The Men of Pride County: The Rebel Read Free

there to watch your back, should any of your own men try to stick something in it.”
    “I am comforted in that knowledge.”
    Later, Juliet paced her Maryland hotel room, fretting over the situation. She was a born campaigner, taking up where her mother had left off. She knew no other life than the hard one she led, accompanying her father to isolated posts on the frontier. She didn’t think to complain of the loneliness, the difficulties, or the continual danger. She considered those a part of daily living. What worried her was the men her father would command for the next year or two, men he’d faced in battle and had secured in a Northern prison—men her father would have to trust to follow his instructions and not desert at the earliest opportunity.
    She had no fondness for Southerners. There had been a few in her father’s last command in Texas before the war began. She thought them vain, arrogant, and more than a little lazy. The were used to lackeys doing their work and to women who’d fawn and faint to earn their favor—pompous fools, all of them, severing the Union for their own selfish purposes at the cost of innocent soldiers’ lives, and forcing her to spend three long years in a prison of her own while her father was pulled from her life to fight in the Western Theater.
    She’d hoped to put all that behind her when her father was reassigned to Fort Blair in the New Mexico territory. She had more tolerance for Indians defending their land than for beaux galants defending their self-indulgent ideals. How could her father trust such shallow aristocratsto cover his flank when under hostile fire?
    She had a very bad feeling about the whole thing.
    Juliet’s feeling only worsened when she got her first glimpse of the recalcitrant troops.
    They formed a ragged line just inside the gates of Point Lookout Prison, shivering with cold in thin uniforms. Mere skeletons, less than men, she thought—until she saw their eyes. Those eyes burned with a fever of pride and indomitable will.
    Her father was going to have his hands full.
    And it didn’t take more than a second to figure out who was going to cause the most grief.
    He wore the insignia of major, but even without it, there could be no mistaking him for anything but the Confederates’ leader. Even weakened by the harsh conditions of the camp, he braced the blustery weather with a posture as stiff as a Stars-and-Bars-bearing flagpole. His ice-blue stare was fixed upon her father with an unblinking intensity, his look not one of arrogance or hostility, as it was with many others, but with a wary gauging, a careful studying. This man was no soft Southern fop. She read intelligence in those unswerving eyes, confidence in his rigid stance, and authority in the way the others deferred to him as her father spoke.
    “I am Colonel John Crowley. From whatyou know of me, I’m sure it’s a name you’ve cursed since your incarceration in this … facility. From what I know of you, you are men deserving of more respect than this place allows you—a respect you have already earned by your cunning and valor in the field. It’s my wish to put you in that field again, not here in this theater of brother against brother, but in the West, where we can all rally together against a common foe.”
    He scanned the impassive troop, looking for a reaction, finding none. Juliet wondered if he’d expected any from these hard and hostile men.
    “I don’t expect you to thank me. In fact, I am certain you’ll have even more cause to curse me. A U.S. soldier on western duty has little to be grateful for. I have heard it said that where we are going, everything that grows pricks and everything that breathes bites. You will be facing an enemy tougher and more ferocious than you can imagine, and if you are foolish enough to think of them contemptuously as simple savages who are no match for our military acumen, they will be wearing your hair on their lances. The danger is