As had been true up in Wilson Town, not all the civilians had fled from Waurika. Most of the men and women who came out of the houses to look over the retreating Confederates had dark skins: Waurika, Lieutenant Nicoll had said, was about half Kiowa, half Comanche. Reggie couldn't have told one bunch from the other to save himself from the firing squad.
Some of the civilians had skins darker than copper: the Indians' Negro servants. Most of those, or at least most of the ones Bartlett saw, were women. The men had probably been impressed into labor service already: either that or they'd run off toward the Yankees or toward the forests and swamps of the Red River bottom country, where a man who knew how to live off the land could fend for himself for a long time.
More than a few Indians, men wearing homespun and carrying hunting rifles, tried to fall in with the column of Confederate soldiers. "You braves don't know what you're getting into," Lieutenant Nicoll told them. "This isn't any kind of fighting you've ever seen before, and if the damnyankees catch you shooting at them without wearing a uniform, they'll kill you for it."
"What will the Yankees do to us if they take this land?" one of the Indians answered. "We do not want to be in the USA."
"Our grandfathers have told us how bad the living was under the Stars and Stripes," another Indian agreed. "We want to stay under the Stars and Bars." He pointed toward the business section of Waurika, where several Confederate flags flew in spite of the threatening weather.
At that moment, the weather stopped threatening and started delivering chilly rain mixed with sleet. Shivering, Bartlett consoled himself with the thought that the rain would be harder on the Yankees, who would have to fight their way through it, than on his own unit, which had already reached the place it needed to defend.
Sergeant Hairston spoke in a low, urgent voice: "Sir, you can't give them redskins any stretch of line to hold. They ain't soldiers."
"We are warriors," one of the Indians said proudly. "The tribes in the east of Sequoyah have their own armies allied to the Stars and Bars."
"I've heard about that," Nicoll said. "Isn't anything like it hereabouts, though." He scowled, visibly of two minds. At last, he went on, "You want to fight?" The Indians gathered round him made it loudly clear they did indeed want to fight. He held up a hand. "All right. This is what we'll do. You go out in front of the line we'll hold. You snipe at the damnyankees and bring us back word of what they're doing and how they're moving. Don't let yourselves get captured. You get in trouble, run back to the front. Is it a bargain?"
"We know this country," one of the Indians answered. "The soldiers in the uniforms the color of horse shit will not find us." The rest of the men from Waurika nodded, then trotted quietly north, in the direction from which the U.S. soldiers would come.
Reggie turned to Nap Dibble. "The damnyankees may not find 'em, but what about machine-gun bullets? I don't care how brave or how smart you are, and a machine gun doesn't care, either." He spoke with the grim certainty of a man who had been through the machine-gun hell of the Roanoke River valley.
All Nap Dibble knew was the more open fighting that characterized the Sequoyah front. No: he knew one thing more. "Better them'n us," he said, and, taking out his entrenching tool, began to dig in.
Along with using the Indians of Waurika as scouts and snipers, Lieutenant Nicoll used the few Negro men left in town as laborers. None of the Indian women and old men left behind objected. No one asked the Negroes' opinions. With shovels and hoes and mattocks, they began helping the Confederate soldiers make entrenchments in the muddy ground.
Once there were holes in which the men of Nicoll's company could huddle, the lieutenant set the blacks to digging zigzag communications trenches back toward a second line. "Lawd have mercy, suh," one of them said, "you gwine work us to death."
"You don't know what death is, not till the Yankees start shelling you," Nicoll answered. Then his voice went even colder than the weather: "Weren't for the way you niggers rose up last winter, the Confederate States wouldn't be in the shape they're in."
"Weren't us, suh," said the Negro who had spoken before. "Onliest Reds in Sequoyah, they's Indians, and they was born that way." The other black men impressed into labor nodded emphatic agreement.
"Likely tell," Nicoll said, dismissing their contention with a toss of the head. "You want to show me you're good, loyal Confederates, you dig now and help your country's soldiers beat the Yanks."
Sullenly, the Negroes dug alongside the soldiers. Bartlett began to hope the Confederates around Waurika would have the rest of the day and the whole night in which to prepare their position for the expected U.S. onslaught. Having slogged through a lot of mud himself, he knew what kind of time the Yankee troops would be having.
But, a little past three in the afternoon, a brisk crackle of small-arms fire broke out ahead of the line. He found himself in a trench and peering out over the parapet almost before he realized he'd heard the rifles. Some of the reports were strange; not all rifles sounded exactly like the Tredegars and Springfields with which he'd been so familiar for so long.
Machine guns were heavy. Units not of the first quality-which, on the Sequoyah front, meant a lot of units-didn't make sure they kept up with the head of an advancing column. But that malignant hammering started only moments after the rifle fire broke out.
"Now we see what kind of balls the redskins have," Sergeant Hairston said with a sort of malicious anticipation. "Warriors!" He hawked and spat in the mud.
Here came the Kiowas and Comanches, running back toward the hastily dug entrenchments. Behind them, trudging across the fields, firing as they advanced, were U.S. soldiers. An Indian fell, then another one. An Indian leaped into the trench near Bartlett. "Why do you not shoot at them?" he demanded. "Do you want them to kill us all?"
"No," Reggie answered. "What we want is for them to get close enough for us to hurt 'em bad when we do open up. Fire discipline, it's called."
The Indian stared at him without comprehension. But when the Confederate company did open up with rifles and machine guns and a couple of trench mortars, the U.S. soldiers went down as if scythed. Not all of them, Reggie knew, would be hit; more were taking whatever cover they could find. But the advance stopped.
More Indians jumped into the trenches with the Confederates. They kept on shooting at the Yankees, and showed as much spirit as the men alongside whom they fought. "Maybe they are warriors," Bartlett said.
Sergeant Hairston nodded. "Yeah, maybe they are. I tell you one thing, though, Bartlett. They give the niggers guns the way it looks like they're gonna, them coons ain't never gonna fight this good."
Reggie thought about that. The Kiowas and Comanches-most of the Indians in Sequoyah-had done pretty well for themselves under the rule of the Great White Father in Richmond. As these young men had said, they wanted to stay under the Stars and Bars.
How many Negroes wanted the same thing? "Maybe they'll fight for the chance to turn into real citizens," he said at last.
"Shitfire, who wants niggers voting?" Hairston exclaimed. Since Reggie himself was a long way from thrilled at the idea of their voting, he kept quiet. It all seemed abstract anyhow. Wondering about if and how soon the Yankees would be able to haul their artillery forward through the thickening muck was a much more immediate concern.