by Eric Flint
“I want that boat down!” Ball hollered. “Don’t you give me one and not the other, you blasted curries!”
One of the white gunners flashed a grin. However much he might have taken offense as being labeled a curry under other circumstances, under this one he apparently simply found it amusing.
Ball didn’t see the grin. He was already turning his glare onto Callender McParland and young Parker.
“All right, boys. Jones been braggin’ you the best shots in his regiment. That’s why you here, wet behind the ears and all.” He pointed at the boat some forty yards away, which was now halfway through its turn. A man was crouched in the stern, yelling orders.
“Take him down,” Ball hissed. “I want that bastard down.”
Both young corporals already had their muskets leveled. Rifled muskets, Robert now understood, from the way they were actually aiming the weapons, not simply pointing them in the general direction of the enemy.
For a brief moment, they seemed to hesitate. Robert recognized the moment. Just so had he seen other young soldiers, in times past, hesitate before firing their first shot intended for real murder. Just so could he remember himself hesitating, that first time so long ago.
Ball knew the moment also. “Down, I said.” But he growled the words; he didn’t shout them. This was not the time for shouting.
Sheffield Parker fired first, just a split second before Callender. Robert saw his shot take the steersman in the shoulder, lifting and turning him just in time to take Callender’s shot in the chest. A second later, his corpse—for corpse it surely was—splashed into the river.
“Good,” Ball said. “Reload.”
He paid no more attention to the teenage corporals, leaning instead over the guard of the upper deck and going back to hollering at his gun crews.
Hollering, now. No need for tenderness—of sorts—dealing with such veterans.
“Kill ’em, God damn you! Kill ’em all!”
Two seconds later, both cannons fired almost simultaneously. And—
Robert looked up at the target.
And it was done. For the most part, at least. There were survivors, of course. There almost always were, even with a murderous volley at such close range. Time after time, Robert had been astonished at the way the whimsy of battle would rip one man to pieces and completely spare the man next to him. That same whimsy had saved his life more than once.
Still, over half were dead or wounded. Only four of them went over the side into the river, to start swimming after their companions toward the shore.
Robert wondered if Ball would show any mercy. He didn’t expect he would.
No, no chance of it.
“Reload, blast you! That boat’s bloody but it’s still not down! I want it down! ”
The gun crews went through their practiced cycle. Ball turned back to the youngsters. “Don’t waste shots on them while they’re still in the water. But the minute they start climbing up on shore, I want to see at least two of them dead before the rest get away. You hear me? Two, at a rock-hard damn bottom!”
Callender was a bit pale-faced, perhaps. Impossible to tell about Sheffield, as dark-skinned as he was. But from the tightness of the young negro’s very full lips, he seemed determined to keep whatever emotions he was feeling under control.
Splendid young soldiers. Whoever this “Jones” was, Robert had no difficulty understanding why he’d recommended them to Ball. Their marksmanship had only been part of it, as always—and not the most important part. This was probably their first real clash at arms, and they were conducting themselves with as much composure as most veterans.
The cannons went off again. That volley slew whoever might still have been alive on the second boat, and punched enough holes in the hull that it began to settle. Robert swiveled his head and saw that the first boat was still afloat. But it was drifting with the current, obviously out of control, leaking streams of blood into the water. The three men slumped in the boat might still be alive—some of them might even survive the whole experience—but they were no longer a threat to anyone.
By now, even with the difficulty of reloading rifled muskets, Callender and Sheffield had them ready. Not quite to shoulder, but close. Waiting for their targets to come out of the water. To his surprise, Robert saw that the shore was now much closer. Apparently—he’d never noticed—the steamboat pilot had been driving the craft after the men swimming toward safety.
That seemed rather dangerous, Robert thought. He was no expert on the subject, but he could remember people talking about the perils of navigating the Mississippi, much of which was still uncharted. The river was so muddy that it was impossible to see more than an inch or two beneath the surface. If they grounded on a hidden sandbar or hit a submerged snag…
The first of the freebooters reached the riverbank and started to clamber ashore, with two of his companions right behind. From the corner of his eye, Robert could see the two corporals aiming.
