The Railroad War (39 page)

After the fourteen locomotives were secured and inspected, they were passed over to two-man crews, who were to make them ready
for travel.

It was no surprise to Noah, when he made his inspection, that the Yankees had left the engines without either fuel or water.
That’s what he would have done in their place, especially if he was using green troops to guard them, as they had done.

Having foreseen that eventuality, Noah had prepared for it. A train carrying wood, water, and two armed companies on flatcars
fortified with cotton bales was due to arrive at seven
A.M.

When his supply train didn’t arrive on schedule, Noah was not immediately apprehensive, but he asked Lam to order the troops
to scout around and gather what wood they could. Anything at all that was more or less loose and would burn would do: fences,
sheds, corn cribs, telegraph poles.

At eight o’clock Lam sent a dozen men riding south to see about the cause of the supply train’s delay.

By nine, the wood gatherers had collected enough of a fuel pile to work with, once the pieces were chopped and divided among
the fourteen locomotives. But that left the water problem. All fourteen tanks in the locomotive tenders were dry.

Within half a mile of the spur there were small springs, and a farmhouse had a working well. But there was no way the water
from either the springs or the well could be transported to the tenders in sufficient quantities to be useful.

“We could all drink ourselves full,” Lam offered to Noah, “and then piss in the tanks. A hundred men ought to be able to piss
enough to make steam for fourteen locomotives.”

Noah was not amused.

“How about using a hundred horses and a hundred men to haul the locomotives,” he countered.

Lam was no more amused by that idea than Noah had been by Lam’s.

One of the wood-gathering parties, exploring farther afield than any of Lam’s men had done previously, rode to the end of
the spur, which was about a mile and a half from its junction with the main line. What they found was a gravel quarry. The
gravel was used as ballast for the roadbed of the rail line, but it was not currently being worked, and so the pit was half
filled with water. This information was passed on to Lam and Noah, but neither paid much attention to it. The water there
was no more accessible than the water from the springs.

Just after ten, the twelve men who’d been sent down the track returned. The supply train had broken down just north of Tupelo,
and the locomotive would have to be taken to the shop in Meridian for repairs. Meanwhile another engine had been called up
to replace it. It ought to arrive, it was reported, sometime that evening.

The day was turning hot, and the latest scouting reports indicated that Federal forces were not yet active nearby. So Lam
released a third of his troops for a swim in the quarry pit. In an hour another third would have their turn.

As these men started out for the quarry, Noah decided to join them—not because he much felt like swimming, but because he
wanted to have a look at all that water. Perhaps when he got there, he’d come up with some ingenious way to bring it the mile
and a half to his tenders.

What he found when he reached the pit was a small, muddy lake and a long, low weather-beaten shed. The shed contained rusted
picks and shovels, wheelbarrows, three broken water pumps, and a few fifty-foot sections of ragged canvas hose. The pumps
and hose had been used to drain the pit when it was being worked.

On further inspection, Noah determined that a good mechanic might salvage a working pump from the three bad ones. And temporary
patches might allow the hoses to carry water, though they would never again be watertight. He went to find a mechanic and
a seamstress.

I have three good mechanics here, he said to himself as he made his way back down the spur to the locomotives. But where in
hell am I going to find a seamstress?

“You’re going to think I’m mad,” he said to Lam, who was munching on a peach. The three mechanics were already on their way
to the quarry. “But if we had a seamstress, I think I could water the tenders.”

“A seamstress?” Lam asked incredulously.

Noah explained why he needed someone who could sew.

“Right,” Lam said, and smiled.

Noah took that smile—mistakenly—as a sign of regret. “What I think I could do,” Noah said, “is walk over to that farmhouse
and see if the woman there could do the job for us.”

“Well, you’re right,” Lam said. “I can’t get you a seamstress.”

“Then I’ll go over to the house.”

“Wait,” Lam said. “I said I can’t find a seamstress. That’s because we’re all men here, and a seamstress is a woman, by definition.”

