TOLLIVER MADE SURE his bowie knife was secure in its metal-studded leather sheath before he mounted up. The buffalo hunter’s skinning knife that Gatling carried in his boot wasn’t as formidable as the bowie, but it was razor sharp and he had killed a fair number of men with it. What they were setting out to do called for knife work; only as a last resort would guns be used.
The Kilby house faded behind him, cut off from view by a line of black trees with pulpy leaves. There was no need to go back to Tolliver’s house. Tolliver was armed with a Winchester and a six-gun; his pockets bulged with ammunition. Gatling had the light gun and the single-action Colt. An extra belt for the light gun was wound around his waist.
Riding hard, they got to the landing at a few minutes to three. About fifty riflemen were in the corral in back of the landing; the main force hadn’t assembled yet. Tolliver talked briefly to the riflemen, giving them last-minute instructions. They had been over them many times. He took Longley aside, and they talked about the Maxim and the cannon that Longley was going to sneak onto the Ruffin behind the general’s back.
“He’ll skin me alive when he sees the guns,” Longley said. “He has to see them sometime.”
“He’ll skin nobody,” Tolliver said. “He may be thankful yet that we brought the guns. Blame it on me if he catches you.”
Outside the corral Tolliver’s twenty-man squad was waiting with the four canoes. The sides of the canoes had been painted black. There was no moon, and when the men picked up the canoes and headed for the jungle, they looked as if they were carrying giant crocodiles. The other side of the river couldn’t be seen because it was so dark. No lights showed, no sound came across the dark water.
The first stretch of jungle made for easy going because for half a mile the underbrush and tangled vines had been cleared by lumbermen. They hadn’t begun to cut down the trees and the brush was growing back fast. Even so Gatling and the others made good time in spite of the canoes and the dark. When the cleared land gave out, Tolliver led the way down to the edge of the river, where they slogged through shore muck until they reached the point at which Tolliver said they were going to cross. The moon broke through the clouds while they were sliding the canoes into the shallows. It was dark again by the time the paddlers took the canoes out into the current. The paddlers had to work hard to keep the canoes from being swept downriver. For a while they let the current carry them along; then Tolliver gave an order and they steered the canoes toward the opposite shore. A warm, light wind was blowing from that direction and it brought the stink of rotting vegetation. It was a sweetish smell that reminded Gatling of dead bodies in the first stage of rot.
They dragged the canoes into the brush and left them. Tolliver stood still and listened to the night sounds of the jungle. To Gatling the grunts and screeches meant nothing.
Out in front, Tolliver beckoned the men to come ahead. They had to be close to see even his shape in the near-total darkness. The moon came out again, but not much light filtered down through the thick, green canopy of branches that grew together overhead. But even the dimmest light was better than no light; it allowed them to move a little faster.
They were about a quarter of a mile from the canoes when the thump of riverboat engines and the crash of paddles rolled up along the silent river. The sound grew louder. “Doesn’t have to be our boat.” Tolliver said in a hoarse whisper. “Could be any boat. But we better wait a minute. If it goes on upriver we’ll move on.”
After five minutes the riverboat didn’t seem to be getting any closer. By the sound of the engine it was moving fast. Tolliver was turning to say something to Gatling when gunfire erupted about two miles down from where they were. The firing became more intense. It sounded as if hundreds of rifles had opened up at the same time and more were joining in.
“Head for the canoes!” Tolliver yelled. The riflemen started to run back the way they had come. Tolliver cursed a blue streak as he ran. Gatling cursed silently. He damned old Kilby to the hottest corner of hell. The crazy old braggart had started the attack without waiting for a signal. He was paying for it, but so were the four hundred poor bastards he had led into a trap. Hundreds of Suarez’s men, well-hidden at the edge of the jungle, must have grinned when the Ruffin’s stern wheel began to turn and the jam-packed riverboat started across the river, then swung around so that the starboard side was up close to the sharp drop-off where the beach gave out. Gatling knew from Tolliver that there was deep water there and a boat could get in close to the beach.
Suarez’s men must have grinned even harder when the last rifleman on the Ruffin was on the beach. On the narrow strip of beach, no more than one hundred yards long, the New Columbia men must have been bunched up like sheep when hundreds of rifles opened up on them.
