Ride Proud, Rebel! by Andre Norton (ebook reader with highlighter txt) 📗

They kept their trap as it was through the rest of the day and the following night without any more luck. When the next fish swam into the net it approached from the other side and not past the scout post. The steamer Anna progressed from Johnsonville, ran the gantlet of the batteries, and in spite of hard shelling, was not hit in any vital spot, escaping beyond. But when the transport Venus, towing two barges and convoyed by the gunboat Undine, tried to duplicate that feat they were caught by the accurate fire of the masked guns. Trying to turn and steam back the way they had come, they were pinned down. And while they were held there, another steamer entered the upper end of the trap and was disabled. Guns moved by sweat, force, will and hand-power, were wrestled around the banks to attend to the Undine. And after a brisk duel her officers and crew abandoned her.

"We got us a navy," Kirby announced when he brought their order to leave the picket post. "The Yankees sure are kind, presentin' us with a couple of ships jus' outta the goodness of their hearts."

The Undine and the Venus, manned by volunteers, did steam with the caution of novice sailors upriver when on the first of November troops and artillery started to Johnsonville.

"Hi!" One of the new Horse Marines waved to the small party of scouts, weaving in and out to gain their position at the head of the column. "Want to leave them feed sacks for us to carry?"

Kirby put a protecting hand over his saddle burden of extra and choice rations.

"This heah grub ain't gonna be risked out on no water," he called back. "Nor blown up by no gunboat neither."

Those fears were realized, if not until two days later, when the scouts were too far ahead to witness the defeat of Forrest's river flotilla. The Undine, outfought by two Yankee gunboats, was beached and set afire. The same fate struck the Venus a day afterward. But by that time the raiders had reached the bank of the river opposite Johnsonville and were making ready to destroy the supply depot there.

Drew, Kirby, and Wilkins, with Boyd to ride courier, had already explored the bank and tried to estimate the extent of the wealth lying in the open, across the river.

"Too bad we jus' can't sorta cut a few head outta that theah herd," Kirby said wistfully. "Heah we are so poor our shadows got holes in 'em, an' lookit all that jus' lyin' theah waitin' for somebody to lay a hot iron on its hide—"

"More likely to lay a hot iron on your hide!" countered Drew. But he could not deny that the river landing with its thickly clustered transports, gunboats and barges, the acres of shoreline covered with every kind of army store, was a big temptation to try something reckless.

They had illustrious company during their prowling that afternoon. Forrest himself and Captain Morton, that very young and very talented artillery commander, were making a reconnaissance before placing the batteries in readiness. And during the night those guns were moved into position. At midafternoon the next day the reduction of Johnsonville began.

Smoke, then flame, tore holes in those piles of goods. Warehouses blazed. By nightfall for a mile upriver and down they faced a solid sheet of fire, and they smelled the tantalizing odor of burning bacon, coffee, sugar, and saw blue rivers of blazing liquid running free.

"I still say it's a mighty shame, all that goin' to waste," commented Kirby sadly.

"Well, anyway it ain't goin' into the bellies of Sherman's men," Drew replied.

The Confederate force was already starting withdrawal, battery by battery, as the wasteland of the fire lighted them on their way. And now the Yankee gunboats were burning with explosions of shells, fired by their own crews lest they fall into Rebel hands. It was a wild scene, giving the command plenty of light by which to fall back into the country they still dominated. The reduction of the depot was a complete success.

Scouts stayed with the rear guard this time, so it was that Drew saw again those two who had so carefully picked the gun stands only twenty-four hours before. General Forrest and his battery commander came down once more to survey the desolation those guns had left as a smoking, stinking scar.

Drew heard the slow, reflective words the General spoke:

"John, if you were given enough guns, and I had me enough men, we could whip old Sherm clean off the face of the earth!"

And then the scout caught Kirby's whisper of assent to that. "The old man ain't foolin'; he could jus' do it!"

"Maybe he could," Drew agreed. He wished fiercely that Morton did have his guns and Forrest all the men who had been wasted, who had melted away from his ranks—or were buried. A man had to have tools before he could build, but their tools were getting mighty few, mighty old, and.... He tried to close his mind to that line of thought. They were on the move again, and Forrest had certainly proven here that though Atlanta might be gone, there was still an effective Confederate Army in the field, ready and able to twist the tail of any Yankee!

Sleet drove at the earth with an oblique, knife-edged whip. The half-ice, half-rain struck under water-logged hat brims, found the neck opening where the body covering, improvised from a square of appropriated Yankee oilcloth, lay about the shoulders.

"I'm thinkin' we sure have struck a stream lengthwise." Kirby's Tejano crowded up beside Hannibal. "Can't otherwise be so many bog holes in any stretch of country. An' if we ever do come across those dang-blasted ordnance wagons, we won't know 'em from a side of 'dobe anyway."

They had reined in on the edge of a mud hole in which men sweated—in spite of the sleet which plastered thin clothing to their gaunt bodies—swore, and put dogged endurance to the test as they labored with drag ropes and behind wheels encrusted with pendulous pounds of mud, to propel a supply wagon out of the bog into which it had sunk when the frozen crust of the rutted road had broken apart. The Army of the Tennessee, now fighting storms, winter rains, snow and hail, was also fighting men as valiantly, engaged in General Hood's great gamble of an all-out attack on Nashville. They had a hope—and a slim chance—to sweep through the Union lines back up into Tennessee and Kentucky, and perhaps to wall off Sherman in the south and repair the loss of Atlanta.