“I’m not up for jokes, Lam. It’s getting on to noon, and we’ve got fourteen deathly idle engines here.”

“You ever heard of sergeants, Noah?”

“Sure I’ve heard of sergeants.”

“I thought you might have heard of sergeants, you coming out of West Point and all. But the way you’re acting, I thought maybe
you forgot.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, although he already realized what Lam was leading up to.

“A lot of things in the cavalry need sewing. That’s what sergeants are for. They all have needle and thread in their saddlebags.
Career sergeants—not the other kind that need their daddies to show them where to aim when they piss. What kind of career
sergeant would leave home without needle and thread?”

The first sergeant Lam grabbed, whose name was O’Rourke, proved Lam right, and Noah led him back to the quarry.

While O’Rourke and the mechanics were busy, Noah had the last tender in the line uncoupled. A team of horses then hauled it
back to the end of the spur.

By two-thirty they had a single pump working, along with enough hose to connect the pit with the tender.

An hour and a half later, they had filled the tender’s tanks, which held two thousand gallons, and they’d pulled the tender
back up to its locomotive.

They steamed up the locomotive successfully, and after that it was a matter of shuttling it back and forth between the quarry
and the other locomotives. They’d fill up the tanks, load up the pump and hose onto the tender, pull up to the line of engines,
and transfer 150 to 200 gallons into each one, enough water for the journey to Tupelo, where the tanks could be filled completely.

The night before, when they had cut the telegraph between the fourteen locomotives and General Dodge’s headquarters in Corinth,
Lam Kemble’s scouts had left intact twelve miles of line north of where they were. And then they’d set up a telegraph post
at the far end of the line—in order to give Lam and Noah early warning of Yankee activity. The free-ranging teams of scouts
would report in to the telegraph post every hour or so, or whenever there was a sign of enemy movement south.

At 6:27 Lam’s telegrapher brought him the first bad news all day. A Yankee cavalry force, two hundred strong, was moving swiftly
down the road toward Baldwyn. They’d reach the spur before dark.

At 6:34 the telegrapher brought another message. A twelve-car train loaded with soldiers and light field pieces had passed
the telegraph post. The train looked to be moving at about fifteen miles an hour, which meant that Lam and Noah could expect
it in less than an hour.

“It looks to me like General Dodge’s people have finally got wind of us and have gotten off their asses in a big way,” Lam
said.

“We’ve been lucky we’ve had so much time,” Noah said. “We originally planned to be steaming out of here by ten this morning,
if you recall.”

“How much time before you can move the engines?” Lam asked.

“Another hour, hour and a half to finish filling enough to move. And we have to build up steam, too.”

“You can be doing that at the same time?”

“Of course. I plan to.”

“Then I’ll see what I can do about delaying that train. We don’t have to worry about the cavalry that’s coming—not yet.”

“When did you tear up the tracks north of here?” Noah asked.

“What do you mean, tear up the tracks?”

“A section of track,” Noah said reasonably, “thereby preventing rail passage south—which is where
we
are. When did your people do that?”

“They didn’t do that. How was I to know that they should have torn up tracks?”

“Because you’re a colonel in the Confederate cavalry, you horse’s ass, with a good command and a West Point education. And
I always thought you were smart.”

“You should have told me.”

“Shit,” Noah said. “Any virgin in Mississippi could tell you about tearing up tracks.”

“There aren’t any more virgins in Mississippi.”

“Go on, get out of here. Get busy. Make yourself useful. Do something destructive.”

“I’ve
never
had such a mad, harum-scarum day in all my life!” Fanny Shaw whispered. Her whisper was due to the proximity of a twenty-foot
Federal longboat two boat lengths away out on one of the numberless channels of the Darien River. The Darien was itself one
of the estuarial arms of the Altamaha.

“Hush, Fanny!” Ash mouthed, holding up a restraining hand. He was covered with mud and slime and sweat. Leeches clung here
and there on his arms and legs and neck. He was too exhausted to deal with them now. Even with all his seemingly boundless
energy, he looked near to collapsing with weariness.

