There were times when Lacey could see nothing at all to indicate that anyone had passed by, but Matt seemed confident they were heading in the right direction and she took comfort in that. When they stopped at noon to eat and rest the horses, she asked him where he had learned to read trail sign. “During the war,” Matt replied. He bit off a piece of jerky and chewed it thoughtfully for a moment. “Old Smoke Johnson was in my outfit. He’d been an Army scout out West before the war, but when he heard the Yankees were marching through Georgia, he came home and joined up. Old Smoke was a talkative cuss, and he must have told me everything he knew about tracking and Indians and the fur trade. When he wasn’t yapping at me, he was teaching me to read sign, and how to navigate by the stars. Between battles, he used to go off into the woods and I’d see if I could pick up his trail. He ran into a half-dozen bluebelly scouts one night when I was following his tracks.” Matt laughed with the memory.
