While Coker worked on the far side of the pylon from the soldier shooting regularly from shore, James climbed toward the bridge, zigzagging between the stout oak posts rising from the muddy creek bed. The soldiers on the bridge were shouting and running from one side of the bridge to the other, trying to get an angle on James and Coker.
A couple fired shots, but their slugs merely splashed into the oily water.
James had climbed trees and stony mountainsides as a boy, running wild through the Tennessee and north Georgia wilderness, so he made fast time of frogging up the bridge’s girders. He hunkered just beneath the top of the bridge, a stout beam six inches above his head. Pausing to listen to the scrambling soldiers, who were all shouting and cajoling each other, he saw a couple of men from the bridge now running down the creek’s opposite bank. James had figured they’d try to get around in front of him and Coker, and that’s just what they were doing.
The Confederate felt his mouth and throat go dry. Probably, he should have called off the mission just after Billy had died. Too late now. He and Lawrence would have to do the best they could. His other five men were lurking in the forest above where James, Krieg, and Coker had entered the stream, probably nervous as jackasses in a thunderstorm. But they’d hold their fire until James signaled them with his customary Rebel yell, so they didn’t risk hitting their own boys or the dynamite and blow the bridge too soon.
The plan had been to blow the bridge just as the supply train was crossing it, but that was likely impossible now. Now, if they were lucky, they’d blow the bridge tonight and at least delay the train and the Confederates’ convergence on Atlanta. Even that, under the circumstances, was a long shot.
James watched the three silhouettes run down to the water’s edge, ambient light glinting off the rifles in their hands. There were now four men on the shore, the young lieutenant thought. How many did that leave on the bridge? From the thudding of the boots above him, he judged there were three or four up there now.
“Where are they, Lieutenant?” one of the silhouettes called to the man shooting at Coker from the bridge’s opposite side.
The rifle blasted once more. Then the man on the far side of the bridge shouted, “I can’t see ’em! Can’t you?”
“Hell, no—it’s dark as a well out there!”
“Well, just start shootin’. Eventually, you’ll hit one o’ them Rebel dogs!” James thought only in passing that the lieutenant’s voice was hazily familiar—a remembered resonance from the murky, mostly forgotten time before the war.
James cast a worried glance down at Coker, who was a small dark spot against the silver-black stream. Something flashed, and James gritted his teeth. It was a looking glass attached to one of the bundles now armed with special detonation caps that made the dynamite especially sensitive and easy to ignite.
“There!” shouted one of the men on the shore, having noticed the reflection. “We got ’em now, Lieutenant!”
“Take ’em, then!” the lieutenant shouted, his voice quaking as though he was running.
“Take cover, Lawrence!” James shouted just before propelling himself up off his heels and around the side of the bridge.
He wasn’t sure what he was leaping into, but he grabbed the bridge’s lower side rail and hurled himself between that rail and the top one. As he gained his feet, he saw a dark-clad soldier to his left. The man had been facing James’s side of the bridge, but now he was turning toward James and swinging a rifle in the lieutenant’s direction. A cigar glowed between his teeth, dimly illuminating his large, craggy, gray-whiskered face and the pale smoke wafting around his head and leather-billed forage cap.
James squared his shoulders and flicked his double-edged knife behind his right shoulder. The knife spun with a menacing swishing sound end over end before the blade crunched into the middle of the federal soldier’s chest. The Yankee groaned and, stumbling backward, triggered his rifle into the air—a burned-orange lap of flames stabbing at the murky sky. In the flash of light, James had seen the brass captain’s bars on a shoulder of the officer’s tunic.
“Hey-hey-hey!” a man shouted behind the dying captain, who lay flat on his back atop the bridge, kicking his muddy boots.
James saw the second man running toward him with a rifle. The Confederate ran over to the dying captain just as the man running toward him fired his rifle, flames stabbing from the barrel, the slug screeching past James’s right ear.
James scooped up the captain’s rifle, a Spencer repeater, and quickly worked the trigger guard cocking mechanism, seating a cartridge into the chamber beneath the hammer—oh, what he wouldn’t give to have every Confederate soldier outfitted with a brass-cartridge-firing repeater!—and fired. The soldier running toward him jerked sharply to one side and fired his own rifle into the bridge rail to his left. James cocked and fired the Spencer again, aiming from his shoulder, and sent the second blue-belly spinning around and down, yowling.
