Shin nodded in smiling approval and suddenly pointed at the two men heading the line. “You. Face each other. Hold hands.”
The two did as ordered and Mao approached them, inclined his head and turned his back to them.
“You carry Mr. Mao across water,” Shin ordered and the two mea crouched. Mao sat upon their clasped hands and was lifted clear of the ground. The smooth-faced gang leader rattled out a rapid stream of Chinese and Shin pumped his head in acknowledgment. “We go now. Mr. Mao say, you drop him you regret day mothers tell fathers okay. Okay?”
The two men nodded emphatically and as Shin smiled in approval, they moved forward, splashing ankle deep into the icy coldness of the rushing stream. Flanked by the guards, the line of hostages followed. The passengers left on the train stared from the windows with wide-eyed concern as the prisoners and their captives waded through the sparkling water, the men at the front being forced to raise their burden higher and higher as the level of the water rose almost to waist level at the mid-way point.
The quaking fear of most of the hostages was supplemented by shivering cold as they climbed up on to the opposite bank.
Mao rattled out a further order and Shin smiled at the two men heading the line. “Mr. Mao thanks you.”
They lowered their burden with sighs of relief, flexing their aching muscles. Mao whispered to Shin, who looked along the line, nodded, then strode towards the end. He halted beside Alvin and Beth. His smiling eyes lingered on the woman’s cleavage.
“Mr. Mao asks that the lady walk beside him.”
Beth’s sensuous features showed nothing of what she thought about the request. But anger broke through Alvin’s fear and his complexion darkened to a purple hue. He tightened his grip on the woman’s hand.
“No!” he rasped, and his eyes pleaded with her. “Beth?”
She managed to force a smile for him. “If it’ll keep us alive, dear,’ she said softly.
Alvin hesitated, fear fighting fury behind his young face. Suddenly every shotgun was pointed at him.
“Mr. Mao no like to be kept waiting,” Shin urged.
Tension stretched like an invisible band around the group, threatening to snap with an explosion of sudden death. Edge’s words were like an escape valve.
“She figures she can handle him.”
Alvin read the implication behind the remark and spun around, seeking to vent his frustration on a man apparently as helpless as himself. But as his blazing eyes became locked on Edge’s ice cold stare he saw an enormous latent power and became hypnotized into immobility. Beth jerked free of his grip and stepped out of the line.
“I’ll keep the guy company,” she said to Shin, the tone and her expression revealing the well-learned lessons of her former profession.
“That good,” Shin replied, motioning with his empty shotgun.
Her deportment was also a carefully calculated ploy and despite the danger of their situation, few of the male hostages could quell a stab of desire as they watched the woman’s swaying hips and thrusting breasts. When she halted alongside Mao, she smiled beguilingly at him and he bowed slightly from the waist.
The line moved forward again, angling away from the stream and the railroad, towards a cleft in the side of the ravine. And they had not gone many yards before Mao unfolded his arms and laid a proprietary hand on Beth’s vibrant rump, the yellow fingers splaying before forming into a lustful claw.
Alvin snarled, his head bobbing to and fro as he peered ahead along the line of marching prisoners.
“You just got to admit it, Alvin,” Edge muttered to the boy. “Mao can’t lose any way it falls. He won it with the head. Now he’s got the tail.”
Chapter Five
THE troopers used only two of the houses offered them, and neither of these for sleeping. Rhett, Bell and Douglas joined Hedges; and Seward and Scott followed Forrest into the house next door. They were little more than cabins, single storied with a sparsely furnished sitting room and a bedroom and kitchen each. In common with their outward appearance, they were neatly kept and extremely clean, but loose hinges, warped boards and sagging shelves witnessed the long absence of men to attend to such chores.
“What the hell’s happening?” Bell wanted to know as the Captain assigned his section of the troop to keep watch from the windows.
Hedges peered out through a cracked pane at the street. “You know the facts of life, trooper?” he hissed.
