American Front

"West," Captain Lincoln answered. "The blockhouse they built to protect the railroad is on the east side of town. We don't want to tangle with that. Them damn machine guns, they're liable to take all the fun out of war."

The standard-bearer, a kid named Gibbons, pointed ahead to a smudge on the horizon. "Reckon that's Kingman, sir."

"Swing left," Lincoln told him. "We'll want to set ourselves on the track a couple miles away from town."

Up ahead, a church bell began ringing as if a

He glanced over to Brock. The sergeant nodded back at him. It was nice to have an officer who knew which end was up.

"There's the track," Lincoln said. "Let's go!"

They knew what to do. Some of them had grandfathers who'd done the same thing in the War of Secession. They had better tools for mischief than their grandfathers had used, though. Under Captain Lincoln's direction, the troopers fa

Ramsay's horse shied under him at the flat, harsh bark of the explosion. Clods of dirt came raining down on him and the animal both; he hadn't moved back quite far enough. You could make a hell of a hole with dynamite, a hole that would take a long time to fill by pick-and-shovel work. The explosive also did a good job of twisting rails out of shape. Till the Yanks brought in some fresh iron, they weren't going to be using this line to ship things from one coast to the other.

Dismounting, Ramsay gave the reins to a cavalryman who was already holding two other horses. Then he went over to the pack animals and started pulling crowbars off the pa

The Confederates fell to work with a will, laughing and joking and whooping as they separated the iron rails from the wooden ties that bound them. The demolition men used gasoline to start a fire on the prairie. They didn't worry about its spreading, as they would have back in their own country. If it got out of hand, that was the Yankees' problem.

"Come on!" Ramsay said again. He lugged a cross tie over to the fire and threw it in. The rest of the troopers followed his example. Then, several men to a rail, they hauled the lengths of track over and threw them in, too. They'd slump in the heat and have to be taken to an ironworks to be straightened.

They had one rail left to cast into the fire when gunshots rang out in the east, over toward Kingman: not just rifle shots, but the hard, quick chatter of a machine gun. "Mount and form skirmish line!" Captain Lincoln yelled. "No more horseplay, not a bit-we've got some real work to do now."

Ramsay reclaimed his horse and sprang into the saddle. He checked to make sure he had a round in the chamber of his Tredegar carbine, then made sure his front pockets were full of fresh five-round clips. He had a cavalry saber, a copy of the British pattern of 1908, strapped to the left side of his saddle, but who could guess whether he'd get a chance to use it against a machine gun?

Captain Lincoln was holding a pair of field glasses up to his eyes. "Looks like they've got maybe half a company of horse," he said. "Half a company of horse and-uh-oh. They got one of those newfangled armored automobiles with 'em, too. That's where the machine gun is at." A predatory grin stretched across his face. "Well, let's go see what the contraption is worth. Move 'em out!" His voice rose to a shout again.

Before long, Ramsay could pick out the armored car without any help from field glasses. As it bounced over the prairie, it kicked up more dust than half a dozen horses would have. The Confederate pickets fell back before it; the Yankee horsemen, encouraged by the mechanical monster's presence, pursued a lot more aggressively than they would have otherwise, considering how outnumbered they were.

The armored car didn't move much faster than a trotting horse. The ma chine gun it mounted sat in a steel box on top of the superstructure; the gu

He rapidly discovered that wasn't quite true. Not only did the gun traverse in its mounting, but the driver, by swinging the front end of the armored car this way and that, could bring it to bear on targets it wouldn't have been able to reach otherwise. And the Yankee troopers were doing their best to make sure the Confederates couldn't outflank the ugly, noisy thing, anyhow.

A bullet cracked past Ramsay's head. The noise-and the fright it gave him-made him realize this wasn't practice any more. The U.S. soldiers were doing their damnedest to kill him, and their damnedest, by the way his comrades and their horses were crashing to the ground, was better than he'd expected. He'd never seen combat before, not even fighting Mexican bandits along the frontier with the Empire. His cherry was gone now, by Jesus.

He raised his carbine to his shoulder and fired at a green-gray-clad Yankee. The fellow did not pitch from the saddle, so he had to have missed. He worked the bolt to get rid of the casing and chamber a fresh round, then fired again. Another bullet zipped past him, and another. Now he didn't bother looking after he fired, to see what effect each round had. The more he put in the air, the better his chance of hitting something.

A lot of bullets were hitting the armored car. The sound of them rattling off its side put Ramsay in mind of hail hitting a tin roof. But the car kept on coming, like an ironclad smashing its way through a navy of wooden ships. The comparison was apt, for it was doing more damage to the Confederates all by its lonesome than all the troopers who came with it.

Bobby Brock made a noise somewhere between a groan and a scream. There was a neat hole in the front of his uniform tunic. As he slumped down over his horse's neck, Ramsay got a look at the hole the bullet had made going out through his back. That wasn't neat at all. It looked more as if somebody had set off half a stick of dynamite in his chest.

The trooper right alongside of Brock went down as his horse took three bullets-neck, barrel, and hock-from that damned machine gun in the space of a second and a half. The cavalryman pulled himself free, but he didn't bounce to his feet. Having a horse fall on your leg wasn't the best thing that could ever happen to it.

For a couple of dreadful minutes, Ramsay was afraid the armored car would win the little battle all by its lonesome, even though the Confederate troopers were mopping the floor with the damnyankees whenever they could engage them away from the car with its machine gun. But then the vehicle, all of its tires shot out, slowed to walking pace and, when it went into a hole, couldn't pull itself out no matter how the engine growled and roared and sent up clouds of stinking exhaust.

Ramsay threw back his head and let out the catamount wail of a Rebel yell. "Damn thing is stuck, boys!" he shouted. "Now we can get around behind it and settle the rest of these bastards."

The Confederates went wide to right and left around the bogged-down armored car, getting away from the deadly arc of fire its machine gun could command. Once that gauntlet was run, chasing the Yankee cavalry back toward Kingman proved the work of only a few minutes.

"And now we settle with this goddamn thing," Captain Lincoln said, riding toward the armored car from the rear. The machine gu