by the light of the burning woodpile and the full moon Kakuska caught a glimpse of his general’s natural endowments.
    “But he sure knows how to brawl,” Kakuska said later. “He was still there come dawn, yelling orders at the troops, in his nightshirt. Finally we fell back to Waynesboro, where the Wisconsins had built light fortifications, and he strutted about half-naked behind the palisades until his orderly found him another pair of trousers. Wheeler took Kil’s own trousers as booty, along with those two black tarts, but they got away from him and when we took Augusta, Kil had them in tow again, this time in a carriage.”
    The flames of the campfire flickered on the faces of these soldiers, all of them from a distant land. Long, tall Stejskal, ten years in the land of the Yankees, more than two in the army, a veteran of General Sigel’s Eleventh Corps, a survivor