Several Invincibles let out strangled coughs. Mollie turned red.
Hope soared in Nate. Then he saw that George Lewis’s plump cheeks were on the pink side, too. Why, you son of a bitch, he thought—you’ve known all along. The only thing Lewis might not have known, since he’d spent most of the time since the war down in Raleigh, was that Mollie and Caudell were together.
Now, though, something about Mollie besides her smooth cheeks caught the captain’s notice. “It says here you’re from Rivington.”
“Yes, sir, that’s so,” she said, nodding.
“You’re about the only one from the company who is. I’ll make you acting corporal, put you next in charge of skirmishers after Nate here. Most of the fighting right now is north of Rivington, but along with breaking up stills and such, I want us to see how closely we can approach the town from this direction. Maybe Forrest will want to hit the Rivington men two ways at once, and that’s something he’ll need to know. Does that suit you?”
“Yes, sir.” She walked over to stand by Caudell, grinned up at him. “That suits me right fine.” If Lewis hadn’t known they were together, he did now.
Nate wanted to kick her. He wanted to pick her up and shake her, to see if he could get some sense into her that way. He wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. Captain Lewis had ordered the two of them to work together, which was wonderful.
But he’d also given them the most dangerous job the company would have to do, a job that wasn’t even properly its responsibility. Caudell wondered if he ought to squawk about that. He ended up just standing there, feeling foolish.
He saw more than one soldier eyeing the way Mollie stayed at his side. He hoped they got the message she wasn’t available—and he hoped she wasn’t. Maybe, he thought hopefully, jealousy would make someone give her away and force Captain Lewis to notice officially that she was a woman. But no one said a word.
Lewis said, “Come on inside the courthouse and get. Your rifles.”
Dempsey Eure whooped. “I’d sooner get my hands on a repeater again than—damn near anything.” He was looking at Mollie, too, but with a twinkle in his eye that made it impossible for Caudell to get angry at him.
The AK-47s leaned against the courthouse wall in a row neater than the Castalia Invincibles were likely to form. Cornelius: Joyner, an Invincible himself, stood guard over them with a pistol. One by one, Lewis handed each of his men a rifle and three banana clips heavy with cartridges.
Caudell hadn’t touched a firearm since he left the army. His hands, he discovered, still knew what to do. The smell of oil and metal and powder that came from the rifle, the sensuously mechanical glide of the charging handle as he pushed it back to expose the open chamber, made him see the army’s old Virginia campground almost as vividly as he did the courthouse where he stood. By the murmurs that rose from his comrades, they also had memories flooding back.
The only memories Henry Pleasants had of AK-47s were unpleasant ones. “I’m glad I’ll be on the right end of one of these things for a change,” he said. “Somebody’ll have to show me what to do with it, though.”
“Easy enough to learn.” Dempsey Eure had mischief in his voice. “Especially getting the bolt back in.”
“I have a feeling, Sergeant, that you’re trying to lead me down the primrose path,” Pleasants said.
“Me?” Eure was the picture of affronted innocence.
“Sir, if you like, I’ll take Henry with me and teach him what he needs to know,” Caudell said to Captain Lewis.
“All right,” Lewis said. “Teach him quickly, though. You, Bean, and the rest of a squad will head up toward Rivington tomorrow morning. Check the farms you come across, certainly, but I want to know where the Rivington men have their pickets out. As I said before, that’s important military information. Send a man back with the word before sunset tomorrow, or at once if you come under fire.”
“Yes, sir.” Caudell knew Lewis was giving him the option of using Henry Pleasants as his messenger if the Pennsylvanian had trouble getting the hang of the AK-47. Maybe he would do that. On the other hand, if bullets started flying, maybe he would send Mollie Bean back to Nashville to tell Lewis what they’d run into. She wouldn’t like that, but she would have to go: she was only acting corporal, while he was a first sergeant.
The conclusion would have made him happier if he’d managed to forget how free and easy Confederate soldiers were apt to be about obeying orders they didn’t care for.
“There’s nothin’ you could call a straight road between here and Rivington,” Mollie said early the next morning. The smell of brewing coffee took Caudell back to the war, though this cup came from the Liberty Bell instead of being hastily cooked above a little campfire.
