Copperhead Page 36

  “Can I borrow a horse to take a look?” Starbuck asked. He wanted to be alone to decide his future now that his sponsor was dead. He imagined de’Ath lying in the crumbling mansion with a sardonic smile on his dead lips. Would the old man have left a note exonerating Starbuck? Somehow Starbuck doubted it and he shivered again despite the heat.

  “Take my horse,” James offered.

  “But be back here before six!” Pinkerton warned Starbuck. “I have a man coming to take you down to the river at six!”

  “Six o’clock,” Starbuck promised and then, in a daze of uncertainty and fear, he went to the stables.

  Pinkerton took Starbuck’s chair and helped himself to more chicken. “He’s a fine young man, your brother. But high-strung, Jimmy, very high.”

  “He always suffered from nervous debility,” James said. “And he doesn’t help himself by using tobacco and alcohol.”

  Pinkerton smiled. “I’ve been known to use those myself, Jimmy.”

  “But you’re a well-set man,” James explained, “and my brother’s thin. People like you and I, Major, suffer in the belly and bowels, but men like my brother will always suffer in their nerves. He takes after my father in that.”

  “It must be a great thing to be educated,” Pinkerton said, settling himself to his plate. The sound of gunfire increased, but he ignored it. “Now my own dear grandmother, God rest her soul, always claimed there was no disease on God’s earth that a wee dram of good whiskey would not cure. I doubt you’ll agree with her, Jimmy, but she lived a good long while and scarce knew a day’s sickness.”

  “But she only recommended a wee dram,” James said, delighted to have scored the point, “not a hog’s bellyful, Major, and no sensible person will dispute whiskey’s curative powers, but sadly it is not usually imbibed as a medicine.”

  “Your brother likes his drop,” Pinkerton pointed out wickedly.

  “Nate is a sore disappointment,” James admitted. “But I look at it this way, Major. He has forsworn his political mistake, so he is well started on the hard road to redemption. He backslid a long way, but with God’s grace he’ll come back every step of that path and then go on toward full salvation.”

  “I daresay you’re right,” Pinkerton grumbled. He was never comfortable when his chief of staff fell into a preaching mode, but he was sensible of James’s solid virtues and knew that the odd sermon was well worth the rigorous order that James brought to the affairs of the Secret Service.

  “And maybe we can help Nate’s salvation,” James persisted, “by offering him a post in the Bureau? We’re grievously understaffed, Chief. Just look at that!” He gestured at the pile of telegraphs and interrogations.

  “When he’s back from Richmond,” Pinkerton said, “we’ll think on it, I promise you.” He twisted toward the window, frowning. “Those guns are lively. You think the seceshers are attacking us?”

  “We have no intimation of a rebel attack,” James said, thus implying that no assault could possibly be happening. Whenever an attack did take place there was always a trickle of deserters bringing news of the enemy’s preparations, but the front between the armies had been unusually quiet these last few days.

  “You’re right, Jimmy, you’re right.” Pinkerton turned back to the table. “It’s probably just a gunboat exercising its crew. And doubtless we’ll hear soon enough if it’s anything more remarkable.” He picked up a one-week-old copy of the Jacksonville Republican and began reading a boastful account of how a blockade runner had evaded the northern warships off the South Carolina coast. The ship had been carrying canvas cloth from Genoa, French-made shoes, British percussion caps, gutta-percha from Malaya and eau de cologne. “Why would they want cologne water?” Pinkerton asked. “Why in God’s name would they want that?”

  James did not answer. He was applying himself to his lunch plate and had just helped himself to another serving of chicken when the door to the parlor was rudely thrown open and a tall, gaunt-faced colonel stepped into the room. The Colonel was wearing riding boots and carried a crop, while his uniform was spattered with red mud, evidence of how hard he had been riding. “Who the devil are you?” Pinkerton looked up from his newspaper.

  “Name’s Thorne. Lieutenant Colonel Thorne. Inspector General’s Department in Washington. Who the devil are you?”

  “Pinkerton.”

  “Well, Pinkerton, where’s Starbuck?”

  “Sir? I’m Starbuck, sir,” James said, plucking the napkin from his neck and standing up.

