The Andre Norton Megapack - 15 Classic Novels and Short Stories

was still out there.
    Again, Drew made one of those careful turns to keep his unsteadiness under control. If Boyd was out there, he must be brought back—now! Hands closed on Drew’s shoulders, jerking him back so that he collided with another body, and was held pinned against his captor.
    “You can’t go theah now!” Kirby spoke so closely to his ear that the words were a roaring in his head. But they did not make sense. Drew tried to wrench loose of that hold, the pain in his half-healed arm answering. Then there was a period he could not account for at all, and suddenly the sun was fading and it was evening. Somebody pushed a canteen into his hand, then lifted both hand and canteen for him so that he could drink some liquid which was not clear water but thick and brackish, evil-tasting, but which moistened his dry mouth and swollen tongue.
    Through the gathering dusk he could see distant splotches of red and yellow—were they fires? And shells screamed somewhere. Drew held his head between his hands and cowered under that beat of noise which combined with the pulsation of pain just over his eyes. Men were moving around him, and horses. He heard tags of speech, but none of them were intelligible.
    Was the army pulling out? Drew tried to think coherently. He had something to do. It was important! Not here—where? The boom of the field artillery, the flickering of those fires, they confused him, making it difficult to sort out his memories.
    Again, a canteen appeared before him, but now he pushed it petulantly aside. He didn’t want a drink; he wanted to think—to recall what it was he had to do.
    “Drew—!” There was a figure, outlined in part by one of those fires, squatting beside him. “Can you ride?”
    Ride? Where? Why? He had a mule, didn’t he? Back in the horse lines. Boyd—he had left the mule with Boyd. Boyd! Now he knew what had to be done!
    He moved away from the outstretched hand of the man beside him, got to his feet, saw the blot of a mount the other was holding. And he caught at reins, dragged them from the other’s hand before he could resist.
    “Boyd!” He didn’t know whether he called that name aloud, or whether it was one with the beat in his head. Boyd was out on that littered field, and Drew was going to bring him in.
    Towing the half-seen animal by the reins, Drew started for the fires and the boom of the guns.
    “All right!” The words came to him hollowly. “But not that way, you’re loco! This way! The Yankees are burnin’ up what’s left of the town; that ain’t the battlefield!”
    Drew was ready to resist, but now his own eyes confirmed that. Fire was raging among the few remaining buildings of the ghost town, and shells were striking at targets pinned in that light, shells from Confederate batteries, taking sullen return payment for that disastrous July day.
    A lantern bobbed by his side, swinging to the tread of the man carrying it. And, as they turned away from the inferno which was consuming Harrisburg, Drew saw other such lights in the night, threading along the slope. This was the heartbreaking search, among the dead, for the living, who might yet be brought back to the agony of the field hospitals. He was not the only one hunting through the human wreckage tonight.
    “I’ve talked to Johnson,” Kirby said. “It’ll be like huntin’ for a steer in the big brush, but we can only try.”
    They could only try…Drew thought he was hardened to sights, sounds. He had helped bring wounded away from other fields, but somehow this was different. Yet, oddly enough, the thought that Boyd could be— must be—lying somewhere on that slope stiffened Drew, quickened his muscles back into obedience, kept him going at a steady pace as he led Hannibal carefully through the tangle of the dead. Twice they found and freed the still living, saw them carried away by search parties. And they were working their way closer to the breastworks.
    “Ho—there—Johnny!”
    The call came out of the dark, out of the wall hiding the Yankee forces.
    Drew straightened from a sickening closer look at three who had fallen together.
    “Johnny!” The call was louder, rising over the din from the burning town. “One, one of yours—he’s been callin’ out some…to your left now.”
    Kirby held up the lantern. The circle of light spread, catching on a spurred boot. That tiny glint of metal moved, or was it the booted foot which had twitched?
    Drew strode forward as Kirby swung