Henry Pleasants methodically stripped his AK-47, reassembled it, then stripped it again. “This is an astonishing weapon,” he said, the third time he’d said that this morning and at least the dozenth since he’d got the rifle. “Whoever invented it was a genius, to get so many new things right and put them all together.” He’d said that about a dozen times, too.
Caudell sipped his coffee, which was far better than the chicory and burnt barley he’d drunk while he was in the Army of Northern Virginia. Pleasants already handled the repeater with confidence and competence. He was an engineer, Caudell reminded himself, and used to learning to use unfamiliar devices in a hurry. That suited Nate fine. Not only did he admire his friend’s knack, but if Pleasants was no liability with a rifle, he could use Mollie as a messenger without—well, with only a few—qualms of conscience.
She was saying, “Easiest way to get from hereto there, matter of fact, is to go over to Rocky Mount and take the train on up.” She chuckled. “That’d be the easiest way, anyhow, if the line wasn’t busted an’ if the Rivington men wouldn’t shoot you dead for tryin’ to use it.”
“Let’s try another road, then,” Alsie Hopkins said. He sounded so serious that the whole squad hooted at him.
Caudell raised his cup, tilted his head back to drain it. He slung the AK-47 over his shoulder. “Let’s go,” he said.
Ambling east along Washington Street to First hardly seemed like soldiering, though Ruffin Biggs complained, “I forgot how heavy a rifle this was.” Caudell frowned; compared to the rifle musket he had carried, the AK-47 was small and light. But compared to no rifle at all—his burden the past four years—it did feel rather like a slab of stone. He decided Biggs had a point.
First Street remained a respectable road until it leaped over Stony Creek. The soldiers’ feet drummed loudly on the wooden bridge. Bob Southard said, “What’s that fairy tale? The three billy goats guff?”
“Gruff,” Caudell corrected him. He waved down at the little stream. “Might could be a few snappers in there, but I don’t think Stony Creek’s big enough to hold a troll.”
A few hundred yards past the bridge, the road split into three narrow tracks, none of which seemed to lead anywhere in particular. “See what I mean?” Mollie said.
“The right fork is the one that goes north and east,” Henry Pleasants remarked. “That’s the way we’re looking for.”
Mollie looked at him. “You’re right, but how’d you know? You’re new hereabouts.”
“A couple of my miners, Welshmen, came down and settled on that road,” he answered. “I thought they’d work on the railroad with me, but they’re content to farm a few acres and hunt a little.”
“Haven’t seen ‘em in town much,” Caudell said. “They must stick to themselves.”
Pleasants nodded. “They do. Lloyd and Andrew are both like that.”
“We ought to have a look at those farms of theirs, then,” Caudell said. “Could be anything on ‘em—a still, maybe, or who knows what else?”
Lloyd Morgan’s place came first, a couple of miles up the path from Nashville. The cabin on it was small, dark, and tumbledown, rather like Morgan himself. He looked anything but happy at having guests, but did not presume to argue with a squad o
f soldiers with repeaters at the ready. He also smelled powerfully of whiskey. Try as they would, though, Caudell’s squad found no still. Nate asked him where he’d got the liquor. He just shook his head and muttered in Welsh.
Finally Caudell gave up. “Lee’s proclamation doesn’t make it against the law to get drunk. Let’s go,”
As pine woods screened Morgan’s farm from view, Ruffin Biggs grumbled, “I bet he’s standing back there laughing at us.”
“Could be so,” Caudell agreed.
“Can’t win all the time,” Mollie Bean said. When she was doing what any other soldier might, as now, Caudell found he had no trouble thinking of her as Melvin again. He could not decide whether that was good or bad.
Andrew Gwynn’s farm, an hour’s tramp from Lloyd Morgan’s, made the latter seem a plantation by comparison. Looking at the tiny, weed-infested plot Gwynn cultivated—or rather, did not seem to cultivate—Caudell marveled that he managed to make a living from it. And if he didn’t…how did he make a living? Suspicion rose within Caudell. He said, “We’ll look this place over real careful, boys.”
