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Authors: Frank Leslie

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BOOK: The Bells of El Diablo
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Northern forces were now being led by General Sherman on his brutal march toward Atlanta in a desperate attempt to put the finishing touches on the War of Aggression that the Union had all but won. The young lieutenant knew this to be true but would not, could not admit it to anyone, least of all to himself.

The South could not be subjugated by the tyrannical rule of Washington. The consequences of such a tragedy were unthinkable—James’s beloved home state of Tennessee and all the Confederacy conquered by a government no less corrupt than that which they’d originally won their freedom from! Sometimes, as he did now, James felt as though he were the last man standing between the Yankees and victory.

If that were true, he would not appear at first glance as a formidable last foe. He was of average height, flat-bellied, and slender, with a clean-lined, strong-jawed, dimple-chinned face that many a young Southern lady had found dashing. Not intimidating in the least. Cobalt blue eyes gazed serenely out from deep, hard-mantled sockets framed by straight, dark brown hair that hung now to his shoulders. His voice was as soft and subtly lilting as a spring rain in the heart of Dixie.

No, James Dunn did not stand out as the cool, efficient killing machine he’d proved himself to be on many a Southern battlefield since marching off to war barely before the first shots at Fort Sumter had ceased echoing. But amongst the Union forces that he’d bedeviled in the long months since, he’d earned the reputation of a wily, tough-nut guerilla, and those eerily serene eyes must have confounded many a Yankee soldier staring into them from only inches away as his guts slithered out his gaping belly.

It was the crafty young Rebel lieutenant’s mission now to blow up the bridge crossing Snake Creek Gap. Not his alone, thank God. Not yet. But that of his and his few loyal, hickory-hard, mostly mountain-bred Confederates who’d been handpicked by General Forrest himself. Seven men were all that remained of James’s platoon, which had been so badly decimated at Chattanooga and again a few weeks ago at Kennesaw Mountain, when they’d tried to stem the howling Yankee hordes’ plundering of Georgia.

James was glad to see that the information of Bedford’s spies had proven reliable, as it so often had not been, and that this stretch of road and the bridge would, indeed, likely see a Union supply detail soon. Any chance to further complicate the efforts of the federal troops, and to draw more Union blood, quickened the young Confederate officer’s wild heart. The best indications of the supply train’s approach were the picket James had just gutted and the other soldiers prowling atop the bridge itself.

The young Confederate, long hair tucked behind his ears and dangling to his mud-smeared shoulders,
could see the silhouettes of three men milling around atop the bridge, hear the low, desultory mutter of their voices above the creek’s watery chitter. The faint orange glow of a cigarette or cigar shone sporadically in the darkness around a silhouetted head. The peppery fragrance of Union tobacco reached James’s nose, made his mouth water. He hadn’t had a good smoke—or a good meal or a good drink—in months.

Or a woman—good or bad—in nearly a year, an inner voice silently reminded him.

Lieutenant Dunn had suspected the bridge might be guarded. That’s why he’d left the rest of his seven-man contingent farther up the ridge behind him before he’d stolen down the slope with two others—Corporals Billy Krieg and Lawrence Coker—clad in nothing more than river mud to keep their pale skin from glistening in the hollow’s steamy darkness.

The two men sidled up to their slender, rugged leader now—Coker a year older than James and a fellow Tennessean. Billy Krieg was all of seventeen, bucktoothed and golden-haired, but the heart of a barbarian beat in the south Georgian’s chest. He hailed from Cairo, where his father was a wheelwright. Bowielike knives strapped to their naked waists, they, too, looked up at the bridge and then swung their heads slowly from right to left as they stared along the shore of the creek before them and along the creek’s far side, looking for more pickets.

When James was reasonably sure they were alone here on this side of the bridge, he glanced at his two subordinates, then canted his head to indicate behind him. Krieg and Coker disappeared. When they stepped
back up beside him a moment later, they carried a coffinlike rifle crate between them. The crate was covered with a strip of tarred burlap that kept the moisture away from the small bound bundles of dynamite nestling inside, on a bed of dry straw.

