ON BLAIR MOUNTAIN, THE defenders were stuffing their ear canals with cotton balls and chewing aspirin tablets. The relentless gunfire was giving them headaches. Some had spit their fillings out. The whole mountain thundered and smoked, as if preparing to erupt, and thousands of spent shell casings littered the trenches, so that treasure-seeking boys would be digging up brass shells instead of arrowheads for decades to come.
Down on the shoulder of the mountain, on the defense line near Crooked Creek Gap, a local reporter was embedded with the defense forces—the same reporter who’d caught Sid on the train home from Williamson, delivering news of the acquittal of the Baldwin-Felts agents for the Battle of Matewan. Now he was holed up in a machine-gun nest alongside a grizzled major in the defense forces named Antoine “Bad Tony” Gaujot. A veteran of the coal wars, short but hard-made, with a pale scar between his eyes and the tattoo of a heart on one forearm that thump-thump-thumped with the recoil of his Colt Model 1895 machine gun—an air-cooled, belt-fed, gas-operated monster mounted on a heavyweight tripod.
Earlier that day, before the shooting started, Bad Tony had wiped down the barrel and action with an oiled rag. “Used this same honey up on Paint Creek, nineteen and thirteen. She’s a real slick piece.”
The reporter held his pencil perched. “Paint Creek? You mean you were on the Bull Moose Special?”
“Don’t write that down.”
The reporter quickly retracted his pencil. Bad Tony had fought in Mexico, the Philippines, France, and the American mine wars. Rumor was, he’d been narrowly acquitted of murder while serving in the 2nd West Virginia Volunteer Infantry, having shot a private in the neck with a purloined captain’s pistol during an arrest attempt. He went on to earn a Congressional Medal of Honor during the Philippine Insurrection, swimming across a swollen river under heavy fire to steal an enemy canoe—a medal he wore as a fob on his watch chain.
For hours, he’d been running the gun like a jackhammer, expertly traversing it back and forth, the heart throbbing on his forearm as he sent fire downrange, the black tie of his uniform tucked between his shirt buttons. Now he called back over his shoulder, not taking his eyes from the iron sights.
“Reload!”
A runner came ducking up with a pair of wooden ammunition boxes, the caliber stenciled on the sides. He unlatched the top and presented the draped canvas belt of cartridges over his palms like an offering, sliding it carefully through the gun before Bad Tony jacked back the gas lever, recharging the weapon.
“Keep ’em coming, son.”
As Tony brought the gun back online, jingling hot casings at their feet, the reporter rose to his knees and sighted over the edge of their log-built nest, raising his field glasses. Down the slope of the valley, he could see a cluster of buildings—a bullet-sieved farm where a large force of miners had holed up.
Twice already, they’d tried to mount a charge up the valley, a denim swarm of them scrambling over rocks and deadfalls, howling like Johnnies or Comanches. But the defense line had held strong, the fire of three hundred rifles and two machine guns cutting the legs from underneath them, sending them scurrying back with their wounded.
Tony was lighting a cigarette, talking with his teeth clenched. “They keep coming, they’ll do the job for us. We can drive coffin nails all day.”
The reporter, glassing the tree line diagonal to their position, landed on a bearded man, big as a bear, standing bare-shouldered in a pair of overalls and a rumpled brown hat. He appeared to be urinating on a tree. The reporter held the man in the converged spheres of the binoculars’ focus, as if zeroing a rifle. A single word to Tony and the man would be dropped like a king buck or black bear or the great Sasquatch himself. Then the bearded man jiggled, replaced himself, and turned to squat beside a large Black miner—and the reporter saw a ring of six barrels aimed right at them.
“Gatling gun!”
He ducked as fire erupted from the tree line like sudden-shot lightning, hissing and cracking into the logs of their emplacement. Bad Tony cursed, dropped his head, then inched up to return fire. Through a sliver between logs, the reporter watched the miners break again from the shattered farmhouse, flooding upward beneath the suppressive fire of the Gatling gun. Soon Bad Tony was swiveling the barrel between the marchers and the wood line every few seconds, hammering off rounds, trying to stop two leaks with the same plug.
“God damn them, they don’t know when to quit.”
He spat out his cigarette and squinted behind the pop-up rear sight, working the elevation wheel to keep the gun on target. He was breathing hard and steady through his nose, his nostrils flaring. Spent shell casings rattled at their ankles, the gun hammering out empty cartridge belts like tickertape, running through one box of ammunition, then another. The reporter could see the heat radiating from the weapon, a gout of crackling, dangerous air.
The reporter chanced another look through the sliver—the flood of miners was closer than ever, weaving in and out of the trees and rocks, rising higher in the valley. Tony emptied another belt of cartridges and fed in the next, racking the bolt.
“Aim low!” he shouted down the line. “Aim at their feet, hit ’em in the chest!”
The deputies and civilian militiamen were popping from their trenches to fire and dropping down again, tucking their heads between their shoulders. Tony swiveled to run more rounds into the tree line. His chin was dripping sweat and the gun’s muzzle had begun to glow red, inflamed.
Tony called over his shoulder to his ammo runner. “Start the truck.”
“Yes, sir.”
Tony cocked his chin toward the reporter. “Hey, Mister Newspaperman. You got a gun, little pocket pistol or something?”
“No, sir.”
“Too bad. We get overrun, it might be the only thing standing between you and a cut throat.”
The reporter got out his penknife—a tiny folding blade he used to sharpen his pencil nubs. He rammed his eye into the gap of the log-built emplacement again. An incoming round could zip right through the chink and hollow out his skull, but he couldn’t help himself. He had to see what was coming.
His heart lurched—they were so close now, no more than a hundred yards, as if they’d leapt forward when he wasn’t looking. Like banshees or ghost soldiers. Their brows were knit hard over the iron sights of their guns, their hands rolling bolts and working levers and shouldering rifles with relentless exactitude, again and again, as if swinging sledges or picks, burrowing through fire instead of earth, digging toward the defense line.
A jet of dirt and wood chips struck him in the face—a round that nearly slipped between the logs. He fell back, holding his eye with one hand. The bullish snout of the machine gun was glowing red above him, throbbing with every burst, the slugs scoring the rifling from the barrel. Rounds began popping off without Tony even touching the trigger, igniting in the overheated chamber. The man’s face looked scalded, blistered, as if he’d stuck it in the hot door of a stove. He’d been running the gun for nearly three hours. The action jammed with a terminal clack and Bad Tony barreled his hands to his mouth, shouting down the line.
“Fall back, fall back! Join up at the next ridgeline!”
The runner and Bad Tony each lifted a leg of the tripod, carrying the machine gun like some biblical relic, red-glowing, and the reporter scrambled for the truck behind them, squinting his clogged eye, still gripping the penknife under his thumb.
At their backs rose a wail, high and bloody, like the damned let slip from Hell.