Authors: Jesse Taylor Croft
“What about them?” Noah snapped.
“Look around you,” Hottel said with a sweeping gesture. “You need that equipment now more than ever.”
“That’s right, Captain,” Noah said with growing impatience. “I need them desperately. And I can try to summon up spirits from
the vasty deep,” he went on, “but will they answer?” He shook his head grimly.
“Aye,” Hottel said, “but what about me?”
“You?” Noah asked, raising his brows.
“You might recall that you made a suggestion that I look into the matter.”
Noah looked at him. He vaguely remembered something of the kind.
“I have time for that, since you have this business as much under control as any mortal could. There’s no need for me here,
and no one will doubt that the South needs those engines.”
Noah couldn’t help but notice that Hottel had skirted the issue of whether he was supposed to be Noah’s superior, or vice
versa. That was an issue Noah wanted to thrash out no more than Hottel apparently did. In fact, as Noah thought about it,
the captain seemed to be implicitly admitting that Noah himself was in charge of railroads in this part of the world, and
Noah liked that.
“And you are proposing that you will find them and bring them in safely?” Noah said with a sharp glance at Gar Thomas. Gar
shook his head almost invisibly, to indicate that this was the first he’d heard of Hottel’s idea. With an almost equally invisible
nod, he indicated that he thought the idea was a good one.
“I’m proposing that I do what I can to determine the location of the locomotives that are still in northern Mississippi. If
and when I locate them, we’ll work out together how best to deal with them.”
Noah nodded, deep in thought. “How long will you take?” he asked finally.
Hottel shrugged. “Who knows?”
“And what if General Sherman gets to them first?”
“Then it will do us no good,” Hottel said. “My own estimate, however, is that after Sherman takes Jackson, he’ll have his
hands busy enough with destroying the locomotives and whatever else he can easily reach. My hunch is, further, that the wrecked
equipment is scattered about here and there. His people might find some of it, but not all. So that leaves it for us to wait
for the Yankees to leave and then bring all the equipment in.”
“You don’t just leave locomotives under rugs and in cellar corners,” Noah said. “I’ve never heard of anybody mislaying a locomotive,
much less
fifty
of the damn things.”
“That’s right,” Hottel said without losing a beat. “That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking. You don’t just lose track of fifty
locomotives—unless you want to hide them.”
“Huh?” Noah asked, incredulous. “Who’d want to hide fifty locomotives? Why? They don’t do anybody any good unless they’re
being used.”
“If you owned a railroad during wartime,” Hottel said slowly, “how would you like your equipment disposed of?”
“For the good of my country,” Noah said instantly.
“You’re not thinking like an owner, Major. You’re thinking like a soldier. An owner wants his equipment—his expensive and
well-nigh irreplaceable equipment—safe and undamaged.
Hidden,
in other words.”
“Jesus Christ!” Noah said.
Hottel stared at him.
“And you think you can locate all of this stuff in a few days?” Noah asked.
“No more than a couple of weeks,” Hottel said. “There are not many places where you can hide a locomotive.”
Noah thought on that for a time, then said, “All right, fine, let’s say you do find the equipment. What do we do with it once
we have it? It’s going to do us no good at all in Mississippi.”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it,” Captain Hottel said.
Noah turned to Gar Thomas. “Gar,” he asked, “how come you haven’t said anything about these locomotives, assuming that Captain
Hottel is right about them?”
“You’re talking about other railroads than the one I know,” he said. “But what he says makes sense. I like it.”
“I like it, too,” Noah admitted. “Let’s think about it a bit while we attend to matters here.” He glanced up the track as
he spoke, toward the place where the battered remains of the locomotives lay. “Come on with me,” he said, “both of you. Let’s
see what these things look like after that crash.”
“You go on,” Gar said. “I’ve got to go take care of that girl. She’ll kill herself in that wreckage.”
Noah turned his head to look at the girl whom he had watched a few minutes earlier rummaging through the debris. She now seemed
to be thigh deep in charred planks and was digging furiously with a more or less intact board. Her reddish-brown hair was
in knots where once there had been curls, and her face was smeared with grime.
