The movement added to the throbbing pain in my head, but I could see just fine. Legs adorned with shoes held together with thongs and patched with scraps of leather, levy-issue shoes they were, loped past. That sight and the virtual absence of the screaming and howling I’d heard before the bullet struck Blue meant the sweeping charge of the First Dragoons had temporarily flushed the enemy from the center of the encampment. But for how long?
I squirmed into the open, latched onto the wheel of the gun carriage, and levered upward. Once on my feet, the ache in my skull diminished rapidly. I cast about and found my sword a scant rod from the dead Blue. Averting my eyes to avoid tears, I regained possession of my blade. I almost quit on finding my rifle till I thought to search under the transom. Sure enough, it was there, keeping company with the bloody skull. Bullets thunked hollowly against the wooden trail of the carriage, but refusing to panic, I sought the cover of the dead bodies heaped alongside the off wheel and saw to my long gun. I removed the dirt plugging the barrel with the point of the Starkweather knife, then set and released the cock, checked the flint, and primed the pan with fresh powder. With my rifle again in proper working order, I was ready to rejoin the dragoons, my first duty now that the Shawnee had renewed their assault, Erin or no Erin.
A solid gander every which way produced no sightings of helmeted riders. The main defensive line of the rear echelon had receded to the outermost wagons and carts within the army’s hollow square, and I guessed the surviving dragoons, such as there might be, would be rallying within that scattering of vehicles, the original object of Starkweather’s charge. That being the most likely place to also find one Erin Green lent speed to my feet.
In spite of the renewed, constant, incoming hail of balls from the enemy, I gained that which Blue and I had sought: the closest wagon. The exertion riled the knot on my noggin, and I paused to let the pain dull while I got my bearings. What confronted me now was the havoc and slaughter perpetrated by the Injuns during their brief penetration of the rear echelon. The bodies scattered among the parked wagons were mainly those of the drivers and women and children. Not the length of a rifle from me reposed a slim, raven-haired female that had been chopped in half. A child whose cleaved forehead oozed gray brains clung to the lower portion of the corpse with both arms.
Beyond the slain mother and daughter rested the overturned cart of the Green family, a sight that froze my blood. The box of the overturned cart faced away from me, the airborne wheel spinning slowly on its axle. Expecting the very worst, I wound quickly among the civilian dead and swept twixt the poles of the cart. Tor Devlin, skin white and waxen, lay on his backside. A bloody bandage rested beside his scalped head. White-stockinged legs, partially hidden by the tail end of the cart, caught my eye. Praying Erin hadn’t switched her male breeches for stockings and skirt, I inched past the remains of the sergeant. I couldn’t help my relieved sigh. It wasn’t Erin. It was the tallest of Annie Bower’s friends. The harlot’s torn bodice exposed ghastly wounds where the Injuns had cut away her breasts. Her tortured features indicated she’d suffered much before dying.
Where, though, was Erin? I felt an insane urge to start searching for her among the dead, and got a grip on the tailboard of the cart till it waned. With the Injun horde threatening to collapse the whole of the army’s hollow square, there was no time to confirm the death of anyone, beloved though they might be. Besides, a moment’s reflection told me that if Erin and her self-appointed female guardian were alive, I already knew where to find them. I trusted her and Annie Bower to seek the safest place for noncombatants at this stage of the battle: the very center of the ground still held by St. Clair’s forces.
I shagged through the hodgepodge of wheeled vehicles separating me from that protected middle ground, eyes peeled for sign of either woman as well as the First Dragoons. I found dragoon sign first, two of the troop’s horses, one prone, the other burdened with a profusely bleeding neck wound. Their riders, both privates, had been brought down, tomahawked, and scalped. It wasted precious time, but I couldn’t leave the wounded animal to suffer. I shot him behind the ear and knelt to reload.
I was seating the ball when a great yelling sprang from white throats along the front echelon defending the near bank of the creek. This was no victory cry, being instead the harsh outpouring of what was now a thin blue line summoning every ounce of courage they could muster as they undertook a desperate charge. A tremendous firing arose, and I set off at a dead run, sensing that if Starkweather was sucking wind, he had those of his cherished troop able to lift sword or rifle plumb in the thick of that desperate forward push.
