The Big Gun (Dusty Fog's Civil War Book 3) (8 page)

‘
All
of us fly-slicers’re mighty slick,’ Dusty commented in tones
redolent of false modesty. ‘They had to be watching from
somewhere—’

‘
I
haven’t seen any balloon!’ protested the lieutenant, displaying
alarm at what he suspected might be called an error on his
part.

‘
It’s
there, mister,’ Staunce declared. ‘I’d say close to five hundred
feet above the woods on the right of the Malvern trail.’

‘
Damn
it!’ the lieutenant ejaculated. ‘How was I to know? My orders were
to keep watch on the Yankees’ positions along the river, not
to—’

‘
Like
you said, mister,’ Dusty put in. ‘How were you to know? Nobody
could have guessed that they’d make this kind of play. Can you see
the gun, Doug?’

‘
I’m
damned if I can,’ Staunce replied, after carrying out another
careful examination of the woodland in the vicinity of the balloon.
‘But they must be fairly close, so the observer can pass down his
corrections either by shouting, dropping notes, or through a
telegraph wire. Even if he’s using telegraph, they’re not likely to
be too far apart.’

‘
There’s wooded country on both sides of the trail,’ Dusty
pointed out. ‘I’ve heard that one of those balloons needs a fair
amount of heavy, bulky gear to get into the air and I couldn’t see
any of it. So I reckon it and the cannon’re hidden among the trees.
Not too far from the trail, either. A gun that big’ll take a heap
of moving and won’t be so easy to man-handle as one of your lil ole
howitzers.’

‘
That’s true,’ Staunce confirmed, concentrating his scrutiny
on the distant woodland. ‘But I can’t see any—’

There was another explosion in the town.
Although Dusty and Staunce had not seen it, the enlisted men were
looking down.

‘
Hell’s fire!’ yelled the corporal who was present ‘They’re
aiming for the houses, not our guns!’

Turning his gaze to Arkadelphia, Dusty saw
people running to a store. Its front had been blown in by the
shell.

‘
Why
the hell don’t our guns start shooting back?’ raged a private and
the other enlisted men spluttered furious agreement.

Turning his eyes towards the
defensive batteries, Dusty saw
—although his ears had already informed him—that
they were still inactive. A moment’s thought gave him the reason
for their refusal to open fire.

‘
Even
if they could see the gun that’s doing the shelling,’ the small
Texan explained, ‘they couldn’t reach it. And if they start
throwing lead across the river, the Yankees’re sure to cut loose
back at them. Which’ll get the town damaged a whole heap worse than
with one gun shooting.’

In view of
Dust
y’s
youth and small size, the infantrymen might have disregarded his
comments as unworthy of their attention. However, they had
identified him and knew of his part in the Battle of Martin’s Mill
and also as the captor of General Culver. So they figured that
anything he said was likely to have merit and be worth listening
to. Once the basic facts had been pointed out and elaborated upon,
they could see the wisdom of their batteries refraining from
opening fire.

‘
Hey!’
yelled one of the enlisted men, pointing downwards. ‘There’s a
Yankee going like a bat out of hell along the Malvern
trail.’

‘
Likely he’s headed for the gun,’ Dusty guessed. ‘What do
you make of him, Doug?’

‘
A
lieutenant,’ Staunce answered, having adjusted the telescope’s
alignment. ‘Artilleryman, going by his red sash. Riding
fast.’

‘
Hey,
you fellers!’ called the telegraph operator—who, being a civilian
and employed by a private company instead of the Army, as was the
policy in the Confederate States, had no need to conform with
military courtesy—looking out of his wedge tent. ‘There’s a message
just come through from Colonel Galveston. He wants to know why the
hell we haven’t reported the shooting.’

‘
What
shall I tell him?’ asked the lieutenant, looking worriedly from one
captain to the other.

‘
You
might say that you thought he knew it was happening,’ Staunce
suggested, ‘but I don’t think that it would be very well
received.’