“Leave her,” Noah said.
“But no girl should be doing what she’s doing.”
“Leave her. She’ll be all right,” Noah said, his voice hard and bitter. “There’s nothing that girl would rather be doing right
now. That kind of passion can only be satisfied by going through with it.”
“All right,” Gar said unhappily.
“Come on,” Noah said, and the three men went to look at the locomotives. Noah knew, when he saw them, that his original guess
had been right. There was no sense trying to save anything. The best thing would be to get all the wreckage out of the way,
repair the tracks, and get on to something else.
And then, not far away, they heard a scream.
“It’s that girl,” Gar yelled, breaking into a run. “I knew I shouldn’t have let her stay there.”
Noah didn’t answer him, but he, too, started running fast enough to keep up with Gar. William Hottel came up behind.
The girl was still screaming when the three men reached her. She was holding her hands out in front of her, waving them back
and forth painfully. They were white and charred and blistered, because she had plunged them inadvertently into a still-smoldering
pile of rubbish.
“Damn it to hell!” Noah said.
“You’ll be all right,” Gar said, rushing up to her and taking hold of her shoulders. But the girl refused to budge. She just
kept screaming. Then the three men realized that she wasn’t screaming because of her burned hands, but because she had uncovered
the bodies of her mother and her two sisters. Most of their clothes, save for a few blackened scraps, and much of their flesh,
had been scourged away by the flames. And indeed, the three bodies were only recognizable because of their number and their
size and vaguely feminine shape, and because they were huddled so tightly together.
When he realized what these figures were, it was all Noah could take. He doubled over and retched.
When he was done, he went over to Gar and the girl. Gar had his arms around her, trying to pull her gently off the wreckage.
But the girl would have none of that. She was crying out fiercely, “Go ‘way! Go ‘way! Let me be! I don’t want you here!”
“Leave her,” Noah said.
“What?” Gar said with an incredulous look.
“Do as she asks,” Noah said. “Leave her. She’ll calm down later. She doesn’t want you or me with her in her pain.”
“But did you see those hands? Those are dangerous burns.”
“I know. But leave her. Let’s get going. We’ve got five hundred men waiting down the way for directions, and I want them to
have this mess off the tracks by nightfall.”
“But the girl?”
“Send one of the men over in a while to look after her and her kin.”
“He’s right,” Captain Hottel said.
“I…” Gar said, wanting to refuse to obey. The girl had managed to jerk out of his grasp, and Gar, realizing that she was not
to be subdued, backed slowly away.
“I’ll tell you something,” Noah said as they walked toward the waiting soldiers. “When I catch the spy who did this, I’m going
to personally tear his heart out.”
“You’ll have any help you need from me,” Gar said. “And from me,” Captain Hottel said.
General Joseph Johnston withdrew from Jackson, Mississippi, on the night of July 16. As soon as he was aware of the Confederate
movement, General Sherman, making no effort to pursue the retreating Rebels, ordered General Frederick Steele to move his
Nineteenth Corps into the city.
General Sherman himself entered Jackson on the morning of the seventeenth. He came in on horseback with his aide, Sam Hawken.
The two men rode down State Street as far as the state capitol. They dismounted there, leaving their horses in the care of
the commander of the company that had occupied that facility, and entered the building.
While they had been on horseback, the general had been deep in thought, and Sam knew better than to intrude upon him. But
once they were inside the capitol, Sherman broke his silence. They were then walking slowly under the great, elaborately decorated
dome. It was fifty feet high, and surmounted by a great lanternlike skylight that let in the sun. Their hard-soled boots echoed
on the marble, making a hollow sound. Sam and the general were the only occupants of the vast and imposing space.
“This is where Mississippi enacted the Ordinance of Secession,” Sherman said softly. He was the first Union general to stand
under that dome since the secession ordinance was enacted.
“Here?” Sam said, indicating the space beneath the dome.
“Not here, no. But in the house chamber over there.” He pointed. “Mississippi was the second state to join the Confederacy.
And now I’m taking possession of it for the Union.”
“It gives you a kind of thrill, doesn’t it?” Sam said.