“Aw, come on, Captain,” Bell answered. “You let me out with those dames and I’ll show you.”
“So how come there’s that many women in this town and no kids around?”
Douglas was guarding the kitchen window at the rear. “Hey, I never thought of that!” he exclaimed.
Hedges grinned mirthlessly out at the empty street as he heard the church door slam shut. Then a bolt was shot home. “That’s because when you men got screwing on your minds, you can’t think.”
Rhett was in the bedroom. His nervousness could be heard in his voice. “And if they really trusted us, they’d be no reason to keep the children hidden?”
“Smart,” Hedges complimented with heavy sarcasm. “And if you could count as well you’d know that one of our horses and one of the women have gone.”
“Man!” Bell breathed.
“I figure more than one,” Hedges responded in low tones.
“Why, Captain?” Rhett called anxiously from the bedroom. “I can’t figure any of this. Georgia’s Rebel land. You reckon those women realized we’re Union?”
“I ain’t doing anymore figuring until I see who the missing woman brings back with her,” Hedges answered. “Now cut out the yakking. We’re supposed to be sleeping.”
Bell swallowed hard, his eyes swiveling up and down the street narrowing against the glare of sunlight, coming wide to peer into the deep shadows thrown by buildings. “Suddenly I ain’t tired,” he whispered to himself.
For an hour nothing moved in the tiny town and the sole noise came from the stream in its ceaseless rush to tumble down to the foot of the rise. Then the seven troopers heard a sound invade the silence from far off: and as it grew steadily in volume they were able to pin down the direction. It was coming from the north-west. And moments later, just before it came to an abrupt end, they identified it. A group of horsemen riding at the gallop.
In the last house but one on the street, Frank Forrest bared his crooked, tobacco-stained teeth in an evil grin. “Figure to creep up on us, Billy,” he said softly.
Seward nodded and checked the action of his Spencer. “How many you reckon, Frank?”
“Sure ain’t no regiment,” the sergeant answered. “Don’t figure they’ll give us much trouble.”
Forrest was at one of the front windows of the house, Seward at the other. Scott crouched in the bedroom. Each man had been fighting drowsiness in the heat and silence of the waiting: but now they were alert, keyed up for action - even exhilarated by the prospect of renewed killing.
A similar pulse of excited anticipation throbbed in the hearts of the eleven men advancing up the slope on the town side of the stream, from where their horses were held by the woman who summoned them. Their ages spanned a broad spectrum, from very young to past sixty, their builds from short and rotund to tall and emaciated and their garb from disheveled Confederate uniforms to ill-used denim. But despite the obvious differences between them, there was a certain uniformity about the men which could be identified in the set of their grizzled faces and the haunted, deep-set eyes. For here could be seen the look of the hunted, cowering behind the thin veneer of triumph as the fugitive sensed a much sought reversal.
And as the men drew nearer their objective, the desire for revenge showed most vividly in the dark, red-veined eyes of their leader, Bill Terry. For it was in him that the seeds of bitterness had been sewn deepest. He was a short, compactly built man of forty-one who had served his apprenticeship in the art of cruelty as slave master on a Virginia cotton plantation before becoming a bank robber
. Then had come the Civil War and he had elected to evade regular army service in the Confederate cause and chosen to fight a guerilla campaign. The band of stage robbers, rapists, con men and murderers who followed him took his orders not because of his self-appointment to the rank of captain, but because he proved himself to be the meanest and toughest man in the group, particularly in using a saber captured from a Union officer.
It had been a good war for him, until his raiders hit the Union camp at Murfreesboro in the summer of sixty-two and abducted some women. A troop of Union cavalry had given chase and of the raiders, Terry was the sole survivor, making good his escape after burning an officer’s lady at the stake.
Since then, his war had turned sour and he could no longer wage a hit-and-run campaign against the North with the support of the Richmond administration. For word of his atrocity had been communicated to the Confederate capital and both the army and civil authorities had issued wanted posters on him. Thus, he was forced to adopt the tactics of his pre-war days as a criminal - stealing, running and hiding in company with the human dregs who comprised his newly formed raiders.
