campaign a whole ocean wide.'
Lincoln chuckled at that, though Ramsay had meant it seriously. Warships and liners and freighters and submarines from the CSA and the USA and England and France and Germany were scurrying all over the ocean, and shooting at one another whenever they knocked heads.
Ramsay added, 'This here is better country for fightin' than the regular prairie or the ocean. If we can't hold the Yanks the far side of the river, we ain't gonna hold 'em anywheres.'
'I'm not going to tell you you're wrong, Corporal,' Captain Lincoln said. The territory between the Cimarron and the Arkansas, which came together about twenty miles east of Jennings, was rough and rugged: wooded hills and gullies took over for prairie. There were caves in the hills, if you knew where to find them. Outlaws and robbers had infested the area for years, because just about all the people who could find them after they'd fled from their crimes were either friends or relations.
'One other thing,' Ramsay said. 'They ain't gonna get one o' those armored automobiles through here. You try and run a motorcar in this kind of landscape and it'll fall to pieces before you've gone ten miles.'
'Damn good thing, too,' the company commander said, to which Ram say could only nod. A lot of the men with them in the company were new recruits. Confederate raids into Kansas hadn't lasted long; the damnyankees had the initiative now, pushing down into Sequoyah and threatening the oil fields that gave the Confederacy so much of its petroleum.
The U.S. troopers were not better soldiers than their Confederate counterparts; anyone who claimed they were would have got himself pounded by any cavalryman in butternut who happened to hear. But what Ramsay and Lincoln had feared from the time of their first encounter was a reality: the U.S. cavalry usually advanced with armored cars bolstering the horsemen. Confederate armored automobiles, by contrast, were often promised, seldom seen. In open country, protected, mobile machine guns were deadly all out of proportion to their numbers.
Ramsay chuckled reminiscently as an exception to that rule came to mind. 'Remember when we had that battery of field artillery with us, up near the border with the Yankees? We made 'em pay that day, by Jesus.'
'Sure did,' Captain Lincoln agreed. 'Sure do. Pretty damn fine to have guns to outrange those damn cars-and to blow one of 'em to hell and gone when you hit it.'
'Yes, sir,' Ramsay said enthusiastically. The quick-firing three-inch field guns had hit two armored cars, setting them ablaze and making their fellows scuttle on back toward Kansas. They'd also started a grass fire that had slowed up the advance of the U.S. horsemen, who weren't nearly so eager to go forward without their mechanical buddies, anyhow.
But there weren't enough batteries of field artillery to go around, and the Yankees kept coming. Even if they weren't very good at what they did, enough mediocre soldiers were eventually liable to wear down a smaller force of good ones. And now parts of Sequoyah lay in U.S. hands.
Ramsay's horse stumbled. What passed for roads here in these badlands were pretty miserable even when they were dry. When they were wet, puddles disguised potholes deep enough to break an animal's leg-sometimes, it seemed, deep enough to drown an animal.
He sharply jerked the horse's head up. The beast let out an indignant squeal of complaint, but it didn't fall. Ramsay knew everything there was to know about complaining-he was a soldier, after all. He'd heard better, from men and horses.
The damp, muddy road wound round the edge of some bare-branched scrub oaks and opened out into a valley wider than most. A couple of farms took up most of the horizontal land and some that wasn't: the sheep grazing on a hillside would have done better if their right legs had been shorter than their left. Smoke curled up from the chimneys of both wooden farmhouses: cabins might have been a better word for them.
A woman wearing a kerchief, a man's flannel shirt, and a long calico dress was tossing corn to some scrawny chickens between one farmhouse and the barn. As the cavalry company drew nearer, Ramsay saw she was a half- breed, or maybe a full-blooded Indian. Sequoyah held more Indians than the rest of the Confederacy put together, and had even elected a couple of Indian congressmen and a senator.
