FORT PILLOW

He slashed at a trooper in muddy butternut. The Confederate brought up his Springfield (or was it an Enfield?) to block the blow. Sparks flew as iron blade struck iron barrel. Another Reb lunged at Leaming with his bayonet. The lieutenant had to leap back in a hurry to keep from getting stuck like a hog. A saber was all very well, but a long bayonet at the end of a long rifle musket had the reach of a spear.

He slashed again, this time at a trooper running by with blood already on his bayonet. The man didn't even seem to see Leaming till the blade bit into his arm. He howled like a wolf and dropped his rifle musket. As blood spurted from the wound, he said, “You son of a bitch! What the hell did you have to go and do that for?”

Instead of answered, Leaming cut at him again. The Confederate scrambled back and tripped over his own feet. Another soldier in butternut (in fact, the man's trousers were blue: surely plunder from a dead Federal) stepped on him. He howled again, and cursed the man on his own side even more foully than he'd sworn at Leaming.

“This way! This way!” an officer in blue shouted, doing his best to rally the Negro troops he led. A moment later, he groaned and crumpled, clutching at a bullet wound in his side.

With him or without him, the colored artillerymen went on fighting. Leaming saw one of them bayonet a Confederate trooper in the belly. The man who fought for Forrest shrieked like a damned soul as he fell. A moment later, a pistol shot at point-blank range blew off half the Negro's face. With a bubbling scream of his own, he went down beside the man he'd speared. Neither of them had a prayer of living.

Forrest's troopers shot down another white U.S. officer, and then another. They seemed to make a special effort to pick off the men with shoulder straps. No doubt they thought the Negroes would fall to pieces without white men to lead them. Before Mack Leaming saw the colored soldiers fight, he would have thought the same thing. Now? Now he had to change his mind.

He wounded another Confederate, and heard another minnie snap past his head, perilously close. Forrest's men brawled ahead. No matter how well the Negroes fought, would it do them any good at all?

When the assault came, the half-dozen gaps cut through the rampart to let the guns of the Sixth U.S. Heavy Artillery (Colored) offered Bedford Forrest's men easy ways into Fort Pillow-or so they thought. Three of them rushed straight for Ben Robinson's twelve-pounder.

He fired the piece himself. Sergeant Clark was down with a leg wound. Unlike some earlier rounds, this one didn't go to waste. Canister blew the Confederates to red rags. One of them managed a wail. The other two.. simply ceased to be.

Sandy Cole whooped. “Bury them buckra in a jam tin!” he shouted. “Blew 'em right out a their shoes!” Sure enough, several shoes still stood in the gap. One of them had a foot left in it.

“Reload!” Captain Carron shouted. But there was no time. Not all of Forrest's men were rash enough to charge straight into the muzzle of a gun. Many more, great swarms of them, scrambled over the earthwork and into Fort Pillow. Using the worm, swabbing out, shoving in another powder bag and then another round of canister… The Rebs would shoot or bayonet them all before they finished the job.

When Robinson grabbed the worm, then, he didn't grab it to pull smoldering bits of wadding from the twelve-pounder's barrel. Instead, he used it like the butt of a spear, or perhaps more like a quarterstaff, driving the twin iron corkscrews at the end into a Secesh soldier's chest. They didn't pierce the Rebel-but, with a startled squawk, his arms flailing, he fell back into the ditch from which he'd climbed.

“That's the way to do it!” Sandy Cole was laying about him with a sponge. It wasn't a weapon that would kill any Rebs, but he had enough reach with it to keep them from bayoneting him where he stood. He knocked a Confederate trooper off his feet, then kicked him in the face as he started to rise. After that, the Confederate stayed down.

Carron's pistol barked-once, twice, three times. In the chaos, Sergeant Robinson had no idea whether the white officer hit anybody. More and more men in butternut dashed up over the rampart and sprang down into Fort Pillow.

Robinson clouted one of them in the head with the worm. It made a much better weapon than the sponge. The C.S. trooper toppled, his face a mask of blood. Robinson snatched up the bucket of water in which the sponge rested when it wasn't swabbing out the twelve-pounder. He threw the water into one startled Confederate's face, then flung the bucket at another.

Yet another Reb fired at him from perhaps six feet away-and missed. The soldier swore and lunged with the bayonet. Ben Robinson beat the blade aside with the worm. “Black flag!” the Confederate shouted. “We're gonna kill us every goddamn nigger we catch!”

“You couldn't catch the clap in a whorehouse,” Robinson retorted, cautiously thrusting with the worm.