Crouching and cocking the Spencer once more, James looked around quickly to see another man running toward him from the opposite direction of the other two soldiers—from the far end of the bridge. Now the men on the shore were shouting chaotically. The man running toward James shouted, “Hold it, you Rebel bastard!”
James threw himself to his left as the man cut loose with three quick shots, one after another, the slugs hammering the top of the bridge where James had been a half second before. James rolled and came up firing the Spencer, and the man, now twenty feet away from him, dropped to his left knee while clutching his other knee, which he held stiffly out to one side, his rifle clattering onto the bridge floor.
“Son of a bitch!” the man shrieked, lifting his bearded head, his hat tumbling off his shoulder.
James rose to a knee. The Spencer popped again, the slug driving the knee-shot blue-belly straight back onto the bridge, where he lay shaking his arms and legs and making weird gurgling sounds, like a huge, gasping carp.
James had noticed something odd about the man’s rifle. Seeing no one else immediately around him, the lieutenant ran to the man now and reached for the rifle, raising it slowly, inspecting it carefully, heart quickening at the long, octagonal barrel and the sleek brass frame—smooth and solid beneath his left hand’s gentle caress. Pale smoke slithered from the maw of the barrel, above the long loading tube.
“That damned Yankee rifle,” as the saying went, “that they load on Sunday and shoot all week!”
A Henry. He’d heard about them but had never had the pleasure of seeing one before.
Boots thudded behind James. He swung around, straightening, to see several shadows running down off the pale road dropping out of the wooded mountainside and onto the bridge, dark blue capes buffeting like bat wings in the muddy darkness. The young Confederate lieutenant levered a round into the Henry’s breech, vaguely appreciating the smooth, assured sound of the action, and fired the gun quickly from his right hip. He grinned devilishly as he levered and fired, levered and fired, until five brass cartridges had clinked to the wooden boards behind him.
The three soldiers who’d been running toward him lay howling and writhing while a fourth wheeled and ran back up the road a ways before darting into the woods on its right side.
James curled his upper lip in a mocking grin.
Something sliced across his left arm, and he realized the men on the shore were firing at him while a few were running back up toward the bridge behind him—scurrying shadows in the inky night. The rifles boomed and popped and the balls screeched around him, several hammering into the bridge rail before him. Another man was shooting from the bridge’s far side, on the opposite shore of the creek from where James and his men had entered it.
James racked another shell—so easily!—into the Henry’s chamber, and returned fire on the man shooting from the bridge’s far end and whom the lieutenant figured was probably the man who’d first started throwing lead at him and Coker. He fired three shots in the rifleman’s direction but couldn’t tell if he’d hit anything except for the bridge rail, as the dark woods formed a stygian backdrop.
James then racked another shell, hoping he had a full tube of cartridges, and triggered round after round at the shore of the creek to his right, where most of the soldiers had gathered to throw lead in Coker’s direction. The Confederate was mildly surprised they hadn’t hit the dynamite and blown the bridge. Even a near shot would cause those sensitive caps to ignite.
Or had they killed Lawrence before he could place the bundles against the pylons?
As the cartridges clinked around his bare feet, he heard men yelp and howl and curse, and several silhouettes dropped under his deadly aim. When he spied no more movement along the shore, he slid his attention to the south end of the bridge, saw the flash of two rifles, heard the slugs hammering the bridge rails on either side of him.
He watched with satisfaction as two more figures went down before the Henry’s hammer pinged on an empty chamber. He gritted his teeth against a sharp, burning pain in his right side, and realized he’d been hit. When had that happened? He sloughed it off—far from the first of his many wounds since the beginning of the war….
Dropping the Henry, he scrambled toward the first man he’d shot on the bridge and slid the man’s Colt Navy .44 from the dead captain’s holster.
Two rifles were still barking at him, spitting small javelins of flame. Balls sizzled around him, skidded off the wooden floor of the bridge, and pounded the rails. One clipped his ankle. He cocked the .44, hoping the charge hadn’t been fouled by the drizzle, and dropped to a knee, raising the pistol straight out from his right shoulder. The first shot sputtered a hair but still threw the ball. The second time he pulled the trigger, there was only a thwisht! sound.
The damn cap was wet….
James heard the thuds of running feet, saw a silhouetted figure running toward him. The federal triggered his own pistol, and James flinched as the bullet screeched off the bridge about one foot to his right. He heard a click as the approaching soldier triggered his pistol on an empty or fouled cylinder.
