The Andre Norton Megapack - 15 Classic Novels and Short Stories

troops!”
    “No wonder they’re clearin’ out—fast.”
    “Cheatin’ us outta a fight,” Kirby observed with mock seriousness.
    “All the better. Kirby, you cut back and tell the General they’re givin’ us free passage. We can get the work done here, quick.”
    “Back to axes, eh, an’ some nice dry firewood—an’ see what we can do to mess up the railroads for the Yankees. Only, seems like we’re messin’ up a sight of railroads, all down in our own part of the country. I’d like to be doin’ this up in one of them theah Yankee states like New York, say, or Indiana. Saw me some mighty fine railroads to cut up, that time General Morgan took us on a sashay through Indiana.”
    Kirby got to his feet and stretched. Drew unwound his own lanky length to join the other.
    “Maybe the old man will be leadin’ us up there, too—” Wilkins put away the binoculars. “Rennie, we’ll move on down there and see if we can pick up any information.”
    Two months or a little more since Harrisburg. The brazen heat had given way to torrents in mid-August, and the rain had made quagmire traps of roads, forming rapids of every creek and river—bogging down horses, men, and guns. But it had not bogged down Bedford Forrest. And one section of his small force, under the command of General Buford leading the Kentuckians, had held the Union forces in check, while the other, under Forrest’s personal leadership had swung past Smith and his blue coats in a lightning raid on Memphis.
    Now in September the rain was still falling in the mountains, keeping the streams up to bank level. And Forrest was also on the move. After the Memphis raid there had been a second honing of his army into razor sharpness, a razor to be brought down with its cutting edge across those railroads which carried the lifeblood of supplies to the Union army around Atlanta.
    Blockhouses fell to dogged attack or surrendered to bluff, the bluff of Forrest’s name. The Kentucky General Buford was leading his division of the command up the railroad toward the Elk River Bridge and that was below the scouts now, being abandoned by the Union troopers.
    Two factors had brought Drew into Buford’s Scouts. If Dr. Cowan, Forrest’s own chief surgeon, had not been the medical officer to whom Drew had by chance delivered those saddlebags of drugs, and if Abram Buford had not been a division commander, Drew might not have been able to push through his transfer. But Cowan had spoken to Forrest, and General Buford had known both the Barretts and the Mattocks all his life.
    Boyd had recovered speedily from the leg wound, but his convalescence from heat exhaustion and the ensuing complications was still in progress, though he had reached the point that only General Buford’s strict orders had kept him from this second raid into enemy territory. Now he was safe in a private home in Meridian, where he was being treated as a son of the house, and Drew had even managed to send a letter to Cousin Merry with that information. He only hoped that she had received it.
    As for the change in commands, Drew was content. Perhaps the more so since the news had come less than two weeks earlier that John Morgan was dead. He had gone down fighting, shooting it out with Yankee troopers in a rain-wet garden in Tennessee on a Sunday morning. Men were dying, dead…and maybe a cause was dying, too. Drew’s thought flinched away from that line now, trying to keep to the job before them. There was the abandoned stockade to destroy, the trestle and bridge to knock to pieces, and if they had time, the tracks to tear up, heat, and twist out of shape.
    Wilkins stood behind a pile of wood cut for engine fuel. “They are on the run, all right. Headin’ toward Pulaski.”
    “Think they’ll make a stand there?”
    “One guess is as good as another. If they do, we’ll smoke them out. Keep ’em busy and chase ’em clean out of their hats and back to camp.”
    The destruction of the blockhouse and the trestle could be left to the army behind; the scouts moved on again.
    “The boys are havin’ themselves a time.” Kirby returned to his post with the advance. “Tyin’ bowknots in rails gits easier all the time. When this heah campaign is over, we’ll know more ’bout takin’ railroads apart then the fellas who make ’em know ’bout puttin’ ’em together.”
    “Trouble!” Drew reined in Hannibal and waved to Wilkins. “There’s a picket up there.…”
    Kirby’s gaze