  “You’re Nathaniel Starbuck?” Colonel Thorne asked grimly.

  James shook his head. “No, sir, I’m his brother.”

  “Then where the devil is Nathaniel Starbuck? Have you arrested him?”

  “Arrested him?” Pinkerton asked.

  “I wired you yesterday. Does no one attend to business here?” Thorne asked the question in a bitter voice, conscious that Delaney’s letter revealing Starbuck to be a traitor had lain unopened on his own desk for far too long. “So where the devil is he?”

  James fluttered a feeble hand toward the back of the house. “In the stables, I believe.”

  “Then take me there!” Thorne drew a revolver from a holster at his waist and slipped a percussion cap onto one of the chamber’s cones.

  “Might I ask…” James began nervously.

  “No you damn well may not ask! Take me to the stables!” Thorne shouted. “I haven’t come all the way from Washington to watch you dithering like a virgin in her wedding bed. Now move!”

  James ran to the stables.

  The door of the stall where his horse had been cribbed swung creaking in the wind. The stall was empty. “He was going to see what the firing was about,” James said weakly, frightened of Thorne’s savage expression.

  “He’ll be back here by six,” Pinkerton assured Thorne.

  “You had better pray he is,” Thorne said. “Where’s McClellan? He’ll have to find me some cavalry and we’ll pursue the treacherous bastard.”

  “But why?” James asked. “Why? What’s he done?”

  But the Colonel had already gone. The guns cracked on the horizon where now a film of white smoke showed pale above the trees. Nate was gone west, something terrible was adrift in the universe, and James felt his heart sink hard. He prayed his fears were wrong, then went to find a horse.

  The Confederate infantry half trotted and half walked across ground that was hard in places and like a morass in others. The Yankee pickets saw the line of gray and brown uniforms emerge from the woods and ran back to warn their comrades that the rebels were advancing.

  Bugles sounded the alarm in the Federal encampments spread across the farms south of Fair Oaks Station. General McClellan had trained these men well and would have been proud of the way they stood to their arms. Whole regiments dropped the letters they were writing and the coffee they were brewing, they dropped their baseballs and playing cards, and they snatched up the rifles that were stacked like tepee poles as they ran to form ranks behind the waist-high abatis that protected their camps. The skirmishers ran out to a line of rifle pits that had been dug a hundred paces ahead of the abatis where a slight rise in the ground supposedly kept the soil above the floodline, but the night’s storm had flooded the pits anyway and so the skirmishers knelt beside the waterlogged holes and pulled out the muzzle stoppers which had kept the rain from rusting their rifle barrels. The rest of the newly alerted regiments formed two long ranks which now stood in the warm, hard wind and watched the trees from which the pickets had just come running. Men loaded their weapons and placed percussion caps on their rifles’ cones.

  The abatis in front of the waiting infantry was a tangled barrier of felled trees. It was interrupted by gaps that let the skirmishers through and by the earth ramparts of artillery emplacements. The cannons, mostly twelve-pounder Napoleons but with a handful of ten-pound Parrotts, were already loaded with shell. Gunners pulled tarpaulins off ammunition limbers, rammed friction primers into touch-holes, and order
ed rounds of canister stacked in readiness for the second and third shots. Birds were flapping up from the trees, disturbed by the advancing rebels, then a pair of deer bolted from the woods and galloped across the front of a new battalion of unblooded New Yorkers. “Hold your fire!” a sergeant snarled at a man tracking the deer with his rifle. “Aim low when they come, look for their officers! Steady now!” The Sergeant paced along the front of his nervous men. “They’re just a bunch of ragged-assed farmboys, no different from you miserable lot. There ain’t nothing magical in rebs. They can be killed like anyone else. Aim low when you see them.”

  One boy was muttering Christ’s name over and over again. His hands were shaking. Some of the men had pushed their ramrods into the wet turf so they would be more readily at hand for reloading. “Wait, lads, wait,” the Sergeant said, seeing the nervousness on the young faces. The Colonel galloped behind their rear rank, his horse’s hooves kicking up sprays of water and dirt.

  “Where are they?” a man asked.

  “You’ll see ’em soon enough,” another man said. In the line’s center the colors looked bright against the dull sky.

