The Last Three Soldiers

What if the Confederacy had won the American Civil War? It’s July 1864 and three oh-so-young Union troopers are assigned to a mountaintop in Tennessee to be a link in a chain of flag signalers across a ridge of mountains. They encounter a dizzying gorge with a rickety bridge, bears, aching heartache, freezing cold, avalanche, bats, skeletons, deserted cabins, puzzling mysteries, starvation, and more.

By : William Henry Shelton (1840 - 1932)

01 - Completing The Line; The Old Man Of The Mountains 02 - The Mountain Of The Twentieth Red Pin; A Day Of Discoveries 03 - The Cipher Code; Messages Of Dire Disasters 04 - In Which The Three Soldiers Make A Remarkable Resolution; Which End In A Battle 05 - The Plateau Receives A Name; The Prisoners 06 - In Which The Soldiers Make A Map; How The Bear Disgraced Himself 07 - How The Bear Distinguished Himself; Which Gives A Nearer View Of The Neighbor Called 'Shifless' 08 - The Golden Mill; Which Shows That A Mishap Is Not Always A Misfortune 09 - How The Postmaster Saw A Ghost; Knowledge From Above 10 - The Cave Of The Bats; The Stained-glass Windows And The Prismatic Fowls 11 - A Scrap Of Paper 12 - The Deserted House 13 - Starvation 14 - The Rescue; Conclusion

If Andy Zachary, the guide, had not mysteriously disappeared from his home within the month which followed the events of the night of the 2d of July in the year 1864, sooner or later the postmaster in the Cove on one side and the people in the valley on the other must have learned of the presence of the little colony on the summit of the great rock.

On that particular night the cavalcade had come silently and secretly over the mountains by an unfrequented trail from the last station on Upper Bald, which towered above the Sandy River country. The troopers had followed the guide in single file along the ridges and down the stony trails, and now, when they emerged on the open Cove road for the first time, Andy fell back to the captain's side, in his butternut suit and mangy fur cap, with his long rifle slung behind his broad, square shoulders.

For that night his will was law above that of the captain; and before the three pack-mules at the end of the train had come out on the road, the head of the column had turned up a washout to the left, which presently brought the whole outfit into the shelter of a grove of pines alongside a deserted log cabin. It was just a trifle past midnight by the captain's watch, and the full moon which hung above the ridge to the west would light the Cove face of old Whiteside for yet an hour; and during the darkness which must follow in the small hours of the morning there would be ample time to steal through the sleeping settlement and find a lodgment high up on the mountain which was the objective of the expedition...