Breakthroughs

A jolt, and the barrel clattered off the bridge and onto the soft dirt of the southern bank of the Cumberland. For a bad moment, Morrell thought the dirt would be soft enough to make the barrel bog down, but, engines screaming, the machine moved ahead, and onto ground better able to support its weight.

Machine-gun bullets clattered off the barrel’s armored carapace. The two left-hand machine guns returned fire. The Confederate gun fell silent. Maybe they’d knocked it out. Maybe its crew had been so busy shooting at the barrel, U.S. infantry were able to rush them. Morrell had seen that before: barrels were machine-gun magnets, attracting fire that might have been more profitably aimed against foot soldiers.

Now Morrell had the vision louvers down to slits. Through those slits, he saw Confederate soldiers moving forward now that the barrage had passed them by to punish targets farther behind the line. Halt, he signaled, and reached forward with a length of dowling to tap one of the artillerymen at the nose cannon on the shoulder.

They had no trouble figuring out the target he had in mind. The cannon snarled once, then again. The noise wasn’t too much worse than everything else going on inside the barrel. Through the slits, Morrell watched oncoming Rebs get flung aside as if they were paper dolls. The men in butternut who came through unhurt had to dive for cover.

Forward, Morrell signaled again. Forward they went, through the Confederate defensive system. The Rebs had a lot of trench lines, but not very many men in them. The barrel crews concentrated on wrecking machine-gun positions; those guns could tear the heart from an infantry attack, and had torn the heart from many. One after another, the barrels put them out of action.

Then, quite suddenly-or so it seemed-the barrels had traversed all the Confederate trenches, and reached the level ground behind them. A few C.S. artillery pieces were still firing. More had been pulled back and out of the pits from which they had shelled U.S. forces.

And quite a few were wrecked. Morrell’s traveling fortress rumbled past a quick-firing three-inch gun whose barrel had burst not far from the breech. U.S. shells had wrecked the carriage; most of the crew lay dead by the piece. At the end of the trail sat one of the gunners, his head in his hands, a picture of despair. His war was over. Soon the infantry advancing with the barrels would scoop him up.

Southwest, Morrell signaled. He stood up in the cupola again, to compare the field to the map he carried inside his head. If anything, what he saw looked better than what he had imagined and presented to General Custer.

“Open country!” he said exultantly. “We’ve got the Rebs out of their holes at last. They know how to fight from trenches, but now we’re playing a different game.”

There ahead, a railroad line ran toward Nashville. Along it chugged a train full of soldiers, the engineer blissfully unaware the United States Army had broken through. A cannon shell through the boiler brought him the news. Gleefully, the machine gunners in Morrell’s barrel raked the train.

Forward, he signaled again. He intended his thrust to cut off and outflank the Rebs who were defending Nashville from the rest of First Army. “Keep going,” he muttered. “We’ve got to keep going. You don’t get what you want by doing things halfway. I don’t want to scare these bastards. I want to wreck ’em.”

On rumbled the barrel. For the moment, the CSA seemed to have little with which to stop it.

Cassius tossed Scipio a Tredegar. Automatically, Scipio caught it out of the air. Automatically, he checked the chamber. It had a round in it. He pulled off the clip. By its weight, it was full.

“You is one o’ we, Kip,” Cassius said, and tossed him a couple of more ten-round boxes. “When we fights de feudal ’pressors, you fights wid we.”

The men of the Congaree Socialist Republic hadn’t trusted him with a rifle in his hands since he’d returned to the swamps by the river that gave the Republic its name. He looked around. “Cherry ain’t here,” he remarked.

Cassius’ expression turned sour. “She still huntin’ dat damnfool treasure Miss Anne never hid no kind of way.”

“She kin hunt till she git all old an’ shriveled up,” Scipio said. “If they ain’t nothin’ there, she ain’t gwine find it.”