Hannibal brayed, shifting his weary feet in the churned-up muck of the field edge. The ground, covered with a scum of ice at night, was a trap for animals as well as vehicles. Breaking through that glassy surface to the glutinous stuff beneath, they suffered cuts deep enough to draw blood above hoof level.

Drew called to the men laboring at the stalled wagon.

"Ordnance? Buford's division?"

He didn't really expect any sort of a promising answer. This was worse than trying to hunt a needle in a stack of hay, this tracing—through the fast darkening night—the lost ordnance wagons, caught somewhere in or behind the infantry train. But ahead, where Forrest's cavalry was thrusting into the Union lines at Spring Hill, men were going into battle with three rounds or less to feed their carbines and rifles. Somehow the horse soldiers had pushed into a hot, full-sized fight and the scouts had to locate those lost wagons and get them up to the front lines.

A living figure of mud spat out a mouthful of that viscous substance in order to answer.

"This heah ain't no ordnance—not from Buford's neither! Put your backs into it now, yo' wagon-dogs! Git to it an' push!"

Under that roar the excavation squad went into straining action. Oxen, their eyes bulbous in their skulls from effort, set brute energy against yokes along with the men. The mud eventually gave grip, and the wagon moved.

Drew rode on, the two half-seen shapes which were Boyd and Kirby in his wake. A dripping branch flicked bits of ice into his face. The dusk was a thickening murk, and with the coming of the November dark, their already pitiful chance of locating the wagons dwindled fast.

There was a distant crackle of carbine and rifle fire. The struggle must still be in progress back there. At least the stragglers about them were still moving up. No retreat from Spring Hill, unless the Yankees were making that. All Drew's party could do was to continue on down the road, asking their question at each wagon, stalled in the mud or traveling at a snail's pace.

"D'you see?" Boyd cried out. "Those men were barefoot!" Involuntarily he swung one of his own booted feet out of the stirrup as if to assure himself that he still had adequate covering for his cold toes.

"It ain't the first time in this heah war," Kirby remarked. "They'll ketch 'em a Yankee. The blue bellies, they're mighty obligin' 'bout wearin' good shoes an' such, an' lettin' themselves be roped with all their plunder on. Some o' 'em, who I had the pleasure of surveyin' through Sarge's glasses this mornin', have overcoats—good warm ones. Now that's what'd pleasure a poor cold Texas boy, makin' him forgit his troubles. You keep your eyes sighted for one of them theah overcoats, Boyd. I'll be right beholden to you for it."

Hannibal brayed again and switched his rope tail. His usual stolid temperament showed signs of wear.

"Airin' th' lungs that way sounds like a critter gittin' set to make war medicine. A hardtail don't need no hardware but his hoofs to make a man regret knowin' him familiar-like—"

Drew had reached another wagon.

"Ordnance? Buford's?" He repeated the well-worn question without hope.

"Yeah, what about it?"

For a moment the scout thought he had not heard that right. But Kirby's crow of delight assured him that he had been answered in the affirmative.

"What about it?" Boyd echoed indignantly. "We've been huntin' you for hours. General Buford wants...."

The man who had answered Drew was vague in the dusk, to be seen only in the limited light of the lantern on the driver's seat. But they did not miss the pugnacious set of knuckles on hips, nor the truculence which overrode the weariness in his voice.

"Th' General can want him a lotta things in this heah world, sonny. What the Good Lord an' this heah mud lets him have is somethin' else again. We've been pushin' these heah dang-blasted-to-Richmond wagons along, mostly with our bare hands. Does he want 'em any faster, he can jus' send us back thirty or forty fresh teams, along with good weather—an' we'll be right up wheah he wants us in no time—"

"The boys are out of ammunition," Drew said quietly. "And they are tryin' to dig out the Yankees."

"You ain't tellin' me nothin', soldier, that I don't know or ain't already heard." The momentary flash of anger had drained out of the other's voice; there was just pure fatigue weighting the tongue now. "We're comin', jus' as fast as we can—"

"You pull on about a quarter mile and there's a turnout; that way you'll make better time," Drew suggested. "We'll show you where."

"All right. We're comin'."

In the end they all pitched to, lending the pulling strength of their mounts, and the power of their own shoulders when the occasion demanded. Somehow they got on through the dark and the cold and the mud. And close to dawn they reached their goal.

But that same dark night had lost the Confederate Army their chance of victory. The Union command had not been safely bottled up at Spring Hill. Through the night hours Schofield's army had marched along the turnpike, within gunshot of the gray troops, close enough for Hood's pickets to hear the talk of the retreating men. Now they must be pursued toward Franklin. The Army of the Tennessee was herding the Yankees right enough, but with a kind of desperation which men in the ranks could sense.

Buford's division held the Confederate right wing. Drew, acting as courier for the Kentucky general, saw Forrest—with his tough, undefeated, and undefeatable escort—riding ahead.

They had Wilson's Cavalry drawn up to meet them. But they had handled Wilson before, briskly and brutally. This was the old game they knew well. Drew saw the glitter of sabers along the Union ranks and smiled grimly. When were the Yankees going to learn that a saber was good for the toasting of bacon and such but not much use in the fight? Give him two Colts and a carbine every time! There was a fancy dodge he had seen some of the Texans use; they strung extra revolver cylinders to the saddle horn and snapped them in for