"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.
"General Winter," Bartlett answered. Hairston did a double take, but then he nodded. If the rain kept coming, the way it looked as if it would, nobody on either side would go anywhere fast, not for a good long while.
"Ma'am?" Lieutenant Nicholas H. Kincaid loomed over Nellie Semphroch. "May I speak to you for just a minute, ma'am?"
"What do you want?" Nellie knew her voice was cold, and did nothing to warm it. Speaking with the Confederate officer who'd seduced her daughter (or so she'd thought of it, not that Edna would have needed much seducing) was the last thing she wanted. "Whatever it is, you'd better make it snappy. We're goin' to be busy very soon, I expect."
"Yes, ma'am. I know that, ma'am. That's why I came here so early, ma'am." Kincaid stood there, holding his butternut slouch hat in both hands. He kept twisting it every which way, though he didn't seem to notice. He took a deep breath, held it so long he began to turn red, and then blurted, "Ma'am, me and your daughter, we'd like to get married, ma'am."
Nellie's head whipped around. There stood Edna, stacking cups on the countertop by the coffeepots so she and Nellie could serve a lot of coffee in a hurry. Edna's face wore what Nellie could think of only as an idiot grin. "That's right, Ma," she said, and the grin got wider.
"You're too young," Nellie said automatically.
"I'm older'n you were when you got married," her daughter retorted. "And I sure do want to marry Nick there." It was the first time she'd called Kincaid that-no, the first time Nellie had heard her call him that. When she did, he started grinning an idiot grin, too.
And she was right. Nellie had been younger than Edna was now when her name abruptly became Semphroch. Her name had had to change abruptly. "Edna, are you in a family way?" she demanded.
Lieutenant Kincaid turned red, the blush starting at his collar and rising all the way to his forehead. Edna indignantly tossed her head. "I am not-no such thing," she answered. "And I ought to know, too." When Kincaid heard that, he got even redder.
"All right." Nellie knew when to beat a retreat. She'd been in a family way when she got married, though she didn't think Edna knew that. The less Edna ever found out about her unsavory past, the better she'd like it.
"Ma'am, your daughter and I, we really do love each other," Kincaid said earnestly. "We'll be happy together for the rest of our lives, I know we will."
If I laugh at him, he'll get angry at me, and so will Edna. Nellie made herself hold her face still. It wasn't easy. He'd managed to get Edna's corset off her once (maybe more than once; Nellie admitted to herself she didn't know for sure about that) and both of them had liked what followed, so they thought they'd be happy together forever. Nellie knew better. She'd learned better the hard way. She wanted to pass on what she'd learned, but they wouldn't listen. She knew they wouldn't listen. The only way anyone learned those lessons was the hard way.
Off in the middle distance, artillery rumbled. Lately, days didn't go by-hours hardly went by-without that sound in the air. It reminded Nellie of her second biggest problem with Lieutenant Nicholas H. Kincaid, after his being a man. "Edna," she said, as gently as she could, "he's a Confederate. Do you want to go down there to live?" By the way she said down there, she might have been talking about dropping into hell for a visit.
Now Edna turned bright red. Like every child in the USA since the War of Secession, she'd been taught to think of Confederates as the enemy, with a capital E. That hadn't worried her when Kincaid started sniffing after her. But maybe she hadn't faced, even in her own mind, all the implications of what marrying him would mean. "I love him," she said defiantly.
"You think you can stay here in Washington the rest of your days?" Nellie asked. The artillery rumbled again, louder this time. "How much longer do you think the CSA can hold on here?"