They looked. Andrew Gwynn came out of the shack by the path to watch them look. Under a shock of dark hair, his face was pale, narrow, closed. Unlike Morgan, he was in complete control of himself. When the searchers again failed to find anything, he gave them a cold nod and went back inside.
Caudell was dissatisfied, frustrated. “I know he’s hiding one somewhere,” he said several times. “I can feel it.”
After the squad had moved another couple of miles closer to Rivington, Henry Pleasants told him, “It’s back in a little clearing, well off the road. There’s no path—far as I know, Andrew never goes there the same way twice.”
“Why didn’t you say that when we were back there, Henry?” Caudell demanded, glaring at his friend.
“If you’d found it by yourselves, that would have been all right,” Pleasants answered. “But Andrew came down here at my urging. I didn’t feel right, giving him away before his eyes.”
“But our orders were—” Caudell stopped, remembering what he’d thought about orders the day before. He set hands on hips. “You know what, Henry?” Pleasants shook his head. Caudell went on, “You’d better watch yourself, because near as I can see, you’re turning into a rebel.”
Alsie Hopkins slapped his knee and doubled over laughing. Pleasants didn’t look so sure. “Is that a compliment?” he asked.
“Damned if I know,” Caudell said.
The road twisted like a snake with the bellyache. Past Andrew Gwynn’s farm, Pleasants was as lost as Caudell, who marveled at how strange places just a few miles from home could be. Without Mollie to tell him which turns to make, he knew he might have wandered in circles. A blue jay jeered at him from up in a pine tree.
Before long, they found another break in the woods. Caudell glanced first at Mollie, then at Henry Pleasants. So did the rest of the squad. “Nobody knows who lives here?” Caudell said. “Well, we’ll have to go and find out, then.”
They stopped at the edge of the woods, peering through brush at the clearing ahead. By the look of things, nobody lived there, though someone once had. The cabin was a roofless ruin, the fields a riot of weeds and shrubs and, here and there, man-high saplings.
Bob Southard tramped off across the field. Alsie Hopkins started after him. Caudell put out an arm to stop him, called to Southard, “You want to be careful, Bob. We’re getting close to where those Rivington bastards might be.”
Southard shook his head and kept walking. “They got more things to worry about than me. They—” He never said anything else. A burst of fire from the far side of the clearing cut him down where he stood. He spun when he was hit, so Caudell could see the almost comic amazement on his face as he fell.
Caudell’s own battle reflexes had not faded; at the first sound of fire he threw himself flat. The wisdom of that was proved a moment later, when bullets probed the place from which Southard had emerged, searching for anyone who might have been with him. “Oh, sweet Jesus, I pissed myself!” Alsie Hopkins wailed. Caudell didn’t feel like laughing. Had he not stepped behind a tree not long before, he knew he might have done the same thing.
Bullets slapped trees, smacked branches with a rough hand, again and again and again. Whoever was shooting up ahead, he seemed to have all the ammunition in the world, and he wasn’t shy about using it. Caudell turned his head far enough to get his mouth out of the dirt, said to Henry Pleasants beside him, “That’s no AK-47 up there.”
“What is it, then?” Being a transplanted Northerner, Pleasants was not yet intimately familiar with the rifle he carried.
Caudell shook his head without raising it.” Damned if I know. But the report is heavier, and he’s not firing clips, either. Listen—damn bullets just keep on coming.” He remembered how far away the trees on the other side of the clearing were, and how fast poor, overconfident Bob Southard had gone down. “Whatever he’s shooting, it’s got ungodly range.”
The firing stopped. “Stay down!” three people hissed at the same time. Mollie Bean added, “He’s tryin’ to find out just where we’re at.”
“We’ve got to spread out,” Caudell said. His initial terror at unexpectedly coming under fire was gone now, replaced by the more familiar fear that went with any combat. If he could not master that fear, he could live with it; four years of peace dropped away from him as if they had never been. When he spoke again, he might have been teaching a lesson his students already knew well: “Henry, you and I will slide right. Ruffin, you and Alsie head left. M-Melvin, you stay here, give us some covering fire, and if anything goes wrong, you make sure you get back and give Captain Lewis the word.”