‘
Try
telling him there’s no sign of activity along the river,’ Dusty
advised, seeing the alarm on the lieutenant’s face and taking pity
on him. ‘Then say the shelling’s being done by one big gun that’s
hidden in the woods about two miles away and close to the Malvern
trail. Say you haven’t been able to locate the gun’s exact
position, but it’s got a balloon observing for it. I reckon you and
I’d best go down and report, Doug.’

‘
It
would be the polite thing to do,’ Staunce admitted, leaving the
telescope and looking at the lieutenant. ‘While you’re at it, you’d
better ask the colonel if he wants you to keep watching the
Yankees’ positions or to try to find exactly where the big gun
is.’

‘
I’ll
do that, sir,’ the lieutenant promised. ‘I might locate it by
watching that officer who rode out.’

‘
I
was just going to
suggest that,’ Dusty remarked with a grin, watching the
lieutenant—whose face showed relief at having been given the answer
to his problem—scuttling away towards the telegraphist’s
tent.

‘
And
me,’ admitted the Englishman. ‘I’m pleased that he thought of it
himself.’

‘
Won’t
old Galveston be pot-boiling mad, though?’ Dusty
drawled.

‘
That’s
very
likely,’ Staunce smiled. ‘And he’ll be looking for somebody
to lay the blame on. So we’d better get down there, or he may
decide that we’ll do for it.’

Collecting their horses, Dusty
and Staunce mounted. Despite the Englishman
’s comment and an awareness of the
situation’s gravity, they intended to return to Arkadelphia at a
more leisurely pace than they had used when ascending the hill. The
telegraph would have relayed their discoveries and conclusions long
before they could hope to have done so themselves, no matter how
hard they had pushed their mounts. Having no wish to punish their
horses unnecessarily, they held their pace to a fast
walk.

‘
I
wonder what that
blighter’s up to, Dusty?’ Staunce said, pointing to where the Union
officer was galloping along the Malvern trail.

‘
Likely going to tell them to get their aim straight and
start hitting our batteries,’ the small Texan suggested, watching a
shell explode in the center of a street far from the
river.

‘
They
don’t seem to be ranging in very well,’ the Englishman admitted. ‘I
would have expected them to be on to their targets by
now.’

‘
They
didn’t waste too many shells in hitting the courthouse,’ Dusty
drawled. ‘Just two, getting closer each time, then in through the
roof.’

‘
You
don’t think they’re just shelling the town indiscriminately, do
you?’ Staunce asked, for such an idea had never occurred to
him.

‘
I’d
hate like hell to think that even a Yankee soft-shell
^xii
would do
that,
’
Dusty answered. ‘What kind of gun do you reckon it
is, Doug?’

‘
A
twenty-four-, or maybe even a thirty-pounder “rifle”,’ Staunce
replied.

‘
As
big’s that, huh?’ Dusty breathed, knowing the word “rifle” used in
such a fashion meant a cannon with a rifled barrel.

‘
At
least that big,’ Staunce confirmed. ‘A twelve-, or even an
eighteen-pounder couldn’t be throwing from anywhere near that
balloon and wouldn’t have made such big craters. And a smooth-bore
couldn’t pitch its balls accurately.’

Once again, Dusty followed his
companion
’s
meaning without the need for further explanation. In the period of
his training at Judge Blaze’s small military academy—in Polveroso
City, Rio Hondo County, Texas—Dusty’s education had covered many
aspects of Army life. Although he had been intended to join the
Texas Light Cavalry, he was encouraged to study training manuals
devoted to Infantry and Artillery matters. From his reading, he
knew that the spin imparted to a shell by the grooves of a
‘rifle’s’ barrel enabled it to fly more accurately than a round
shot from a smoothbore cannon. He also had a fair idea of a
thirty-pounder’s dimensions.

