1824: The Arkansas War (26 page)

When he told the two corporals, they both seemed more relieved than anything else.

As Anthony watched them march off the gangplank to join their 3rd Regiment, now mustering somewhere in the darkness, he found himself envying the boys. Not for the moment, but for the past memory. On the eve of Anthony’s first battle, he’d been frightened out of his wits. Of course, it hadn’t helped any that he’d been executed by Driscol not so many days earlier.

He grinned, then. It was an odd world. Now that he was looking toward his fourth decade of life, in just a few years, he found that he had a more insouciant view of the world than he’d had as a teenager. Death had been a mysterious terror, then. Today it was just a familiar enemy—and he
still
had the world’s meanest troll on his side.

CHAPTER 17

Arkansas Post

O
CTOBER 6, 1824

“Imogene! Adaline! You come down from there right this minute! You hear me?”

The twins standing on the gun platform above her tried for a moment to pretend they hadn’t heard their mother.

“This second! I ain’t foolin’!”

Imogene stamped her foot. Watching, it was all Zack Taylor could do not to laugh.

“Mama! It’s
exciting.
”

“Won’t be excitin’ you get a bullet in your head! Or be too excitin’ altogether.
Get down here.
I ain’t sayin’ it one more time.”

Reluctantly, the two girls obeyed Julia, clambering down the ladder that led up to the platform with the peculiar combination of grace and awkwardness that seemed to be the uniform property of twelve-year-old girls. Most of all, that blithe indifference to propriety. Taylor’s oldest daughters Ann and Sarah were about the same age as Julia’s twins. Imogene and Adaline were just at the point in their lives when they were starting the transition from girlhood to womanhood. It simply hadn’t registered on them yet that proper young ladies didn’t give the world such an exposure of leg and ankle as they came down a ladder wearing dresses.

Anywhere—much like a fort full of soldiers. Especially girls as pretty as these two seemed likely to be.

Julia knew it, of course. As soon as the girls arrived on solid ground, she was looming over them, shaking a finger in their faces.

“You bein’ a disgrace! If your father had seen this!”

As stern a disciplinarian as their mother was, the girls—especially Imogene, whom Taylor had already recognized as the more rambunctious of the two—weren’t ready to give in yet.

“It’s gonna be a
battle,
Mama!” Imogene protested. “We oughta be able to watch it!”

The shaking finger now concentrated on her alone. “And watch your language, young lady! Your daddy ain’t sending you to no expensive school so’s you can talk about ‘gonnas’ and ‘oughtas’!”

Blithely indifferent, of course, to the fact that Julia’s own lingo was every bit as colloquial as that of most frontier women. But the thought was simply one of amusement, not condemnation. Being the father of four girls himself, Taylor had more than once fallen back upon that most ancient and reliable staple of parenting:
Do as I say, blast it, not as I do.

Imogene was nothing if not stubborn. “ ’Sides, I’m worried about that young corporal. The one who sings so pretty.”

Adaline even pitched in, though she was normally the more obedient of the two. “And I’m worried about th’other one.” She and her twin exchanged glances. “Me and Imogene already decided.”

“Decided
what?
” Julia’s expression could by now only be described as a glower. The finger shaking increased its tempo. “Don’t you two be thinkin’ about no boys! You too young for that! Way too young! Only thing you best be thinkin’ about—I’ll smack you, so help me I will!—is your lessons in school.”

“School ain’t started yet,” Imogene said sulkily.

Smack.
“Don’t you sass me, girl! And don’t you be usin’ no ‘ain’ts,’ neither!”

Chuckling, Taylor turned away from the scene. The sun hadn’t even come up yet, but daylight was starting to fill the sky. He foresaw a frenzied day for Julia, trying to keep her spirited daughters from finding ways to watch the battle that was about to unfold.

Zack Taylor, on the other hand, was long past the age where he had a mother to answer to. Which was fortunate, because he had every intention of watching the battle himself. Not from simple curiosity, in his case, but from professional necessity. It wouldn’t surprise him at all if he found himself someday having to face the army of Arkansas. He wanted to get as good an estimate as he could of its capabilities.

Since there was no point in skulking about, however, he’d simply join Major Totten in the blockhouse, which had the best view of the cleared ground on the riverbank opposite the fort. It was possible that Totten would order him to leave, but Taylor didn’t think so. As polyglot as it might be, he’d already gotten enough sense of the spirit that infused the Confederate army—its Arkansas portion, anyway—to think that Totten and his officers would consider it ungallant to refuse a fellow officer such a straightforward courtesy. Enemies they might be on the morrow, but today was today, and protocol was important for its own sake.

He hoped he was right. The battle that was about to unfold was going to be fought by such rules as any Hun or Mongol would accept. But it was Taylor’s growing belief—certainly his personal desire—that if a war did erupt between the United States and the Confederacy, such savagery could be avoided in the future. And, if so, his own behavior and conduct today might make a difference.

No skulking, then, and no spying. Just a straightforward request by an officer of one army to observe a battle being conducted by another. Who was to say, after all? The time might also come when the United States and the Confederacy were allies.

When Taylor arrived in the blockhouse, Major Totten looked away from the firing slit he was peering through and gave him a courteous nod. “You’re just in time, Colonel. It appears that the Laird—ah, General Driscol—plans to start the battle by ravaging the enemy’s fleet.”