Tolliver dragged the first canoe from the brush and shoved it into the water. Gatling jumped into the canoe and moved up to the front, the light gun ready to fire. It was a big canoe, the biggest made on the Amazon, but with six men in it, it was low in the water. The canoe moved swiftly as the paddlers dug their paddles into the dark surface of the river. The other canoes were strung out behind it.
They moved close enough to see hundreds of rifle flashes coming from the jungle. Some of the flashes came from high in the trees fronting the beach. Fire from the jungle never wavered for an instant, and Gatling knew the New Columbia force was getting the worst of it. But why weren’t they pulling back to the boat? The general was insane or close to it; there could be no other explanation. And the cocaine he was mixing in his coffee was making him crazier. He was trying to make a fight of it when he should have ordered the men to pull back to the boat. Not all of them would make it to the boat, but at least some would get off the beach. Gatling wanted to kill the general as much as he wanted to kill his son.
With their paddles turned against the current, the men in the lead canoe brought it in close to the riverbank. “Over there!’’ Tolliver called out. He pointed to a break in the trees that grew right down to the river’s edge two hundred yards above the beach where the New Columbia men were pinned down. The bottom of the lead canoe scraped on gravel as they dragged it out of the shallows. Two hundred yards away the uneven fight was still raging. Gatling could tell the French Lebels from the Winchesters by their sound. He kept hoping for the rattle of the Maxim, the boom-boom-boom of the Hotchkiss cannon. But all he heard was rifle fire.
They had to do something to take the pressure off the men on the beach. It was a tall order, but they had to try. If the New Columbia men didn’t pull out soon, they wouldn’t pull out at all. The general wanted them to die fighting, and that’s what they were doing. It would have been easy to shoot the old man, but no one did it.
The jungle was higher than the river and bullets from the beach sang high over their heads. Soon they were no more than fifty yards behind the bandit soldiers. Suarez’s men were right in front of them, but for the moment all they could see was trees with brush growing between them. They kept moving forward until they came to a clearing that had to be crossed at a run. A shorter stretch of jungle put them behind the ambushers. Gatling and Tolliver were in the middle of the line of men. Gatling had the light gun ready. Everybody was ready. Gatling opened fire, swinging the light gun from right to left in a slow arc. Twenty-one Winchesters joined in. Tolliver’s men were good and they fired as fast as they could work the loading levers. A line of men went down in front of the light gun. There was yelling and screaming and cursing as the bandit soldiers turned to face the threat from behind. They were more surprised than afraid, and when they got over the surprise they started shooting back. Some of them had French Lebel military rifles and if they had been better shots they would have ended the battle fast. But they had the numbers and the firepower to make up for their lack of training.
Gatling ducked back behind a tree after firing a short burst from the light gun. Four of Tolliver’s men were down, dead or wounded. Down on the beach some fool with a bugle was blowing the charge. Gatling wanted to stuff the bugle down the general’s throat. He shoved the light gun out from behind the tree and cut down three men who were running toward him. One of Tolliver’s men turned for some reason—maybe he meant to run—and was shot in the spine. He lay face down, unable to move his legs, begging Tolliver to kill him. With no expression on his face, Tolliver turned his rifle and shot him in the head.
Gatling felt the second ammunition belt clicking into the feed. The light gun had torn a hole through the line of ambushers. The sky was low and gray and it began to rain. Great sheets of rain slanted down on the river and the jungle. Gatling stepped out from behind the tree, holding the light gun at his hip. Sooner or later Suarez’s men would get him if he stayed in cover. All they had to do was circle out wide, then come at him from behind. He looked over at Tolliver, flat on his belly behind a bump in the ground. Tolliver pointed his rifle in the direction of the beach and patted the top of his hat in the old army sign telling Gatling to cover him. A few of Suarez’s men were trying to fill the gap in the line made by the light gun. Gatling cut them down with two bursts and then Tolliver was through the break in the line and running for the beach. Gatling turned to see how many of Tolliver’s men were left and saw that they were all dead. Ten men had died for nothing at all, and he wondered how many more men were dead on the beach.
