FORT PILLOW

He reloaded as fast as he could. Some of the colored soldiers and Tennessee Tories were still fighting, as that bullet proved. Fewer and fewer U.S. soldiers kept on shooting, though. A lot of them were down. Others went out into the Mississippi, mostly without their weapons, doing whatever they could to get away from Bedford Forrest's men. And quite a few were trying to give up.

Some, like Henry Clay, succeeded. Others, like the fellow Matt Ward shot without even thinking about it, didn't. The ones who died had only their own officers to blame, as far as Ward was concerned. General Forrest told them he couldn't answer for what his own troops would do if he didn't get a surrender right then. The Confederates' blood was up. Considering the men the soldiers in butternut faced, that was as near inevitable as made no difference. Blacks as soldiers… Ward ground his teeth at the very idea-carefully, because the hardtack had shown that that one was tender.

A handful of the bluebellies in the Mississippi were really trying to swim, or at least to float away, letting the current carry them downstream past the C.S. lines. Most just waded out and stayed there. Everybody said ostriches stuck their heads in the sand and left the rest of themselves in plain sight. The Union soldiers were just the opposite. Only their heads stuck out of the water.

Ward aimed at a Negro who had to be unusually tall to have waded as far out into the Mississippi as he had. Before he could fire, somebody else hit the black man. He shrugged. He had plenty of other targets to choose from. He had to swing his rifle musket only a little to the right to bring it to bear on a blond man with a long beard. He fired. The Federal sank into the river.

Bedford Forrest's troopers had already started plundering the enemy. Some of that was rifling pockets, the same kind of thing Ward did to Henry Clay. (The homemade Yankee's name still made him smile.) But much of it was more serious, more essential. Barefoot Confederates stole dead bluebellies' shoes. Troopers in ragged shirts and trousers took what they needed from men who wouldn't be worrying about clothes any more. And fine Springfields lay scattered on the ground like oversized jackstraws. Troopers who'd joined Forrest's force with nothing better than a squirrel gun or a shotgun got weapons as good as any their foes carried.

As good as any their foes here carried, anyhow-Ward silently corrected himself. He longed for a repeating rifle, a Henry or a Spencer. What Confederate cavalry trooper didn't? But the only way to keep a rifle like that in cartridges was to capture them. The Confederate States weren't up to making those fancy brass cases.

Just when Ward thought the fighting was over, it flared up again. A few Federals down here by the riverbank didn't want to give up and didn't think they could get away with surrendering. They seemed bound and determined to take as many Confederates with them as they could.

Ward didn't run toward the new skirmish. Plenty of other troopers were closer to it than he was. He'd already put himself in enough danger for one day. And those coons wouldn't last long any which way.

Sergeant Ben Robinson wondered if he would be the last soldier from Fort Pillow to go down fighting. He could do without the honor; he didn't want to go down at all. Sandy Cole had fallen with a bullet in the right thigh and another in the arm. Charlie Key was shot in the arm, too-if that bone wasn't broken, Robinson had never seen one that was. Aaron Fentis was down with bullet wounds in both legs. He lay groaning somewhere not far away. And somebody'd shot poor Nate Hunter right in the ass.

The little knot of Federals who were still fighting had Bedford Forrest's troopers coming at them from along the Mississippi and from the direction of Coal Creek. More Confederates went on shooting down at them from the bluff. By any reasonable measure, the fight was hopeless.

No matter how hopeless it was, the U.S. soldiers kept on loading and firing, loading and firing. Some were Negroes who'd seen what happened when other colored men tried to surrender. Robinson preferred dying with a gun in his hand to being murdered in cold blood. And some were whites from the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry who'd avenged themselves on the Confederates whenever they found the chance and now feared like vengeance would fall on them.

They were a band of brothers now, those last couple of squads' worth of struggling Union soldiers. Race didn't matter any more; neither did rank. Some of them were wounded. Those men loaded Springfields and passed them to others hale enough to use them.