Fanny was about to say something else, but thought better of it. She also thought about slapping at the mosquitoes that were
lighting on her unprotected face and neck, but she thought better of that, too. She was acting with admirable restraint, she
thought to herself as she suffered.

Fanny, Ash, and First Officer Muller were in a twelve-foot boat, hidden a few feet up a tiny branch of the Darien. The growth
that covered them was thick enough to make them invisible to the Yankees gliding a few yards away. It was also thick enough
to muffle any conversation the three on the smaller boat might have ventured. But it was safer to keep silent.

The Federal longboat passed safely out of sight and earshot.

“Now can we leave this place, Ash?” Fanny asked.

Ash shook his head. “We’ll stay here until dark. Then we’ll row up beyond Darien. They’ll be watching the town for us.” He
glanced at Muller. “What do you think about that, Mr. Muller?”

“Whatever you say, Mr. Kemble,” Muller said.

“I’ll be eaten alive by bugs, Ash!” Fanny groaned.

“If I’d had my choice, Fanny, I’d have ordered up a different course of events for you. But here we are.”

Ash’s intimate familiarity with the maze of waterways around the Kemble plantations had come in handy, after all.

Once
Miranda
was on the beach of Little Saint Simon’s, they had very little time to abandon her and escape. The captain of the
Florida
had pursuing boats in the water even as
Miranda
drove to shore. Another boat was dispatched to squadron headquarters ten miles away on Saint Simon’s Island; reinforcements
would not be long in coming.

Meyer and those of the crew who could be moved took to two longboats, while Ash, Fanny, and Muller—and the eight chests of
drugs—went in a smaller boat.

Before taking care of his own business, Ash led the captain and his longboats to the town of Darien. Darien was long deserted
because of the war, but it was on the mainland, and it was in the opposite direction from the Federal base. The captain and
his men could make their way to safety with relative ease.

The captain and crew having been disposed of, Ash and Muller rowed Fanny and the chests along the snaking back channels to
Kemble Island itself. They stowed the boat up one of the canals behind a floodgate, and while Muller stood watch over the
boat and its cargo, Fanny and Ash made their way to the main house, where they gathered digging tools.

There was a patch of woodland suitable for concealing eight fifty-pound chests on the north side of General’s Island. This
island, also Kemble land, lay east of the main island between Kemble and Darien. Fanny had passed by it many years before
on the famous night when she had rowed away from the Kemble plantations.

The way they had to take to the woodland on General’s Island was tortuous. They had to go carefully; the Federals were out
in surprising force, searching for survivors from .the
Miranda.
They must have somehow sensed that they had significant prey in their sights.

There was another reason, too, for the tortuous course Ash took. He wanted to make certain that First Officer Muller would
never again find his way to the spot Ash had chosen for burial of his chests. Ash had no reason to mistrust Muller, but the
light of honor and responsibility dims in the presence of goods that can be turned into half a million dollars in gold.

A squad of Yankees was working through the north woods of General’s Island even as Ash and Muller placed the chests into the
ground. A mere squad was not enough to find Ash Kemble on any Kemble island. Ash could have eluded a division of Federal troops
on General’s Island.

They finished burying the chests late in the afternoon, and then started back toward Darien. But when they approached the
town, they were surprised by a Federal picket boat that had been lying hidden in one of the branches of the Darien, just as
Ash was to do a couple of hours later.

The Federals fired, and there was a chase. And the chase grew complicated when the Federals were joined by another boat, which
had been positioned to head Ash’s boat off.

As the Yankees closed in, Ash turned into a channel invisible to all who had not grown up in these parts. After the first
hundred feet, it was as much semisolid mud as water, and the two men had to climb out and drag the boat across it. But the
discomfort did not displease the two men at all. The Yankee longboats could never follow them through any muck they had to
drag their smaller, shallower draft boat through.