But the exchange of fire was not futile. It drew the attention of the men in the house to just one end of the street. So that while these men continued to blast at attackers they could hear but not see, the other three blue-uniformed figures were able to race across the street and reach cover on the north side, rifles cold an unfired in their sweat-sticky hands.
One of the Union men saw the captain and two troopers cross the street. Hedges knew this the moment he, Scott and Bell lunged into fresh cover and the rifle fire faltered and was stilled. For he knew the way the mind of Frank Forrest worked.
The viciously tough non-com had used his initiation to good account. He had been prepared to accept responsibility for the death of the helpless Negro boy, order to create a diversion so that Hedges and the troopers with him could reach their position unseen by the enemy.
Now it was the officer's turn to make a positive move as effective or more so than the opening attack on the men in the house. The trust the men had in Hedges was only good for as long as he proved himself a superior leader to Forrest. The moment he slipped in theire estimation—and there had been a number of occasions during the war when he had come close to this—they would transfer their allegiance from the captain to the sergeant, who would have no hesitation in accepting. For Frank Forrest hated taking orders and never had done so from any man before Hedges whom he made the exception because of a grudging respect for the captain—grudging to the extent that he never lost an opportunity to test the man, eager to see him fail. Keenly anticipating the excuse this would give him to establish his supremacy the best way there was—to his mind. By killing Captain Josiah C. Hedges.
John Scott and Roger Bell were as aware as Hedges himself that this was the latest of many tests Forrest had set. It showed on their darkly bristled faces as they looked expectantly at the captain in the total silence which followed the ending of gunfire. He did not have to search more deeply into their expressions to know they were hopeful he would fail. For, like Seward and Douglas, Rhett and Forrest, they shared the common soldier's dislike of officers. It was nothing personal. They all simply hated the authority which came with officers' braid.
"Around the rear," Hedges rasped, and stayed flat to the wall as he turned the angle of the side and back walls of the shack.
The troopers followed him, setting down their booted feet as if walking on thin ice. With no covering fire from the far end of the street, all three knew that the enemy were doubtless peering toward other areas of Peatville now, suspecting that the burst of frenetic shooting had been a diversionary tactic. But no shots exploded from the house four away from that which the trio of Union troopers were using as cover.
The buildings on the north side of the street had back lots as neglected as those opposite. But instead of a mixture of long grass and weeds behind, there was the vast expanse of fields covered with a crop of tobacco. A slight breeze rippled the fields in some areas, under a sky that was lightening as the rain clouds thinned.
"Why they all holed up in just the one place, sir?" Scott asked in a rasping whisper as Hedges led the two men to the rear of the second house along the street.
Hedges turned, tapped Scott on the shoulder and then jerked a thumb into the air. "Up on the roof and wait until the crap starts to fly, trooper," he murmured.
"Smells like it already has," Bell growled, returning his attention to Hedges after giving the scowling Scott a boost up onto the rear of the shack's low-pitched roof. The familiar sickly-sweet smell of decomposing flesh was not strong, but it was unmistakable to the nostrils of such men as these. It seemed to permeate the entire single-street town, just discernible along with the fresher, much pleasanter scents of wet earth and grass, timber and growing tobacco.
"Sir," Bell called softly as they reached the next shack along the street and he was given the signal to climb onto the roof.
"Yeah, trooper?" Hedges rested his rifle and cupped both hands so that Bell could place a foot in them and be raised aloft.
Bell waited until he was crouched on the roof. "You didn't answer John's question."
"That's because I don't know the answer," the captain growled, retrieved the Henry repeater and took one more look across the back lots of the shacks before he moved along the side of the one on which Bell was positioned.
All the crude dwellings of the plantation slaves were identical, with a door and two windows at the front and a door and one window at the rear. So, if the men who lured the Union patrol to Peatville feared there was a move to surround them, they should have at least tried to sneak some of their number out of the back door.
Then again, Hedges pondered with a narrowing of his eyes and a tightening of his mouthline, they should never have concentrated all their firepower in a single building in the first place.
Maybe they hadn't.
Ever since he, Scott and Bell had crossed the street without drawing fire, he had been conscious of the possibility that he and his men were advancing into a well-laid trap that took account of the very moves they were making.
The two troopers on the roofs were aware of this, too. Which was why their keen readiness to begin the killing had been blunted, by fear of the unknown.
The tall, lean Union cavalry captain crossed the gap to the shack next to the one where he knew some of the enemy were located. And, his back pressed to the rough timber, he took short side-steps along the front of it.
He knew that his own men could see him. Scott and Bell on the roofs on this side of the street. Forrest, Seward and Douglas inside or concealed by the walls of shacks across the street.
But what of the enemy?
As a fusillade of rifle shots exploded, Josiah C. Hedges felt his lips curl back to show his teeth in an expression that was a mixture of relief, triumph and self-anger.
Every shot cracked out from the shattered windows of the single shack, every bullet aimed across the street toward the area where the riflemen had known their enemy to be.
"Come on, you Yankee bastards!"
"Yeah, you all come and get us!"
"Die, blue-bellies!"
