Alias Dragonfly by Jane Singer Page A

pugilist.
But oh, she is brave.
Is this yet another face of this just war? The civilian little she-scrappers who wanted in on the fight?
Does this hellion speak, or should I say, shout for us all?
What is their duty? What is mine?
No time to tarry, reader. I’m going back.
PAN
    I threw the paper across the room, fuming, and fascinated, and to be honest, really, really sorry to see Jake go.
    Nellie came into the room carrying a bucket of steaming water. She closed the bedroom door. “The cellar is clean now. I saw to it myself,” she said, her eyes piercing into mine. I breathed a heavy sigh of relief.
    Nellie was mute as she soaped me with the blessedly warm water. Finally, she spoke. “My boy ain’t no threat to you now. You understand?”
    “I understand that Isaac is brave,” I said.
    “Them folks he gets to freedom? If the slave catchers find him, they’ll kill him and send the others back to be punished bad.” She knelt by the bath and prayed. Then, she wrapped me in a blanket and helped me to my bed.
    The last thing I imagined I saw before sleep overtook me—you know that dozy, dreamy state where you are conscious but not really—I thought I saw my father. He was surrounded by a bunch of cheering, Rebel soldiers. My father was kneeling on the ground, his head down, his rifle smashed to pieces. I was gasping. My head was whirling. I got straight out of bed and paced the floor the rest of the night.
    The next morning, before I dragged myself down to breakfast, I found this paper slipped under my door. It was folded to the page you’ll read now.
Special Dispatch from the New York Tribune
At first the Union retreat was orderly, a withdrawal, they called it. Those who cried victory to Mr. Lincoln’s soldiers, the overzealous, frothing reporters, were dead wrong. By some means or Rebel miracle, word was gotten to Generals Johnston and Beauregard. They crested Henry Hill just near the stone bridge over Bull Run after learning that Rebel reinforcements were desperately needed—the right place at just the right moment.
But how were they summoned? There was no time, unless someone had gotten a dispatch through Confederate lines.
And yet, they came, a steady, ready stream of Rebel fighting men. Like lions they devoured the Union troops, sending them flooding the roads and farms, routing them in a wild skedaddle all the way back to Washington City.
Earlier dispatches, some from the great pen of the mighty, much-celebrated English reporter Russell, got it dead wrong.
    This reporter was no fortune-teller, readers, he just waited atop a perch overlooking the fighting as the last of the partygoers, politicos, pie hawkers, and war watchers trickled away. And he saw the flight, saw the jumble of untried soldiers, some leaving their dead where they lay, scrambling back to their camps.
The roads were clogged with these same revelers who’d heard of an early victory, now stunned at the sight of the bodies of the dead and wounded strewn amid the remains of blackberry pies and liquor bottles, nearly trampled by young warriors screaming for their mothers, damning their generals, and tumbling down hillsides making masses of dust that clogged the eyes and ears.
And where was the little scrapper, a girl who’d been a strange comfort to this lumbering reporter? I thought long and hard of her as I watched her leave the chaos.
“My father is down there,” she cried. “My father.”
May she find safety. May he as well.
This is official, no matter what you’ve read. Mr. Lincoln’s army has suffered a great defeat. Humiliation is in the air, reader, as is fear of a Rebel invasion. What will become of Washington City now?
I am going to get a sense of what is to come, reader, to mingle, as they say, with both sides. Might reporters from Mr. Greeley’s paper be endangered because we are so firm in our stand for Mr. Lincoln, unlike Mr. Bennett’s Herald, which seems to appease and flatter? Perhaps. It matters not to this faithful