And besides, Major William Bradford knew too painfully well how close to cutting and running he was himself.
Try as he would, he couldn't make himself go right up to the rampart and battle it out with the Confederates hand to hand. He did shoot at one of them who jumped down into Fort Pillow and ran at him with rifle musket clutched by the barrel and swung up over his head. He aimed for the Reb's midsection, but hit him in the left shoulder. His Army Colt pulled up and to the right when he fired.
With a howl of pain, the trooper reeled away. He dropped the rifle musket with which he would have clubbed Bradford to clutch at himself. Bright blood welled out between his fingers. Then a colored soldier hit him in the side of the head with the butt of his Springfield. The blow wasn't sporting, but it was damned effective. The Confederate swayed like a tall tree almost cut through, then fell at full length in the mud. Bradford half expected someone to yell, Timmmber!
Another Confederate shot the Negro. He too crumpled, both hands flying to his belly. The best he could hope for was a quick death. Belly wounds almost always killed, if not from the force of the bullet itself then from the fever that followed punctured bowels.
Bradford fired at the soldier in butternut. Even at point-blank range, he missed. A moment later, another black man tackled the trooper. They rolled on the ground, punching and kicking and kneeing and biting in a spasm of hatred and fury.
“Come on! Keep fighting them! As long as they don't get in, we can whip them!” That voice, so like his own, made Bradford's head whip around. His brother Theodorick was still very much in the fight. Theo had a pistol in one hand and one of his blue wigwag flags in the other. He fired at a Reb. The man went down.
“That's the fucker who was signaling the gunboat!” shouted another Confederate-a major. “Nail the lousy son of a bitch!”
Half a dozen of Bedford Forrest's troopers fired at Theodorick Bradford at the same time. At least three bullets struck home-in the chest, in the belly, in the leg.
“Theo!” Bill Bradford cried. He shot at one of the Confederates. The pistol ball caught the Reb just above the bridge of the nose. The man went down without a word, dead before he finished falling.
But Captain Theodorick Bradford was also down, feebly thrashing in the mud. For once careless of his own safety, Bill Bradford knelt beside his brother. “Hurts,” Theo choked out. Blood bubbled from his nose and ran from the corner of his mouth. “Hurts bad.”
“It'll be all right, Theo,” Bradford said, knowing too well it wouldn't.
His brother tried to answer, but only blood poured from his mouth. His eyes rolled up in his head. His chest heaved once, twice, as he fought for air. Then it was still. Bill Bradford smelled a harsh stink. Theo's bowels had let go. It was over.
For those few seconds, no one tried to murder Bradford as he bent over his brother's body. That wouldn't, couldn't, last. No matter what Bradford wanted to do for Theodorick, he had to stay alive or he'd never get the chance. He scrambled to his feet and fired again. The Colt clicked on an empty chamber. He threw it down, snatched up the one Theo had dropped, and fought on.
IX
Matt Ward hadn't thought much of the Federals garrisoning Fort Pillow. Half renegade Tennesseans, half coons-what kind of fight could people like that put up? He figured they would throw up their hands and surrender as soon as that first terrific volley tore into them. Of course, from what he heard, Bedford Forrest had thought they would surrender when he sent in the flag of truce.
Forrest proved wrong, and so did Ward. The soldiers in blue fought with as much courage as anyone could want to see. Maybe that was the desperation of cornered rats. Whatever it was, they showed no signs of yielding even if they were badly outnumbered, even if that blast of gunfire killed or wounded quite a few of the men at the rampart.
If they wouldn't give up, they had to go down. A big colored man in a blue uniform swung his clubbed Springfield at Matt Ward's head. Ward ducked just in time. The rifle-musket butt knocked the slouch hat off his head, but didn't knock out his brains. He swore all the same; he liked that hat.
He stabbed at the Negro with his own bayonet. The black man sprang away. But then he swung again, trying to knock the Enfield out of Ward's hands. Ward wasn't an experienced bayonet fighter. He didn't think any soldiers except former U.S. Army Regulars were expert with the bayonet. But he held on to his weapon, and the black man's swipe left him hideously exposed and unable to get away. Only a sandbag on a practice field could make a more inviting target.
Like anybody who grew up on a farm, Matt Ward had slaughtered and butchered his share of livestock. He knew the soft resistance flesh gave to a knife, knew the feel of a blade grating off a rib and then sliding deeper. But there was all the difference in the world between sticking a hog and sticking a man.
The Negro's eyes opened enormously wide. “Do Jesus!” he screamed. Then he let out a bubbling, wordless shriek of pure agony. He jerked away from the blade and from Ward. An experienced bayonet fighter would have held the lunge and gone on stabbing, twisting the blade to make sure he had a killing stroke. Ward thought the black man would fall over dead. The blood pouring from his side made that seem likely.
Likely or not, it wasn't so. Once free of the bayonet, the Negro went right on fighting-not against Ward, but against a nearby Confederate trooper. That wound had to kill him sooner or later-Ward drove more than a foot of steel into his chest-but it wasn't finishing him fast. As Ward had by the barracks below the bluff, he found out how hard human beings were to kill.
Not far from him, a black soldier threw down his Springfield and fell to his knees in front of a couple of Bedford Forrest's troopers. “Don' shoot me!” he shouted. “Please don' shoot me! I surrender! Ain't gonna fight no mo'!”
“You a runaway, boy?” one of the Confederates asked. Most of the Negroes who fought for the U.S.A. were. By the way this bluebelly talked, he sure didn't come from Massachusetts or New York.
He hesitated a split second, but had to realize lying would do him no good. “Yes, suh,” he admitted. “You kin send me back to my massa. I don' care, so he'p me Jesus.”
Most of the time, the Yankees complained because the Confederates treated captured colored troops as reclaimed property, not prisoners of war. Forrest had offered to treat the blacks in Fort Pillow as prisoners like any others-he'd offered, and the U.S. commander turned him down. Now the bill for such folly came due.
“I'll send you to your master, all right,” the Confederate said. “I'll send you straight to the Devil, because you belong in hell!” He shot the black man in the head from no more than a yard away. Blood and brains and bits of the Negro's skull blew out. The black toppled and lay twitching in the dirt.
“That's telling him, Hank!” said the other C.S. trooper in butternut. “I should've bayoneted him in the guts, let him die slow,” Hank said. “Shooting's too good for a mad dog like that.”
“If you can kill 'em fast, you better do it,” Ward broke in. “I stuck one, stuck him good, and he's still on his feet, the son of a bitch.”
“Niggers is like rattlesnakes-they don't die till sundown.” Hank stirred the man he'd just shot with his foot. “Well, this here one's a goner. Bastard's dead as a stump. But Lord only knows when I'll get a chance to reload.”
If you didn't carry a repeater or a revolver, that was the rub, especially in a close-quarters fight like this. If you fired too soon, you might come to a point where you desperately needed a bullet but didn't have one. If you waited too long, somebody on the other side was liable to shoot you before you pulled the trigger.