"You ain't gonna win this stinkin' war!"
After the initial volley of shots which ripped the silence to shreds, the men in the shack began to yell the taunts. Hatred gave their voices a harsh shrillness which served to make every word sound distinctly despite the constant barrage of gunfire.
Hedges, the sweat of tension drying cold on his flesh, continued to side-step across the front of the shack. Then turned and took three long strides to cross the open area and reach the corner of the building in which the enemy were gathered. This as the rifle fire ceased to be concentrated on one area, the barrels raking to left and right so that the entire south side of the street was sprayed with bullets.
The captain's expression was now of evil pleasure. He had run a high risk and whatever the outcome of this battle of Peatville, he could claim victory in the latest of another kind of battle. Against the men he commanded and against himself.
"Let's go get 'em, boys!"
"Kill the sonsofbitches!"
"Show 'em the south ain't done yet!"
The door of the shack was wrenched open. And gray uniformed figures plunged out into the night, exploding rifle shots on the run and covered by a constant barrage of fire from the glassless windows to either side of the doorway.
Hedges' Henry was leveled from the hip and he squeezed the trigger and saw a Rebel soldier tumble as he pumped the action to jack another shell into the breach.
Another Rebel staggered and pitched forward as Scott and Bell sent bullets angling down from the rooftops.
Both men hit the ground with bloodstains blossoming across the backs of their uniform tunics.
This left four still on their feet. On the run, but with less wild fervor than before, glancing over their shoulders in shock at the realization that two of their number had been backshot.
"Shit, we been tricked!"
"Damn 'em to hell!"
<
br /> Hedges heard these taut-voiced comments during a brief lull in the covering fire as the men in the shack adjusted to the new situation.
Then three shots cracked out from the south side of the street, accompanied by the shattering of broken glass.
"The friggin' south's goin' friggin' west!" Billy Seward yelled in high glee as two more Rebels fell, rolled and became still on the street.
As the two survivors swerved to angle across the street in different directions, the Rebels in the shack intensified their covering fire. They sent a hail of bullets toward the windows which had been shattered by Forrest, Seward and Douglas.
Just as he had happened a few moments ago, Scott and Bell elected to aim at the same target, the nearest one. And a fifth Rebel died from two bullets tunneling into his back.
The remaining running man got off another shot and took two more strides. Then something came spinning out of the window of the shack where Frank Forrest was positioned. And the running man came to a halt, flung away his rifle, looked down at the knife buried in his belly and wrapped both hands around the hilt.
He tugged at the knife and screamed.
"Aw, quit bellyachin', Reb!" Forrest yelled, and triggered a revolver shot out through the window.
It was a heart shot that killed the man on his splayed feet and sent him into a backward fall.
Hedges heard the shots and the screams and the shouts but he did not see who or what caused them. For after making the one kill he whirled and ran along the side and around to the rear of the Rebel-held shack.
He had been seen to be taking a high risk and that was important in terms of his personal battle. For until then, Frank Forrest had been winning all the way down the line. At the outset, back at the point where the railroad entered the timber, it had been obvious there was a chance the Negro boy was part of a Rebel trap. And had the former bounty hunter been in command, the youth of Floyd would not have given the boy the benefit of the doubt. His interrogation would not have been gentle.
Forrest had not commented on Hedges' handling of the situation and from that moment the test was in progress. The captain had for a time been in grave danger of failing, after the sergeant started the shooting and revealed to the men that he had no compunction about killing young Floyd. The men were keyed up then, eager to do some killing of their own and looked to Hedges for the opening.
But the situation called for patience. A waiting game to play on the nerves of the Rebels until human nature forced them to reveal their strength and positions. But the men under the captain's tenuous command were ill-suited for such a tactic. They had smelled blood and were hungry to spill more.
This was why he had set himself up as a sweating target, against his better judgment but conscious of the personal conflict that was as dangerous as the impending fight with the Rebels. And fortune smiled on him.
Thus had he felt relief that the enemy were concentrated in one building and that their nerve had broken after such a short time, triumph at having topped Frank Forrest's play, and self-anger that he felt it necessary to compete with his own men as well as the Rebels. But at least self-anger was better than self-pity.
Now, as he gestured for Scott and Bell to join him, and moved along the rear of the house before the two troopers had started to leap down from the roofs, the grin of pleasure was firmly fixed to his lean, dark-skinned features. For he was as one with his men now. All side issues were dispensed with and he could indulge his own taste for slaughter.
He killed for the second time this day as he turned in front of the rear door of the shack and saw it flung open even as he drew back a leg to kick at it.
"Sonofa—" the man on the threshold started, but had the curse curtailed by a bullet driving into his throat and bursting clear at the nape of his neck.
Cries of alarm were amplified by the confines of the one-room shack. The vocal sounds replacing the cracks of rifle shots as men at the front doorway and flanking windows whirled.
Hedges received a fleeting image of at least six men in the process of whirling around. He shot one as he pitched forward, jacked a fresh shell into the breech as he went down and fired again as he hit the ground. Then he powered into a roll to the side, out from under a volley of shots that dug divots of earth along the stretch of earth he had been sprawled on.