But now, as the distance between the group and the town narrowed, Terry could almost taste vengeance. Up ahead, sleeping in their innocence of impending slaughter, was a unit of Confederate cavalry. And Terry had no doubt that it was one of many such units scouring Georgia for him following a successful bank raid in Atlanta. It was their ill-luck - and his good fortune - that found them sleeping off their exhaustion trapped in a town which he had claimed as home for the raiders’ wives and families.
At the top of the rise, where the spur of the trail leveled out to feed the town’s single street, Terry raised a hand, halting the men. Then he motioned with his other hand, which clutched the hilt of his saber, instructing the men to split into two groups. One group, led by Terry, continued on up the street while the second angled towards the rear of the houses.
“Hey,” Seward whispered as he drew a bead on one of the raiders. “Ain’t that...?”
“That’s him,” Forrest cut in. “The Captain was right about his luck. Don’t break it for him.”
“What?”
“Don’t reckon he’ll take kindly to anybody else killing Terry.”
From the outside, there was nothing about the houses to arouse the suspicion of the raiders as they crept forward, for sunlight bouncing against the window panes at the front acted as an opaque screen for the men behind them. And at the rear, Scott, Douglas and Rhett stayed low or to the side.
The raiders first surrounded the house at the end of the street, moving with silent caution. From the church, the women watched with bated breath, aware that the house was empty but knowing a shout of warning could also alert the soldiers.
As he neared the front door, Terry drew a Colt from his holster and nodded to two men to cover the window with their rifles. Then he gave a low whistle and the men at the rear closed in. Terry, his grizzled face twisted into a mask of hatred, raised a foot and sent his boot crashing into the door. As it slammed wide, he rushed inside, and two windows smashed in the rear.
“They ain’t here!” he roared and the men ringing the house whirled, fear crawling across their faces.
For long moments the familiar silence gripped the town and the sole movements were the swiveling of the raiders’ eyes as they sought to explore every hiding place. Then Terry exploded an animalistic bellow of frustration and his boot thudded against floorboards as he ran to the door.
“Blast ’em!” Hedges yelled.
Seven rifles cracked with a sound like a single cannon shot. Four raiders screamed and reeled drunkenly before slumping to the ground, pumping blood from head and chest wounds. Two survivors on the street turned and scuttled for the cover of the houses opposite. One of them reached safety but the second was launched into a clumsy cart wheeling motion as a bullet from Forrest’s rifle took the man high in the thigh. He dropped his gun and tried to drag himself one-handed across the sun-baked street as his other hand clawed at the blood-soaked raggedness of his jeans. The rest of the raiders ran into the house where Terry stood, trembling in a rage, shrieking a string of obscenities.
“Come on, Cookie!” the raider on the far side of the street yelled, not daring to break cover to help the injured man.
“Yeah, Cookie!” Seward taunted. “Get the lead outta your pants!”
“For Christ’s sake, they’ll kill you!”
The injured man clawed at the hard ground, his features painted with agony. His body snaked forward a pitiful few inches. Four shots rang out simultaneously and pieces of bloodied flesh and shiny bone splinters spun away from the back of the man’s head. His face snapped forward into the ground and he lay still.
“Bastards!” the man across the street screamed.
“Just the way the Cookie crumbles!” Forrest taunted in reply.
Since the houses were built in a straight line neither group could see its enemy and only the man who had reached the other side of the street was in a position to assess the situation.
“Hemingway!” Terry yelled.
“Yeah, Bill?” The man’s voice was still shaky with shock.
“What d’you see?”
“House next door and the one next to that.”
Terry, sweating, irritatingly aware of the five pairs of eyes looking to him for a decision, began to pace the room.
“We got took, Bill,” a bearded fifty-year-old complained. “Them army guys must have smelled a rat.”
