Ride Proud, Rebel Part 26

"More company comin'?"

"Might be. Anse went for the boys."

But Boyd's chin lifted an inch or two, a slight gesture to indicate the ceiling again. He brought his other hand up, and using both, c.o.c.ked the Colt, that click carrying with almost a shot's sharp tw.a.n.g through the room.

Jas' was again staring at Drew, his lips a silent snarl. But the scout believed that as long as he was alert, weapons in hand, he had nothing more to fear from his prisoners. They had made their reckless gamble and had lost.

The opening at the top of the ladder was a square of dark, hardly touched by the flickering light of the dying fire.

"You theah...." The barking hail came from without, strident, startling.

"We have you surrounded."

It was the voice of an educated man with the regional softening of vowels. Simmy's cap'n? What then had happened to Weatherby? Boyd braced the barrel of his Colt on a bent knee, its sights centered on the front door. But Drew still watched the loft opening.

"Last chance ... come out with your hands up!" The voice was very close now. And the unknown apparently knew at least part of the situation in the cabin. Which meant either very clever scouting, or that they had taken Weatherby. But Drew, knowing the habits of the guerrillas, dared not follow that last thought far. He tried to locate the man outside; he was in front all right, but surely not directly in line with the door.

"Cap'n!" Jas' called, his gaze daring Drew to shoot. "There's only two of 'em, and one's sick."

There was a flicker of movement in the trap opening. Drew fired, to be answered by a yelp of pain and surprise. Perhaps he had not entirely removed one of the attackers from the effective list, but the fellow would be more cautious from now on.

There was only a short second between his shot and an answering fusillade from outside. The panes in the other windows shattered and Hatch, gurgling incoherently behind his gag, kicked to roll himself behind the flimsy protection of the bedstead.

"You almost got one of your own men then!" Drew called. Feverishly he tried to think of a way to play for time. Weatherby might be dead, but Kirby could have reached the headquarters camp and already be well on his way back with reinforcements.

Hatch's gurgling was louder. And now Jas' had transferred his attention to the broken windows and what might be beyond them. There was a creaking above. Drew tried to deduce from those sounds whether one man or two moved overhead. The fire was dying fast. Should he try to urge it into new life with the last of the wood, or would the dark be more to his benefit?

Shots again, but not crashing through the windows now; these were outside. A man screamed shrilly. Then a horse cried in pain. Drew heard the pounding of hoofs, and in the loft a quick shuffling. More shots....

Boyd laughed hysterically, and then coughed, until he bent over the Colt he still grasped, gasping. Drew steadied him against his shoulder, trying to picture for himself what was happening outside. It sounded very much as if Kirby's relief force had arrived and that the "cap'n"

and his gang were in retreat.

"Drew! Everythin' all right?" There was no mistaking Kirby's voice.

He had brought not only four other scouts from the camp, but also Lieutenant Traggart and the doctor. And as the major portion of that relief force crowded into the room Drew leaned back against the wall, very glad to let other authority take over.

"Guerrilla sc.u.m," was the lieutenant's verdict on their prisoners. "They say they're Union ... or ours, whichever works best at the time. There's another one dead out there, and he's wearing one of _our_ cavalry jackets!"

"Officer's?" Drew wondered if they had picked off the "cap'n."

"No, you thinkin' he was this renegade officer Kirby was talkin' about?

I don't think this is the one. He's a pretty nasty-lookin' specimen, though. Four of 'em at least got away. We'll take these two into camp and see what they can tell us. The General will be interested. I'd say this one's a Yankee deserter." He studied Jas'.

The young man in the blue jacket spat, and one of the scouts hooked his fingers in the other's collar, jerking him roughly to his feet.

"Mount and start back with them!" Traggart ordered. "How's the boy, suh?"

Boyd had wilted back into his blankets when the stimulation of the fight was gone. He was still conscious, but his coughing shook his whole body.

"Lung fever, unless he gets the right care." The surgeon was going about his business with dispatch. "I hate to move him, but there's no sense in remaining here as a target for more of this trash." He glanced at Jas'

and Hatch impersonally. "Lucky we brought the wagon. Tell Henderson to bring it up. We'll take him to the Letterworth house for now--"

Reeling a little when he tried to walk, Drew found himself sharing the accommodation of the wagon with Boyd, a canvas slung across them to keep off the gusts of rain. He fell asleep as they b.u.mped along, unable to fight off exhaustion any longer.

