Noon came and went. The firing from around Fort Pillow and from within the embattled fortress went on and on. Major William Bradford began to have its measure. Indeed, he began to think it mattered less than it did. When Bedford Forrest's men first attacked, Bradford had feared they would storm the earthwork.
They'd tried-they'd tried hard from first light of day till now. They'd tried, and they hadn't had any luck. To Bradford's eye, that meant they couldn't have any luck.
“Keep shooting, men!” he yelled. “Kill 'em all! They'll never break in! Never, you hear me?”
The V.S. soldiers, white and black, cheered raucously. They'd taken fresh courage, too. The colored men, especially, began treating war more as a game than as a serious business. They danced and sang and yelled bits of filth at the Confederates. Men from the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry did the same thing.
“Sir, do we really want to tick the Rebs off like this?” Lieutenant
Leaming asked.
“What difference does it make?” Bradford said grandly. He felt like dropping his trousers and waving his backside in Forrest's face, the way that one Negro had. He didn't do it, but he felt like it.
But then a minnie snapped past just in front of his nose, so close that he could feel the wind of its passage-or at least so close that he thought he could. He'd seen a couple of men who got hit in the face. He wished he hadn't. Of itself, his hand came up to caress his handsome features. Yes, they were still intact.
Even so, the near miss made him stop thinking about what his soldiers could do to the Confederates and start worrying about what Forrest's men could do to Fort Pillow. He walked over to talk to Theodorick, who was wigwagging signals to the New Era. If that also took him away from the Rebels' fire, well, he wasn't altogether brokenhearted.
“Hello, Bill,” Theo said. “We're giving 'em hell, aren't we?” As if to prove his point, the gunboat roared out another volley.
Bradford smiled as the shells hissed through the air, and again when they burst among the Rebs. See how you like it, you bastards, he thought. But then he brought his mind back to business. “Send a question down to Captain Marshall, if you'd be so kind,” he said.
“At your service.” His brother looked attentive. “What is it?” “Ask him if the New Era can support us with canister if we have to come down by the riverside.”
If the Confederates broke into Fort Pillow, that meant. It sounded much better when he said it the way he did, though. But no matter how he said it, Theodorick understood the true meaning. “Is that likely?” the older officer asked, sudden alarm in his voice and on his face.
“No, no, no,” William Bradford said quickly, as much to reassure himself as to ease Theo's mind. “I just want to cover every possible contingency.” There was a fine, impressive-sounding word.
“All right, Bill.” Theo sounded relieved. He waved his flags to draw the New Era's notice, then started semaphoring again. His younger brother admired his speed and what looked like his precision, though semaphore signals were a closed book to the major.
“Isn't anyone paying attention down there?” he asked.
But then, down on the gunboat in the Mississippi, someone with flags of his own wigwagged from the foredeck. “They have the message,” Theo reported.
“Well, what do they say about it?” Bradford demanded. “Nothing yet,” his brother answered. “They have to pass it on to Captain Marshall and wait for his reply.”
“All right. I understand.” Bill Bradford also had to wait. He liked it no better than any other busy, important man would have-so he thought of himself. After what seemed a very long time but couldn't have been more than a couple of minutes, the sailor with the semaphore flags on the New Era started using them.
“At your service in every way, Captain Marshall says,” Theodorick told his brother.
“That's good. Thanks a lot, Theo.” Bradford took off his hat and waved it in salute to the gunboat, though the sailors far below probably wouldn't notice.
More than a little reluctantly, he made his way back toward the firing. Nothing had hit him yet. Nothing would hit him. He kept telling himself so, over and over again. Whenever the law had to say something repeatedly, it was a sign nobody was paying attention to it. As an attorney, Bill Bradford understood that principle. Applying it to his own case didn't occur to him, which might have been just as well.
“Captain Young!” he shouted. “Where are you, Captain?”
“I'm here, sir,” John Young answered after Bradford called his name several times. Fort Pillow's provost marshal was a large, solidly built man with a habitual scowl and a black beard so thick it was almost like a pelt. “What do you need?”
Bradford pointed toward the New Era. “I want you to get some men to take a store of cartridges down to the riverbank. If we have to fight down there, 1 don't want it to be just with whatever ammunition we chance to carry with us.”
Captain Young's frown deepened. “If we have to fight by the riverbank, that will mean the Rebs have carried the fort,” he said. Major Bradford waited with a scowl of his own. After a pause that stretched, Young added, “Sir.”
“Yes, I know it will,” Bradford said. “Would you rather not nail new shingles on the roof in case of rain?”
Young grunted. “Well, when you put it that way-”
“That is precisely how I put it, Captain.” Bradford drew himself up again.
He didn't have to wait so long this time. With a crisp salute, Young said, “Yes, sir. I'll take care of it.” He started shouting for soldiers. Before long, he had men lurching and staggering down the side of the bluff, two of them carrying each heavy crate. “All right, sir,” he reported when the job was done. “We've got half a dozen cases of minnies down there. If those aren't enough to keep up the fight, God help us all.”
“Yes,” Major Bradford said. “God help us all.”
Bedford Forrest watched the fighting at Fort Pillow from a swell of ground about a quarter of a mile from the Federal earthworks. Sharpshooters from Colonel McCulloch's brigade not far away sniped at the Union men. Unlike the troops farther forward, who simply fired as fast as they could, the sharpshooters took their time and made sure they had good targets before they pulled the trigger.
“There you go!” Forrest shouted encouragement. “Keep banging away at them. They'll fall down.”
One of the sharpshooters whooped, so maybe the soldier he'd aimed at did fall over. Forrest hoped so. The men in blue inside the fort were putting up a stronger fight than he'd expected. He still thought he could overrun their works-with his men on so many high spots around Fort Pillow, they could fire into the fort with devastating effect, and could keep the enemy from doing as much as he would want to when the final assault came. Still, that final assault was liable to prove more costly than he looked for when he set out from Jackson. And so… A slow smile spread over his face. Even if the colored troops and homemade Yankees inside the fort hadn't fought unusually well, he supposed he would have trotted out one of his favorite ploys. He used it for one simple reason: it worked often enough to make it worthwhile.
“Captain Anderson!” he yelled. “Where in the tarnation is Captain Anderson?” Then he laughed at himself. “To hell with me if I didn't send him down to the riverbank my very own self.” He called to one of the soldiers on the little rise with him: “Hey, Zach! Go down to the river and bring Captain Anderson here, will you?”
“Sure will, General.” Zach hurried away. Bedford Forrest smiled. Sometimes an order phrased as a request worked better than any other kind. Touchy about their personal pride, a lot of Confederates resented being flat-out told what to do.
Rough, steeply sloping ground and fallen trees made Zach's trip down to the riverbank slower than it might have been. Captain Anderson couldn't come back up much faster, even if he was on horseback. Sketching a salute to Forrest, he said, “What's up, sir?”
Forrest pointed toward the fort. “I'm going to give those people in there a chance to surrender. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.”
“Sure worked in Union City three weeks ago.” A smile stole over Anderson's face. “Poor Colonel Hawkins has surrendered to you twice now, even though you were only there once.”
“Well, so he has.” Forrest. grinned, too. His detachment under Colonel Duckworth that intimidated-buffaloed, really-the luckless Isaac Hawkins into yielding Union City was a good deal weaker than the force that surrendered to it. A lot of the Federal officers who went into captivity were furious at their commander-which did them no good at all.
“All right, sir. Let's see if they'll throw in the sponge.” Captain Anderson always had paper and pencil handy.
