Last Stand at Saber River by Elmore Leonard

Author:Elmore Leonard
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780061840920
Publisher: HarperCollins

It was evening, but not yet dark, a silent time with the trees standing black and thick-looking and the sky streaked with red shades of sun reflection. A whole day had passed and Cable was returning home.

He had already skirted the store, wanting to see Martha but wanting more to avoid Janroe, and now he was high up in the shadows and the silence of the pines, following the horse trail along the ridge.

He would talk to Janroe another time, after he had thought this out and was sure he knew what to say to him.

This morning he had talked to a man, a small old man who was perhaps in his sixties with a graying beard and a mustache that was tobacco-stained yellow about his mouth. Denaman’s friend from Hidalgo. In the dimness of the adobe room, and with the early morning sounds of the village outside, the man seemed too old or too small or too fragile to do whatever he was doing.

But he asked Manuel Acaso questions about Cable, then looked at Cable and asked more questions; and it was his eyes that convinced Cable that the man was not too old or too thin or too frail. Brown eyes—Cable would remember them—that were gentle and perhaps kind; but they were not smiling eyes. They were the eyes of a patient, soft-spoken man who would show little more than mild interest at anything he saw or heard.

He was willing enough to talk about Janroe once he was sure of Cable, and he made no attempt to hide facts or try to justify Janroe’s actions. He spoke slowly, carefully, as if he had memorized the things he was saying….

Edward Janroe, Cable learned, was a native of Florida, born in St. Augustine a few years before the outbreak of the second Seminole war, and had lived there most of his early life. Almost nothing was known of Janroe during this period; not until he joined the army in 1854. From then on his life was on record.

In 1858, a sergeant by this time, Janroe was court-martialed for knifing a fellow soldier in a tavern fight. The man died and Janroe was sentenced to six years of hard labor at the Fort Marion military prison. He was well into his third year of it when the war broke out. It saved him from completing his sentence.

With a volunteer company from St. Augustine, Janroe traveled to Winchester, Virginia—this during the summer of 1861—and was assigned to the 10th Virginia Infantry, part of General Edmund Kirby Smith’s forces. Strangely enough, despite his prison record, but undoubtedly because of his experience, Janroe was commissioned a full lieutenant of infantry.

A year later, and now a captain, Janroe lost his arm at the battle of Richmond, Kentucky. He was sent to the army hospital at Knoxville, spent seven months there, and was discharged sometime in March, 1863.

But Janroe didn’t go home. He learned that Kirby Smith had been made commander of the Trans-Mississippi Department, headquartered at Shreveport, Louisiana, and that’s where Janroe went.

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