I cleared the last of the wagons and carts and encountered a vista as shocking as any previously witnessed. The crack and boom of small arms equaled the roll of thunder, and across the creek a cloud of fresh powder smoke formed atop the far bluff. Groups of blue-uniformed soldiers with bayoneted rifles, the Second Americans, scaled the steep incline and vanished into the expanding smoke cloud. But directly in front of my nose, a huge throng milled aimlessly, a throng composed of levies and militia who had thrown aside their weapons in abject fear. They drifted about the tattered tents of camp followers and elegant marquees of officers, begging aloud for mercy and deliverance from death. They paid no heed to their officers, unmoved by the threat of a bullet if they didn’t return to the ranks. Most ludicrous of all was the bonneted, buxom camp follower chasing a cowering shirker from her tent with an iron skillet.
The fighting beyond the bluff eased, then the crash of small arms resumed fierce as ever. A blue-uniformed figure staggered from the smoke cloud. Their fear a raw stink, the milling crowd quieted. Suddenly, blue uniforms flooded the crest of the bluff, then just as suddenly dwindled to a trickle. I stared and stared, but no more bayoneted infantrymen appeared there.
An ominous foreboding weakened my legs. The charge of the Second had failed, and their failure signified the worst for General St. Clair. In the absence of the First Americans, the devastation of the only regular regiment engaged brought his army to the brink of total disaster. No surrounded force of arms could sustain the general’s losses to death, wounds, and cowardice the past three hours and continue to resist a foe as intrepid and zealous as the Shawnee. Defeat would be a kind fate for the general’s army, for it was threatened now with annihilation.
Nine of the A.M.
A new fear beset me, the fear that I might be associated with the shirkers. I pushed and barged through them, slamming with shoulder and elbow where necessary. Damn if I’d die thought a coward.
The cannon of the front echelon had ceased firing. The lines of levies and regulars defending the creek were perilously thin, and their rate of fire slackened by the minute. As a consequence, the red enemy forded the stream in ever-greater numbers. In an admirable display of bravery, portly General Butler, wounded arm in a sling, popped above his kneeling soldiers on horseback in an attempt to rally their flagging spirits, only to be shot from the saddle. The last I saw of him, he was carried from the field in a blanket by four of his own soldiers.
The attacking Injuns seized the near creek bank, and many levies and regulars already poised to withdraw scrambled to their feet. At that crucial juncture, the Injun strategy of killing officers first turned the tide of battle in their favor. Without sufficient officers to enforce orders to the contrary, the standing levies and regulars began shuffling backward. Others joined them. The emboldened redsticks rose from cover and loosed a withering round of fire. The air sang with bullets. Defenders crumpled, and the will of their lines crumpled with them. A few war whoops, accompanied by another round of shooting by the enemy, and the inevitable rout was under way, St. Clair’s untrained, undisciplined levy battalions abandoning their positions in bunches with the suddenness of startled deer.
I, too, was tempted to put sole to path and might have but for the flashing sweep of a sword. I was thankful I hesitated, for it was Starkweather wielding the blade. He was ensconced in the tents of Clarke’s battalion,
vainly trying to staunch the flight of deserting infantrymen while a dozen plus of his dragoons, all afoot now, continued to fire on the enemy. Tap was with the captain, shielding him from the enemy the fleeing cowards refused to fight. Bear and Andy Young were nowhere to be seen.
Heartened by familiar faces, I dodged the terror-stricken soldiers bound the opposite direction and joined with Tap and the captain.
Tap’s eyes bugged at the sight of me. “Damn my soul!” he exclaimed. “Thought you was a goner, lad.”
I clapped the old scout’s shoulder and knuckled my forehead. “Reporting for duty, Captain.”
Starkweather, always the officer, allowed me a nod of recognition. “Dragoons, fall back in pace with me!”
We withdrew in orderly fashion to the innermost row of tents. “Sergeant Baker, form line abreast!” the captain bawled. Without a moment’s delay, the sergeant and his companions swung about. The instant, unquestioned obedience of the sergeant and the last shred of the First Dragoons was a testament to the stern discipline Miles Starkweather had instilled in his troop. “Ensign Downer and Mr. Jacobs, after me, please!”
