That got the peddler’s attention. He wasn’t just big; he looked strong and tough, too, in spite of those snowy whiskers. “Vot you vant?” he asked, his voice wary-no matter how tough he was, he had the brains not to argue with anybody toting a Tredegar.
“You’d better get out of here before you get killed,” Bartlett told him.
“Oh. Dot vot you talk about.” The peddler shrugged. “Soon I go.”
Hairston made money-counting motions. “Business is good, huh?” He laughed. “Damn fool Jew. Money ain’t worth your neck.”
The Jew muttered something under his breath. Reggie didn’t think it was a compliment. He didn’t think it was English, either, which was likely to be just as welclass="underline" if he didn’t understand it, he didn’t have to notice it. That made something else occur to him: “Hey, Hymie, you sell a lot to the Indians around here?”
“A lot, yes,” the peddler answered. “Is most of folk.”
“How do you talk to ’em?” Bartlett asked. The Jew stared at him, not following the question. He tried again: “What language do you use when you sell to them?”
“Oh.” The Jew’s face lit with intelligence. “They speak Henglish, same like me.” Reggie burst out laughing; from what little he’d seen of them, most of the local Chickasaws and Kiowas spoke English better than the peddler.
“Go on, get the hell out of here,” Hairston said, and the peddler, not without a sigh or two of regret for business lost, scrambled up into the wagon and rattled south out of Wilson Town, almost the last one to leave it.
Methodically, the troops of Lieutenant Nicoll’s company began to dig in. Nap Dibble said, “Wish them niggers what was in this town would’ve stayed a bit. They could have done this here entrenching for us.”
“Back on the Roanoke front, we had us lots of nigger labor battalions,” Reggie said as he made the dirt fly. “Haven’t seen so much of that here out west.”
“Ain’t that much of it,” Sergeant Hairston said. “Like I been tellin’ you since you got here, Bartlett, ain’t that much of anything.”
“Except Yankees,” Reggie said.
“Yeah, except them,” Hairston agreed. “But they ain’t got any more’n-well, ain’t got a whole lot more’n-what we do, ’cept maybe soldiers.”
“Except,” Reggie said again. He dug and dug, steady as a steam shovel. The ground was the perfect consistency: not so hard that he had to labor to force his entrenching tool into it, not so soft or muddy that the edges of the trench he was digging started falling down into what he’d already dug. He flipped the dirt up in front of his excavations to form a parapet. “Wish we had some more barbed wire.” He scooped out another couple of shovelfuls. “Wish we had any barbed wire.”
“Wish for sugarplums for Christmas while you’re at it,” Sergeant Hairston said. “Oh, we may get some wire-we had a good bit in front o’ Duncan, once we’d stayed there a while. But this here ain’t the Roanoke front-that kind of good stuff don’t grow on trees here. I just told you that a couple seconds ago, dammit. Ain’t you listenin’ to me?”
“Yeah, Sarge. I always listen,” Bartlett answered, so mildly that Hairston went back to digging for another stroke or two before giving him a dirty look. Reggie grinned back, a grin that had occasionally softened even the Yankee prison guards in West Virginia. He looked around, not to see if the Yankees were coming or the Chickasaws getting the hell out but to spot his company commander. “Now that the fighting’s picked up again, what’s the lieutenant going to do for his hooch?”
“Damned if I know.” As if reminded of what he’d traded to the men in green-gray for Lieutenant Nicoll’s supply of whiskey, Hairston rolled himself a cigarette. He sucked in smoke before going on, “Hope nothin’ bad’s happened to Toohey. He ain’t a bad guy.” After another drag, he chuckled. “Crazy sayin’ that about one of those Yankee bastards, but it’s so.”
“I know what you mean, Sarge,” Reggie replied. “Fellow who captured me, there in the Roanoke valley, he could have shot me and my pals easy as not. I ever run into him once this damn war is over, he can do all the boozing he wants. I’ll buy till he can’t even see, let alone walk.”
The sporadic Yankee shelling had been falling short of Wilson Town, so much so that the Confederate soldiers had gone on about the business of digging in without pausing at the explosions a couple of furlongs to the north. Now, suddenly, the U.S. gunners began to find the range. Hearing the hideous whistle of a shell that might have his name on it, Reggie dove headlong into the stretch of trench he’d just dug. The round hit behind him. Fragments and shrapnel balls hissed through the air. One of the lead spheres with which the shell had been loaded drilled a neat hole in the dirt he’d heaped up in front of the trench. It would have drilled a neat hole in him, too.
He got back up and started digging again. A hoarse shout from the southern edge of town made him turn his head. The Jewish peddler didn’t care for artillery close by. He was getting his horses up to a gallop so he could escape Wilson Town in jig time. Others who had lingered, the last few, now delayed their departure no more.
Reggie laughed. “Look at ’em go,” he said, pointing. After a moment, though, it didn’t seem funny. “If two guys are in a dangerous place, and one leaves while the other stays, which one of ’em is stupid?”
Hairston laughed, too, but singularly without humor. “That’d be funny, Bartlett, if only it was funny, you know what I mean?”
“Yeah, Sarge, I do. Wish to Jesus I didn’t.” Bartlett looked out across the broad Sequoyah prairie. “Here come the damnyankees. I don’t think they think we’re ready for ’em yet.”
“Yeah, well, if they don’t, they’re gonna be real sorry real fast,” Hairston said.
The artillery fire supporting the men in green-gray who trotted forward got heavier, but it didn’t turn into anything that would have been reckoned worse than harassment back in Virginia. Here and there, a Confederate soldier shrieked or abruptly fell silent, forever blasted from man to butcher-shop display in the blink of an eye.
But most of the C.S. troopers crouched down in the field fortifications they’d been digging and waited for the Yankees to get closer, so they could sting the enemy hard. Reggie wouldn’t have wanted to be trudging through that yellowed autumn grass, waiting for the machine guns to open up on him. He wondered how much experience the damnyankees up there had. Were they brave men advancing into what they knew would be awful or raw fish too ignorant to tell they were heading for a fish fry? In the end, it didn’t much matter. They’d kill him or he’d kill them. War reduced everything to a brutal simplicity.
Closer, closer…A couple of Confederate riflemen opened up on the Yankees. Men in green-gray started dropping, most not because they were hit but to keep from getting hit. Others kept coming forward, running now, not trotting, as if they knew they didn’t have much time to do before they were done by. Raising his rifle to his shoulder, Bartlett picked one.
He pulled the trigger at the same time as the first machine gun began spraying precisely measured death at the U.S. soldiers. More and more of the men in green-gray were falling, and taking cover had little if anything to do with it. A couple of hundred yards off to the left, the second Confederate machine gun joined its satanic chattering to that of the first. More and more Yankees toppled.
None of the foe got within a hundred yards of the position the Confederates had chosen to defend. As the attack finally broke down, cold rain began falling on U.S. and C.S. troops alike. Looking west, Reggie saw more and more clouds rolling his way. He pointed in that direction and said, “Looks like we’ve got ourselves a new commanding officer.”
“What are you talkin’ about?” Pete Hairston asked.