It wasn’t long before our battalion was mustered in and ready. We numbered fewer, just two hundred. The general and the colonel thought this sufficient to take on what remnant of the guerrilla force we might find. We were shed of Backuss, whom Draper arranged to have join the general’s staff, but acquired the newspaperman Tewksbury, who boasted, puffed-up like, that he wanted to be where the fighting was. Our column set off, four abreast as before, down a road adjoining the one we’d come in on, with a lively chaos behind us as Wild’s men struck camp.
The morning was exceedingly cold. The newspaperman rode aside the colonel, and as a result, he was nearby to me as well. The first fire we received, maybe an hour into the march, had him scrambling off that horse for cover, ducking behind the wall of men who rushed forward, barrels raised. The potshot had gone way wide, and Tewskbury’s rabbit response caused some of the troopers to snigger.
Paps Prentiss said, “Why, that ain’t but a hoot owl’s fart, Mass. You ain’t afraid of a tiny bird, is you?”
I ordered Fields and my corporals to have their men remain ever more vigilant for movement in the trees, and Draper sent out an additional squad to join the skirmishers already on our flanks and rear. I’d taken to treating Fields as a corporal again, though he was not one, and he responded gamely. Draper either trusted my judgment or did not notice. I preferred to think the former.
We arrived at a farm on the Sligo road that Wild had identified as belonging to a family that knew the location of the guerrillas’ base in the pocosin. Draper forced the master of the house into our service, at the point of his pistol. This man, Burgess, was none too pleased to have to join our ranks.
“You done took my niggers,” groused he. “And now me, too?”
His wife, two sons who were on about fighting-aged though not quite there, and a daughter just topping the ma’am’s waist stood by, equally displeased.
“In exchange for your service to the Union,” said Draper, “we’ll leave your home and outbuildings standing.”
Burgess harrumphed at this but led us along. The lane we passed down was obscure and not well tended, and I feared he might be leading us into a trap. Draper seemed not to share my fear. He rode tall in the saddle just behind Burgess, sometimes speaking at him. About two miles along, a-border the pocosin, Burgess sat his horse and pointed into the swamp, considering his duty done. Draper tied his own horse to a tree and, with pointed pistol, inspired the farmer to follow suit.
Burgess guided us in on foot. We proceeded single-file by squads, extra vigilant, muskets at the ready. The pocosin was more spottled dark than light, and the cold became wet and heavy. Tewksbury narrated in whispers his future reporting. “A Sabbath silence brooded over the mire,” he mumbled—more to himself, really, than to us others, as though the sound of his voice might distance him sufficient from here and now and thereby allay his visible quaking. It was as good a turn of phrase as I had yet heard from him.
The way in seemed a bit haphazard until, in due course, I noticed that our zigzag route through the slough had been fairly easy, the footing firm beneath me—not like slogging through muck and underbrush. And then I saw why. We were moving over felled trees that touched end-to-end, just below the surface of the water: a deliberately laid footpath. Similar such paths, I noted, looking around, were all over out here, all leading in one direction.
Maybe a half mile on, a hummock rose out of the bog. Crab’s Island wasn’t an island, properly speaking, but it was island enough. The general had called it a “swamp city,” maintained out here by the guerrillas. He turned out to be damned near right. Tewksbury described it thusly, in a bolder voice this time, as the site was abandoned: “The camp, finally found in the interior of this dense swamp, consisted of nine log-huts, containing bunks enough for seventy-five men, and a number of tents. Fires were found burning. Everything indicated a hasty retreat from the place.” The houses and sheds stood atop short, stout stilts, raising them out of the muck, with peat moss overgrowing every surface such that they blended in with the surrounding trees. I wondered if the hamlet where the swamp men lived in the Great Dismal looked similar.
As Tewksbury had observed, many men had been here just recently. So speedy was their withdrawal that they’d left behind their stores: some sixty-odd muskets, most of them new Enfields; a larger number of bayonets and cartridge-boxes; much Rebel army clothing; and the prize of prizes, their muster rolls. Here were the names of every bushwhacker of the various bands of the neighborhood. Included among them was Patrick’s.
Fields found me and led me to a discovery made by his squad behind the farthest of the log-huts: two distilleries. One still dripped liquid fire into a wooden keg. “To help keep themselves warm, I expect,” said he, smiling jokey.
Paps Prentiss asked, “Should we provision up before alerting Mass Colonel?”
Those around him laughed, but it was clear the old man was serious.
