Even finding Fort Pillow's outer works by moonlight wasn't easy. He might never have done it had he not heard several other disgruntled pickets grousing with one another. They gave the two stripes on his sleeve suspicious looks-they had to wonder if he was coming to make them act like proper soldiers. But when he started discussing Newsom Pennell's unsavory ancestry and inflammable destination, they knew him for a fellow sufferer and relaxed.
One of them had a jug. He was willing to share it. "Leastways you brought a little something out of the fort," another picket said mournfully. "Me, I didn't get no loot a-tall."
"This should've been our chance," another man said. He drew on his pipe. The glowing red coal in the bowl lit up the top of his face from beneath: a strange, almost hellish glow. "Now we're stuck out here, and the others're getting all the goodies."
Jenkins already had some greenbacks and new shoes, and now a knock of whiskey. He didn't know what else he could expect to get, but he joined in the grumbling anyway. When the jug came around again, he took another good swig. Thus fortified, he found a place on the outer line that wasn't too close to anybody else's.
Out in the darkness beyond, a whip-poor-will said its name. Jenkins said Lieutenant Pennell's name, loudly and foully. Nothing was going to happen out here. This was all a waste of time. Here he was, stuck. "I'll pay you back for this, Pennell. See if I don't," he muttered.
XIV
Wherever the rebel officer who was a Freemason had gone, it didn't look as if he was coming back. Mack Leaming lay where the two Negroes who carried him up to the top of the bluff had left him. He was chilly. The gunshot wound pained him and gnawed at his vitality. But he believed he would live. Maybe the water the Reb gave him helped that much. Maybe his bleeding had stopped. Or maybe he was just tougher than he thought after first getting hit.
Every so often, a Confederate would walk by and look him over. Seeing him barefoot and without his trousers, each Reb in turn would realize he'd already been picked clean and go away. A couple of them thought he was dead. They wanted to put him on the pile of bodies not far away.
“I'm still here,” Leaming said when one of Forrest's troopers bent to take hold of his ankles.
The man jerked back in surprise-and, if Leaming was any judge, in fear as well. “Goddarnn!” he exclaimed. “For a second there, I reckoned you was a dead man talkin' to me.”
“Not quite,” Leaming answered. “I'm only a wounded prisoner.”
He wanted to remind the Reb that Bedford Forrest had taken prisoners; just because he wasn't dead now, that didn't mean the trooper couldn't kill him in a hurry.
“Gave me quite a turn,” the enemy soldier said.
“Do you have a canteen? Could I have some water, please?” Leaming asked. Perhaps because of the blood he'd lost, he'd stayed thirsty even after the Confederate Freemason's kindness.
“Sorry. I drank it dry myself during the fight.” Unlike a lot of his comrades, this Rebel didn't sound actively hostile.
That encouraged Leaming to say, “Could you get me some water, please? Would you be so good?”
He watched Forrest's trooper think it over. “No, I don't believe I would,” the Reb said at last. “You're a homemade Yankee, a Tennessee Tory, a damned renegade. If you was standing here and I was laying there, would you get me water?”
“I hope I would,” Leaming said. But he might as well have kept quiet, for the other man went on, “I don't think so. I expect you'd give me a sermon instead, and tell me how wonderful it was to lick Abe Lincoln's boots and kiss a nigger's ass. I don't care to murder a helpless man, but you get no help from me, neither.” He walked off.
If I die because I get no water, won't you have murdered me? Leaming thought. But he did doubt he would die now. He was alive and suffering, and likely to go on suffering for quite a while. The white-hot agony he'd known after he first got shot was duller now, but taking a Mini? ball still hurt much worse than anything else that had ever happened to him-and he'd had a toothache that kept him sleepless for two days and nights before a dentist finally did his bloody work.
A couple of white Federals-prisoners, of course-paused to look at him. “Isn't that Lieutenant Leaming?” one of them asked.
“Sure looks like him, poor devil,” the other said. “So he got it, too, eh?”
Leaming opened and closed his right hand. “I'm not dead,” he said.
Both men from the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry (U.S.) started as violently as the Confederate trooper did a few minutes before. “Jesus Christ!” one exploded. His laugh was shaky. “You gave us a hell of a jolt there, Lieutenant.”
“That's a fact,” the other agreed.
“You're Bill Ryder,” Leaming said to him. The Federal nodded.
Leaming had to think about the other man's name: “And Elmer Haynes.” He got it at last. “What have the Rebs done to you?”
“We been totin' bodies,” Haynes answered.
“Hell of a lot of 'em,” Ryder added. “They took all the money I had, too. Only good thing about that is, I didn't have much.”
“I'm sorry. They robbed me, too.” Leaming wished he hadn't had much money. It was gone now, into that thieving Reb's pocket, and his gold watch, too. He asked, “Is there any place where they're taking care of wounded Federals?”
The two troopers looked at each other. Slowly, Haynes said, “They've got some of 'em down in the barracks we tried to burn this morning. “
“They've got 'em there, yeah.” Bill Ryder seemed content to comment on what Haynes said. “They've got' em, but I don't know what they're doing for 'em. Don't know that they're doing anything for, em, tell you the truth.”
“Could you men carry me there?” Leaming asked. “Lying on a floor, lying under a roof, has to be better than this.”
Ryder and Haynes looked at each other again. They both sighed. They both shrugged. “Reckon we could,” Haynes said resignedly. “One more toting job-what the hell?”
“You want the head end or the feet end, Elmer?” Ryder said.
“I had the head last time,” Haynes said. “Your turn for that.”
“Be careful when you lift me,” Mack Leaming said as Ryder stooped by him. “Be-Aii!” He bit down hard, but couldn't stifle the yip of anguish as the captured trooper picked him up.
“Where are you men going with that body?” a Confederate officer demanded. “Just throw it in the damn ditch.”
“Not a body, sir-he's alive.” Haynes spoke as respectfully to the Reb as he would have to one of his own superiors. Leaming didn't like that, but he was in no position to criticize. Haynes went on, “We were taking him down to the barracks, to put him with the other wounded down there.”
He's not so dumb, Leaming thought. By reminding the Confederate that other injured Federals were in the barracks building, Haynes made this transfer seem routine.
Sure enough, the officer nodded. “All right, go ahead. But don't dawdle around. Still plenty of dead ones to get rid of.”
“We won't, sir.” Bill Ryder sounded respectful, too. Under that respect, though, Leaming heard an old soldier talking. Ryder didn't intend to move one lick faster than he had to.
The Confederate officer turned away. Ryder and Haynes carried Lieutenant Leaming across a plank bridge over the ditch, and then down the front of the bluff. Leaming shook his head in wonder, though the motion made him hurt even more than he already did on account of the jolting journey. Was it only this afternoon that he walked down the same slope to parley with Nathan Bedford Forrest? It was, even if it seemed a million years away.
Just this afternoon, I was spry as a bighorn, he thought. That didn't seem possible, either. He couldn't stand now if his life depended on it. He wondered if he would ever be hale again. He hoped so, but had no notion of how bad his wound was. He couldn't see it. All he could do was suffer, and he was doing plenty of that.