“Yes,” Sherman said. “It’s another corner turned. It makes the war that much closer to being over.”
How much more will we have to fight? Sam wondered. And how many more women and children will die?
Sherman, who at times almost seemed to read his mind, spoke to Sam’s questions, even though Sam hadn’t uttered them out loud.
“But my guess is that there are going to be many more dead women and children before this is done. It’s not going to be easy
on the ones who aren’t soldiers. It’ll be just as hard on them as on the soldiers themselves.
“And the war has at least two more years of life in it, as well. I wouldn’t want to be a southern woman during these times,
I can tell you.”
“Two more years, sir? You really believe that?”
“At least,” the general said, shaking his head slowly, grim-faced. “You’ve seen the new way they’re fighting. After they tried
to hold Vicksburg and lost it, and lost an entire army along with it, they’re not going to try to hold anyplace any longer.
They’ll move out anytime we come close, just the way Joe did last night. And then if we finally do manage to corner Joe and
beat him, they’ll go on fighting with irregulars—guerrillas. They’ll melt into the hills and woods, and then this goddamned
war could last until 1900.”
Before Sam could reply to that, the general led him to a stairway that went to the third floor. “Come on,” he said. Suddenly
energized, he accelerated to a brisk pace. “Let’s go upstairs. I want to get a high up view of this city.”
“Yes, sir,” Sam said.
“Do you think I should have gone after Joe Johnston, Sam?” Sherman asked. As he spoke, he bounded up the stairs two at a time.
“I truly don’t know,” Sam answered quickly, breathlessly trying to keep up with his commander. This was not quite the truth.
If he had been in command, he would have kept the pressure on his opponents. But he was not about to try to second-guess Cump
Sherman right now, especially when Sherman was using him as nothing more than a sounding board.
“It would be a great pleasure to fight him, God knows. He’s the best they’ve got, I think, except for Bob Lee. But Joe is
not quick to fight. He trades for time and territory. He’ll move and stop, move and stop, the way the Russians did when Napoleon
invaded. And when he finally does do battle with me, it’ll be at a place where I won’t want to fight him.
“Maybe I should have kept him bottled up here.”
“We tried our best, sir.”
“Yes, we did,” Sherman said. “You did especially, putting the railroad east out of commission the way you did. That was good
work.”
“It wasn’t good enough,” Sam said. “They had the railroad operating again eighteen hours later. I was shocked that they fixed
it so fast.”
“So I guess they’ve found people who can do for them what Grenville Dodge has done for us,” Sherman said philosophically.
General Dodge had been in charge of a number of railroad repair projects in Tennessee, and he had completed them sooner than
anyone imagined possible.
They were on the third floor of the capitol now. Sherman tried several doors, but they were locked. Finally he found one that
was open, and they entered the office that was behind it. Across the room there was a wide, tall window. Sherman went up to
it and threw it open.
“There, by God,” he said. “Now we’ll see what we’ve got.”
“Yes, sir,” Sam said.
Sherman leaned far out the window, breathing in the air deeply and smiling. He stayed that way for perhaps three minutes,
then he pulled himself back inside and looked at Sam.
“Quite a view,” he said.
“It is that, sir,” Sam said.
“Do you think you’ve had a chance to take most of it in?”
“I think so, sir.”
“Then tell me what you’ve seen.”
“A fair-sized Mississippi town,” Sam said cautiously, not sure what he was supposed to have noticed. “Some of it damaged by
shelling.”
“You know what I see, Sam?” Sherman said. “I see prosperity.”
“Prosperity, sir?” Sam asked. That was the last thing he would have considered. Jackson may have been a prosperous town once,
before the war, but now it was drained and beaten, just like most of the rest of Mississippi.
“That’s right, Sam, prosperity. And I see military capability.”
“Yes, sir.” Sam didn’t see much of that, either, but he was not about to contradict the general.
“That’s right, Sam: prosperity and military capability. And I can’t allow either one of those to exist here. I can’t permit
it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Sherman gave him a hard, cold stare. “You look doubtful.”
“No, sir, I just don’t understand. This place looks pretty well beaten to me.”