“Looked that way to me,” Cassius said.
“You know anything about guns?” the scarfaced man asked.
“No, suh, but I reckon I can learn,” Cassius replied.
The older Negro nodded. “That’s a good answer. Now I got another question fo’ you: you take orders? Folks call me Gracchus.” He jabbed a thumb at his own chest. “I runs this outfit. You don’t like that, you hit the road. No hard feelin’s, but we don’t want nobody who’s out for hisself and not for all of us. The outfit gotta come first.”
“I’ll take orders,” Cassius said. “If you gave dumb ones, I reckon you’d be dead by now, not runnin’ things here.”
“Expect you’re right,” Gracchus said. “Well, my first order is, tell me about yourself. What’s your name again? Where you from?”
“I’m Cassius. I got out of Augusta when the ofays nabbed my folks.”
“How come they didn’t catch you, too?” Gracchus sounded coldly suspicious. Cassius wondered why. Then he realized the rebel leader might fear he was bait, and would betray the whole band when he saw the chance.
“They went to church,” he answered truthfully. “Me, I stayed home.”
Gracchus nodded again. “God didn’t help ’em much, did He?”
“You reckon there’s a God?” Cassius said. “I got a hard time believin’ any more. Either God likes ofays, or there ain’t none. I got to choose between a God that loves Jake Featherston an’ one that ain’t there, I know which way I go.”
For the first time since he shouted out his warning, Gracchus eyed him with something approaching approval. “Maybe you’s all right after all,” he said.
“Give me a rifle. Teach me what to do with it,” Cassius said. “Reckon I show you how all right I am.”
X
Irving Morrell rolled into Bowling Green with a smile on his face. The burnt-out Confederate barrels he rolled past were what made him happy. The Confederates had fought hard outside-they’d fought hard, and they’d got smashed. The one thing they managed to do was empty out most of their big supply dump and wreck what they couldn’t take away. The U.S. Army wouldn’t be able to salvage much. Given what the CSA had in Kentucky, logistics was one of the enemy’s strengths. Some capable officer or another probably needed killing.
Almost without thinking about it, Morrell brought his left hand up to his right shoulder. It still twinged every now and again. Now both sides used snipers and bombs and any other way they could find to try to murder their foes’ better leaders. It hardly seemed like war. Neither USA nor CSA seemed to care. Any weapon that came to hand, either side would use. When this war ended, one country or the other would lie flat on its back. The winner would have a booted foot on the loser’s neck, and would try to keep it there as long as he could.
Somebody’d painted FREEDOM! on a wall. Somebody else-or maybe the same Confederate patriot-had added several blue X’s: quick and easy shorthand for the C.S. battle flag. The Stars and Stripes might fly over Bowling Green, but the people still longed for the Stars and Bars.
Only a long lifetime ago, this town-this whole state-belonged to the USA. They spent a generation back in the USA after the Great War. The Negroes in Kentucky had liked that fine. Most of the whites had hated it. They thought of themselves as Confederates, and didn’t want to be U.S. citizens. The ones who did fled north when the CSA won the plebiscite in early 1941.
All of a sudden, Morrell stopped muttering and swore with savage fluency. “What’s wrong, sir?” Frenchy Bergeron asked.
“Nothing,” Morrell said. That was so patently untrue, he had to amend it: “Nothing I can do anything about, anyway.” How many whites-and maybe even blacks-who fled Kentucky after the plebiscite were really Confederate spies? That hadn’t occurred to him till now. He hoped it hadn’t because he was innocent and naive. He intended to send a message to the War Department anyway, on the off chance that everybody else was just as naive.
“Thinking about the next big push, sir?” the gunner asked.
“I’m always thinking about that,” Morrell said, and Sergeant Bergeron chuckled. He was a good gunner, even a very good gunner. He wasn’t quite in Michael Pound’s league, but who was? Now that Pound was an officer at last, he was finding new ways to annoy the Confederates. Seizing the crossing over the Green River between Calhoun and Rumsey probably put the western prong of Morrell’s offensive a couple of days ahead of where it would have been absent that.
A couple of artillery shells burst off to the south. The Confederates were fighting hard-if anything, harder than Irving Morrell had expected. No matter how hard they were fighting, they were still losing ground. They were losing it almost fast enough to suit Morrell’s driving perfectionism-almost, but not quite. When he conceived his plan, he wanted the CSA wrecked in a single campaigning season. Unless the bastards in butternut flat-out collapsed, he didn’t think he could bring that off. He would have to slice the Confederacy in half in two installments. John Abell was right about that.
“Ask you something, sir?” Frenchy Bergeron said.
“Sure,” Morrell answered. “What’s on your mind?”
“When do we go for Nashville?” Bergeron asked. Morrell started to laugh. The gunner coughed reproachfully. “What’s so damn funny, sir? Isn’t that’s what’s coming next?”
“You bet it is,” Morrell said. “And that’s what’s so damn funny. The War Department probably hasn’t figured out where I go from here, but you damn well have. I want to get moving as fast as I can, too, before the Confederates think I’m ready.”
He never denied the military talent facing him. After what happened in Ohio, after what came much too close to happening in Pennsylvania, he would have been a fool to do that (which didn’t always stop some of the more feverishly optimistic U.S. officers). What he wanted to do was make sure the Confederates’ talent didn’t matter much. If they lacked the men and barrels and airplanes to stop his thrusts, what was talent worth?
“Nashville…Nashville could be a real bitch,” Bergeron said. “Uh, sir.”
Why do I always get gunners who think they belong on the General Staff? Morrell wondered wryly. It wasn’t that Frenchy was wrong. The problem, in fact, was that he was right. Along with George Custer, Morrell had planned and executed the attack that crossed the Cumberland and took Nashville in 1917. That wasn’t quite the blow that won the Great War, but it did knock the Confederates back on their heels, and they never got over it afterwards.
Meanwhile, Sergeant Bergeron was waiting for an answer. “I expect we’ll come up with something,” Morrell said.
“Oh, yes, sir,” Frenchy said. “Don’t want to try crossing the river where you did the last time, though. What do you want to bet Featherston’s little chums’ll be laying for us there?”
“Jesus!” Morrell exploded. “You really do belong on the General Staff!”
“Not me, sir. I don’t want to go back to Philly. The people back there, they just talk about what’s supposed to happen. Me, I want to make that shit happen myself. They’re smarter’n I am, but I have more fun.”
“I feel the same way,” Morrell said, which was only partly true. No way in hell did he think the high foreheads back in Philadelphia were smarter than he was. A lot of the time, he thought they thought they were smarter than they really were. Of course, Frenchy might have been sandbagging, too.
“You know what you’re gonna do?” Bergeron persisted. “Anything happens to you, I may be the guy who has to talk through the fancy wireless set for a little while.”