Twenty-four hours later he was back on duty with the advance. Boyd was housed in such comfort as any could hope to find, and the cavalry was on the move. Buford's men were to picket along the c.u.mberland River. There was a new feel to the army. Drew sensed it as he rode with the small headquarters detachment. Empty saddles, too many of them, and the growing belief--evidenced in mutters pa.s.sed from man to man--that they were engaged in a nearly hopeless bid.

Franklin, which for Drew had been a wild gallop across some fields, a strip of cloth seized from the enemy to set beneath a guidon of their own, had been a major disaster for the Army of the Tennessee. Forrest's energy and drive kept the cavalry a sharp-edged weapon, still to be used with telling effect. But they all sensed the clouds gathering over their heads, not those laden with the eternal chill rain, but ones which carried with them a coming night.

It was so cold that men had to use both hands to c.o.c.k their revolvers.

And Drew saw Croff swing from the saddle, draw his belt knife to cut the hoof from a dead horse. The Cherokee glanced up as he looped his grisly trophy to his saddle horn.

"Need the shoe," he explained briefly. "Runner has one worn pretty thin." He patted the drooping neck of his mount.

Hannibal walked around the dead horse carefully. The mule was only a skeleton copy of the st.u.r.dy, well-cared-for animal Drew had ridden out of Cadiz. But he would keep going until he dropped, and his rider knew it.

"Any trace of Weatherby?" Drew asked. The disappearance of the other Cherokee scout at the cabin battle had continued as a mystery for their own small company. None of those who had known him could credit the Indian being taken unawares by the guerrilla force. He had vanished somewhere in the dark of the night, and none of their searching a day later, interrupted by orders to move, had turned up a clue.

"Not yet," Croff answered. "He may have made too wide a circle and run into a Yankee picket. Someday, perhaps, we shall know. Look there!"

From their screen of cover they watched a blue cavalry patrol trot along a lane.

"Headin' for th' home corral, an' lookin' twice over each shoulder while they do it," commented Kirby. "Was we to let out a yell now, they'd drag it so fast they'd dig their hoofs in clear down to the stirrup leathers."

Drew shook his head. "Those are General Wilson's men ... can't be sure with them that they wouldn't come poundin' up, sabers out, tryin' to take a prisoner or two. Anyway, we don't stir them up, that's orders."

Kirby sighed. "Too bad. Cold as it is, a little fightin' would warm an hombre up some. You know, for sure, the only way we're gonna git outta this heah war is to fight our way out."

Croff reined his patient mount around. "The big fight is comin'--"

"Nashville?" Drew asked, aware of a somber shadow closing in on them all.

The Cherokee shrugged. "Nashville? Maybe. The signs are not good."

"It's when the signs ain't good," Kirby observed, "that fellas lean on their hardware twice as hard. Heard tell of gunfighters knotchin' their irons for each man they take in a shootout. Me, I'm kinda workin' the same idea for battles. An' I have me a pretty good tally--Shiloh, Lebanon, Chickamauga, Cynthiana twice, Harrisburg, an' a mixed herd o'

little ones. Gittin' pretty long, that line o' knotches." His voice trailed away as he watched the disappearing Yankee cavalrymen, but somehow Drew thought he was seeing either more or less than blue-coated men riding under a sullen December sky.

Yes, a long tally of battles, and all those small fights in between which sometimes a man could remember better than the big ones, remember too often and too well.

"The wagons pulled out of the Letterworth place this mornin'," Drew said. "They were gone when I stopped by at noon--"

"Goin' south? Any news of the kid?"

"They took him along." There was a faint ray of comfort in the thought that Boyd had been judged well enough to be moved with the rest of the sick and wounded up from the temporary hospitals and shelters in the neighborhood. The seriously ill certainly could not be moved. But he wished he could have seen the boy; there was no telling when and where they would meet again.

"Well," Kirby pointed out, "if the doc took him, it means they thought he was able to make it. He's young an' tough. Bet he'll be back in line soon."

"They'll travel slow," Croff added. "Drivin' hogs and cattle and all those wagons, they ain't goin' to push."

Forrest, along with his prisoners, wagons, sick and wounded, the barefoot, and dismounted men, was driving four-footed supplies south on his way to the Tennessee River, and he was not likely to risk or relinquish any of the spoil. Buford's Kentuckians lay in wait along the c.u.mberland, hoping perhaps to echo, if only faintly, their earlier successes against the gunboats and supply transports. And at Nashville a battle was shaping....