Seeing soldiers approaching, the woman grabbed a shotgun that was leaning up against a stump. It wouldn't have done her much good, not against a cavalry company, but Ramsay admired her spirit. After a moment, the woman lowered the barrel of the shotgun, though she didn't let go of it. 'You're Confederates, ain't you?' she said, her words not just uneducated but also flavored with an odd accent: she was Indian, sure enough.
'Yes, we're Confederates,' Captain Lincoln answered gravely, brushing the brim of his hat with a forefinger. He pointed to the flag the standard bearer carried. 'See for yourself, ma'am.'
The woman peered at it, peered at him, and then nodded. She turned the barrel of the shotgun away from the troopers, using it to point north and west. 'Yankees in them woods. Leastways, they was there last night. Seen their fires. Don't know how many-less'n you, reckon. Go over there and kill 'em.'
Her vehemence made little chills run up Ramsay's back. One thing you could rely on: the Indians in the state of Sequoyah were loyal to Richmond. The government of the United States had made them pack up and leave their original homelands back east for this country. Since the War of Secession, though, the Confederacy had treated them with forbearance, and that was paying off now.
'Whereabouts exactly were they?' Captain Lincoln asked, getting down off his horse and standing beside the woman. A chicken walked over and pecked at the brass buckle of his boot-maybe the stupid bird thought it was a grain of corn.
The woman pointed again. 'Halfway up this here side of that hill-you see it? Ain't seen 'em move out since. Maybe they still there.'
Ramsay doubted that, but you never could tell. Maybe they'd decided to wait out the bad weather-even though it wasn't raining now-or maybe they were waiting for reinforcements to come up before they started pushing south again. Any which way, the company would have to ride on up there and find out what was going on.
Captain Lincoln touched his hat again. 'Thank you, ma'am. Don't want to ride into trouble blind, you know.'
'You just keep them damnyankees from tramplin' our garden and stealin' our critters,' the woman said, as if such petty thievery were the only reason U.S. soldiers were in Sequoyah now. She probably thought that; Ramsay wondered if she'd been off this farm since she was married.
As if the thought had gone straight from his head to Captain Lincoln's, the company commander's voice suddenly got hard and suspicious as he demanded, 'Where's your husband at?'
The farm woman spat, right between his feet. 'Where the hell you think he's at?' she snapped. 'He got drug into the Army, and I jus' hope to Jesus he come home again.'
'Sorry, ma'am,' Lincoln said, colour rising in his face. A couple of the troopers snickered. One of them was in Ramsay's squad. He'd rake Parker over the coals later on; couldn't let discipline go to pot. The captain was saying, 'Hope he comes home, too. Hope we all do, when this war is over.' He swung back up into the saddle and waved to the company. 'Let's go find those damnyankees.'
They rode in loose order, with plenty of scouts forward and more out on either flank. This whole country was made for bushwhacking. And then, up ahead, they heard a brisk crackle of gunfire. 'Somebody else done found 'em for us,' Ramsay yelled. 'Now we go in there and clean 'em out.'
As the Confederates rode toward the shooting, a machine gun started hammering away. 'That's Yankees, all right,' Lincoln said. 'God knows the outlaws have plenty of rifles, but they don't have any of those.'
A winding little track led through the scrub oaks toward the fighting. Lincoln dismounted his men and sent them through the woods on foot, using them like dragoons rather than true cavalry. Ramsay heartily approved- galloping up that path was asking to be massacred.
Before long, the dismounted troopers ran into Yankee pickets. Whoever was commanding the U.S. forces was doing the same thing with them as Lincoln was with the Confederates: they might have ridden to get to the fight, but they were making it on foot.
They also seemed to be outnumbered, and had to give ground again and again to keep from being outflanked and cut off. What with the thick undergrowth, you couldn't see much. If anything moved, you took a shot at it. And when you moved, people you couldn't spot shot at you. Getting a taste of what infantry did for a living, Ramsay discovered he didn't much care for it.
Eventually, the crew for the company machine gun managed to lug both it and its mount through the woods and started spraying the Yankee positions with damn near as many bullets as the rest of the company put out all