But they never fired. Instead, a volley was fired from somewhere in the thick growth next to the river. All three of the freebooters were blown right back into the river. The two remaining, who’d been with that first five, were paralyzed by the shock, crouched half in and half out of the water.
A man stalked out of the foliage, a pistol in his hand. From a distance of five feet, he leveled the pistol and shot one freebooter in the head. Then, he leaped on the other and began clubbing him senseless with the pistol butt. His opponent tried to resist, but to no avail. His attacker seemed on the slender side, but there was something utterly relentless about the way he kept slamming down the pistol butt. As if, half immersed in water like his companion, he was engaging in some sort of horrible, upside-down baptism.
Within half a minute, the freebooter slipped into the water. His body, rather. That skull had been shattered into a pulp.
The four remaining freebooters were now treading water in the middle of the river, trapped between the oncoming steamboat and whoever had fired the volley from the riverbank. Their faces looked pale. One of them was gaping like a fish.
“Did I say anything about quarter?” Robert heard Ball snarl at the two corporals.
“No, sir,” replied Sheffield. “But you did say—”
“Don’t sass me, boy! I said don’t waste shots while they were in the water. At this range—now—that don’t count. Or if it does, you not the men Jones said you were.”
Parker’s jaws tightened, just for an instant. Then:
“Yes, sir.” He stepped up to the rail, aimed, fired. Quick as that. The freebooter with the gaping mouth went under, leaving a little patch of blood and brains on the surface.
Callender was a bit slower. Not much. Another shot, and another freebooter went down. Rolled, rather, the way a slain fish might, before slowly starting to sink.
The two survivors—the second boat’s sole survivors, now—began frantically swimming downstream.
“Follow ’em!” Ball yelled to someone Robert couldn’t see. The pilot, he assumed.
A voice came back. “Be damned if I will! Be damned, I say! This ain’t your boat, Ball—and I ain’t in the fucking army!”
A sudden moment of mercy, Robert might have assumed, except for the next exercise in profanity and blasphemy.
“God damn you, Ball, this boat is valuable! Henry Shreve’ll have my fucking hide, I run it aground and we gotta scuttle it! Which we will, God damn your black soul, ’cause there ain’t no way were gonna—”
“Oh, never mind. And shut up!” Ball hollered back. “It’s all gonna be over soon, anyway, so take your blasted boat wherever you want to—as long as it’s upstream and into the Arkansas!”
Soon, indeed. Robert could now see over a dozen men emerging from the foliage by the river. All of them were armed with muskets, and all of them were half running down the riverbank, keeping even with the swimmers. Like a pack of wolves trailing wounded prey.
It was over quickly. The two surviving freebooters were exhauste
d by now, as much from sheer fright as from physical exertion. The moment one of them slowed, a dozen muskets went off. At least one of the rounds hit. Another patch of red stain was all that was left on the surface of the river.
It took almost a minute for the repetition. Mainly because the men, whoever they were, were clearly not experienced infantrymen. They took much too long to reload. Still, another volley went off soon enough, and the last head faded from sight.
By now, a different river might have been streaked with blood. The carnage had been as horrendous as any Robert had ever seen in a small unit action. But the muddy Mississippi swept it all away within seconds.
Half an hour later, the pilot finally agreed he had a safe place to bring the steamboat alongshore. There was a pier there. Not much of one, since it had clearly been designed for a much smaller boat than the Comet. Still, it was enough to tie up to.
Seventeen men came out of the woods, five of them boys. Along with them came six girls and four young women, two of whom were carrying infants. All were white except for two of the adult males, one of the boys, and one of the infant-toting women. They were black.
The man who led the way across into the steamboat was the same one who’d clubbed the man in the river. Robert hadn’t been able to discern his features, at the distance, but there was something distinct about his way of moving.
