And then, hard on the heels of that good feeling, fear.
Hollins would never give up the fight as won? he thought.
He looked up at the Calhoun, Hollins’s flagship, wondering how he might determine the flag officer’s intentions. He saw a belch of black smoke pour from her stack, saw the water churn white as her side wheels began to turn and the five-hundred-ton steamer began to inch ahead, the eighteen-pounder rifle on her bow pointing the way, like the nose of a hunting dog on its quarry’s scent.
Paine stepped eagerly back into the wheelhouse. “Half ahead, Mr. Kinney,” he said. He had been puttering about the river long enough that he was beginning to feel comfortable in his role of captain. “Keep pace with the flagship.”
Kinney grunted. “Flagship… ” he muttered in a derisive tone, and it did sound a bit foolish, said that way, but Robley did not care. They were plunging ahead, down South West Pass, chasing after the fleeing enemy, and that was all he needed to know.
Kinney rang the requisite bells, and down in the engine room Mr. Brown jingled back. The Yazoo River seemed to come awake. The big stern wheels began to turn and the bobbing, erratic motion of a ship stopped in the stream—underway but not making way, in the parlance of the mariners—changed into the steady rhythm of a ship steaming ahead.
Paine looked east and west. The others, the McRae, the Ivy, the Tuscarora, the Calhoun, and the Jackson, they were all gathering way, heading downriver in line abreast. Here was the bold advance, the waterborne cavalry charge. The fleet looked to Robley like a line of mounted knights, rolling forward.
And on this charge cried “God for Henry, England, and St. George!” Robley Paine was not happy—happiness was a thing from his past—but he was at least satisfied.
They eased their throttles open, Commodore Hollins’s squadron, and churned the brown water white and under parallel trails of black smoke steamed the fifteen miles down the South West Pass to the sea.
Kinney fidgeted, chewed hard, spit on the deck and the sides of the spittoon. “Don’t know what in hell y’all think you’ll do, if you come on them Yankees…” he muttered, and Paine was not sure if he was looking for an answer, but he gave it to him anyway.
“We will go to battle with them, Mr. Kinney. We will fire on them and endeavor to do as much damage as we can.”
“‘Fire on them…’” Kinney muttered. Paine did not answer again.
The fleet was capable of eight knots over the ground, with the boost they got from the current, and the marshy shore seemed to fly past. The sun broke the horizon and turned the sky a light, hazy blue. Two columns of smoke rose from stacks somewhere down the South West Pass, and the Confederate fleet was closing fast.
“Come left, you stupid son of a bitch,” Kinney growled at the helmsman, who turned the big wheel a few spokes. The pilot was becoming visibly more nervous with each mile made good and turning his fear into abuse.
“Steady, Mr. Kinney,” Robley said, hand resting on the butt of the Starr. “Don’t lose your nerve yet. The iron has not yet begun to fly.”
“‘Iron fly…’ Ain’t what I goddamned signed on for! How many time I got to tell you? You never said nothing about fighting no Yankees.”
“Mr. Kinney…” Robley pulled the Starr from his holster, spun the cylinder to see that each chamber was loaded. “Please be assured that you have much more to fear from me than you do from the Yankees.”
Kinney looked from the pistol to Robley’s face. He turned, stared out the window at the water under the bow. “‘More to fear from me…’ Crazy son of a bitch…” he said, lower this time, low enough so as not to invite response, which Robley did not provide.
South West Pass was all but straight, a boulevard of water through the delta, and soon the Yankees were in sight, clustered around the bar, one ship on the Gulf side and two still inland of the muddy shallows. The largest of them, the steamer, was pouring smoke, which made a sharp angle as it roiled from her stack and blew away to the south. The ships were motionless, as far as Robley could tell, the steamer broadside to the river, the smaller one with her stern pointed right at the Confederate fleet.
Robley picked up his field glasses, swept the ships on the bar. “They are aground,” he said. “I do believe they are aground.” It was too much to hope for. The enemy stranded in the mud, right under his bow gun.
He stepped from the wheelhouse and forward, to the edge of the hurricane deck. Below him, the gun crew sat on the deck, leaning against the cotton wall, or stood gazing forward at the distant Yankee ships.
“Gun crew!” Paine called, and the men looked up. “The Yankees are aground! Load and run out!”
The men went through the drill, silent and fast, just as they had done so many times dockside in New Orleans.
“Fire!” Paine shouted out, much louder than necessary. The gunner pulled the lanyard and the ten-inch Dahlgren fired with its great throaty roar, flung itself back against the breeching. Paine could see the shell make a black streak in the light blue sky as it sailed toward the Yankees, shrieked through the rigging, and plunged into the water beyond the bar.
“Lower! Lower! You’re firing right over their damned heads!”
On either side of the Yazoo River the other gunboats were opening up, firing their heterogeneous collection of artillery, an eighteen-pounder Dahlgren, an eight-inch rifle, an eight-inch Columbiad; they all fired as fast as they could, pouring shot and shells into the stranded Yankees, hitting back in a way that the Confederate Navy had yet to do, after seven months of war.
The Yazoo River ’s bow gun fired again, but Robley could not see where the shot fell.
And then the Yankees replied, the big steamer, firing her broadside guns at the mosquito fleet. The muzzle flashes looked dull and insignificant in the sunlight. A series of water spouts shot up from the river, two hundred yards short.
“Kinney,” Paine called, stamping back into the wheelhouse. “Slow ahead. We’ll creep up to point-blank range.”
“Son of a bitch! We ain’t in range of them Yankees here. We should stay here.”
“If we ‘ain’t’ in range, then we should get closer. But see here, I don’t need you just to ring a bell. I can ring the bell myself, and that will save me the cost of paying you your wages.” Robley reached for the bell cord, but Kinney was there, moving across the wheelhouse with two quick steps, snatching the cord practically from Robley’s hand.
“All right, all right, goddamn it…slow ahead!”
Robley nodded, left the wheelhouse, took his place on the front edge of the hurricane deck, where his view of the enemy and his own gun crew was unimpeded.
He looked right and left. The line of pugnacious gunboats blasting away, from the 830-ton, bark-rigged side-wheel steamer McRae to the fast river tug Jackson, made his heart sing. Fighting back, that was the thing. Was there anything more terrifying then sitting idly by, while the serpent wrapped itself around his new nation?
The turn of the Yazoo River ’s stern wheels began to slow, the creaking note lowering in pitch, and the boat’s forward motion was checked. Paine whirled around, caught Kinney’s eye, and Kinney looked quickly away.
Paine crashed the wheelhouse door open as he burst in. “I give the goddamned orders! I say when to go, and when to stop, is that clear, Mr. Kinney?”
“I reckoned it was time to stop. We getting damned close to being in range of them Yankees.” The shot from the steamer’s smoothbores was beginning to fall just a hundred yards or so beyond the bow, and some even falling around the boat.