Her eyes narrowed and she glared at him. “I’ll be damned if I go anywhere with any foul, abolitionist blue jacket!”
She dropped the reins and leaped from the cart.
Jeremiah was caught flat-footed by her sudden bolt for the woods lining the road, but he still managed to catch her left arm — and was promptly dragged from his saddle for his trouble. She shifted her efforts from escape to attack and he found himself trying — and mostly failing — to control a spitting, hissing, clawing demoness.
Just as he was convinced she was going to claw his eyes out, she was lifted bodily into the air and held between Sergeant MacKay and Trooper Henry, both of whom were laughing so hard they could barely breathe.
Jeremiah picked up his hat and dusted it off as he tried to salvage what dignity he could from the situation. Another trooper handed him one of several sheaves of paper that had fallen from the girl’s dress during her furious assault. It turned out to be a railroad schedule for supplies.
“I suppose this was accidentally pinned inside your dress?”
Jeremiah was expecting denial, maybe some tearful contrition.
The young lady simply exploded with hate. “It’s no accident you damn foul Yankee! I’ll take no condensendin’ from a low-born, gutter-crawling Black Republican thug mercenary!”
Jeremiah stepped back.
“So you admit to being a spy?”
“I admit to being true to my State!” She lunged at him, but the troopers’ firm grip saved him from being bitten.
At that point, she exploded into an obscene diatribe against Yankees, the North, the Union Army and Jeremiah himself. With details on general Yankee anatomical shortcomings and Jeremiah’s ancestry in particular. Her accent was so thick he could barely understand half of what she was saying, and for that, he was truly thankful. What he could understand was enough to make even a hardened sailor cringe. Even Sergeant MacKay looked suitably impressed, and he was a true artist in vulgarity at times.
Despite being outnumbered and very much in custody, the young woman, who refused to even cooperate so far as to give her name, had to be bound hand and foot, then placed on her own cart, with one of the troopers at the reins.
A half an hour into the trip to Headquarters, the trooper begged Lieutenant Lodge to be relieved of his duty, or his life, if necessary, to avoid her boundless vulgarity.
Rather than shoot his own trooper, Lieutenant Lodge ordered the young lady forcibly gagged.
*****
Upon arrival at Sutton, the young woman, refusing to walk on her own, was carried into the makeshift headquarters and jail, a former hotel that the Provost had appropriated for the time being.
After Jeremiah’s explanation, and a brief — blissfully, an exceedingly brief – attempt to talk with the prisoner, Captain Darr sat at his desk watching the proceedings with ill-hidden humor. The Sergeant and three brawny troopers placed the woman, with her gag firmly in place again, in a former storage closet, which now had a sturdy oak door with a small barred window facing into the interior office.