“Run over and alert him of our find,” I ordered Paps, choosing him to create a distance from all this temptation.
When Draper arrived, along with the bulk of the battalion and the farmer Burgess, he praised me for my good work, which I passed along to Fields. A huzzah was rousened, the men raising their rifles and cheering. Draper ordered that we use the contents of the kegs as fuel and splash it overall the camp, seized weapons excepted, which we would take away with us. Once this was accomplished, he went from log-hut to log-hut, tossing bits of kindling into each. A roaring blaze erupted throughout the swamp citadel, producing a pungent black smoke that climbed toward the sky. We knew the general would see it. Hell, Creecy himself back at Elizabeth City would likely see it, such was the density and breadth of each rising black finger.
“It is an instructive turn of the tables,” narrated Tewksbury, “that the men who have been accustomed to hunt runaway slaves hiding in the swamps of the South should now, hiding there themselves, be hunted by the former slaves.”
Indeed, thought I. And nicely expressed.
We wended our way out the way we’d come in. Draper released Burgess from service, even though we followed his horse’s unhurried saunter down the lane, toward the main road. We’d not traveled a mile before we heard bits of rifle fire in the woods on our left flank. Our skirmishers rushed in, and behind them we saw amassed at the edge of the trees a fairly sizable number of the bushwhackers—ninety, maybe a hundred.
Draper began shouting, as likewise did we sergeants and corporals:
“Form up! Arms at the ready!”
“First platoon, extend to the flank, twenty paces!”
“Close up, second platoon! Close up!”
This got the Rebby-boys excited, and they commenced their yipping and yelling. Burgess, caught in between, spurred his horse and circled around behind us, where he found Tewksbury already there, a-crouch behind the highest stump on the field.
Then it became apparent that only some of the bushwhackers had rifles—very few, in fact. Many were without coats, just in their shirtsleeves, and a few without pants, only in long drawers. They were the boys from the swamp citadel, for certain, confirming the extent to which our approach had caught them unawares.
“I think we’ve deprived them of some required fittings,” I said to the colonel.
“They seem distressed by it,” replied he.
Others along our line were likewise apprising the situation, and laughter broke out general, even from the farmer Burgess.
Draper wheeled on his horse. “Fix bayonets!” he called.
“Fix bayonets!” we sergeants repeated. “Fix bayonets!”
“Charge bayonets!” called Draper, and the buglers sounded the order over the din of all the rest—over the shouts conveying directions and the troopers returning the Rebel yells, yip for yip, and some laughter also, yet ongoing. With our charge, the bushwhackers turned tail quicker than quick, scrambling off into the woods.
At the tree line, we ordered the men to halt and spread out.
“Fire at will!” we hollered.
I heard a ball sail by—though none of the bushwhackers seemed to be shooting back—and damned close to my ear, too, and from the rear. I turned, and a hundred yards distant sat Revere and Golar, a-mount, Revere lowering his rifle. Troopers were forming up around me to bang out their fare-thee-wells at the running Rebby-boys; it was this that saved me another, maybe better-aimed, attempt. Golar lowered his gun, and the two of them turned and disappeared into the trees.
Then Fields was there aside me, speaking the self-same words that were clenching up my mind. “Did my eyes see true?”
I didn’t know how to answer him.
“We got to report this to the colonel!” said Fields.
Our men surrounded us now, a few still firing at the bushwhackers, but most just whistling and hooting.
“Keep calm,” I told him, “keep calm. We can’t do that. He would tell of our encounter with Paddy, and it’d be hell for you and me. Maybe even worse.”
“So you just going to let the man snipe at you at his leisure?”
“For the time being,” said I, scanning the trees that they’d disappeared into, not so much for sign of the swamp men as to avoid having to full-on face Fields. I didn’t want him to see the dread that I was feeling and that must have been rising into my face. I needed to think this through, but just that moment wasn’t the right one for it. My immediate duty was to sergeant my company and aide-de-camp the colonel without allowing that either the former or the latter became suspicious of my present peril.
Back up the road, at the Burgess place, we came upon a gruesomeness, pure and plain. The farmer’s two boys, bloodied and leaking, had been hanged from the crossbeam above the entry gate to the premises. One flopped limp over the shoulder of his father, who’d cut the line and was struggling to free the body from the girder. The other was still affixed by a length of rope about his neck. Beyond, the main house blazed, a thick black smoke accumulating and beginning to rise.
Burgess could have preceded us by only mere minutes.
