The Return Of Chase Cordell. Linda Castle

do.”

      Linese was shoved and jostled to the very edge of the train platform. She tried to retreat backward into the crowd, but the crush of bodies formed an impenetrable wall behind her.

      There was no escape. Her first meeting with Chase would be as public as it could get in Mainfield, Texas. Knowing they would be on display made her all the more uncomfortable.

      She told herself not to fret too much for Chase’s sake. He was, after all, Major Chase Cordell. He had always been a man who kept his inner feelings to himself and showed the world, including her, only his bravado. Now he was the darling of Texas and the Northern army, coming home victorious from his last battle. He would be as happy as a whitewashed pig, and she would simply have to endure.

      Linese glanced around at the faces in the crowd. She saw Southern and Northern sympathizers standing side by side on the platform, waiting for her husband’s return. The opinion about which side would ultimately prevail, like the entire issue of the war, was split firmly down the middle in Mainfield. The town leaders had never shown any lasting allegiance to either North or South. Linese thought it was probably because of Mainfield’s unique location. A Texas town, yet so very near the Louisiana border. Western ideals had never really meshed with Southern traditions. In addition, Mainfield had the odd distinction of being located on a major route. Supplies, troops and even fleeing slaves came remarkably close to the town.

      In one respect the residents of Mainfield had been lucky. Food and goods continued to trickle into Mainfield, when other towns had nearly perished during the conflict. Still the months she had worked at the Gazette made her wonder how the town could remain so neutral, and how long that privilege would last.

      Chase had kept Linese updated by letter on each battle—and uncompromising victory—which had ultimately insured his status as a local champion. Many of those letters had been used to document the news of the war in the Gazette.

      It had been Chase’s dream to ride off to battle and return with medals of honor, to the praise of an adoring community after the Union had won the war and settled the question of secession. At least in one respect, he had gotten his wish. Though the question of secession was unclear, he was definitely returning home a hero.

      Linese sighed and mentally scolded herself for her selfishness. A dutiful wife should rejoice in her husband’s return, be happy for his achievements.

      She fell in love with Chase because he was dashing and bold and knew exactly what he wanted. Now was no time to begin questioning those sentiments, although in her heart of hearts she admitted it would be easier if she didn’t feel as if she were greeting a living legend.

      A tiny thread of sweat snaked down the nape of her neck. Linese tried to ignore the rising temperature and the throng of people elbowing her relentlessly forward, to the very edge of the platform, while she stared down the track toward the dark puff of smoke wending its way through the treetops. Each mile it drew closer, the knot in her stomach grew larger.

      

      Chase shifted his position on the hard train seat and peered out the window. The throbbing in his hip had become a steady pain. He squinted his eyes and searched far out until the features of the land blurred into a shapeless nothingness that matched the formless void in his head. He prayed he would recognize something—anything—about the landscape outside the train-car window.

      A pretty river meandered down the rocky slope and cut a slash through tangled vines and dense forest. It was completely unknown to him. He might as well have been a thousand miles from the place his aide identified as his home, for all the familiarity it summoned in his brain. He rubbed the heels of his hand against his eyes. His head hurt, his leg hurt, and still he had no memory.

      Sporadic recollections of certain events in his childhood rattled around in his head, like a few stones in an empty bucket, but he could not grasp one shred of fact about his adult life.

      He didn’t know who he was now or what kind of man he had been before. Chase Cordell had had no recollection of anything tangible since the Confederate shell fragment had torn through his hip, knocked him senseless and taken him out of the war forever.

      He glanced over at the young man in uniform who had accompanied him from the field hospital. Jeffrey’s companionable chatter had filled the hours on the train and supplied some commonly known anecdotes about Chase’s military life, but Chase had no memory of his own with which he could confirm or deny anything the young soldier said.

      Jeffrey must have felt Chase’s eyes on him, because he looked over and smiled uncertainly. “I bet you are anxious about getting home, aren’t you, sir?”

      The lad’s question sent an uneasy shiver through Chase. Several times on the journey he had caught the young soldier looking at him with an expression that was close to awe, but he didn’t know why the boy stared, and that clawed at his insides.

      Chase nodded stiffly in answer to Jeffrey’s comment. Anxious was too mild a word for the way he felt. There was a knot in the pit of his stomach the size of a cannonball and twice as heavy.

      Chase had spent the better part of last night rereading the stack of dog-eared letters that bore his name on the envelopes. The letters were all signed by Linese—his wife—a woman whose face he could not remember.

      He was returning to a town he couldn’t remember, to a wife he didn’t know, from a bloody war he wanted only to forget.

      The irony of it all was not lost to him. Chase leaned his head back against the seat and closed his eyes. He tilted his hat down over his face in order to spare himself further conversation with the eager young soldier.

      Images of waking in the infirmary swept over him. At first he had been so heavily dosed with morphine and laudanum that everything had had a fuzzy, uncertain quality about it while he floated between life and death. Days later, when the surgeon told him he would live, Chase realized there was a giant chasm where his identity should have been. While his head cleared, volunteers were busy reading Lin-ese’s latest letters to him. Each letter they read brought more dread to Chase.

      As the drugs wore off and Chase saw that his wound was mostly concentrated around his hip and not his skull, he tried to reason out what had happened to him.

      There had been only a small lump on his head from hitting it on the ground. None of it made sense to him, so he remained silent about his condition, while he listened to the letters from home.

      The woman who was evidently his lawful wife carefully outlined every detail of life in Mainfield, Texas, particularly the events concerning his grandfather, Captain Aloyi-sius Cordell.

      It didn’t take long for Chase to understand that his grandfather was mad, had been mad for years. In fact, that one memory returned crystalline clear within the first week of his confinement. Since then Chase had slowly regained sundry odd recollections of growing up under the strain of being the only grandchild of “mad Captain Cordell.”

      He couldn’t remember actual events or specific places, but he recalled disembodied voices saying that phrase, “mad Captain Cordell,” like some manner of identification that was incomplete if uttered any other way. While bits and pieces of torn memory swirled through his head, he had learned one important thing about himself. He was ashamed of his grandfather, humiliated by his mental affliction and the way the old man had been treated.

      Chase swallowed hard and tried to control the anxiety rising inside him. He didn’t quite know why, but some deep instinct had compelled him to keep his missing memory secret from everybody, including the doctors who had patched him up and cared for his damaged body. And he had kept his secret.

      Through the weeks in the hospital and all through the long train ride home, he remained silent about his amnesia.

      He sighed and lifted his hat brim. He prayed that when he opened his eyes, it would all be there—his past, his memory, himself.

      But it was not.

      Weeks of agonizing and analyzing kept bringing him back to one inescapable thought. The injury sustained in battle did not appear