Mollie said, “Ought to be me with you instead of Henry, Nate. He ain’t that handy with a repeater.”
“But you know the country hereabouts best. That gives you the best chance of making it back to Nashville,” Caudell said. He made sense enough that she quit arguing. He took a deep breath. “Let’s go.” He slid backwards, into deeper cover. Henry Pleasants had no trouble staying with him, or staying low. He might have been a lieutenant colonel, but he’d learned to move like a red Indian.
Mollie’s AK-47 barked, three or four quick rounds sent in the direction from which the bullets ahead had come. The reply was almost instantaneous, a storm of fire so furious that Caudell realized he hadn’t left Mollie in a safe place after all. Against that monster gun, there didn’t seem to be any safe places.
Off to the left, Hopkins and Biggs started to fire. The gun hesitated for a moment, then began stuttering out death in a new direction. It chewed away at the brush that screened attackers from it. Caudell noticed he was thinking about it as if it were a sentient entity in its own right, and a malevolent one.
When he said something like that to Henry Pleasants, his friend laughed mirthlessly. “Now you know how I felt at Bealeton.”
Now crouching, now crawling, they scurried through the trees, guided by the deep, monotonous patter of the gun—and the gunner, Caudell reminded himself—they were stalking. Mollie kept squeezing off shots every minute or two. So did Alsie Hopkins and Ruffin Biggs. For a while, the hidden gunner continued his pattern of swinging back and forth between them. Then, apparently deciding Mollie wasn’t advancing and wasn’t dangerous where she was, he concentrated his fire on the two moving men.
“Shall we take some of the heat off them?” Pleasants asked, hefting the AK-47 he’d still never fired.
Caudell shook his head. “Not yet. Best way we can do that is get close enough to make sure our shots count.”
Pleasants sketched a salute. “Spoken like an officer.”
Most of an hour of slow movement went by before Caudell spotted muzzle flashes ahead and to his left. He went flat on his belly and wriggled forward like a cottonmouth. Henry Pleasants was right beside him. For some time, those flashes were all they saw. When at last they drew near enough to make out more, Caudell’s lips shaped a silent whistle.
“He’s got his own little earthwork there.”
In back of concealing branches, heaped-up dirt warded the gunner against bullets from front, left, right. Either Hopkins or Biggs fired at him. A burst answered them, keeping them pinned well away. Caudell saw a flick of motion behind the long barrel of the gun that projected over the revetment. A plan shaped itself in his mind. He whispered to Pleasants, “Move away from me, over to that stump there. Next time he starts shooting; we’ll both try and take him out.”
“All right.” Ever so cautiously, Pleasants crawled into place. Caudell himself crouched behind a tree trunk. He waited, waited…Mollie fired. The hidden enemy did not reply. Then shots came from the left, from Biggs and Hopkins. A stream of bullets lashed out at them.
Caudell fired. So did Henry Pleasants. They were close enough to hear the enemy gunner’s cry of fear and rage. The long barrel swung toward Caudell with terrifying speed. Seen straight on, the muzzle flashes were bright as the sun. Bullets slammed into the trunk, just above his head.
All at once, the bullets were chewing up the treetops, not closing in on him. After a few seconds, the firing stopped. Wary of a trick, Caudell waited several minutes before peering round his sheltering tree trunk. The big, black gun barrel pointed up at the sky. In his mind’s eye, Caudell saw the Rivington man who had been back of it hit, saw his dying weight slump down onto the gun and raise the muzzle, saw him fall away so the bullets stopped corning.
Shaking with reaction, he called over to Pleasants: “You all right, Henry?” His voice shook, too.
“Yes, I think so.” Pleasants didn’t sound any too steady himself, which reassured Nate. “What the hell kind of gun is that, anyhow?”
“Damned if I know. Shall we go find out?” Caudell started to leave his cover.
But Henry Pleasants said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Nate.”
“What? Why not?”
“Two reasons. For one thing, we’ve done what Captain Lewis told us to do: we’ve found where these bastards have their southern pickets posted. And for two, look how well situated that gun is. Do you think it’s there all by its lonesome, or do you think there are more guns farther back, just waiting for us to show ourselves so they can cut us down?”
The Guns of the South Page 60