He’d armed himself with a fowling piece and presently let the boy drop to the ground so that he might raise up the gun. He aimed it wild and all around in our general direction.
“What did you do? I helped you and what did you do?”
Draper didn’t unholster his pistol, which I would have counseled, but approached, his hand held out, to calm the man’s wild aiming, I supposed. “It wasn’t us,” he said. “We were engaged with the bushwhackers. You know. You saw us.”
“God damn you, God damn you!” Burgess wheeled the scattergun about, but with so many targets at hand, he did not fire at any.
And where were the wife and the daughter?
Draper gestured me forward, to help cut down the second boy. As I moved to do so, Burgess set the barrel on me and kept it there.
“You leave him be. Get! Get out of here! You have brought ruin on me.”
Draper complied with his wishes, waving me back to the column, and the column forward. He remained behind as the men double-quicked past, and I stayed back, too, to second him as best I might should Burgess reconsider and decide that shooting the man who’d taken him away from his family at gunpoint might, after all, suffice to avenge his sons.
When the last of the battalion was by, we then set off, and not so slowly either. Draper, distressed, asked, “The bushwhackers, do you think?”
I didn’t reply, but I had difficulty seeing it. They’d been tail down, with no time for murderous mischief.
I rejoined my company. Fields, once we were down the road a ways, confirmed his suspicions to mine. “Them boys’ bodies, peppered of gunfire when the bushwhackers were short on arms? Plus hung, to boot, and the house in flames? It was Revere.”
I couldn’t bring myself to fully believe it. “And the woman and the girl?”
He didn’t immediately respond. When finally he did, he said, “That nigger on a rampage, and you the spark that tindered his blazing.”
We made it to the village Currituck Courthouse by mid-afternoon, still finding slaves to free along our route, though far fewer. The men kept a sharp eye out for the bushwhackers. Me, I stayed nearby my company or Draper, close enough to discourage any potential sniping by adding the risk of hitting someone other. I hoped—nay, I prayed to the Lord Almighty—that this would be a deterrent to Revere and Golar.
Currituck Courthouse, on the Currituck Sound, was no larger than Indiantown and completely overrun with colored troops and contrabands. Soldiers and former slaves alike loaded captured goods and matériel onto one or the other of the two transport steamers at anchor off the docks. From various quarters could be heard “Kingdom Coming,” either played on fife and drum or sung. The most common thing repeated throughout the crowd, announced with both relief and pride, too, was “We headed back!” We’d accomplished something out here, and everyone knew it.
My own feelings ran toward wariness. This and great, great fatigue.
I learned that the hired-on helper women were already aboard the transports, and this was a comfort, as I didn’t want Fanny anywhere near me when Revere might pop off a shot given the least opportunity. Fields made a point to stay aside me, intently scanning around us.
“What we done out there in the pocosin,” said he, “I fear it was the wrong decision.”
I didn’t disagree, nor did I truly agree either. All I knew for certain was that I couldn’t kill Patrick or see him killed, unarmed and in flight, without an attempted intervention.
Fields said, “It’s like we’ve jammed a stick into a hive, hoping it would break our way and the bees not rousen up. With Revere, that was damn fool hoping.”
Josh Land approached and told me that the colonel was looking for me.
“Where is he?”
“At the docks, with the general.”
Fields accompanied me there, ever watchful. The general spoke at his brother and, though clearly seeing me, didn’t acknowledge my presence. It was as though our late-night exchange had not happened—or that it had and he regretted the intimacy.
Upon noting my arrival, Draper broke away from him. “Etheridge, form up the men we took into the swamp. We will board the gunboat Flora Temple before first light and ferry over to Knotts Island. The roster we uncovered shows that a few of the Pungo Raiders from north of the border are based on Knotts, including Edgar Clapson’s second, a man named Henry White, and his brother, Caleb, who is likewise a prominent guerrilla. We’re to arrest them, after which we’ll march into Virginia and back to base.”
I could feel Fields tensing up at this news. “Begging pardon, sir,” said I, “but isn’t there a federal garrison nearby to Pungo Point? Couldn’t we leave it to them to gather up these men?” It wasn’t concern for myself in this feud with Revere that prompted the suggestion—truly—but regard for the men. I added: “The troops are pretty worn out right about now.”
“I know it,” said Draper, showing genuine fellow feeling. “The strain of being out front is tremendous. But General Wild wants it so. He wants the affair with Clapson and his raiders concluded by Company F. It began with us, and this final action would signal complete success.”