  Somewhere off to the right a blast of musketry sounded like a burning canebrake. A cannon fired with a noise that made the men jump. Over on that flank men were screaming like demons and smoke was drifting above the wet ground, but there was still no enemy visible in front of the New York boys. A second cannon fired, spewing a plume of smoke thirty yards along the ground. A shell burst in the air behind the New York regiment, evidence that a rebel battery was in action somewhere in the vicinity. One of the waiting New Yorkers suddenly buckled over and vomited a bellyful of hardtack and coffee onto the grass. “You’ll feel better when you see them,” the Sergeant growled. Another deer burst from the trees and galloped north toward the smoke and noise, then reversed itself and ran across the regiment’s front. There were shapes moving among the trees now and the flicker of dull light reflecting from weapons and the splash of bright color where a rebel battle flag showed among the pines.

  “Ready! Aim!” the Colonel of the New Yorkers shouted, and seven hundred rifles came up into seven hundred shoulders. The skirmishers had already opened fire from beside the flooded rifle pits, dotting the rough ground with patches of smoke that were whipped northward on the wind.

  “Wait for it! Wait for it!” the Sergeant called. A lieutenant slashed at a weed with his sword. He tried to swallow, but his throat was too dry. For days now he had been constipated, but suddenly his bowels felt like water. “Steady now! Wait for it!” The Sergeant stepped back into the front rank.

  And then, quite suddenly, they were there; the enemy they had all read about and had been told about and had joked about, and a poor, tattered enemy they looked too, nothing but a scattered line of ragged men in dirt-brown and rat-gray uniforms who emerged from the shadows of the far trees.

  “Fire!” The Colonel had drawn his sword and now whipped it down. The New York regiment’s front rank vanished behind the gouts of smoke.

  “Fire!” the gun captains shouted and the artillery shells screamed into the edge of the woods and exploded in sudden small smoke clouds. Men swabbed out barrels and rammed canisters down onto powder charges.

  “You’re stopping them, boys! You’re holding them!” The New Yorker’s chaplain strode up and down behind the companies, his Bible in one hand and a revolver in the other. “Send their souls to the Lord, boys, translate the rascals to glory. Well done! Praise the Lord, aim low!”

  “Fire!” The canisters split apart at the guns’ muzzles to fan like duckshot across the rough ground. Rebels were snatched backward, their blood stippling the puddles left by the night’s rain. Steel ramrods clattered in rifle barrels as the New Yorkers reloaded. The smoke of their opening volley had thinned and they could see the enemy was still advancing, though now they came forward in small groups of men who stopped, knelt, fired, then came on again, and all the time they made the weird, ulullating scream that was the famous rebel yell. Their new battle flag looked bloodred against the trees. “Fire!” the Sergeant shouted and watched as one of the rebel groups was stopped cold. Two men in gray went down. A ramrod, fired in error, wheeled through the smoke. Rebel bullets smacked into the logs at the heart of the abatis while others whistled overhead. The New York skirmishers were falling back, yielding the useless rifle pits to the rebel skirmishers. Smoke was beginning to hide the battlefield and make a patchy screen behind which the rebels were mere shapes punctuated by rifle flames.

  The cannon cracked back on their carriages and dug their trails deep into the waterlogged turf. There had been no time to make proper embrasures with hardened floors, only time to erect a rough wall in front of the guns that now choked out the killing blasts of canister. Each twelve-pounder was now being double-shotted with two full canisters rammed on top of a bag containing two-and-a-half pounds of gunpowder so that every barrel fired fifty-four musket balls, each musket ball a full one-and-a-half inches across. The canisters themselves were made from tin that tore apart, and the balls were packed in sawdust that vanished in flame at the cannons’ muzzles. The balls cracked on the tree trunks beyond the attacking rebels, splashed into the wet soil, and tore into Confederate bodies. Each time the guns fired they recoiled farther, digging their trails deeper into the soft ground, and the gunners had neither the strength nor the time to haul the heavy weapons out of the sucking mud. Barrels had to be lowered to compensate for the sinking trails, but still the gunfire was doing its job and holding the rebel attack. The unsettling sound of the rebel yell had stopped, replaced by the swishing noise of canister tearing through the far woods.