Gatling knew he had to make a run for it like Tolliver. He didn’t know if Tolliver had made it all the way to the beach. He had run through a storm of bullets, and even with the light gun to cover him, the odds were stacked against him. For the moment the gap in the line remained open and Gatling walked through it firing the light gun right and left. Bullets came at him, but didn’t kill him. If he lived to bea hundred, he would never understand why they hadn’t dropped him before he’d gone five feet. A bullet tugged at his hat without knocking it off. Another bullet fired low nearly clipped off his balls, then passed through his legs and hit the base of a tree.
A short sandy hill went down to the beach. When he reached it he turned and backed down the rest of the way, firing the light gun steadily. Men rushed at him and he cut them down.
Dead men lay everywhere; there must have been eighty or a hundred corpses sprawled on the beach. Uncle Jed was dead. Longley was dead. Whitey the mule was dead. Gatling saw dead faces he knew from the first days on the river. They had fought well and survived because they had a fighting chance. On that beach, they had no chance at all. The great sheets of rain provided a kind of cover. The sun was gone, the sky was gray, and it was hard to see. Rain pitted the surface of the river and drummed on the deck of the riverboat. The Ruffin wasn’t at anchor; it was being kept in place by the engines. Gunfire from the jungle picked up again.
Otis Kilby was huddled behind the dead mule. More men were hit. General Kilby raised one of the Le Mats and was about to pull both triggers on his son. The old man looked like a sleepwalker. Otis Kilby shut his eyes as the huge pistol came up. Tolliver stepped forward and wrenched the Le Mat away from the general. He had been holding it with both hands.
“Fall back! Get on the boat! Move forward when you do! Get the hell out of here!” Tolliver was red faced with roaring.
The general’s face twisted with rage and he reached for his other pistol. It wasn’t there. Otis Kilby opened his eyes, looked up at this father, then scrambled to his feet and ran for the boat. He got aboard without being hit. Running behind him, a man was hit in the back. He clawed at the side of the boat before he died.
Tolliver was holding the general’s wrists with both hands. For so old and frail a man, the general struggled wildly. Gatling would have shot him or knocked him out with a punch. What Tolliver did was to pick him up, imprisoning the general’s arms with his own, and carry him to the boat and put him on board. But the old man still fought him and Tolliver pulled off his broad leather belt and buckled it around the old man’s arms. Then Kilby lifted the old man and laid him down behind a row of sandbags.
Men were still coming aboard and Gatling covered them with the light gun. Tolliver kept yelling at them to move forward in the boat. Suarez’s men had left the trees and were running out on the beach. Gatling swung the light gun and opened fire. A row of them went down, but they were as thick as fleas. The engines roared and the Ruffin began to move off. Gatling kept firing until he had no more ammunition.
The Maxim and the cannon Longley was in charge of were in the stern of the boat. Tolliver jumped forward to help Gatling lift the cannon and fit it to the undercarriage. The wheels had to be chocked before the cannon could be fired. Tolliver did it by ramming sandbags in behind the wheels. An ammunition box filled with 10-round feed cases was beside the gun. Gatling nodded and Tolliver top loaded a magazine and Gatling opened fire. There was no need for a range-finding shot; he knew the cannon and he was firing point-blank. He fired fast and the shells exploded one on top of the other. Thousands of bullets and pieces of shrapnel swept the beach like a hot, killing wind. Mangled bodies, the dead and the dying, littered the beach from one end to the other. Tolliver loaded and Gatling fired the cannon until they were well past midpoint in the river. Rain was coming down harder than before. Gatling fired off a magazine of ten more shells, then called a halt to it. He couldn’t see the other bank of the river. A few shots came through the rain, then stopped.
The Ruffin moved in to the landing and tied up. It was miserable in the rain. Blood and rain dripped from the bodies of the wounded as they were carried ashore. Some of the wounded had died on the boat. It was hard to tell the dead from the wounded unless they were moving and had their eyes open. Tolliver talked to two young riflemen and nodded toward the trussed-up general. The two men ignored his halfhearted roars and carried him ashore. Most of the men were off the boat when Otis Kilby went ashore. He had been hiding below decks. Gatling wanted to draw his pistol and kill him. But he knew it couldn’t be done here. It could wait.
