Dear God, tell me the rest are with the brigade.
“We all capped and loaded?” Kershaw asked. “Check yor guns, boys. We stumble unexpected-like on Yankees, I want volley fire. Only my number ones shoot. Number twos, y’all wait till the ones step back to reload. Only then aim, take yor time, and shoot.”
All along the line the men nodded, faces hard, jaws clamped. Some wore kepis, others had shapeless felt hats atop their heads. Their coats were threadbare. Some carried Yankee knapsacks picked up here and there. Others kept their meager possessions in cloth sacks hanging from their belts or rolled in their blankets. The various rifles might have been battered and hard used, but what was left of Company A kept them well cared for. Cartridge boxes on their belts were unsnapped and ready. Their caps within reach.
“Cap’n?” Kershaw asked.
Butler’s heart trembled in his chest. What if he were wrong?
“Move out,” he whispered as he made a fist of his right hand to keep it from shaking.
“Phil, y’all take the lead,” Kershaw ordered. “Ten paces ahead, and aim us a’tween the fighting. We don’t want to stumble into no pile of Yankees here.”
“Just ’cause I’m half Injun?” Vail, a tall boy with cinnamon hair, gave him a grin.
“You be all Injun for me today, boy,” the burly Cajun told him.
“Yes, suh!” Vail clipped off a salute, his smile exposing white teeth in a soot-encrusted face.
Twice during that long and twisting passage through the woods, Vail raised his arm. Both times Kershaw copied the move, and when Vail slashed his arm down, the whole command dropped to the forest floor, merging with the sticks and old leaves.
Each time, a panicked group of Yankees went crashing past. So fixed were they on escape, they never so much as glanced sideways in their flight.
Sticking to the west side of a small creek, they crossed two beaten roads and had proceeded maybe a mile before Vail raised his arm, ducked down, and went still, his head cocked.
Butler’s small command could have been a Cherokee raiding party the way it hunched down in the brush or melted behind trees. With a hand signal to wait, Vail slithered off into the thickening honeysuckle and currants.
A nasty battle was taking place less than a mile to the west. Great crashes of musketry kept firing in volleys that rolled over the sporadic background of shooting. And through it all, the popping bark of the howitzers and the sharper bang of the rifled cannon spoke of massed artillery.
This sounded worse than the Hornet’s Nest at Shiloh.
Just give us a hole to creep through. That’s all I ask, dear Lord.
If he could just save these remaining men, it would be enough. He could resign his commission, find another way to serve. Perhaps in the commissary or supply. Anything to relieve himself of the knowledge that he’d failed so many of these boys who trusted him to …
Vail barely shifted the brush as he stepped out and grinned. “We’re saved! Just ahead. They’s Humphrey’s brigade of Longstreet’s Corps.”
Turning he led the way, parting the stiff branches like Moses through the Red Sea and out onto a road packed with Mississippi volunteers. There wasn’t any mistake given the actual matching uniforms, the better-fed look, and modern Enfield rifles on their shoulders.
“Who’re y’all?” one lieutenant called.
“Company A, Second and Fifteenth Arkansas,” Kershaw answered proudly, though the words were drowned by a swelling thunder from the battle just behind the trees.
Looking that way, Butler could see the thick pall of battle smoke that wreathed a treed ridge and blew slowly off to the northeast.
“Arkansas?” a voice called, and Butler turned to see a horseman, his uniform splotched with mud and smoke. “Butler? Is that you?”
“Jerome?” Butler gaped at Hindman’s aide-de-camp. For the first time that day, he felt his heart go light in his chest. God had indeed delivered him. “What are you doing here?”
“Looking for a lost company.” Wilson propped a gloved hand on his hip as his horse, a white-footed sorrel, sidestepped. “Thought Govan was on the right?”
“We were. Once,” Butler told him with a grin. A great weight lifted from his soul. His men were safe. He’d done it.
“The general will be delighted to see you. That all of your men?”
“I hope there’s more up north.”
Jerome Wilson looked at Butler’s little command, calling out, “How about it, boys? Will you make one last fight for Tom Hindman and Arkansas?”
“Hoorawww!” his boys shouted. “Show us where, Lieutenant Wilson!” They were raising their rifles, showing off for the Mississippi troops.
“By God, we’ll drive them sons of bitches off that hill now!” Wilson crowed. “Follow me.”
“But I need … Wait!” Butler’s words died as his men, of their own volition, headed off after Wilson and wound their way through the Mississippi volunteers.
Should he protest?
Voices laughed in the air around him as he followed, feeling confused, as if his thoughts were as tangled as the forest they’d just crossed.
Across Kelly Road, they threaded their way through hickory, gum, oak, and maple forest, until they encountered massed gray infantry milling among the trees.
Butler glanced uneasily at the tens of wounded—soaked in their own blood—who were laid out in a line broken only by the trunks of trees. A regimental surgeon, pompously dressed in a full, and blood-saturated, uniform was pointing out cases for his assistants to haul off in captured Yankee field litters.
“Grab up what cartridges you can,” Wilson called at a captured Yankee wagon.
Inside the wagon a sergeant—an older man with a gray beard and filthy uniform—handed down boxes of cartridges, calling, “Twenty rounds to a man!”
Butler’s men surged forward, reaching out with grimy and blackened hands. The cartridges came in bundles of ten, each rolled in paper with an extra twist that held twelve caps. His men were grinning, each man stuffing the largess into his mostly empty cartridge box.
Butler watched with an eerie distraction, as if he were a spectator inside his own body. The disembodied voices were all chattering at once, adding