  “You’re beating them! You’re beating them!” The New York Colonel stood in his stirrups to shout at his men. “You’re doing just bully,” he said, then gave a stifled gasp as a bullet slapped into his lower throat. The Colonel began to twitch his head in the manner of a man whose stiff collar was too tight. He tried to speak, but no words came, just a mix of blood and spittle. He slumped back hard onto his saddle, a look of astonishment on his bearded face as his sword slipped out of his hand to quiver point first in the mud.

  “Boys are doing real well, sir, real well!” A major rode up beside the Colonel, then watched appalled as his commanding officer toppled slowly out of the saddle. The Colonel’s horse whinnied and trotted forward, dragging the Colonel by his left foot, which was trapped in its stirrup.

  “Oh, Christ,” the Major said. “Doctor! Doctor!” Then another cannon crashed its hollow-sounding noise of canister, only this time the canister balls flickered into the New York ranks, crackling in the abatis and sending four men reeling back. Another field gun cracked and the Major saw that the rebels had put two guns on his forward left flank and were unlimbering two more. He turned his horse to ride toward the threatened flank, but already the wing company was edging backward from the rebel threat. There were other northern troops on that flank, but they were too far away to help, and besides, those men were fighting off their own surge of rebel attackers.

  “Hold them! Hold them! Hold them!” the Major shouted, but the arrival of the rebel artillery had given heart to the southern attack and now the gray-brown figures were coming closer to the abatis and their musketry was becoming ever more deadly. Wounded men limped and crawled away from the New York ranks, going to find help from the bandsmen who served as medical orderlies. The Yankee dead were pushed out of the ranks and the living closed on the center. Their mouths were dry from the salt in the gunpowder that leaked whenever they bit a cartridge open, and their faces were blackened by the powder. Sweat ran clean lines through the black faces. They rammed and fired, rammed and fired, flinching when the heavy rifles punched back into bruised shoulders, then they rammed and fired again. The ground behind the rebels was heaped with dead and wounded, with groups of the casualties concentrated wherever the canister blasts had cut through the advancing ranks. The new rebel color, with its starred blue cross on a bright red field, had been torn by canister
, but a man picked up the staff and ran forward until a Yankee bullet shattered his leg and put the flag down again. Another man plucked it up and a dozen New York riflemen fired at him.

  A New York sergeant watched a boy ram a bullet home and saw that the ramrod only went twenty inches into the barrel before being stopped. The Sergeant pushed through the ranks and seized the gun. “You have to fire the goddamn bullet before you shove another one on top.” The Sergeant reckoned the boy had put at least four or five charges into the rifle and had forgotten to prime the cone with a percussion cap each time. The Sergeant tossed the rifle aside and picked up a dead man’s gun. “That’s why God gave you percussion caps, lad, to kill rebels. Now get on with it.”

  The New York Major turned and galloped past the body of his Colonel back to the nearest Yankee battery, where his horse slid to a stop in a slurry of wet mud. “Can’t you bear on those guns?” he asked, pointing with his drawn sword to the rebel artillery that was pumping smoke into the killing ground.

  “We can’t move the guns!” an artillery lieutenant called back. The northern guns were dug so deep in the mud that the combined strength of men and horses could not unglue them. A shell moaned overhead to explode just beyond the New Yorkers’ tents. Two of the Yankee guns fired, but their trails were now dug in so deep that their canister just whistled eerily over the heads of the rebels.

  Then the weird screaming began again, the shrill, blood-curdling yelp that somehow suggested insanity as well as a perverse enjoyment of killing, and it was that sound, rather than the musketry or the rebel artillery, that persuaded the New Yorkers that they had done their duty. They stepped back from the abatis, still firing as they went, but eager to escape the hell of canister and rifle fire that ripped through the abatis and drove men down from the ranks. “Steady now, boys, steady!” the Major called as his troops backed away. The wounded begged to be taken with the retreating battalion, but every unwounded man who slung his rifle to help save a casualty was one less gun to help stave off the attack. The rebel fire was growing in intensity while the New York fire slackened, yet even so the green New Yorkers were putting on a brave display. They kept firing as they went and they did not panic.