He was quite a young man, Robert realized, once he came aboard. He hadn’t seemed so, at first, from the severity of his features.
“Name’s Brown,” he said to Ball. “John Brown.” He turned and helped one of the young women with an infant into the boat. “My wife, Dianthe. My whole family—those as are living in Arkansas—and the people working for me.”
The pistol was stuck back in his belt. Shifting his musket to his left hand, he stuck out his right to Ball. “Pleased to meet you.”
“Charles Ball. General in the Arkansas Army. You the one got that new tannery set up near the river?”
“Had a new tannery,” Brown corrected. Tight-jawed but not seeming especially angry. More like a man depicting an unfortunate turn in the weather—but such is God’s will.
“They burned me out,” he explained. “Not without a fight, mind you. But there was too many to make a stand, so we ran off after shooting a few.”
Ball nodded. “We’re heading up the Arkansas, if you want to join us. To be honest, I could use your help. Don’t know what’s waiting for me up there. But…it’s likely to be another fight, and you got children and womenfolk.”
“Would they be any safer anywhere else?” Brown asked, mildly. “With the land overrun by heathens? I think not. Yes, we’ll join you. We’ll fight, too. But—!”
He held up a stiff, admonishing finger. “I want it clearly understood that I am not enlisting in any army! I’ll fight, but I won’t be a soldier. Meaning no personal offense, General Ball, but you’re a blaspheming lot.”
CHAPTER 14
The Arkansas River, south of Arkansas Fort
OCTOBER 4, 1824
“I’m starting to get a little worried, Scott,” Ray Thompson confided to his friend. The two of them were resting in a field, leaning against a tree stump, watching what remained of a small farm cabin burn to the ground. By now, it was mostly embers.
“You’re just starting to get worried?” Powers jibed. “Gol dern, I wonder why. Could it be that it just dawned on you that Crittenden set off without having any resupply figured out? Oh, but I forget. We were gonna ‘live off the richness of the land,’ weren’t we?”
He half leveled his musket at the smoldering cabin. “Insofar as a nigger’s ain’t-got-a-pot-to-piss-in shack qualifies as ‘the richness of the land.’ Insofar as it would have, I mean, if these crackers and yahoos weren’t burning everything down the moment they come to it.”
Thompson couldn’t help but smile a little. He wasn’t any fonder of most of their “compatriots” than Powers was. Both of them—quietly and privately, of course—had shared a laugh after four of Crittenden’s men had been blown to shreds at Brown’s tannery and another half dozen had been injured. It turned out that the damned abolitionist had left kegs of gunpowder behind, strategically situated. When the mob started burning down the tannery without investigating the premises first, the charges had exploded.
But the smile faded very quickly, and Thompson returned stubbornly to the subject. “Quit making jokes, Scott. Or have you got some magic sack full of food I don’t know about?”
Powers sucked his teeth, idly watching a group of men raping one of the two black women they’d found in the shack. That was the young one. The older of the two—presumably her mother—was huddled over the corpse of a middle-aged black man lying in the dust some ten yards away. She was weeping softly, seemingly oblivious to everything else around her.
“No, I don’t,” he admitted. “But we’ll find what we need at Arkansas Post.” He nodded toward the corpse. “I figure he wasn’t lying none. Not after his ears were cut off.”
Gloomily, Thompson studied the body. Other than the skin color, it was impossible any longer to tell much about the man. His nose had been cut off also, along with his genitals and both of his hands. After the group that had been torturing him at Crittenden’s command to get information were done, there hadn’t been any point in keeping him alive. You’d have had to offer money to get anyone in the slave market at New Orleans to take him. So, the crackers had amused themselves for a time before he finally bled to death.
Crittenden might have told them to stop wasting time, but he’d left right after the negro had told them of the storehouses in Arkansas Post. Of course, whether they’d have listened to him or not was another question. Except for the men under the command of the Lallemand brothers, Crittenden’s army was to discipline what a tornado was to decorum.
