I found Nathan like I thought I would, out in the field picking beans. He was eighteen months older than me, Nathan was, though he liked to raise it to two years, and he was starting to stretch out to the height of a grown man, all arms and legs. He straightened up when I called out to him, pulled off his hat to wipe the sweat out of his face. He was a redhead, with freckles the size of dimes all over his face and arms.
"Sure is hot!"
"Sure is," I agreed, and when his eyes went to the pail, I explained, "Came to borrow some 'lasses."
He nodded, letting me know he knew how I'd paid for it and that he'd keep it to himself, since I was really only a go-between, anyway. "Listen, Jamie--" I could see he was all excited about something and bursting to tell it to somebody. The handle of the molasses pail was cutting into my fingers, and I set it down, right next to his half-full sack of beans. "If I show you something, you got to swear to keep it a secret."
"What's the matter, don't you trust me?"
"Well," his voice lowered to a whisper, "it's for the Cause."
I made my expression serious. He glanced around to make sure nobody was watching us, and we lit out, going through the cornfield, the ears all swelling in the summer heat, and down into the belt of woods by the creek. It was cool in the woods, and I thought we might go down to the creek and splash around some in the water, but instead Nathan led me upstream a ways, to a place where the bank had been worn away to expose a shelf of limestone.
"We're off our property here," he said, with the low bitterness in his voice there to remind me, in case I could forget, that all this land had once belonged to Captain Ross, hundreds of acres on both sides of the creek and upstream for more than a mile. But those days, what it meant was that whatever Nathan had hidden here, the Yankees couldn't prove who it belonged to.
Carefully, he knelt down and lifted up a slab of the stone, revealing a narrow opening as deep as a man's arm and maybe twice as long. There was a bundle inside, done up in oilcloth, and Nathan pulled it out, started to undo the wrappings. There was only one thing it could be, that size and shape, and it made my heart hammer, knowing I was so close to it.
"Look at her!" Nathan breathed, pulling aside the last wrapping, and I caught my breath.
"A Sharps repeater!" I whispered in awe.
"Grandpa gave her to me last week on my birthday. He says next spring after the planting I can go down to Texas." He stood there holding the rifle, glowing with pride, and I felt, like I was expected to feel, no more than a little kid next to him. He was all of thirteen and with a gun of his own, just about nearly a man and serving the Cause, or at least he would be come next spring. He sighted down the barrel. "My brother Jeb says there's a place for me in his Company. My Pa's old Company," he added in a lower tone of voice.
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