“Put stuff under the trail till it stays up and the barrel goes down,” Ward said. He wouldn't have insulted the other Confederate the way the sergeant did, but the fellow wasn't what you'd call smart.
Enough “stuff” lay scattered across the grounds of Fort Pillow: boards, barrels, sandbags, what have you. Ward would have used bluebellies' bodies to prop up the trail, but nobody else seemed to want to do that. Even without bodies, they found plenty to depress the gun barrel.
They loaded a sack of powder into the muzzle of the gun. They didn't bother sponging it out first; if any bits of wadding, were still smoldering, they might have been very sorry, but luck stayed with them. Somebody shoved a twelve-pound iron ball into the muzzle and rammed it down toward the end of the bore. And someone else, ignorant of friction primers, stuck a burning splinter in the touch-hole… Matt Ward wasn't the only one who jammed his fingers in his ears. But nothing happened.
“Hang on,” the sergeant said. “You got to prick the bag so the powder's loose and the flame can get at it.”
Artillerymen, no doubt, had a special iron tool to do just that. Forrest's troopers had to improvise-and they did. Several of them carried horseshoe nails and hoof picks in their pockets. One of those proved long enough and straight enough to do the job. Then Matt Ward put a percussion cap over the vent. “Somebody whack it with a rock!” he said. “If that won't set the blamed thing off, I'm a nigger.”
“I'll do it,” the sergeant said. “We aimed at that son of a bitch?” He looked down the barrel of the gun, then nodded. “Oh, yeah.” He smacked the cap not with a rock but with a hammer he'd picked up God knew where.
Boom! The twelve-pounder's roar was a truly impressive noise. Flame and a great, choking cloud of smoke belched from the muzzle of the gun. Cannon, carriage, and all jerked backward, knocking down the ramshackle support the troopers built under the trail. The sergeant had to spring to one side to keep from getting run over, just as he'd warned the men who wanted to hold the trail up by hand.
They missed the Yankee gunboat. The cannonball kicked up a truly impressive splash about fifty feet behind it and well to its left. There were probably fancy nautical terms to describe that better, but Ward neither knew them nor cared about them. All he knew was, the miserable gunboat still floated.
Several troopers cussed. “We shot the stinking gun once,” Ward said. “We can damn well do it again, right?”
“That's the spirit!” the sergeant said. “And even if we did miss, we let those damnyankee bastards down there know this here fort's got it some new owners, right?”
“Right!” the troopers shouted. Maybe they really were heartened. Maybe they just knew better than to argue with anybody who wore three stripes on his sleeve. Under his profane direction, they shoved the twelve-pounder back to the very edge of the bluff. Getting it ready to fire again didn't take so long. Now they had some idea of what they were doing.
They thought so, anyhow. The colored artillerymen whose captured gun they served would have laughed themselves silly. Those colored artillerymen never once entered Ward's mind. Like the rest of the cavalry troopers at the gun, he was intent on the gunboat down in the river.
The sergeant walloped another percussion cap. Again, the cannon bellowed. A gust blew some of the smoke into Ward's face. He coughed and wiped his streaming eyes on his sleeve. More curses erupted from his comrades. This cannonball went into the Mississippi about as far ahead of its intended target as the other one was behind it. “Well, we scared 'em, by God,” Ward said.
“We can still hit that damn thing.” The sergeant had no quit in him. “All we've got to do is split the difference between those two. We do that, we put a cannonball right through the blamed boat's brisket. “
He seemed to think his makeshift gun crew had the skill to split the difference. Real artillerymen would have, no doubt about it. The Negroes who'd been driven from the gun would have. This swarm of Forrest's troopers? They had enthusiasm and very little else.
They did load the twelve-pounder again. Jostling one another to peer down the barrel, they tried their best to aim the field piece at the gunboat-and to hold it on target with that flimsy pile of stuff raising the trail and depressing the muzzle.
“Here we go! This time for sure!” the sergeant shouted, and brought the hammer down on a third percussion cap.
Fire. Smoke. Thunder. The iron shot splashed into the Mississippi at least as far from its target as either of the earlier two. “Hell's bells!” somebody said in disgust. “We can see the son of a bitch down there. Why in blazes can't we hit it?”
“She,” said somebody who fancied himself an expert on things that had to do with ships. “Boats are always she. “
“She's a god damn bitch, is what she is. She don't hold still for no body,” another trooper said.
“Sounds like a woman, all right,” Ward said. His own experience in such things was limited-he'd been kissed twice, not counting cousins-but he got a laugh.
“Let's try again, boys.” Yes, the sergeant who'd taken charge of the twelve-pounder was as stubborn as they came.
No matter how stubborn he was, three misses made his crew start melting away. “Hell with it,” a trooper said as he stooped to pick up his carbine. “I'm gonna go shoot me some niggers and Tennessee Tories. I can damn well hit them bastards.”
“That's right.” Ward grabbed his Enfield, too. “I know how to aim this critter.”
The sergeant squawked, but they all went farther along the edge of the cliff till they looked down on the soldiers in blue scrambling down toward the riverbank. Ward raised the rifle musket and aimed at a white man descending feet first. The homemade Yankee saw him and waved desperately. “Don't shoot!” he cried. “I ain't done nothin' to you!”
Killing a man in the heat of battle was one thing. Killing a man in cold blood, killing a man begging for his life, killing a defenseless man-for the trooper in blue had dropped his piece-proved something else again. With a swallowed obscenity, Matt swung the Enfield away from the other man.
Not all the bluebellies going down the slope and already at the bottom had given up. A soldier down there fired at Ward. He didn't know how to gauge such a steep uphill shot, and the minnie slapped into the mud about ten feet below the Confederate.
If I don't kill' em, they'll kill me, Ward thought. He aimed at a Negro. This time, nothing stayed his trigger finger. The ball caught the black in the short ribs. Although the runaway slave-for what else could he be? — was halfway down toward the Mississippi, the howl he let out reached Ward up on the bluff. The black rolled and tumbled all the way down to the riverbank.
“Nice shot!” another Confederate trooper said. “He looked just like one o' them clowns in the circus, way he turned somersets there.”
“He did, didn't he?” Ward paused in reloading, though not for long-his hands knew what to do even without direction. “Let's see if I can get me another coon like that.”
“Well, it ain't like we don't have plenty to pick from,” said the other soldier in butternut.
“Yeah.” Ward brought the loaded Enfield up to his shoulder and found another target.
A colored soldier rolled past Sergeant Ben Robinson. The man was groaning and trying to clutch at his chest, but his arms and legs kept flying out every which way. “Poor bastard,” Sandy Cole said. “He ain't dead yet, he gonna be by the time he fetch up 'longside the river.
“Ain't it the truth?” Robinson said. A Mini? ball cracked past his head. A few inches lower and he would have rolled and slid all the way down to the Mississippi, too. The only difference was, nobody would have wondered if he was dead.
Aaron Fentis looked up the slope to the top of the bluff, where Bedford Forrest's troopers were taking potshots at the whites and Negroes below them. “Why the hell those officers of our'n want us to come down here?” he demanded. “Dem Secesh sojers, dey shoot us down like we was so many wild turkeys.”