Well…it wasn’t quite that bad. Most of the men belonged to groups of one sort or another. Even if the lines of authority were loose and informal, they existed at least on that level.
As was demonstrated, in fact, just that moment. Another man came up, wearing an outfit that bore a passing resemblance to a uniform if you squinted and were willing to make some allowances. He had a real sword, too, not one of the big knives that usually did for one on the frontier.
“Cut it out!” he shouted, grabbing the current rapist by the scruff of his neck and hauling him off the woman. There was something downright comical about the look on the rapist’s face: a combination of outrage, frustration, and surprise.
“Just relax, boys. We’ll be fuckin’ her all the way down the Mississippi,” the “officer” said, in a friendlier tone, lifting the man to his feet. “You betchum. We want that nigger pregnant by the time we put her up on the block. But we got to get going, before somebody else grabs the boat I got us.”
That was standard procedure for slavers. Thompson had served for two years on the crew of a slave ship. That’s where he’d first met Scott Powers, who’d been an officer of the ship. Even though the international slave trade had been illegal in the United States since 1808, it still went on despite the risk. Mostly, of course, for the profits involved; but there were also the perquisites and the side benefits. Young black women would be segregated from the rest of the cargo and raped all the way across the Atlantic. Entertainment for the crew during the voyage—and a pregnant female was worth more on the slave block when they arrived. “Two-for-one” for the buyer—and, more important, proof that the female was good breeding stock.
Grudgingly, the little crowd around the young black woman obeyed their commander. Two of them hauled her to her feet, one of them taking the time to yank her torn and dirty dress back down to her knees. The woman’s eyes seemed vacant until, wandering, they fell on the corpse lying in the dirt. Then she let out a wail before one of the men holding her slapped her face.
“What do we do with this one?” another man asked, pointing with his pistol at the older woman still clutching the corpse.
The commander studied her for a mo
ment, then shrugged. “May as well leave her. She’s too old to bring much, and we ain’t got enough food to begin with.”
The man who’d asked the question looked back down at the woman. Then, cocked his pistol and shot her in the back of the head.
The younger woman wailed again, and got another slapping.
“Runnin’ low on powder, too,” the commander said sourly. But he didn’t carry the chastisement any further.
Thompson didn’t blame him. Killing the woman had been pointless, but control over a crew like this was always a chancy thing. As excited and fired up as they were, Crittenden’s army had been killing, burning, raping, and torturing anyone they ran across almost since they left Alexandria. Crittenden had barely been able to keep them in check until they passed beyond the borders of Louisiana—and then, only when they came across white people.
Some of those activities had had a conscious purpose—especially the ones aimed at the Choctaw—but most of them had been as mindless as a shark’s feeding frenzy. Just the way it was, with expeditions like this, as a rule. The Lallemands’ men were under better discipline, but Crittenden wasn’t so much leading this army as he was trying to half steer a raft through turbulent rapids.
Thompson and Powers watched the group as they dragged the woman into a keelboat and shoved her onto a bench alongside two other negroes they’d caught. Both young boys, in this case. Then, at a command from their leader, they pushed off from the bank and starting rowing down the Arkansas toward its junction with the Mississippi.
“Damn fools,” Powers said. “For the price of three slaves! You won’t catch me heading off without enough men around to handle Choctaws. I don’t care if I find me a pot of gold. They’ll be riled right good, by now.”
Thompson grunted his agreement. What concerned him, however, was that he was pretty sure a lot of the men in Crittenden’s force weren’t going to have the same horse sense. This was likely to be just the first of many small groups peeling away from the expedition once they’d gotten their hands on a few slaves. Not all of the men who’d come with Crittenden were looking to set up plantations in the northern part of the Delta. That took some money, no matter what else—access to loans, at any rate—and plenty of these boys didn’t have any more of a pot to piss in than a negro did. A fair number of them were, quite literally, former pirates.