Caudell sipped his coffee, which was far better than the chicory and burnt barley he’d drunk while he was in the Army of Northern Virginia. Pleasants already handled the repeater with confidence and competence. He was an engineer, Caudell reminded himself, and used to learning to use unfamiliar devices in a hurry. That suited Nate fine. Not only did he admire his friend’s knack, but if Pleasants was no liability with a rifle, he could use Mollie as a messenger without—well, with only a few—qualms of conscience.
She was saying, “Easiest way to get from hereto there, matter of fact, is to go over to Rocky Mount and take the train on up.” She chuckled. “That’d be the easiest way, anyhow, if the line wasn’t busted an’ if the Rivington men wouldn’t shoot you dead for tryin’ to use it.”
“Let’s try another road, then,” Alsie Hopkins said. He sounded so serious that the whole squad hooted at him.
Caudell raised his cup, tilted his head back to drain it. He slung the AK-47 over his shoulder. “Let’s go,” he said.
Ambling east along Washington Street to First hardly seemed like soldiering, though Ruffin Biggs complained, “I forgot how heavy a rifle this was.” Caudell frowned; compared to the rifle musket he had carried, the AK-47 was small and light. But compared to no rifle at all—his burden the past four years—it did feel rather like a slab of stone. He decided Biggs had a point.
First Street remained a respectable road until it leaped over Stony Creek. The soldiers’ feet drummed loudly on the wooden bridge. Bob Southard said, “What’s that fairy tale? The three billy goats guff?”
“Gruff,” Caudell corrected him. He waved down at the little stream. “Might could be a few snappers in there, but I don’t think Stony Creek’s big enough to hold a troll.”
A few hundred yards past the bridge, the road split into three narrow tracks, none of which seemed to lead anywhere in particular. “See what I mean?” Mollie said.
“The right fork is the one that goes north and east,” Henry Pleasants remarked. “That’s the way we’re looking for.”
Mollie looked at him. “You’re right, but how’d you know? You’re new hereabouts.”
“A couple of my miners, Welshmen, came down and settled on that road,” he answered. “I thought they’d work on the railroad with me, but they’re content to farm a few acres and hunt a little.”
“Haven’t seen ‘em in town much,” Caudell said. “They must stick to themselves.”
Pleasants nodded. “They do. Lloyd and Andrew are both like that.”
“We ought to have a look at those farms of theirs, then,” Caudell said. “Could be anything on ‘em—a still, maybe, or who knows what else?”
Lloyd Morgan’s place came first, a couple of miles up the path from Nashville. The cabin on it was small, dark, and tumbledown, rather like Morgan himself. He looked anything but happy at having guests, but did not presume to argue with a squad of soldiers with repeaters at the ready. He also smelled powerfully of whiskey. Try as they would, though, Caudell’s squad found no still. Nate asked him where he’d got the liquor. He just shook his head and muttered in Welsh.
Finally Caudell gave up. “Lee’s proclamation doesn’t make it against the law to get drunk. Let’s go,”
As pine woods screened Morgan’s farm from view, Ruffin Biggs grumbled, “I bet he’s standing back there laughing at us.”
“Could be so,” Caudell agreed.
“Can’t win all the time,” Mollie Bean said. When she was doing what any other soldier might, as now, Caudell found he had no trouble thinking of her as Melvin again. He could not decide whether that was good or bad.
Andrew Gwynn’s farm, an hour’s tramp from Lloyd Morgan’s, made the latter seem a plantation by comparison. Looking at the tiny, weed-infested plot Gwynn cultivated—or rather, did not seem to cultivate—Caudell marveled that he managed to make a living from it. And if he didn’t…how did he make a living? Suspicion rose within Caudell. He said, “We’ll look this place over real careful, boys.”
They looked. Andrew Gwynn came out of the shack by the path to watch them look. Under a shock of dark hair, his face was pale, narrow, closed. Unlike Morgan, he was in complete control of himself. When the searchers again failed to find anything, he gave them a cold nod and went back inside.
Caudell was dissatisfied, frustrated. “I know he’s hiding one somewhere,” he said several times. “I can feel it.”
After the squad had moved another couple of miles closer to Rivington, Henry Pleasants told him, “It’s back in a little clearing, well off the road. There’s no path—far as I know, Andrew never goes there the same way twice.”
“Why didn’t you say that when we were back there, Henry?” Caudell demanded, glaring at his friend.
“If you’d found it by yourselves, that would have been all right,” Pleasants answered. “But Andrew came down here at my urging. I didn’t feel right, giving him away before his eyes.”
“But our orders were—” Caudell stopped, remembering what he’d thought about orders the day before. He set hands on hips. “You know what, Henry?” Pleasants shook his head. Caudell went on, “You’d better watch yourself, because near as I can see, you’re turning into a rebel.”
Alsie Hopkins slapped his knee and doubled over laughing. Pleasants didn’t look so sure. “Is that a compliment?” he asked.
“Damned if I know,” Caudell said.
The road twisted like a snake with the bellyache. Past Andrew Gwynn’s farm, Pleasants was as lost as Caudell, who marveled at how strange places just a few miles from home could be. Without Mollie to tell him which turns to make, he knew he might have wandered in circles. A blue jay jeered at him from up in a pine tree.
Before long, they found another break in the woods. Caudell glanced first at Mollie, then at Henry Pleasants. So did the rest of the squad. “Nobody knows who lives here?” Caudell said. “Well, we’ll have to go and find out, then.”
They stopped at the edge of the woods, peering through brush at the clearing ahead. By the look of things, nobody lived there, though someone once had. The cabin was a roofless ruin, the fields a riot of weeds and shrubs and, here and there, man-high saplings.
Bob Southard tramped off across the field. Alsie Hopkins started after him. Caudell put out an arm to stop him, called to Southard, “You want to be careful, Bob. We’re getting close to where those Rivington bastards might be.”
Southard shook his head and kept walking. “They got more things to worry about than me. They—” He never said anything else. A burst of fire from the far side of the clearing cut him down where he stood. He spun when he was hit, so Caudell could see the almost comic amazement on his face as he fell.
Caudell’s own battle reflexes had not faded; at the first sound of fire he threw himself flat. The wisdom of that was proved a moment later, when bullets probed the place from which Southard had emerged, searching for anyone who might have been with him. “Oh, sweet Jesus, I pissed myself!” Alsie Hopkins wailed. Caudell didn’t feel like laughing. Had he not stepped behind a tree not long before, he knew he might have done the same thing.
Bullets slapped trees, smacked branches with a rough hand, again and again and again. Whoever was shooting up ahead, he seemed to have all the ammunition in the world, and he wasn’t shy about using it. Caudell turned his head far enough to get his mouth out of the dirt, said to Henry Pleasants beside him, “That’s no AK-47 up there.”