Mudsills & Mooncussers (#multimedia)

Chapter 1

PHOTO: Tift's Wharf - location of Tift's warehouse and ice house.  Source: Tift warehouse : Key West, Florida. 188-. Black & white photonegative. State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory. Accessed 12 Jan. 2016.<https://www.floridamemory.com/items/show/5042>.

AUTHOR'S NOTE:  It's 1862, and the Southernmost city in the Confederate States of America is occupied by Yankee troops.  The young men and boys of Key West are looking for ways to escape the island and join the Rebel army or navy.  The citizens with Rebel sympathies are giving the resident Yankees a hard time every chance they get.

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Sergeant Jules Pfifer, a career Army man, marched his patrol briskly through the evening heat toward a tall wooden house on the corner of Whitehead Street and Duval Street. Atop the house was perched a square cupola surrounded by the sailor-carved balustrades called gingerbread. These porches, just large enough for one or two persons to stand and observe the sea from the rooftop, were known as widows' walks. From this particular widow's walk an illegal Confederate flag flaunted its red stars and bars against the clear Key West sky.

The soldiers in Union blue marched smartly through the gate in the white picket fence, up the front steps, and in at the front door—which opened before them as if by magic.

"Evenin', Miz Lowe," Sergeant Pfifer said, without breaking stride, to the woman who had opened the door.

"Evenin', Sergeant," the lady of the house answered, unperturbed.

On the Lowe house roof, the stars and bars were whipped from their post; they disappeared from sight just as the soldiers, clomping and puffing and sweat-stained, arrived atop the stairway. Pfifer and another man crowded onto the widow's walk. Consternation wrinkled the soldiers' faces when they found no Confederate flag, only 17-year-old Caroline Lowe, smiling sweetly.

...

In the twilight, the three-story brick trapezoid of Fort Zachary Taylor loomed castle-like over the sea waves. It stood on its own 63-acre shoal, connected to the island of Key West by a narrow 1000-foot causeway. The fort had taken 21 years to build and was plagued by constant shortages of men and material as well as outbreaks of deadly yellow fever.

Yankee sentries paced between the black silhouettes of cannon pointed seaward. Firefly lights of campfires and lanterns sparkled on the parade ground and among the Sibley tents huddled on shore at the base of the causeway.

Midway between the fort and Caroline Lowe's flagpole, on the tin roof of a three-story wooden house, behind the gingerbread railing of another widow's walk, two athletic, handsome youngsters stood close together, blown by the wind. Twenty-year-old Richard scanned the sea with a spyglass. Joe, an inch shorter than Richard, kept one hand atop a floppy hat the wind wanted to steal.

Richard found something interesting to the east. He handed over the spyglass and pointed Joe toward the same point on the horizon. Joe searched, then zeroed in.

"Some rascal's laid a false light over on Boca Chica," Richard said, referring to the smaller island just northeast of Key West. "Come on!"

They tucked the spyglass into a hollow rail of the widow's walk and hastened down the stairs.

...

On neighboring Boca Chica island, night blanketed the beach. A hunched figure tossed a branch onto a blazing bonfire then slunk away into the darkness. Pine pitch popped and crackled in the fire, adding its sweet aroma to the tang of the salty breeze coming off the sea.