“Shit!” The man tossed the pistol away and came running, his cape buffeting about his torso.
James looked around for a weapon. He saw only his knife handle sticking up from the dead captain’s chest, around a broad, dark stain on his tunic. James ran over, pulled the knife out of the dead flesh with a slight crunching, sucking sound, then turned to what appeared to be the last of the Union soldiers.
He was James’s height, with long, gold-blond hair and an eye patch. Probably James’s age or thereabouts. Not too many old men remained in either military. If the battles hadn’t gotten them, disease likely had. James couldn’t see many details of the man approaching him, except for the snarl on the broad mouth mantled by a mustache that appeared a slightly darker shade of blond than his hair.
He stopped about ten feet away, breathing hard, as was James. An eerie silence had descended in the wake of the battle. There were only the wet gurgling sounds of the water lapping against the pylons. A cool breeze had risen, shunting a drizzling rain.
It felt refreshing against James’s naked body still partly clad in the sticky river mud.
The enemy soldier, his lieutenant’s bars showing faintly on the shoulders of his dark blue tunic, cursed, curling his upper lip distastefully, and reached down to draw a bone-handled knife from the well of his right boot.
“Good with a gun—are you, Reb?” he said. “Let’s see how you do against a butcher knife!”
He bolted forward, and James thrust his own blade up just in time to deflect the Union lieutenant’s ten-inch blade from his own naked belly. The man, snarling and cursing like an outraged mountain lion, drove forward. The move caught James off guard, and he felt himself thrust up against the bridge’s downstream side, the rails pressing against the backs of his legs. His right arm was straight up before him, knife gripped in his clenched fist, and hooked around the blue-belly’s own knife arm. The man showed his teeth as he growled, turning his head and thrusting his black eye patch toward James as though it, too, were a weapon.
James felt the bridge rails gouging into his ankles, bending his knees. He was leaning too far back, and a quick glance to one side showed him the dully gleaming creek twenty feet below, opening like a dark glove.
He was going over!
Loosing a raucous Rebel yell that seemed to cut the night wide open, he gave one powerful thrust with his knife, ramming half the blade into the Union officer’s upper left chest. Then he and the blue-belly were tumbling over the rails, grunting and snarling as they continued to struggle in midair before the water came up to slap them both like a giant fist.
James felt the cool liquid envelop him. Sideways, spinning slowly, he dropped into the mud at the creek’s bottom, feeling the hairy tentacles of weeds wrapping their slimy fingers around his legs, torso, and neck. The acrid water slithered down his throat, and he heard himself convulse as he choked back a retch, keeping his mouth closed.
Plunging down hard with his left foot, he thrust himself up off the muddy bottom and, with his knife still clenched in his fist, flailed wildly for the surface. He brushed against something yielding and clad in coarse, soaked cloth. When he opened his eyes, he saw the gritted teeth and the black eye patch of the snarling, fearless Union officer. The man swung his knife crossways, and James tilted his head back just in time so that his enemy’s steel blade only made a thin, hot cut across his throat. Another inch closer, and his blood would be geysering from severed arteries in his neck.
James grunted savagely, feeling his lips stretch back from his teeth, and thrust up and forward with his own knife. At the same time that he buried his blade in the officer’s chest, near where he’d stabbed him the first time, the blue-belly’s lone eye thrust toward him—wide and blue and filled with a chilling golden light.
“Oh, God!” James heard himself shout. It fairly exploded from his chest.
The eye before him—the familiar orb he’d know anywhere, for it owned the familial blue of his mother’s eyes…the blue of even his own eyes—dulled. It was like a lamp being turned down in the one lit window of a house he’d just recognized.
Quickly, he grabbed the handle of his knife and pulled. When it slid free of the young lieutenant’s chest, he released it, letting the creek take it. The man before him groaned, winced, and bobbed toward James in the current that carried them both downstream. The Union soldier opened his mouth, gasping.
Only vaguely, James heard the rifle shots of his own men behind him. They were trying to ignite the dynamite. The pops and booms dwindled quickly as the current carried him farther away from the bridge. Just as vaguely, he was aware of the explosion of the dynamite, saw the orange radiance push back the darkness around him and reflect like rubies off the black water.
“Little brother,” he wheezed, now pulling the Union officer toward him, kicking his legs to keep them both afloat as the man became nearly a deadweight in his arms. “Ah, shit, Willie.” His voice rose shrilly, cracking as he started to maneuver toward the creek’s left bank. “Willie!”