‘
Happen you’re right,’ Dusty said, trying to sound as if he
doubted that such an unlikely thing could happen. ‘It’ll be a
fair-sized hunk of iron to haul around.’

‘
If
it’s a Parrot thirty-pounder rifle, which I’m inclined to believe
it is, it will have a tube over eleven feet long. With the carriage
and limber, it weighs almost nine thousand pounds.’

‘
You’d
need ten, maybe even a dozen
big
horses to pull it,’ Dusty said, after Staunce’s
description, speaking half to himself. ‘And they won’t be moving
anywhere near as fast as a flying artillery battery.’
^xiii

‘
They’re not meant to,’ Staunce pointed out. ‘They’re siege,
or even garrison pieces, not field guns. What’s on your mind,
Dusty?’

‘
Somebody’s going to have to do something about that blasted
big gun,’ the small Texan replied.

‘
Let’s
hope there’s a cup of coffee, even if we
can’t get a meal at Stilton Crossing,’ Captain Dusty Fog remarked
to Captain Douglas St. John Staunce as they rode slowly through the
darkness. ‘It’ll be way too late for any by the time we reach
Camden.’

Holding their horses to a
steady walk
—Staunce having retrieved his from the party of 2nd Texas
Infantry who had been catching the animals that had bolted when the
first shell exploded—the two young officers were traversing the
trail that ran parallel with the southern bank of the Ouachita
River. They were going to Camden, seat of Ouachita County, to
rejoin their commands after the conclusion of the meeting in
Arkadelphia. Dusty’s guidon bearer, Sandy McGraw, had been sent
ahead with dispatches from Colonel Mannen Blaze to the headquarters
of the Texas Light Cavalry. All the other officers would be
following the next day.

As the pair did not expect to
reach their destination much before midnight, they were hoping to
obtain refreshment at the part of the river known as Stilton
Crossing. Several civilian workers had been hired to establish
positions from which two batteries of
‘Napoleons’—the Model of 1857
gun-howitzer was the workhorse of both armies’ Artillery—could help
to prevent the Yankees from making attempts at utilizing the easy
crossing at that point. A small detachment of the Texas Light
Cavalry had been assigned to guard the workers. Their officer would
be willing to trade cups of coffee and, possibly, food for news of
the gathering attended by his visitors.

‘
I
wonder if the patrol’s managed to get at that big gun?’ Dusty went
on after a few seconds’ silence, repeating a subject that had
cropped up on two previous occasions.

‘
They
ought to be getting close to it, even if it pulled out after the
crew stopped shelling Arkadelphia,’ Staunce replied, looking at the
small figure by his side. ‘You would have liked to go after it
yourself, wouldn’t you?’

‘
Sure
I would,’ Dusty replied, grimly and bitterly, thinking of the
scenes he had witnessed during the return from the observation post
on the hill. There had been dead and wounded civilians among the
burning, shell-damaged buildings of what had been a peaceable,
pleasant little town. ‘The bastards must have been shooting
deliberately, meaning to kill civilians.’

‘
It
seemed that way,’ the Englishman conceded, in tones which matched
his companions. ‘What a lousy way to make war.’

‘
Lousy
is too mild a word for it,’ Dusty declared. ‘Whoever ordered it
done deserves to be hanged.’

‘
Did
you ask if you could go after the gun?’

‘
I
didn’t need to. Uncle Devil and Uncle Mannen knew what was on my
mind as soon as they saw me.’

‘
And
gave you good reasons why you couldn’t handle it,’ Staunce pointed
out, knowing his young companion wished to talk as a means of
getting the anger and disgust he had been feeling out of his
system.

‘
Sure,’ Dusty agreed. ‘Arkadelphia’s part of the Texas
Mounted Infantry’s bailiwick. So it was up to them to take on the
chore.’

‘
That
was true enough,’ Staunce stated. ‘You wouldn’t have liked it if
another cavalry regiment had been assigned to work in your
area.’