"Crazy bastard!"
Hedges recognized the voice of Bell, saw the man skid to a halt, fire into the shack and then leap over him. Then Scott rushed around behind where the captain got onto all fours and blasted a shot into the window.
"Enough, frig it, enough!" a man shrieked above the cries and groans of the wounded.
"Takes two to make a truce!" Scott snarled, drew his revolver and started to fan the hammer, standing at the shattered window and raking the Colt to left and right.
"And there's two here ain't makin' one, Rebs!" Bell augmented, and moved onto the threshold.
He drew his revolver, as well, but was more deliberate in the way he cocked the hammer and squeezed the trigger, picking out his targets by the sounds of their pain in the dark interior of the shack.
The final shot cracked as Hedges got to his feet, flared nostrils stinging with the acrid taint of exploded powder which now masked the stench of old death and the scents of wet country. There had been time to order a ceasefire before the two Colts rattled empty, but no part of his mind had demanded he give it. Helpless as the trapped and wounded Rebels were, Floyd had been worse off.
"Hey, Frank, Billy, Hal!" Scott yelled. "You can come outta your hidey-holes now!"
"Watch your mouth, trooper!" Forrest snarled.
"The captain okay, John?" Billy Seward called with no hint of concern in his voice.
"You men check the rest of the buildings in town!" Hedges ordered as he brushed by Bell to cross the threshold of the shack.
"Sounds like his old uppity self, Billy," Douglas growled in a stage whisper he knew would carry across the street.
"Do like the man tells you!" Forrest snapped and thus acknowledged that the regulation chain of command was still established.
"Bell, you check some of the shacks," Hedges instructed. "Scott, go bring the horses out of the timber."
There were no complaints with the assignments, for familiarity had bred contempt in the matter of looking at bullet shattered corpses.
There were eight of them sprawled in the shack: one by the front door; two under each of the flanking windows; and three piled up in a heap at the center of the floor.
Hedges saw them in the flaring light of a match he struck on the stock of the Henry and held aloft. Then, as Forrest entered through the front door, wiping the blood of a dead man from the blade of his reclaimed knife on a pants leg, both men reacted to a low moan.
Forrest crouched and drew back the knife, ready to throw it. While Hedges turned from the waist and swung the cocked rifle one-handed.
"If that's the kid's ma, he told some of the truth, Captain," the sergeant rasped.
The black woman was sprawled on her back at the foot of the shack's rear wall. Her wrists were tied together and a length of rope was taut between the bindings and a nail hammered into the front of a big grandfather clock a foot away from and a foot above her head. Other nails had been driven into the floor and bent over at each side of her ankles, forcing her to remain supine and to keep her legs splayed.
She was naked. About forty years old, her face too gaunt to be pretty and her body as scrawny as that of Floyd.
"Sure is in trouble," Forrest added as the match went out.
Hedges did not light another one. There was nothing else to see besides the woman who had been physically damaged only by countless assaults on her defenseless body, the sprawling corpses of the Rebel soldiers and the spartan furnishings of the shack—a table and four chairs made of unfinished timber, a pot-bellied stove, three mattresses and the out-of-place grandfather clock.
"My son, he is dead," the woman said, her tone injec
ting just the hint of a hopeful query as Hedges dropped to his haunches beside her.
"Yes, ma'am," the captain answered.
"Just some dead niggers in a few of the hovels, Frank," Billy Seward reported as he reached the threshold of the shack.
"They made him do it," the woman said.
"We got us a live one?" Seward asked. "Shut up," Forrest rasped.
"Captain!" Hal Douglas yelled from the eastern end of the street.
"Go see what he wants, Sergeant."
"You are Mr. Lincoln's men?" the woman asked. "Like the others."
"Which others, ma'am?"
"Hey, you want some light on the subject, sir?" Seward asked.
"Maybe get some if you button your lip, trooper," Hedges answered in a tone of menace.
Seward spat noisily before he swung away from the doorway.
"They came at noon, the soldiers in gray. Sent the master and his people away from the big house. Said the soldiers of Mr. Lincoln were comin'. Floyd and me, we hide. Watch as they kill all us black people. My man, too. Then we are found. They use me while Floyd is watchin'. Then warned by guard soldiers of Mr. Lincoln come. Hide bodies of our people and say they will fight to death. But none die. Kill all but one of soldiers of Mr. Lincoln. He tells them more of his kind are comin'. He has to tell them this. If he does not, they say they will kill Floyd and make him eat the warm flesh of my son."
Footfalls and horses' hooves sounded out on the street.
"Captain, we found—" Forrest started.
"Henderson and his patrol," Hedges finished.
"She's talkin', uh?"
"Keeps her from thinking, feller."
"They kill him after he tells this," the woman went on in the same dull monotone as before. "Then make Floyd go to fetch you here. Say that if he does not do this, he will have to eat my flesh and drink my blood. All this I tell is the truth. Is there more that you want to know?"
EDGE: A Ride In The Sun (Edge series Book 34) Page 7
