28/29 MAY 1851
Ben McCulloch stepped back into the shadows when he saw the Confederate officer creeping up to him. “Should we be happy that there’s only two of them?” Captain Stewart asked. McCulloch, Stewart and Cleburne were hidden among the outbuildings of the first house they’d encountered on the road into Washington. Up that street, intermittently lit by the flickering of a nearly dead torch, stood a pair of soldiers, muskets propped on their shoulders. The men, in their white fatigue uniforms, looked like ghosts haunting the captive city.
“Depends on how you look at it.” McCulloch spat as quietly as he could. His stomach was tight; stalking criminals was one thing, but not even the viciousness of the Regulator-Moderator War in the north-eastern counties had unnerved him the way this counter-insurgency seemed to be doing. “On the bright side, only two of them means it’ll be that much easier for us to take ‘em. On the nasty side, if we have to recapture this city two men at a time we’ll be still be at it when Walker’s men get here.” He nodded for the others to follow him, and rejoined the too-small group of patriots waiting in a hollow just outside of town.
“We should get on with this, then,” Secretary Travis said when McCulloch had explained the situation to him. “Are you ready, Captain Miller?”
Miller, a middle-aged farmer with a bland, oval face, tiny eyes and an unruly crop of thin, white-blond hair, had not impressed McCulloch as being particularly bellicose. When McCulloch had reached Miller’s farmhouse in the early hours of this morning, accompanied by a half-dozen men from Waller County’s militia company and with the promise of as many more to be in Washington by sunrise, he’d found Miller with his wife and slaves casually serving coffee and fritters to the secretary of state and a scattering of bleary-eyed men. The gathering had resembled the tail-end of a husking party more than it had a council of war, and McCulloch had found himself having to work not to let his nervousness and discomfort show. The slow trip to the Brazos crossing—where they’d met Captain Stewart, who surely did appear capable of bellicosity—hadn’t done much more to improve McCulloch’s opinion of the militia captain, or the men with him.
If Stewart and Cleburne were unhappy with the resources they’d been given they didn’t show it, so McCulloch decided his own worries were perhaps ill-informed. And when Stewart said, “Time to break some heads,” McCulloch allowed himself a smile.
Stewart set off; the moment he emerged from the hollow he shifted to move behind the darkened, shuttered house, running with a peculiar gait that suggested an attempt to move forward while flattening himself to the ground at the same time. McCulloch was surprised to find himself mimicking the Virginian’s movements as he followed. The crouching run felt natural for the kind of work they were about to do, and he caught up with Stewart quickly.
They passed through a series of yards, dodging privies and garbage heaps that made McCulloch wonder just how slovenly the residents of the capital could possibly be. Eventually McCulloch decided that they’d passed the sentries, and he stopped beside a shed that leaned one way into a building that leaned the other; the angle at which the two buildings subsided toward one another left a man-sized gap between them at ground level. Motioning Stewart to stay where he was, McCulloch dropped to his knees and crawled between the buildings toward the street.
As he edged his head around the side of the building, McCulloch realized with pleasure and some relief that he was no longer nervous. There was nothing so unusual about this activity after all; fighting an army would seem to be no more frightening than trying to sneak up on a thief or murderer.
They had, indeed, passed the sentries; the two soldiers stood not twenty feet away from him, right in the middle of the street. If I wanted, McCulloch thought, I could shoot them both from here and nobody would see me. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
Moving back, he waved to catch Stewart’s eye, held a finger to his lips to emphasize the need for silence, and motioned the captain to follow him. They emerged onto the wooden sidewalk just as Captain Miller appeared on horseback, flanked by Travis and Cleburne, at the far end of the street. The soldiers raised their muskets and began to move—somewhat reluctantly, McCulloch thought—toward the horsemen. McCulloch and Stewart followed them, moving quietly but quickly to narrow the gap between them.
They’d closed to within a few feet when one of the sentries stiffened, then whirled around. “Don’t,” McCulloch said, pointing his pistol at the man’s face.
“Nice and quiet, now,” Stewart said, “drop the muskets, gentlemen.”
The second man turned, his face the picture of despair. They haven’t even cocked the hammers, McCulloch noted disapprovingly. When this is over, we’re going to have to do some long hard thinking about our army. The muskets hit the road with a prolonged, dull clatter that was loud enough to make McCulloch wince. Then the soldiers raised their hands above their heads. McCulloch gestured for them to turn around, which they did just as Miller, Travis and Cleburne reached them.
“Men,” Miller said, “I’m Captain Miller and I’m going to give you a chance to redeem yourselves.”
“Wass?” one of the sentries said. It sounded like something a snake would say.
“Damn,” McCulloch muttered. “Another Prussian.”
Cleburne rattled off a guttural speech that caught the soldiers’ attention; the only sense McCulloch could make of it was the word “Miller.” Everyone stared at the Irishman, the soldiers’ countenances brightening with relief and possibly even pleasure. Russell, the newspaperman, muttered, “Christ Jesus, an Irish polymath. Who’d believe it?”
Cleburne turned to Travis and Miller. “I’ve traveled a bit,” he said in answer to their quizzical looks. “Misspent youth and all that. Carry on, Captain. I’ll translate as best I can.”
Miller—in tones far too ponderous for a farmer, McCulloch thought—declaimed to the captive soldiers that the men who had ordered them to capture the city were acting illegally, and that their true duty was owed to himself as the duly authorized military representative of the government, which was itself personified in Secretary of State Travis. Cleburne gamely stammered through a guttural, hocking accompaniment to Miller’s drone; it seemed to McCulloch, who carefully watched the soldiers, that Cleburne was doing a good job of translating, however halting his German might be. When the Irishman repeated Miller’s offer of clemency if the men would join him, and persuade their fellows to do so as well, the eagerness on the soldiers’ faces needed no translation at all, and for the first time since meeting the fleeing, downtrodden secretary on the road out of Washington, McCulloch began to hope that they might yet save the city and the republic.
Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen
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