“... Anything else?”
“Split your men into gangs, each with a job assigned that it rightly understands. Then, ’stead of laying around all the time, asleep under the trees, they’ll know what to do and do it. If the gang doesn’t speak English, pick out one man who does. Get some system into it!”
“You can work a gang?”
“Anyone that has sense can.”
“We haven’t been having much luck.”
“That’s because, instead of letting them know what you want, you’re making speeches at them about Lincoln, telling ’em how much he loves ’em. They don’t care about Lincoln — all they want is their grub and to be told what to do.”
“Then you’ll tell ’em?”
“I think first I have to tell you.”
We fixed it up, since I had to sign on as a private, that I’d tell and he’d beller, as he called it, but actually, by the time I’d been there an hour, I had it all to myself, doing the telling, bellering, and cussing all at the same time — but with some slight success. I don’t say I built the Red River dam. Colonel Joseph Bailey, of a Wisconsin outfit, thought the idea up and was in complete command. I do say that before I got there, things were in a mess, but that after I got on the spot, they began to go right.
By sundown, we had six sets in place which I anchored by floating crosslogs down, then letting them wash up on the brackets and lashing them in place, somewhat out of water to give a bit more weight and offset the tendency to float, which the whole thing suffered from. The Navy helped in grim earnest, and Sandy was there all the time, first on one boat, then on another, taking charge of lines, capstans, or barges, as they came up with stone for the cribs — or with bricks, or busted-up sugar mills, or whatever they could find for ballast. The third night, after I’d eaten the handful of beans my squad had cooked for mess and was stretched out beside the fire, Sandy suddenly appeared, squatting down beside me with a very different look from the one he had been wearing, which hadn’t been too friendly toward me. When I’d told him hello, he drew a deep breath and said: “Bill, I want to apologize.”
“Oh?” I asked him. “What for?”
“Various things. You heard about the Warner?”
“The boat I was to take? No. What about her?”
“She got sunk.”
“Ouch. You mean the Rebs got her?”
“Not only her but the Covington. And not only her but the Signal. And not only her but the City Belle, a boat that was coming up with a bunch of replacement troops. Scores of men were killed, and it’s just one more thing. But what gets me is this: Suppose you had been killed? I’d never forgive myself. And I’d like to come out and say it: I glory in you, Bill. You burned those papers first, before the Warner left. And told everyone why — including me. Including her.”
“Leave her out, if you don’t mind.”
“All right. She has her troubles, though.”
“... What troubles?”
“Death. She was in a funeral procession.”
“When was this, Sandy?”
“Today. The Forest Rose had to heave to and idle in the current while this hearse went over the draw, a little bunch of people following along behind. It was kind of pathetic, at that. No horses now, you know — at least available to the Rebs. Pulling the hearse was Mr. Landry on one side of the tongue, with a rope harness hooked to one singletree, that fellow Burke to the other. She kind of brought up the rear, in that black dress she wears, looking damned cute, with the wind whipping her bottom.”
“I said leave her out! And her bottom!”
“Bill, you’re still stuck on that girl.”
“I’m not. I hope never to see her again. But—”
“You are. If you weren’t, you’d be the first to tell me that bottom is all mine, if I can manage to get it. Well, I’d love to, I own, if it weren’t—”
“You want a puck on the jaw?”
“... Who died, do you have any idea?”
“What do I care who died?”
“I’m just curious, that’s all.”
Two days later it was done, and we’d succeeded only too well. We’d got a rise all right, five feet of it at least, reaching back to the head of the falls, and enough, you’d have thought, for the Great Eastern to turn around in. Still the Navy wanted more depth, and as no bracket could possibly hold out there near the middle, we put six cribs in, like the ones on the other side, and the Navy filled them with stone. But even that wasn’t enough, and the Navy drove pilings, in threes braced with planks, and hauled four barges up that they moored to the pilings with hawsers. The water rose still more, until you stood there holding your breath, watching the whole thing shake from the pressure backed up behind it and its own will to float, knowing as you did that something had to give. The whole Army started to yell that now was the time, or never, that the Navy had to come down. They built a fire, a great thing of pine logs that blazed to the sky from the burning resin, so it looked like a scene from hell. The idea was to give light for the boats to come down by, but still nothing happened, and word came through the woods that the Navy didn’t have steam. That was the last straw, and the yells began to sound ugly.
Still, I was done, and the captain was, and we were stretched out by his fire, sipping some coffee he had, when suddenly Sandy was there. By then, the Navy or anything like it had kind of a rat-poison look, so the welcome he got from the captain was not of a rousing kind. But when he came up with the news, and made it pretty curt, that the reason no boats could come down was “this insane fire you’ve built, that has blinded all our pilots,” it kind of quenched the discussion, and I could feel Sandy out, as I thought he had stuff on his mind. “Bill,” he said when the captain subsided, “this may be nothing at all — a mare’s nest pure and simple. But I keep thinking about it.”
“Go on,” I said. “Shoot.”
“My boat,” he began, “the Neosho, is moored to the right bank up there — and of course we don’t keep a lookout posted. Just the same, a seaman was there, in the pilothouse polishing brass, when he saw a skiff upstream — a joeboat, they call it. Square-ended thing that seemed to be drifting down. Then he didn’t see it, that’s all.”
“You mean it disappeared?”
“That’s it. It was there, and then it wasn’t there.”
“Could have grounded. Maybe bushes hid it.”
“Maybe. Maybe.”
“What did your skipper say?”
“Told the boy thanks.”
“Well, that’s not much of a help.”
“Bill, I can’t shake it out of my head, the threats that man made, your friend Mr. Landry, as we left that day — and he wasn’t just talking to talk; he meant something. And he has some motive, I gathered, for wanting this dam to go out?”
“Just a million dollars is all.”
“That’s in cotton, up at Shreveport?”
“That he can grab with Burke as godpappy.”
“Providing, Bill, that the Navy doesn’t get out, and the Army, to save its face, marches upriver again, ’stead of down?”
“Which I say we should do,” said the captain.
“Now you’ve got it,” I said.
“Then Mr. Landry,” said Sandy, “if he had a skiff, if he brought one down on a tether, if he hauled it into the bushes and had it there tonight, he could fill it with powder, couldn’t he? And start it drifting down? To explode it against our dam?”