Thunder on the Plains by Rosanne Bittner

Author:Rosanne Bittner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
Published: 2012-05-10T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

May 2, 1865

Colt watched from the window of the train that had brought him to Chicago. The engineer had slowed the engine to a stop in honor of the train passing them on the tracks to their right, also headed into Union Station but very slowly.

Men removed their hats, and women cried. The passing steam engine was decorated with United States flags, and each following passenger car was draped with black mourning cloth.

“That’s it,” someone behind him said quietly. “That’s the funeral train.”

The car in which Colt was riding was packed with people who had come from other areas of Indiana and Illinois to view their assassinated president’s body, which Colt had heard people say would be displayed at the Cook County courthouse in Chicago.

The president’s death was the only topic of conversation Colt had heard since the news first hit over two weeks ago while he was in Columbus, Ohio, where he had been sent to recuperate for several days before going on to Chicago to be mustered out of the army. The whole city of Columbus had been in near chaos, people swarming the streets, holding newspapers with bold headlines about Lincoln’s shooting at Ford’s Theater in Washington. That chaos seemed to have spread to each city where Colt’s train stopped.

Although the car in which Colt rode was stuffed to standing room only, the crowd was nearly silent. One woman wept openly, and a man sitting ahead of Colt took out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes. Colt thought how he would have dearly loved to have been the one to shoot John Wilkes Booth. What an ironic way for all this hell to end.

He was well aware of how people on the train had stared at him all the way here. He figured he must be as close to looking like a walking skeleton as a man could look. He wondered how long it would take for the nightmares to end, the awful dreams that made him wake up in a deep sweat. His hellish dreams of LeeAnn and Ethan had been replaced by haunting visions of life in Andersonville Prison—the ugly pain of his slow-healing wound, the lack of food and medical care. The polluted water they all were forced to drink, which came from the pitiful stream that ran through the dismal prison, gave everyone cramps and diarrhea, which were only compounded by the daily rations of three tablespoons of beans, a little salt, and cutting, unsifted corn meal that made a man feel like he had swallowed razors. For months he had seen nothing but gaunt, dying, dehydrated bodies, and he had become one of them. The only difference between him and most others was that he had survived.

Sometimes he thought the stench of blood and garbage and human waste and death would never leave him, as though the smell had penetrated his very skin. He had seen so much suffering and death that he felt numb, and he feared he had lost all human compassion.

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