James nodded, then, holding his Enfield. 50-caliber breechloader up high across his chest, stepped into the river that at first felt shockingly cold against his bare feet and ankles. The other men followed, moving soundlessly as stalking Seminoles, and set the rifle crate in the stream, each man holding a hide-handled end as they guided it along between them. The creek bottom was soft and muddy, and James felt the slime close over his ankles and lift tendrils of sodden weeds and roots up to tickle his calves.

The river climbed higher up his body until he was waist deep and moving into the center of the stream, which moved more quickly here, with slight riffles and eddies, for the rain had been falling in the north Georgia mountains for three long days, filling the creeks and streams and flooding the lowlands. The Snake Creek Gap canyon was deep, however, and the bridge still stood a good thirty feet above the tarry water.

James moved slowly, lifting each foot in turn from the slime, keeping the Enfield above the water. A single cartridge nestled in the chamber, nippled and capped. It was the only round James had, as he couldn’t carry his cartridge pouch into the stream without fouling the ammunition. The other two men were armed only with knives. So between them they had three knives and a single, .50-caliber cartridge…against at
least a dozen Union soldiers guarding the bridge and waiting for the supply wagons.

Hopefully, James and his men wouldn’t need the bullet or the knives. If they did, their mission would likely have failed.

James looked at the top of the bridge that was a faint line against the gauzy sky. He could see the silhouettes of the guards moving this way and that, and he heard the mutter of occasional voices. He gritted his teeth nervously, not liking how exposed he and his men were. It couldn’t be helped, however. This was their best means of approach, as both ends of the bridge were likely being closely watched by the federals. If any of the guards atop the bridge looked down, they’d likely think that James’s party was merely flotsam churned by the unstable current.

The reassuring thought had no sooner passed over his brain before something flashed on the creek’s far side. There was a loud, hollow
crack!
Billy Krieg grunted. His head snapped sharply to one side. Just as the kid began to lift his head, he slipped out of sight beneath the water.

“Shit!” cried Coker.

“Got us a pack of muskrats!” came the shout from the shore, from roughly the same place where the rifle had flashed and belched. “Three in the water, fellas! Can’t you see ’em?
Who’s awake up there?

There was another flash and a
crack
, and the bullet fired from the picket on the far shore slammed into the rifle crate with a loud
whump!
Coker cursed again as Billy Krieg’s end of the coffin swung downstream,
jerking Coker off his feet, and water splashed as he flailed his other arm, trying to keep his balance.

“Hold the box, Lawrence!” James ground his feet into the creek’s muddy bottom and lifted the Enfield. He aimed quickly at the murky silhouette and fired, the single-shot carbine leaping and roaring.

The man on the far shore yelped, and there was the clatter of a rifle falling on rocks.

Rifles were precious amongst the Southern soldiers, and James hated to turn the Enfield over to the river, but after quickly releasing the bayonet sprocket at the end of the barrel and removing his homemade knife, he let the weapon sink out of sight in the murky stream. He took his knife in his teeth, and, hearing shouts from atop the bridge, helped Coker move the gun crate in amongst the stout log pylons, where they and the box would be out of sight from the top of the bridge.

“Gotta move fast, Lawrence!” he said as a rifle popped above him. He saw the flash nearly straight above his head, heard the bullet plop into the water with a hollow
zing
that echoed amongst the wooden piers and zigzagging braces that smelled like creek rot and wood tar.

“Graybacks under the bridge!” shouted one of the blue-bellies.

Running feet thundered on the bridge. Men cursed and quarreled. James heard brush snapping on the shore beyond the bridge’s far side—another picket running toward the action. The picket’s slender silhouette moved amongst the dark tufts of heather and laurel and the pale blue face of a stone slab jutting out from the slope toward the stream. The picket would
soon be in prime position to pick the lieutenant and Coker off as easily as shooting ducks on a millpond.

“We ain’t gonna make it, Jimmy!” Coker said, his teeth showing white beneath his dark mustache. He, too, was looking toward the picket running toward them along the rocky shore, on the opposite side of the bridge from the picket whom James had shot. “We’re gonna have to let this one go!”

“Like hell, Lawrence!” James raked out almost incoherently around the knife in his teeth. “Them blue-bellies get the guns and ammo that detail’s carryin’, Atlanta’s finished!”