He turned to one of his aides. “Lieutenant Morton, be so good as to lend Colonel Taylor your eyeglass. And please make room for him while you’re at it, so he can get a good view.”

So.

“Slow down, Henry!” shouted Captain McParland.

He was wasting his breath, of course. He’d yelled out of simple frustration. Even if Shreve could have heard him over the sound of the engines, in the pilothouse, Anthony knew perfectly well he wouldn’t obey. Shreve wasn’t under military discipline, and he was a lot more concerned about keeping his beloved
Hercules
intact than he was over such petty minutiae as making sure they inflicted as much damage as possible on the enemy flotilla.

“Don’t worry, Anthony,” said Crowell, leaning on his sponge staff. “We’ll manage, well enough—and there ain’t no way Henry’ll pay attention nohow. He do surely love this boat.”

The steamboat was almost in range. If nothing else, the speed Shreve was making had the advantage of increasing the element of surprise. And Anthony would allow that the steamboat designer was at least not trying to keep to the very middle of the river. In fact, he was skirting the southern shoreline more closely than Anthony would have himself. Of course, he was a lot more familiar with the river.

“And will you look at ’em!” came a gleeful shout from another member of the gun crew. “Scurryin’ like chickens!”

It was true enough. Any commander with any brains—or one who wasn’t being constantly distracted by the sort of squabbles that were bound to plague a force like Crittenden’s—would have seen to it that the river was patrolled by picket boats for hundreds of yards upstream and downstream. And would have had sentries along the shore extended just as far.

But they’d seen none of that. No picket boats at all, and the one and only sentry they’d spotted had been fast asleep. Now that the
Hercules
was almost on the enemy flotilla tied up to the shore, of course, the sound of its engines was waking everybody up. But the men sleeping on those boats quite clearly had no thought at all except to either run or gape.

McParland’s eyes swept the riverbank ahead, looking for the battery. It
had
to be there, somewhere. Not even an amateur like Crittenden would have been dumb enough not to move his few cannons into position during the night.

Anthony spotted it, then, and had to suppress a gleeful shout of his own. A genuine battery, sure enough. Sheltered behind an earthen berm, just like it should be. A great big one, too—bigger than Anthony would have thought Crittenden’s mob could have erected in the dark.

Unfortunately, whether from inexperience or simple enthusiasm, they’d made it
too
big. Crittenden’s guns could fire on Arkansas Post across the river, but they couldn’t lower the elevation enough to hit anything on the river itself.

“You know what to do,” Anthony said to the gun crew as he headed toward the pilothouse. “I’m going to go try and talk some sense into Henry.”

He’d just reached the pilothouse when the four-pounder toward the starboard bow cut loose. He didn’t turn to see what effect the shot had, though. The whooping and hollering coming from the gun crew made that plain enough.

He opened the door and stuck his head in. “Tarnation, Henry, their battery’s too high to shoot at us, anyway.
Slow down.
”

Shreve was squinting through the eyeslit, peering ahead toward Crittenden’s battery. Normally, of course, there’d have been a full window there. But he’d had most of the pilothouse fortified by timbers in the course of the voyage down from New Antrim. The planks wouldn’t stop a cannon shot, but they’d handle musket fire pretty well.

“Sam Hill, if you aren’t right.” A sudden and very wicked grin came to the steamboat designer’s face. “Tell you what, Anthony. I’ll go you one better. Get on back there, now! You’re going to be a busy man for a bit.”

As he turned back toward the gun crews, Anthony heard a sudden change in the noise coming from the engine. An instant later, he felt the
Hercules
starting to shudder a bit. Shreve, he realized, was reversing the thrust on the stern paddlewheel. He was going to bring the boat to a complete
stop
—right smack in front of the whole flotilla.

“Hot damn!” shouted the gunner on the rear four-pounder. That crew had just fired its own first shot. “Boys, I want to see this gun firing till it melts! Move it!”

The bow gun fired again, jerking back against the recoil lines. The round struck the stern of one of Crittenden’s keelboats and caved it in. It also slaughtered, in the process, the one man who’d been either too slow or too dumb to get off the boat in time. A big splinter flew into his back as he was trying to clamber ashore and ripped open most of his rib cage. Blood and bone bits went flying everywhere. The corpse hit the muddy bank like a sack of meal.

Crowell was at that lead gun and already had it swabbed out by the time Anthony looked back. The crew hauled the gun back into position, took cursory aim, and fired again.

The aim hadn’t been as cursory as it looked, though. Or maybe they’d just been lucky. That shot hit one of Crittenden’s few steamboats. A little too high, unfortunately, so it simply smashed in part of the main deck instead of holing the hull. But it was enough to send the men gawking there racing to get off the boat, even if none of them looked to have been injured any.

Good enough. There was no chance, other than by a fluke, that four-pounders would be able to destroy any of the steamboats in Crittenden’s flotilla. Not badly enough to prevent them from being repaired, at least. But repairs would take time, and time was one thing Crittenden’s army now had in short supply.

Very short supply. In the lulls between cannon fire, Anthony could hear the faint sounds of the Laird’s regiments coming. The tone of voices raised in command, if not the words themselves; most of all, that unmistakable jingle-jangle of their gear that masses of soldiers made, approaching at a fast march.