He wasn't really looking for an answer. Captains didn't get answers from sergeants. Lieutenants frequently did, but not captains. Captains had to come up with their own answers, no matter how unpleasant a prospect that was.
And come up with an answer Lincoln did. He got help from a Yankee field gun, which started landing shells in front of the cavalry company. The foun tains of smoke and dirt were several hundred yards short, but the Confeder ates had no field guns of their own with which to reply. Before long, the U.S. forces would move that gun forward and bring up others alongside it.
"Back to Okmulgee!" Lincoln shouted. At his order, the company bugler sounded the retreat.
With the rest of the company, Ramsay rode southeast toward the capital of the Creek Nation. Okmulgee lay in a low, broad valley, with tree-covered hills on either side. As the Confederates came into the valley, Ramsay saw that the town was seething like an anthill to which somebody had just delivered a good swift kick. A train was pulling out, heading south. It had nothing but freight cars, but Ramsay would have bet those were packed with people; he'd even seen some with signs painted on their sides: 36 MEN OR 8 HORSES. The road south out of Okmulgee was certainly packed, with people, wagons, buggies, barrows, horses, and other livestock. Captain Lincoln might have intended retreating through Okmulgee rather than into it, but getting out the other side wouldn't be easy.
The Creek Nation Council House was a two-story brown stone building in the center of town. With the cupola rising above it, it was easily the most impressive structure in Okmulgee, and would have made a good fort till can non started blowing it to bits. Outside the Council House waited a delegation of red-skinned men in sombre black suits. They had gathered together a bunch of younger Indians who wore much more nondescript clothes-except for red bandannas tied to their left sleeves as armbands-and who carried a motley assortment of weapons: shotguns, squirrel guns, and what looked to be a cou ple of single-shot muzzle-loaders that went all the way back to the days of the War of Secession.
One of the Creek bigshots stepped out into the middle of the road as the cavalry drew near. He held up his right hand. Captain Lincoln had the choice of reining in or pretending he wasn't there. Swearing under his breath, the captain reined in.
"Save our city!" the Indian cried. "Save our nation! Do not abandon us to the merciless United States, whose soldiers we fought a hundred years ago, long before the South saw it had to escape the brutal oppression that came from Washington. As chief of the nation, I beg you. The delegations from the House of Kings and the House of Warriors beg you as well."
Charlie Fixico gestured to the Indians in fancy dress. They added their voices to his. It was, when you got down to it, a hell of an impressive performance.
He moved his hand, and the delegation-local senators and congressmen, Ramsay supposed they were-fell silent so he could talk some more. "We do not ask you to perform any duty we would not share," he said, now pointing to the young Indians with armbands. "We will help you defend our homes and our lands. We will fight whether you stay or go, but we beg you to stand by us now as we stood by you in the War of Secession and the Second Mexican War."
Captain Lincoln looked mad at first, and then helpless. Stephen Ramsay understood that. It was a hell of a speech. He wondered how many times Charlie Fixico had practiced it in front of a mirror so he could bring it out pat like that. If Captain Lincoln led the cavalry out of Okmulgee now, he'd feel like a skunk for the rest of his days-and a lot of the troopers who heard the speech would think he was a skunk, too.
Ramsay glanced over to the young Creek men. Were they really ready to do or die for the Creek Nation? Even if they were, would it make any difference? You ran amateur soldiers up against veterans, odds were the amateurs would come out looking as if they'd just been through a grinding mill.
He was glad the decision was not his to make. Captain Lincoln looked back toward the northwest, toward the burning oil wells his troopers had had to abandon. There were more oil wells in and around Okmulgee, and still more south of town. If he could save any of them for the Confederacy, that would be worth doing. If, on the other hand, he was just throwing his command away…
Charlie Fixico went down on his knees and held his hands up high in the air. At that, so did the men from the House of Kings and the House of Warriors. Ramsay had never seen anybody just get down and beg like that.
"God damn it," Captain Lincoln muttered under his breath, with luck not so loud the Creeks could hear it. Then, realizing he had to give an answer, he raised his voice: "All right, Chief, we'll make a stand in Okmulgee. Let's get some firing pits dug, and we'll see what we can do."
Charlie Fixico scrambled to his feet, spry for a fellow a long way from young. He clutched Lincoln 's hand. "God bless you, Captain. You won't be sorry for this," he exclaimed.
By the look in his eye, Captain Lincoln was sorry already. In town here, the company would have to fight as infantry, sending their horses south with the retreating Creeks. Ramsay took charge of the young men- am I supposed to call 'em braves? he wondered-with armbands on their sleeves. They were ready as all get-out to shoot at the damnyankees, but when he sent them into a hardware store to commandeer shovels-so they could start digging foxholes and trenches, they almost balked.
"Look," he said, more patiently than he'd expected, "the idea is to kill the other guy, not to get killed yourself. Shells start falling here, bullets start flying around, you're going to be damn glad to have a hole in the ground to hide in."
They weren't soldiers. It wasn't so much that they didn't believe him. They didn't have a clue as to what he was talking about. They worked like sulking Negroes till Charlie Fixico yelled something at them in their own language. After that, they sped up-a little.
Captain Lincoln sited one of the company machine guns so it fired up Sixth Street and the other so it fired up Fourth. When the Yankees came into town, those would give them something to think about. "Wait till you have a good target," Ramsay told the crew at Sixth and Morton, in front of the Creek Council House. "We want to make the bastards pay for everything they get."
U.S. troops were not long in coming. Field guns started landing three- inch shells on the town. The red-armbanded Creeks dove for the holes they hadn't wanted to dig. To Ramsay's amazement, one of them shouted an apology to him.
He waved back. He wondered how much ammunition each Indian had for his gun. With all those different calibers, no hope in hell the cavalry could resupply them when they ran dry. He also wondered what the Yankees would do with any Creeks they captured. Was a red armband uniform enough to let them count as prisoners of war? Or would the Yanks call them francstireurs and shoot them out of hand, the way the Huns had done in France and were doing in Belgium? For the Creeks' sake, Ramsay hoped they didn't find out.
He had his own foxhole nicely dug, sited under a tree that would give him cover if and when he had to pull back, as he probably would sooner or later. He peered north up Fifth Street, looking to see how close the Yanks were.
As he'd expected, here they came, green-gray waves of infantry trudging toward Okmulgee, leaning forward a little under the weight of their packs. "Hold fire till they're good and close," Captain Lincoln yelled. "We want the machine guns to be able to chew up a whole bunch of 'em when we open up."
His own men understood the reasoning behind the order. But the Creeks had never been in combat before. As soon as they saw U.S. soldiers, they started shooting at them. Sure as hell, one of them not far from Ramsay did have a rifle musket from his grandfather's day. A great cloud of black-powder smoke rose above the kid's firing pit.