FORT PILLOW

Maybe the gunboat's captain didn't, either. And maybe he didn't want to find out. Black smoke poured out of the stack. The gunboat began to move-not toward the riverbank to blast the Confederates and rescue Fort Pillow's embattled garrison, but north, up the Mississippi, away from danger.

“You yellow-bellied son of a bitch bastard!” the white man howled. Robinson nodded helplessly. The gunboat paid no attention to either one of them. Away she steamed, faster and faster.

X

WHEN BILL BRADFORD WATCHED THE New Era steam up the Mississippi, he felt like… He didn't know what he felt like. Like a man whose intended bride jilted him at the altar? Something like that, maybe. But a jilted bridegroom didn't die at the altar. He just wished he could.

The men defending Fort Pillow, on the other hand… Captain James Marshall, the commanding officer aboard the New Era, must have decided his gunboat couldn't stand the fire from the riverbank and the cannonballs from the artillery captured up on the bluff. He saw to the safety of his own men. He saw to their safety, yes-but he left the garrison to its fate.

A panicked trooper from the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry clutched at Bradford's sleeve and shouted, “What the hell do we do now, sir?” An equally panicked colored artilleryman all but screamed the same question at him.

“Boys, save your lives,” Bradford said numbly. “I don't know what else to tell you.” He didn't know how to tell them to save their lives. He didn't know how to save his own life, either. The terror that filled the soldiers took root in his own heart, too. What to do? What to do?

From the south came the exultant whoops and jeers of the Confederate cavalrymen who'd forced the New Era to flee. “Yellowbellies!” they yelled, and “Cowards!” and “You stinking, gutless sons of bitches!” Hearing the enemy shout exactly what he was thinking was as humiliating an experience as Major Bradford had ever known.

Save your lives. It was easy to say. With Bedford Forrest's troopers already shooting down at the Federals from the top of the bluff, with those Secesh soldiers whooping and jeering by the river, it wouldn't be easy to do. He wondered if the Rebs would accept surrenders now. Part of him wished he'd taken Forrest's offer while he had the chance. Forrest was known for ploys and tricks, but he wasn't fooling this time. Bradford wished he had been.

Yellowbellied coward, Bradford thought furiously. Stinking son of a bitch. He stared across the muddy waters of the Mississippi at the receding New Era. If he ever met Captain Marshall again, he didn't think God Himself could keep him from punching the gunboat's skipper in the nose. And if Marshall felt inclined to resent that, Bradford was ready to go as much further as the Navy man cared to.

Bradford laughed a bitter laugh. He knew he wasn't a particularly brave man. He did his best to hide that, from others and perhaps most of all from himself, but he knew it. All the same, the prospect of a fight, or even a duel, with James Marshall worried him not a bit. He knew why, too. It was what he would have called a hypothetical question in the courtroom. A lot of things would have to happen for him to face Marshall again. Chief among them was his living through the combat here. And the chances of that didn't look good.

Some of the men still had fight in them. They grabbed cartridges from the crates Bradford had ordered brought here and fired at the closest Confederates. Major Bradford would have expected his white cavalry troopers to show more spirit than the colored artillerymen. The colored soldiers were only niggers in uniform, after all. He would have expected that, but he would have been wrong. Some blacks were terrified and despairing, yes, but so were some whites. The proportions seemed about the same in men of both races.

What that meant… was as hypothetical as punching James Marshall in the nose. If Bradford got out of this, he could worry about it later. If he didn't get out of this, he wouldn't worry about anything later.

“Ain't gonna give up to no Secesh sojers,” said a colored sergeant ramming a Mini? ball down the muzzle of his Springfield. “Even if them fuckers don't shoot me fo' the fun of it, reckon they sell me later. Ain't gonna be no slave again.”

Not many of the troopers from Bradford's own regiment showed anything close to that kind of spirit. The white major stared at the black underofficer. Bradford's own opinion of Negroes wasn't that far from Nathan Bedford Forrest's or any other Confederate's. He thought they made good slaves, bad freemen, and worse soldiers. He favored the U.S.A. because he didn't want to see the country broken in two-and because several prominent men in west Tennessee with whom he didn't get along well went all-out for secession. He'd paid them back ten times over. But he was worse than indifferent toward Negro rights; he was downright hostile, and didn't care who knew it.