He stopped, scowling almost as ferociously as had Senator Wigfall. The long-barreled, large-caliber endless repeaters the Rivington men used to defend strong points made AK-47s seem like Springfields by. comparison. Nor were the torpedoes they buried in the fields between those strong points any bargain, either; after watching the legs blown off two or three men, their comrades grew noticeably less eager to advance.
“We shall in the end defeat them, though?” Gartrell pressed anxiously.
“If we defeated the United States, sir, we shall surely overcome a small band of insurrectionists.” Lee wished he were as certain as he sounded.
Bullets snapped past a few feet over Caudell’s head, the stream sweeping first left to right, then back from right to left. The wash in which he lay was only about a hundred yards from the gunner. Getting this close had taken him all day. Now that he was here, he didn’t know what to do next. Firing a few shots at random was likelier to alert the gunner than to kill him. And the Rivington men still had the rifle grenades they’d used in the trenches outside Washington City. Caudell didn’t want them raining down on him.
He turned to Henry Pleasants, who sprawled beside him in the gully. “We can’t go forward, not anymore,” he said, waving. Pleasants nodded; if they showed themselves, they were dead men. Caudell waved in the other direction. “We can’t go back either, not hardly.” Eight or nine soldiers lay in the gully with them, the survivors of twice that many or more. Pleasants nodded again. Caudell said, “Well, what does that leave us? I’m looking for ideas, damn it.”
“I wish I had one,” Pleasants said. “Maybe when night comes—” He broke off with a grimace. By the way they shot at night, the Rivington men could see in the dark like cats. And even if that weren’t so, with the brute of a repeater up ahead, if one bullet didn’t get you, the next one would, or the next.
Flopped down a couple of feet away, Mollie Bean said, “Can’t go forward, can’t go back.” She wiped her forehead with her sleeve. Since the one was as dirty as the other, that helped her not at all. She still looked good to Caudell. The only way she could have looked better was far away from the fighting. If something happened to her—But she hadn’t let Caudell send her away.
He said, “We can’t go over ‘em: not enough trees, and they’d shoot us out of ‘em like boys with squirrel guns. And we can’t go under ‘em, because we aren’t a pack of moles.”
He’d been talking as much to hear the sound of his own voice as for any other reason. He almost jumped when Henry Pleasants rolled over and whacked him in the shoulder. Jumping, here, was dangerous. Pleasants’s eyes blazed in his filthy face. “The hell we can’t go under ‘em,” he said. His voice shook with excitement.
“Huh? What are you talking about?” Caudell said.
“Going under ‘em,” Pleasants repeated impatiently, as if to a stupid child. When Caudell still looked blank, he realized he had to explain further: “Nate, I used to be a mining engineer, remember? If we could run a tunnel from here to under that big repeater, set a charge of powder, and light it off—We can do it, I swear we can, and blow ‘em high as the sky. The ground around here is soft, the side of the wash will keep the Rivington men from spying what we’re up to…I’m not crazy, Nate; I swear by almighty God I’m not.”
“You mean it,” Caudell said slowly, wonderingly. The stream of bullets was right overhead now. Advancing farther against the gun that spat them was only a fancy way to commit suicide, unless…Caudell had a sudden vision of gun and gunner both flying through the air. He liked it better than anything else he’d imagined since being so rudely returned to combat.
Pleasants sensed he’d hooked his fish. “I sure do mean it, Nate. If we can bring Lloyd and Andrew up here, and some other men who’ve dug—you must have some in this state—and their tools, and the timber we’d need to shore up the tunnel as we dig—” He started ticking off on his fingers exactly what he’d need, as if he were sitting comfortably in a mining office instead of hunkered down in a dry wash.
Finally, to dam the flow of ideas, Caudell held up a hand. “All right, I surrender—you’ve convinced me. But I’m just a sergeant, remember?” He pointed at the stripes on his sleeve. “I can’t get you everything you’re talking about. We’ll head back to Captain Lewis. If you sell him your scheme, too, you’ll likely get a chance to try it.”
“Let’s go.” Pleasants turned and started to crawl down the gully.
Caudell grabbed him by the ankle. “Henry, you just swore to me you weren’t crazy, and here you go making yourself out a liar. If you want to live to see Captain Lewis, you won’t just march off and do it, not from here you won’t. Think about where you are. When night comes, we’ll try getting out. Till then, we sit tight.” Pleasants looked mutinous. Caudell went on, “How much digging did you plan on doing today, anyhow?”
His friend managed a shamefaced laugh. “Sorry. You’re thinking straighter than I am, that’s plain. But when I see something like this in my mind, I go all on fire to get started on it, no matter what’s in my way.”
“I know you do.” Caudell remembered that that driving eagerness to get the job done, and the matching blindness to anything not directly related to getting it done, had cost his friend his railroad job. After a couple of years as a first sergeant, practicality was his own middle name. He plucked at his beard as he thought. After a couple of minutes, he asked, “If you’re not here, can one of your Welshmen oversee this job?”
“Andrew could,” Pleasants answered at once. “Lloyd works well enough, but he likes his whiskey too well to make a proper chief.”
“Fair enough. Here’s what we’ll do, then. After it gets dark, you and I and Melvin here will all head back to Nashville. We’ll go separately, and—”
“Wait a minute,” Mollie Bean interrupted. “What’re y’all sendin’ me back for?”
“You’ve spent the last however long listening to Henry and me,” Caudell answered. “You know as much about this notion of his as I do, anyway. Captain Lewis needs to hear it. Even at night, it’s no sure bet one of us, or even one out of two, will make it back safe out of the range of that damned gun up there. But if I send three, somebody ought to get back.”
She nodded, warily.” All right, Nate. Reckon that makes sense.” In front of other people, a good deal had to stay unsaid between them. If she’d thought he was sending her back just to get her out of danger—which he very much wanted to do—she’d surely have refused to go. But her pride could accept an order with military reason behind it.
Shadows shifted, lengthened, began to blend into the one great purple shadow of twilight. When full dark came, Caudell turned to Mollie and Pleasants. “I’ll go first,” he said. “First one through is likeliest to draw fire. Henry, you’re next—give me fifteen minutes or so before you start. M-Melvin, you go last, fifteen minutes behind Henry. We’ll all meet”—I hope, he thought—”at Captain Lewis’s.”
“Luck, Nate,” Pleasants said.
“Luck,” Mollie echoed, so softly he hardly heard her.
He wanted to hug her, to kiss her, to be with her anywhere but this miserable spot. All he could do was nod a nod she might well not have seen in the darkness, then scuttle off down the dry wash. His mouth was dry, too; he remembered too well the terrifying confusion of the night fight outside Washington City. Then the Rivington men and their fancy weapons had been allies. Now they were trying to kill him.