Out Bradford came. The jailer gestured with the gun. Numbly, Bradford walked outside. The mockingbird he'd heard before-or maybe another one-flew out of a nearby oak, white wing patches flashing every time it flapped. The other Federal prisoners waited out there; they hadn't had to spend the time in jail. The guards who'd brought them up from Covington waited there, too. So did the corporal who'd volunteered to join them.
Was he…? Bradford eyed him with fearful fascination. He couldn't tell. It had been dark, the moon still young and going in and out of the clouds.
“Get up on your horse, Bradford,” said one of the Confederate soldiers. “Get up, and I'll lash you aboard.” By the way he talked, the Federal officer might have been a sack of dried peas.
“You don't need to tie me-I swear it,” Bradford said.
“You swore you wouldn't run off from Fort Pillow, too, you lying
son of a bitch.” That wasn't the guard who was busy binding Bradford's legs beneath him. It was the newly met corporal. He sounded like a man who knew what he was talking about. Bradford bit his lip. He couldn't even tell the Reb he was wrong. The other trooper tied his hands and tied them to the reins.
“That ought to do it,” he said. “Let's ride.”
Off they went, not at any particularly fast clip. By now the prisoners, even Major Bradford, were afterthoughts. No need to hurry with them. The battle was won. Sooner or later, they would get to Jackson. When they did, Bedford Forrest would deal with them as he got around to it.
Had Bradford not been a prisoner of war, had he not been tied to the horse he rode, he would have savored the glorious spring day. It was perfect: not too cool, not too hot, with the sun shining cheerily in a sky powder-puffed with scattered white clouds. The grass and growing bushes were green, greener, greenest. So were the leaves on some of the trees. Others, not yet in leaf, remained bare-branched and skeletal.
More mockingbirds sang. Catbirds yowled. A robin hopping around after worms chirped. Somewhere deeper in the woods, a wild turkey gobbled. Once the riders got away from the town stinks of Brownsville, which didn't take long, the very air smelled fresh and clean and pure.
Yes, it would have been a pleasant ride, a more than pleasant ride, if not for the ropes around Bradford's wrists and ankles-and if the corporal who'd added himself to the guard party hadn't kept talking to the other Confederate troopers in a low voice. Every so often, he would point Bill Bradford's way, which did nothing to improve the Federal officer's peace of mind.
“Are you sure?” one of the other soldiers asked, loud enough for Bradford to hear him clearly.
“Sure as my name's Jack Jenkins,” the corporal answered. “Sure as that son of a bitch…” His voice dropped so Bradford couldn't make out what he said next. Whatever it was, the Federal didn't think he wanted it applied to him.
They'd come perhaps three miles, perhaps five, when one of the troopers said, “We'll stop here for a little bit. Anybody want to ease himself? “
“I do,” a Federal said. He swung down from his horse and went off to stand behind a tree. One of the Confederates lit a pipe. The soldier in blue came back buttoning the last button on his fly. He pointed to the pipe. “Can I have a couple of puffs of that?” The Reb passed it to him. He smoked for a little while, then gave it back. “Thank you kindly.”
“How about you, Bradford?” the corporal named Jack Jenkins said.
Bradford considered. He didn't particularly need anything, but if he said no the Rebs might use it as an excuse to torment him later by refusing to pause. He nodded. “All right. You'll have to let me loose.”
The trooper with the pipe untied him. After Bradford dismounted, he stood by the horse for a moment, opening and closing his hands to work more feeling into them. Then he started for the woods. Jack Jenkins and four other Rebs, one a lieutenant, came with him. “Don't want you wandering off, now, the way you did at Fort Pillow,” Jenkins said.
“I wasn't going anywhere,” Bradford said, as he had early that morning. His lips were suddenly stiff with fear. That was the sentry he'd tricked, and the man knew him for who he was. “Please,” he whispered. “I wasn't.”
“Well, you damn well won't.” The Reb gestured with his rifle musket. “Go on.”
Terror making his legs light, his knees almost unstrung, Bradford went. The Rebs urged him deeper into the woods, so that trees hid the path down which they'd been riding. “Let me… do what I need to do,” he said at last, when they'd gone about fifty yards.
A little to his surprise, they did, spreading out to all sides around the oak he chose so he couldn't get away no matter how much he wanted to-and he did, with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might. At last, after what seemed a very long time, he finished. He did up his trousers and stepped away from the tree.
“Look!” Jenkins said loudly. “Son of a bitch is getting away!” He swung up his rifle musket. So did the other Confederate soldiers.
“No!” Bradford cried. He fell to his knees. “Treat me as a prisoner of war, please! I fought you as a man, and-”
The guns spoke in a stuttering roar. Hot lead slammed into him from three directions at once. He slumped over. The ground came up and hit him one more blow in the face. He tried to get up, but only his left arm seemed to want to do anything his brain told it to, and it wasn't enough, not by itself.
Corporal Jenkins strolled up and stood over him and slowly and deliberately reloaded. “You shit-eating bastard, you got by me once, but I'm damned if you'll do it twice,” he said, and aimed the rifle musket again.
“No,” Bradford moaned through blood in his mouth, through nerves telegraphing torment, though darkness swelling before his eyes.
And the rifle musket boomed once more, and the darkness rose up and swallowed everything. Through the rising flood, he heard a laugh and the words, “Shot trying to escape,” and then it overflowed, and he never heard or saw anything again.
Illinois. The land of liberty. Abe Lincoln's very own state. A free state. A state where owning a nigger was against the law. Ben Robinson knew there were places like that, but he'd never imagined he would come to one. It was an awful lot like getting to heaven, and nearly made getting shot worthwhile.
Nearly.
He lay on an iron-framed military cot in Ward N of the Mound City general hospital. A big sign said it was Ward N. People talked about it a dozen times a day. Now he knew what an N looked like. Benjamin Robinson. He had four of them in his name. It wasn't much of a start for learning his letters, but a start it was.
Colored soldiers from Fort Pillow, a couple of dozen of them, crowded the ward. Charlie Key was here, and Sandy Cole, and Aaron Fentis, too. They'd all survived their wounds, same as Ben had. Dr. Stewart Gordon, the white surgeon who ran the ward, said they were all likely to get better. He seemed to know what he was talking about, and to know what he was doing, too. Only one man had died since the Silver Cloud and the Platte Valley brought them up here, and poor Bob Hall had been in a bad way: a Reb had hacked up his head and his hand with a saber while he lay sick down at Fort Pillow. Another soldier, Tom Adison, had lost an eye and a chunk of his nose to a Mini? ball. He wasn't in good shape; Dr. Gordon looked worried every time he examined him. The rest were going to make it.
Every time Dr. Gordon changed his dressing, Ben stared at his own wound. Every time, he liked what he saw. Oh, yes, he would have liked not getting shot in the first place ever so much better. But the edges of the gouge in his thigh were healing together. The wound wasn't festering. It didn't have pus dripping from it. It didn't stink. It was-he was-getting better.
One morning-Ben thought it was ten days after the fight at Fort Pillow, but he might have been off one either way-the surgeon came into Ward N earlier than usual. “I want you to listen to me, boys,” he said. “Something's up.”