“Hell, it’s probably finished anyway!”

A rifle barked. James saw the flash on the shore of the creek, about sixty yards away. The slug hammered the pylon that was now between him and Coker. The Union picket had found a position from which to shoot, and he’d be cutting loose now, most likely with one of the repeaters the Union had in its arsenal and which James would have given his eyeteeth for. Most of the Confederate soldiers were armed with badly outdated Enfield, Maynard, and Mississippi rifles, some still making do with Harper’s Ferry rifled muskets that were no match for the sixteen-shot Henry repeaters many blue-bellies were now sporting.

James removed the savage, bone-handled, hide-wrapped blade from his teeth and clenched it in his right fist as he drew his end of the crate against the pylon between him and Coker. “Set ’em up, Lawrence. I’m goin’ up top!”

“What the hell you gonna do up there?” Coker snapped, ripping off his end of the tarred burlap,
exposing the three bundles of dynamite, four sticks each, nestling amongst the straw. Each had a small looking glass strapped to it, to make a target of reflected ambient light should the raiders have to detonate the bundles in the darkness with their rifles. That was only if for some reason their four-pounder field gun, which they’d stolen from a Union battery in the early days of the fight for Chattanooga, didn’t fire. When the weather was damp, it often didn’t.

The rifle barked again, another slug tearing into the pylon and scattering splinters in all directions.

“I’m gonna buy you some time, Lawrence,” James said. “Stay behind this pylon and work fast. If you can’t move around without getting a third eye drilled in that wooden head of yours, strap all the dynamite to this one here.” He pounded the back of his fist against the stout oak post.

Coker drew a dynamite bundle and a long length of rope from the box. “What if blowing this one alone don’t take the whole bridge?”

James winced as the rifle popped again. “Then I reckon we’ll have to take out the supply train some other way.”


With six men?

As the rifle barked twice more, one slug drilling another pylon and the other splashing water near James, the young lieutenant climbed up on one of the weblike braces angling between the pylons, supporting them. He grinned at his partner. “You got anything else to do this fine Southern evenin’, Lawrence?”

“Ah, shit, Jimmy,” Coker said.

Chapter 2

While Coker worked on the far side of the pylon from the soldier shooting regularly from shore, James climbed toward the bridge, zigzagging between the stout oak posts rising from the muddy creek bed. The soldiers on the bridge were shouting and running from one side of the bridge to the other, trying to get an angle on James and Coker.

A couple fired shots, but their slugs merely splashed into the oily water.

James had climbed trees and stony mountainsides as a boy, running wild through the Tennessee and north Georgia wilderness, so he made fast time of frogging up the bridge’s girders. He hunkered just beneath the top of the bridge, a stout beam six inches above his head. Pausing to listen to the scrambling soldiers, who were all shouting and cajoling each other, he saw a couple of men from the bridge now running down the creek’s opposite bank. James had figured they’d try to get around in front of him and Coker, and that’s just what they were doing.

The Confederate felt his mouth and throat go dry.
Probably, he should have called off the mission just after Billy had died. Too late now. He and Lawrence would have to do the best they could. His other five men were lurking in the forest above where James, Krieg, and Coker had entered the stream, probably nervous as jackasses in a thunderstorm. But they’d hold their fire until James signaled them with his customary Rebel yell, so they didn’t risk hitting their own boys or the dynamite and blow the bridge too soon.

The plan had been to blow the bridge just as the supply train was crossing it, but that was likely impossible now. Now, if they were lucky, they’d blow the bridge tonight and at least delay the train and the Confederates’ convergence on Atlanta. Even that, under the circumstances, was a long shot.

James watched the three silhouettes run down to the water’s edge, ambient light glinting off the rifles in their hands. There were now four men on the shore, the young lieutenant thought. How many did that leave on the bridge? From the thudding of the boots above him, he judged there were three or four up there now.

“Where are they, Lieutenant?” one of the silhouettes called to the man shooting at Coker from the bridge’s opposite side.

The rifle blasted once more. Then the man on the far side of the bridge shouted, “I can’t see ’em! Can’t
you
?”

BOOK: The Bells of El Diablo
5.67Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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