Rifles for Watie

Two weeks later, Jeff awakes in a bed. He is thin and weak but no longer feverish. A black woman named Hannah is caring for him. She tells him that he has been delirious, calling her “Mama an’ Bessie an’ Mary an’ Lucy. An’ Honey, when you’d call me Lucy, you’d say de sweetest things” (305). Jeff wonders what he said while he was ill, but Hannah doesn’t seem to know that he is a Union spy. Hannah tells Jeff that Heifer had driven him to home of the Jackmans, “a wealthy rebel family” (306) and that Watie himself had sent a note asking “Mrs. Jackson, who he called Aunt Maggie, […] to take Jeff in until he recovered” (306). Mrs. Jackson appears and Jeff thanks her profusely. She tells Jeff that he has been afflicted with a serious case of malaria but is healing and will hopefully be able to return to the army soon. The family’s five daughters enter, and “like Lucy Washbourne, each had the same brownish cast of skin that denoted their Cherokee blood” (307). The eldest daughters, Marjorie and Sophie, are married to men enlisted in the rebel army, and the three youngest, Jill, Janice, and Patricia, are 18, 16, and 13, respectively.