Читать книгу Settling The Score - George McLane Wood - Страница 52

Chapter Fifteen

“Come over here, Private, and let me teach you how to kill a man, quiet like,” the big man said, as Jeff remembered back to the time when he first met Jorn Murphy. They fought in the war together. Their side had been winning battles all that week. He and his pa were fighting in the same regiment. They were sitting side by side on a log; they’d just finished sharing a big watermelon for their supper. Jeff’s dad was now smoking his pipe. The big man, Murphy, was their sergeant when Jeff and his pa just joined up. He motioned to Jeff. “Come over here, boy. Damn it, I want to give you a killing lesson, pay attention now. Here’s how you can kill a feller real quick like. You’re right-handed? Good, now watch close. You slip up behind a man real quiet like so he don’t hear no sound, you see, then you reach around him with your left hand, you pull him to you, quick like, and you slip your right-handed knife blade under his throat at the same time and slice quick. Be sure you pull your knife left to right as you slice his throat. That way, the blood will shoot away from your hand, you understand?

“Here’s another way—you creep up behind a man, walking on the balls of your feet quiet as a cat. You get real close, then you grab him, and quick, you pull him to you real close as you reach around and stab him high up in his gut right under his rib cage. The blade will go right into his heart. You need to hold him close and tight till he quits trembling, then you let him sink down to the ground real quiet like.”

Jeff shivered, he knew he’d never want any part of that kind of killing in this bloody war or any other time.

Thomas Abraham Nelson, Jeff’s pa, had been shot in his head by a rebel’s minié ball two weeks later in a skirmish near Virginia’s east border. His only son had hurriedly been allowed to bury him. Then the Yankee soldiers had quickly moved on, chasing the retreating rebels all the way into North Carolina. Jeff had cried off and on for a month over the loss of his pa. Now he was all alone in this scary world. No family, all gone, just him now. Jeff was barely past seventeen years old.

Jeff Nelson and Jorn Murphy were both alive and fighting until the very last dustup. Then they’d watched the parade and disarmament from the parade ground outside a little white church house where the two mightiest generals from both armies had finally made peace, shook hands, and ended that bloodshed. Jeff disremembered where they were when it happened, but it seemed like maybe Virginia. Afterward, some soldiers went north, some went south. Jeff Nelson and Jornett Murphy decided they’d go west, all the way to Southwest Texas.