The Andre Norton Megapack - 15 Classic Novels and Short Stories

men gathering up their weapons. Then he and Drew tended the slight wounds of their enemies.
    “You’ll both do until you can get to town,” Drew told them. “And you’ve a road and plenty of daylight to help you foot it.…”
    To Drew’s surprise, the sergeant suddenly laughed. “This ain’t going to sit well with the captain. He swore all you Rebs were run out of here a couple of weeks ago.”
    “You can assure him he’s wrong.” Drew saw a chance to confuse the enemy. “We’re very much around. You’ll be seem’ a lot of us from now on, a lot more.”
    They watched the squad in blue, now afoot, plod on down the road. When they were out of sight around a bend, Webb and Croff came out of hiding to inspect the spoil. Unfortunately the Yankees had not possessed rations, but their opponents acquired five horses, five Springfields, four sabers, and three Colts, as well as welcome rounds of ammunition—a fine haul.
    Croff methodically smashed the stocks of the Springfields against a rock and pitched the ruined weapons back of the fence. They had seen during the retreat just how useless those rifles were for mounted men. The sabers were broken the same way, but the rest of the plunder was shared.
    Webb appropriated one of the captured mounts. They stripped the others of their gear, taking what they wanted in the way of blankets and saddle equipment, and were putting the horses on leading ropes when a volley of shots ripping through the early morning froze them. Croff whirled to face the road down which the Yankees had vanished.
    “Came from that direction—”
    They mounted, taking not the open road but a cross route the Cherokee indicated. Coming out on the crest of a slope, they were above another of those hollows through which the road ran. And in that way lay still blue figures. Drew’s carbine swung up as men broke from ambush and headed toward those forms. No Confederate force would have wantonly butchered unarmed and wounded men, nor would the Yankees. Which left the scum they both hated—the bushwhackers!
    Just as the crack of the murder guns had earlier torn the quiet, so did the Confederate answer come now. Three of those advancing on their victims dropped. One more cried out, staggering toward the concealing bush. Then more broke from cover beyond, going into flight up the other rise.
    “Croff! Webb! After them!” The Cherokee scout was already booting his horse into a run.
    Drew and Kirby reached the road together. Slipping from Hannibal, Drew knelt by the Union sergeant, turning the man over as gently as he could. But there was no hope. The Yankee’s eyes opened; he stared up with a cold and terrible hate.
    “Shot us…after all…murder—” he mouthed.
    “No!” Drew cried his protest. “Not us—”
    But that head rolled on his arm, and Drew was forced to swallow the fact that the other had died believing that treachery. Kirby arose from the examination of the rest of the bodies.
    “Got ’em all. Musta bin as easy as shootin’ weanlin’s. They didn’t have a chance! We got three—” He made a circle about one of the dead guerrillas—“but that don’t balance none.”
    Drew lowered the dead sergeant to the surface of the road.
    “It sure doesn’t!” he said bleakly. “We’ll go after them—if we have to ride clear to the Ohio!”
    CHAPTER 16
    Missing in Action
    “I’ve counted twenty at least,” Webb said over his shoulder. The scouts were belly-flat in cover, looking down into a scene of some activity. It almost resembled the cavalry camp they had left behind them to the south. There were the same shelters ingeniously constructed of brush and logs and a picket line for horses and mules. This hole must harbor a high percentage of deserters from both armies.
    “Only four of us,” Kirby remarked. “’Course I know we’re the tall men of the army, but ain’t this runnin’ the odds a mite high?”
    Croff chuckled. “He’s got a point there, Sarge.”
    “Seein’ as how what happened back there on the road could be pinned on us, we have to do something,” Drew returned. This whole section of country would boil over when those bodies were discovered. “And we ain’t the only ones. Any of our boys comin’ through here on furlough are like to be jumped for it if the Yankees catch them.”
    “That’s the truth if you ever spoke it, Sarge. I can see some hangin’s comin’ out of that ambush.”
    “Theah’s still twenty hombres down theah, an’ four of