The men were bitter and discouraged; the long talked about plan for taking Parimba and ridding the province of Suarez had come to nothing. They hadn’t just failed; they had been whipped and had to run like dogs. The general had led them into a trap, had changed the plan at the last moment, and they had been trapped, many of them slaughtered, the rest humiliated.
The colony had a small hospital on its own grounds near town, but one of their two doctors had been killed on the beach. That left one man to look after an awful lot of wounded. Light wagons were lining up to take away the wounded. The rain beat down on the canvas tops of the wagons and when a gust of wind came the rain wet everything inside. It took a while to clear the landing.
Gatling told Tolliver he was going back onto the boat to set up the Maxim. All he had to do was unfold the trip, then turn three bolts so it wouldn’t slip. A small tool kit in a latched steel box was attached to the back support. Tolliver sent two gun crews with him, one for the Maxim, one for the cannon. Gatling knew the men. He had trained them. They knew what to do. The Maxim hadn’t been fired, but shells for the cannon were running low. That had to be taken care of.
The men who were unwounded or just slightly wounded had orders to assemble in the corral in back of the landing. Some ignored Tolliver and walked away. Tolliver yelled after them, but they kept going.
General Kilby had been sent home under guard. The two men Tolliver picked to guard the general were young and not in awe of him. They were to lock him in his room after searching it for weapons. They were to watch for Otis Kilby, who hadn’t been seen since the Ruffin tied up.
The men were waiting in the corral. A few more had walked away. It wasn’t desertion; they were just going home. Three of Tolliver’s sergeants had been killed. Tolliver talked to the others. There was some argument about casualties. Finally they agreed that more than eighty men had been killed or wounded. The number of dead was definite; it would take a while to discover how many of the wounded would live. They had lost one fifth of the force; it could rise to a quarter, maybe more than that, if more and more of the wounded died. Tolliver said the doctor was a good man, but the hospital was small and would be hard pressed to handle so many men.
The wounded men were packed into the frame house where the colony’s export agent lived; they were in the stables, the barn where rubber was stored; a few were under an open-sided lean-to woodshed. Gatling and Tolliver went back to the landing. The rain was easing up, but they could barely see the other side of the river. The gun crews turned to look when they heard them talking.
“I don’t know if they’ll try to cross,” Tolliver said. “We sank a lot of their canoes downriver. They can always build rafts upstream and steer them across to our side. That won’t happen today, I guess.”
“It’s going to happen if we don’t do something to stop it. We can set up every Maxim and cannon we have and they can still cross in a dozen places. But for now we have to protect the landing and the riverboat. It’s the only way out of here. At least the women and children can get to the coast.”
Tolliver looked at the Ruffin. “It will be a sad day if it comes to that. We’ve been here so long. So many years of hard work.”
“You’re not finished yet, but you have to be prepared. Suarez wants your lands and won’t give up, not if you bring in boatloads of guns. You may be able to fight him off for a while, but everything will come to a standstill. The men are down in the mouth because they took such a whipping. It shouldn’t have happened and the dumbest of them know it. But maybe they’ll rally to you.”
Tolliver stared at a pool of blood on the landing. Diluted by rainwater, it was pink instead of red.
“I can’t be sure of that,” Tolliver said. “I’ve always been the general’s ass-kisser.”
“Hardly that.”
“I never questioned anything he did or said. Nothing was ever as serious as today. Just the same, I never stood up to him. The men know that and maybe the young ones would want somebody younger and not so tied to the general. I’d hardly blame them if that was what they decided.”
“Don’t be so quick to step aside. There’s nobody here half as good as you are. Like it or not you’re the new general.”
“Don’t call me that, for Christ’s sake.”
“You have to take command, Tolliver. No way out of it.”
“All right, Gatling, but I’m going to let the council know what I’m doing. The general just told them, no arguments, no debate. I don’t want to be that kind of a leader.”
“Next you’ll be asking their permission. After this war is over maybe you’ll want to do that. Not now though. Too much debating and speechifying is one reason the South lost the war. One end of it didn’t know what the other end was doing. Communications were bad and that accounts for some of the confusion. A lot of ordinary soldiers just walked away from the war when there was a crop to get in. Like I said, you have to make the decisions, no ifs, ands, or buts.”
