FORT PILLOW

“Oh, yes, just for the day. That should be plenty.”

“I agree.” Ferguson walked over to Anderson, who hadn't dismounted, and held out his hand. Anderson clasped it. The two white men got along well enough. Ben Robinson tried to imagine the Reb agreeing to a truce with a colored officer. The picture would not form. “How many wounded are we talking about?” Acting Master Ferguson inquired.

“I don't know, not exactly, but it isn't a small number,” Anderson replied. “Perhaps Captain Young here can give you a better notion.”

“I'm afraid not,” Young answered. “I don't know what happened in the fort after I managed to surrender, and the victors' blood was still running hot at the time.” He didn't want to come out and say the Confederates slaughtered the garrison, but he didn't want to lie, either. Ben Robinson granted him reluctant respect.

“I… see.” Ferguson could add two and two. He went on, “Well, we have a steamer coming right behind us in the hope she would be useful-the Platte Valley. I will order her to land alongside us, and we'll do what we can for these poor devils.” He looked up and down the riverbank. A lot of bodies had been carried up to the ditch and thrown in, but quite a few still remained. “If you will excuse me, Captain…”

Ferguson went back to the boat. The sailors who'd waited in it rowed him out to the Silver Cloud. Smoke poured from the gunboat's stacks as she neared the shore. Signal flags and then shouts ordered the Platte Valley up alongside her.

Captain Anderson looked at Ben Robinson again. “What did you do to earn those three chevrons, boy?”

“Made myself the best soldier I could, I reckon,” Robinson answered. Emboldened by the truce, he answered, “I sure blew some of your sojers to hell and gone while we was fightin'.”

“You lost,” Anderson said.

“Yes, suh. But we put up the best fight we could with what we had,” Robinson said.

The Confederate officer plucked at his beard. “A pity we didn't kill more of you.”

“Me, I reckon it's a shame we didn't kill more of y'all.” Robinson wouldn't have been so bold if the Reb hadn't tweaked him. He also wouldn't have been so bold if the Federal gunboat weren't lying right offshore. He didn't think the Confederate officer would murder him in cold blood with men from the U.S. Navy watching.

When the Confederate's hand dropped to his revolver, Ben wondered if he'd just made his last mistake. But Captain Anderson let it fall to his side. “Yeah, talk big now, nigger. God help you if we ever catch you again, though.”

“I ain't afraid.” Ben Robinson intended that for nothing more than a snappy comeback. But he felt the truth and the power in the words and repeated them, throwing them in Anderson's face: “By God, I ain't afraid!”

Sailors started taking wounded Federals aboard the Silver Cloud and the Platte Valley. The men who came for Robinson didn't have a stretcher-nothing but a plank that they carried between them. They set it on the riverbank by the wounded man. “Climb aboard,” one of them said. “We'll get you back to the gunboat.”

“Thank you kindly,” Robinson said as he gingerly flattened himself on the plank. “I is much obliged to you gentlemen.”

“Doin' our job,” the white man answered, and paused to spit a stream of tobacco juice. Then he said, “You ready, Zeke? We'll lift him on three. One… Two… Three!”

They lifted together. Both of them grunted. Zeke said, “You sure never missed no meals, did you, pal?”

That reminded Ben how ravenously hungry he was. “I ain't had nothin' a-tall for a whole day,” he said. “You got a hardtack you can spare?”

“You want one of those damn things, you must be hungry,” Zeke said.

“Wait till we get you in the boat,” the other bearer added. “Don't want to have to put you down and then pick you up again.”

Robinson couldn't complain about that; it made too much sense.

As soon as they carried him to the rowboat, the sailors each gave him a hardtack. The square crackers tasted like cardboard and weevils, the way they always did. He didn't care. They seemed wonderful.

More wounded Federals filled the rowboat. He was the only Negro in it. Many more whites than colored men seemed to be left alive. The Confederates hadn't murdered so many whites trying to surrender, or after they were already wounded. Oh, they'd killed some, but fewer. The wounded whites were also delighted to gnaw on hardtack.

When the boat was full, sweating sailors rowed the short distance out to the Silver Cloud. More men there hauled the soldiers from Fort Pillow up onto the gunboat's deck. The ship's surgeon took a look at Robinson's wound. “Well, you're not too bad,” he said, and went on to the white corporal next to him.

Ben wasn't offended. In fact, he found himself nodding. As long as he was on a U.S. Navy vessel, as long as Bedford Forrest's troopers couldn't kill him for the fun of it any more, he wasn't bad at all.