Terry’s arm swung and the saber point was suddenly resting against the man’s middle. “Must have been you,” Terry snarled. “You stink of fear.”
The man’s beard quivered. “Yeah, Bill,” he agreed. “But what we gonna do?”
Terry snorted, spun away from the man and went to the window. He stared out at the empty street. “We’re gonna wait, that’s what,” he hissed. “We’re gonna sweat the army into making first move.”
And the troopers were sweating. The air inside the houses was cloyed with stale heat and the tension of knowing that sudden death lurked only feet away was a strong additional factor in sheening the men’s faces with moisture.
“Reckon they’re waiting for us to do somethin’, Captain?” Bell whispered.
Hedges finished reloading his Spencer and pumped a shell into the breech. “They sure as hell ain’t taking a coffee break,” he answered.
“So what we gonna do?” Bell asked.
“Keep ’em from getting bored,” Hedges replied, stepping to the door and jerking it open.
Hemingway, one of the few raiders wearing a semblance of army uniform - a forage cap - heard the creak of the door. He poked his rifle around the corner of the house and fired one blind shot. His bullet had not found a wild mark in the roof before the Spencers of Bell and Hedges spat lead. Wood splinters flew into the raider’s face, hard and jagged enough to draw blood. As he screamed and threw up his hands to his face, his rifle clattered down on to the street.
“Farewell to an arm,” Hedges muttered as Forrest and Seward sent a volley of bullets towards Hemingway’s position, driving the man further back from the corner.
In the vibrant silence that followed the burst of gunfire the heat seemed to increase in intensity. But then the sound of running feet caused every man in the three houses to tighten his grip on his rifle. But the footfalls were moving away from the street and Hedges grinned as he spotted the retreating figure of Hemingway.
Terry bellowed his rage and the shot that was sent after the fleeing man came from his gun. It dug up dirt short of the target and Hemingway splashed through the stream and scuttled towards a stand of trees halfway down the slope.
“The bastard ran out on us!” Terry roared.
“He ain’t ready to die,” Hedges taunted “It ain’t afternoon yet.”
“Where’s he go, Captain?” Bell wanted to know, scanning the street, fearful of attack from another quarter.
“Forget him,” Hedges answered from the o
pen doorway. “Across the river and into the trees.” He looked along the street towards the church and saw the big door was still firmly closed. “Get the others,” he instructed and stepped outside, flattening himself against the front wall.
“Bill, they’re coming out!” a woman shrieked from the church.
Bell, Rhett and Douglas came through the doorway sideways and then followed Hedges in a crouched run for the gap between the house they had left and the one occupied by the other three troopers. Terry pushed his revolver out of his doorway and sent a wild shot harmlessly across the front of the houses.
“You out there?” Forrest called.
Hedges kept his voice low. “I’ll cover the front. Make it out the rear.”
He stepped away from the corner and began firing along the ^street, working the action of the Spencer to the limit of its speed. Then, when the gun was empty, he snatched Rhett’s rifle and continued in the same manner.
Inside the house Forrest whirled and broke into a run across the sitting room and into the kitchen. Seward was hard on his heels. The sergeant crashed into the rear door and it was ripped off its hinges. As he and Seward burst into the open they began to pour lead towards the house next door. The startled Scott had to crouch down under their line of fire as he made his escape. Only one wild shot was exploded from the rear of Terry’s stronghold before the three troopers ducked into cover to join the other four Union men.
Hedges began to reload both the emptied Spencers as Rhett relieved himself against the house wall.
“He’s getting better,” Seward rasped. “Didn’t wet his pants this time.”
Hedges threw the New Englander’s rifle to him. “It’s the only goddamn weapon he’s fired all morning.”
Rhett’s expression was twisted by the insult, but the Captain’s eyes, narrowed again into menacing slits, warned him against a retort.
“We blasted four and one run off,” Forrest said, reloading his own gun. “I figure six more to go.”
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