Tolliver gave Gatling a hard look. “What’re you getting at? I told you you don’t have to pussyfoot with me.”
“You have to attack Parimba and get this war over with. Let me finish. The general was right about one thing. When a small force is outnumbered it has to go on the offensive, else it gets whittled down. The general’s plan wasn’t so bad if he hadn’t gone crazy at the last minute. We could have called off the attack and waited for a better time. Maybe we could have figured a better plan.”
Tolliver showed some signs of impatience. “Come on, Gatling. Say it plain. What do you want to do?”
“I just told you,” Gatling said. “The way I see it, you have to attack Parimba. Arm the Ruffin with every machine gun and cannon we have. The bastards got a taste of one cannon this morning. Ten ought to scare the shit out of them. We can make the Ruffin into a floating fortress, sail up the Ganoza River and blow Parimba to bits. We’ll take a hundred and fifty men armed with the new Winchesters. The Ruffin will be loaded with hardware. Ten cannons, twenty Maxims, a new machine gun called the Hotchkiss, and I’ll have the light gun. You think that won’t make an impression when they all open up at the same time?” Tolliver cut off a chaw of tobacco and stuck it in his mouth. “I’d be impressed if I was on the receiving end. Just the same, what about the things the general mentioned? The logjams made by cutting down maybe hundreds of trees. Like he said, the Ganoza is narrow enough to stretch logging chains across. They’d have to link them but that’s not hard to do. How are we going to get through all that?”
“If the logjam is there we’ll use dynamite to blow it apart. If they’ve stretched chains we’ll ram them and break them.”
Although the rain had been thinning, it started up harder than before. Gatling and Tolliver were soaked through; their feet squelched in their boots.
Tolliver stared at Gatling as if he’d gone crazy. “All right. I can see busting through a logjam with dynamite. But even if there’s only one chain it will wreck the boat.”
“Not if we build a ram at the front of it. If a ram is too hard to build, we’ll reinforce the front of the boat with heavy timbers, steel plates if you have them. Have you?”
“We must have some,” Tolliver said. “I’ll have to think. Some of the buildings have corrugated iron roofs. The forge and the ironworks do. What about that?”
“It might do,” Gatling said. “If that’s all there is, it’ll have to do. Can it be done? And done fast. Say in a few days.”
“Sure it can be done. But how can it get done without making a lot of noise? Hammering on corrugated iron does make a lot of noise. They’ll hear it and then see it with some kind of glass when the rain stops, which will be before the work even starts.”
Gatling said, “I want them to see it. I want them to know we’re getting ready for something big. What’s bigger than attacking Parimba? That’s their city, their headquarters, and they won’t want to lose it. We haven’t seen Suarez, don’t even know what he looks like. If he’s holed up in the governor’s moth-eaten palace—I figure he likes being governor—there must be somebody fairly capable leading his troops. He’d have to be a fool not to figure what all the banging and hammering was about. I think he’ll wait a while and then when we sail he’ll pull back to Parimba. He can get there faster than we can.”
Tolliver jetted a stream of tobacco juice at a huge rat that was making for the riverboat. The bedraggled rat squeaked and ran the other way.
“That means they’ll have plenty of time to get set, with us blowing up logjams and busting chains.”
“That’s what it means. We’re going to have to bull our way through. We’ll sandbag the boat like it never was during the river fight. I’m counting on the cannons to win this for us. If we get through we can turn Parimba into a smoking ruin. But it’s your decision. You’re the boss man now. If you say no I won’t argue about it. We’ll fight them on this side of the river when they come.”
Tolliver gave Gatling a sour smile. “You’re pretty good at prodding a fella. We’ll be taking our best men, leaving men not so good to defend the settlement. Suppose they don’t pull back like you figure? What if they attack while we’re gone? Won’t be much to come back to if they do.”
“No guarantee they won’t do what you say. I don’t think they will, but that’s just one man’s opinion. I have no stake here. You’ve lived and worked here half your life. It’s a hard decision to make. But you have to make it.”
The rain was easing up again. Tolliver walked away from Gatling and stood looking at the river. Maybe he wasn’t looking at anything. He stood there for five minutes before he came back.
“We’ll do it,” he said.