“She keep huntin’, she don’ live to git all old an’ shriveled up,” Cassius answered. “Miss Anne, she put de militia round Marshlands. Dey catch Cherry an’ de poor fools she got with she.”

I hope they do, Cassius thought. Dear God, I hope they do. Cherry knew him for the cold heart, for the weak spirit, he was. She knew he had no true revolutionary fire in his belly, knew and despised him for it. If Anne Colleton caught her, Scipio would do nothing but rejoice.

In one pocket of his tattered dungarees, he had a letter addressed to Anne Colleton in St. Matthews. Getting hold of paper and pencil hadn’t been too hard. Even laying his hands on an envelope hadn’t been too hard. Finding a postage stamp, though…

Finally, he’d seen a dice game where one of the raiders was tearing stamps off a sheet a few at a time to cover his losses. Scipio had had almost no money in his own pockets, but he got down on one knee as fast as he could. Luck was with him; he’d rolled a seven his first try out and then made his point-it was four, which made it tougher-so that, before long, several small, red portraits of James Longstreet took up residence alongside his pocket change. One of them was on the envelope now.

Cassius said, “We’s gwine up to hit Gadsden a lick tonight. We ain’t done no fightin’ no’ th o’ the Congaree in a while. Them fat white bastards up there, they reckons they’s safe from de force o’ revolutionary justice. I aims to show they that they is mistooken.”

“You goes up there, you draws the militia up there after you,” Scipio said. “Not so many white sojers around Marshlands after dat. Cherry, she can dig all she like.”

“I knows it,” Cassius said. “Cain’t be helped.” He was by no means enamored of Cherry or her search for the treasure both he and Scipio were convinced did not exist. Then Cassius turned his gaze on Scipio. He still had a hunter’s eyes-or maybe they were sniper’s eyes. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to say anything. His expression spoke more plainly than words. Yes, you’ve got a rifle in your hands, it declared. You don’t dare use it against me or any of the other revolutionary fighters here. You’d have only one shot sent in the wrong direction, and then you’d be mine-because you and I both know that if that one shot is at me, you’ll miss. And I won’t.

Scipio sighed. He’d always been a halfhearted Red at best. He wasn’t even that any more. He was a man trapped in a nightmare with enemies on all sides and no way out. He saw no way to take Cassius with him when he fell, as he surely would fall. He did have hopes of bringing down Cherry-or, if Cherry got extraordinarily lucky, of bringing down Miss Anne. But Cassius? Cassius was a force of nature.

The force of nature joined Scipio and a couple of other men in a battered rowboat and glided north through the swamps of the Congaree. Several other boats followed. Cassius knew the ways through the maze of twisting channels. Starlight was all he needed. Each of the other boats carried at least one man who knew the swamps almost as well.

Something floated by overhead. Scipio’s blood ran cold. The part of his mind that the Colletons had spared no trouble or expense to educate insisted it was only an owl. The part of him that had grown up in one of those clapboard cabins a world away from the Marshlands mansion by which they sat said it was something worse, something ghostly, something that would lure them all into the heart of the swamp and never let them escape.

Then it hooted, and he felt foolish. More often than not, the educated part of his mind did have some notion of what it was talking about. But the other part was older, with roots that went down deeper. Education ruled his brain. His belly, his heart, his balls? No.

“Do Jesus!” one of the oarsmen said, his voice a shaky whisper. “I reckoned that were one o’ they bad hants, the kind that don’t never let you come out o’the swamp no more.” Scipio hadn’t been the only one frightened, then.

Cassius said, “Ain’t no hant can stand up against dialectical materialism.” His new beliefs had overpowered the older ones. Almost, Scipio envied him for that. Almost. Cassius’ new beliefs had overpowered his good judgment, too, and these tattered remnants of the Congaree Socialist Republic the Reds had hoped to establish were the proof of that.

Cassius did not, would not, see defeat, only a setback on the inevitable road to revolution. He could no more