We heeled like hounds and stuck to the captain tight as cockleburs. I edged close to Tap. “Where are Bear an’ Andy Young?”
Tap’s head shook. “Don’t know. Ain’t seed them since they went off to deliver Starkweather’s message to Colonel Darke.”
Confusion held sway at our destination, the center of the St. Clair encampment. Swollen by the new arrivals from the front echelon, the crowd of shirkers now outnumbered those bearing arms. “Like sheep penned for the slaughter,” Tap muttered disgustedly.
Starkweather skirted the burgeoning crowd and led us into the presence of St. Clair himself. The general was no less disheveled than his command. He was hatless, and his gray hair hung in strands about the shoulders of a rumpled, coarsely woven cappo coat, beneath which he wore only a linen shirt. In short, he looked what he was: an ailing general rousted from his sickbed to confront a day that had begun badly and worsened with each hour.
Corporal Thurston was just finishing a report, his tone dogged as usual. “Left flank has collapsed completely, sir. The heathen have overrun the contractors an’ civilians there. We have hundreds dead an’ wounded.”
St. Clair’s slow nod belied a racing mind. He addressed his listening officers with grave solemnity. “We will effect a retreat via the military road, gentlemen, and spare of this command what is possible. Have the drummers beat the command. Colonel Darke will lead.”
Perhaps it was the finely tailored uniform, but the general spotted Miles Starkweather among his audience like a hound pointing the bird. “Dragoons will continue to support Major Clarke so as to sustain the right flank during our withdrawal. Dismissed!”
Starkweather saluted, and we retraced our steps. “I ain’t one to show disfavor,” Tap said, “but where the general’s road’s concerned, them Injuns be thicker’n summer flies on bloody meat.”
The captain grunted without eschewing a yea or nay regarding the opinion of the old scout. “We have our orders, and we will abide by them, Mr. Watkins.”
Starkweather being the sole officer in our sector, he relinquished the narrow ground separating the tents of Clarke’s battalion from a thin band of trees that ringed the entire right flank, thereby gaining for us a modicum of cover. I took a shine to the backside of a hefty gray beech that bordered on outright fondness. The pain in my head was by now a dull ache that hindered neither my shooting nor my brain. I stood solid with the others and did my duty but dwelled solely on the possible whereabouts of Erin Green. Somehow, some way, I had to conduct a final search for her before we were caught up in St. Clair’s retreat, even if I had to disobey the captain or the general. Maybe it only made sense to me, but regardless of the seeming impossibility of locating her in the midst of a raging battle, if she were alive, she was expecting me to come for her. And I could not fail her, for if I did, I would loathe my every breath to the grave.
The remnants of Clarke’s battalion and we few dragoons successfully shored up the right flank. Though our numbers dwindled alarmingly fast, we stubbornly gave ground a tree at a time. Tap, fresh from checking the progress of the retreat south via the military road, brought news that Colonel Darke’s sortie to break through the encircling Injuns had collapsed, and the enemy was overwhelming the left flank and the rear echelon from the west.
A Shawnee ball struck above the captain, and tree bark rained on his cockaded helmet. “I should never doubt you, Mr. Jacobs,” an unfazed Starkweather confessed. “What course should General St. Clair pursue now?”
Tap tugged at his beard. “Was I he, I’d retreat to the east. There be the fewest Injuns thataway.”
The next tree over, Sergeant Baker lunged to his feet. “Yuh best take note, Captain,” he cried, pointing behind us. “The whole shebang’s callin’ it quits!”
Sure enough and for certain, as Tap had just predicted, a virtual tide of regulars, levies, militia, and noncombatants, every soul in the center of the encampment capable of walking, was gliding eastward, stumbling and falling over their own dead and dying. Starkweather hated such disorder, but evincing no dismay, adjusted his orders accordingly. “Gentlemen, we’ll take station next to the wagon yard and delay the enemy’s pursuit as long as possible. After me, if you please!”
Wanting to shout in thanksgiving, I hung at the captain’s shoulder, eyes surveying the wagon yard for any flash of white shirt or red hair. Infantrymen plowed past us, many casting aside muskets and cartridge boxes and haversacks suddenly too burdensome. I wedged through the retreating infantrymen, bolted among the parked vehicles, and began calling for Erin at the top of my lungs. If the other dragoons thought me crazy, so be it.
Starkweather didn’t yell for me to stop, and I ran farther into the yard, calling louder than ever. Wagons surrounded a circle of deserted fires still emitting smoke. I cast about wildly, saw nothing but a black horse tied twenty paces away twixt two of the vehicles, and cast about again. Something about that tied horse bit at my memory, and my eyes whirled back to him. He was a huge black animal, white-stockinged and rippling with muscle, and he wore a saddle, not a hauling harness. My feet were moving even as I remembered: The last time I’d seen that huge beast, Court Starnes had been riding him.
A squeal of pain sounded at the front of one of the wagons. I ducked under the reins tying the huge black horse, gained the corner of the wagon bed, and saw booted feet big as the black’s hooves straddling a pair of slim legs encased in breeches and moccasins. Another step and I was looking at a broad male backside and the rear angle of a tricorn hat. This go-round there was no hesitation, no granting of quarter. I lifted my rifle and drove the butt plate into the bony crevice where the bottom of the wide skull came together with the nape of the neck.
The tricorn hat went spinning, and the broad backside tautened. Then, despite the tremendous impact of the blow, the wide skull slowly rotated, and I was staring not at the Roman jaw and Grecian nose of Court Starnes but a black-patched eye and a forehead centered by the jagged track of an old knife scar. The second blow of my rifle butt smashed Dyson Barch flush on the cheekbone under his patched eye. With that blow, his good orb rolled upward, and he flopped sideways.
And there, squirming from beneath Barch’s heavy legs, was of course Erin Green. Her white shirt and frock coat were splotched with dirt, and black powder coated her chin and mouth, a disfigurement explained by the cartridge box belted about her waist. Tearing at paper cartridges with your teeth to load a musket was a right messy business. But dear God, even filthy Erin Green was stunningly attractive.
She scrambled to her feet, an accomplishment that, not surprisingly, loosed her tongue. “Well, now that you’re finally here, you must save Annie, too!”
I should have guessed as much. In for one, in for the both of them. I wasted no time arguing, for redstick war whoops and the bang of small arms filled my ears to overflowing. The Shawnee were descending upon the very
middle of the army encampment. “Where is the Bower woman?”
Erin gestured eastward in the general direction of St. Clair’s retreat. “She cut Starnes on the throat with her knife, and he chased after her. He’ll kill her if he catches her. Barch was to fetch me on Court’s horse.”
I untied the huge black. “Climb aboard. We don’t have time to hunt them afoot.” For once, she took no exception to what I proposed. I stepped astride the black, reached down, and lifted her up behind me. A mild thump of my boots against his flanks, and Starnes’s animal answered the rein quite promptly. The gurgling Dyson Barch I left for the Injuns.
The black trotted clear of the tangle of wagons without our beholding Annie or Court Starnes, or more importantly to me, the First Dragoons. The black had to slow to avoid trampling infantrymen retreating now in a pell-mell dash. I was so busy seeking an open path through the dashing soldiers and the bodies littering the ground, the attack of Court Starnes, launched from my blind quarter, took me unawares.
Erin squawked with alarm as her arms were ripped from my waist. The next stride of the black, a substantial weight settled on his haunches and massive forearms engulfed me. Beefy fingers gripped the front of my coat while those of the opposite hand secured a purchase in the black’s mane. The imposing bulk of the body accosting me left no doubt as to my attacker’s identity.
The hand clutching my coat gave a series of powerful jerks, Starnes depending on the fist entwined in the black’s mane for the necessary leverage to unseat me. I squeezed the black with my knees, but the burly Starnes was too strong to shrug off, and with my arms pinned to my sides, I could bring neither my sword nor my rifle into play.
Starnes felt me slipping from the saddle. He laughed and booted the black into a gallop. My downward slide, though, pressed the Starkweather knife against my rib cage and suggested a means of thwarting his desires. I pushed hard against the stirrups, butted backward with my head, and managed to flatten his nose with the metal spine of my helmet. Starnes’s grip lessened for a fraction of a second. I yanked the captain’s knife from its scabbard and stabbed at the only part of him readily available: that immense fist entwined in the black’s mane.
Blood at Dawn Page 32
