“Suppose I say that no armed men come within the outermost perimeter of Fort Pillow?” Captain Anderson suggested. “That's about half a mile. There's not a chance in church anyone could hit you from farther off, even if some hothead should try it. And I will issue orders against any such thing.”

“Seems acceptable,” said Ferguson, nodding. “And you would want this truce to last till five o'clock, you said?”

“Oh, yes, just for the day. That should be plenty.”

“I agree.” Ferguson walked over to Anderson, who hadn't dismounted, and held out his hand. Anderson clasped it. The two white men got along well enough. Ben Robinson tried to imagine the Reb agreeing to a truce with a colored officer. The picture would not form. “How many wounded are we talking about?” Acting Master Ferguson inquired.

“I don't know, not exactly, but it isn't a small number,” Anderson replied. “Perhaps Captain Young here can give you a better notion.”

“I'm afraid not,” Young answered. “I don't know what happened in the fort after I managed to surrender, and the victors' blood was still running hot at the time.” He didn't want to come out and say the Confederates slaughtered the garrison, but he didn't want to lie, either. Ben Robinson granted him reluctant respect.

“I… see.” Ferguson could add two and two. He went on, “Well, we have a steamer coming right behind us in the hope she would be useful-the Platte Valley. I will order her to land alongside us, and we'll do what we can for these poor devils.” He looked up and down the riverbank. A lot of bodies had been carried up to the ditch and thrown in, but quite a few still remained. “If you will excuse me, Captain…”

Ferguson went back to the boat. The sailors who'd waited in it rowed him out to the Silver Cloud. Smoke poured from the gunboat's stacks as she neared the shore. Signal flags and then shouts ordered the Platte Valley up alongside her.

Captain Anderson looked at Ben Robinson again. “What did you do to earn those three chevrons, boy?”

“Made myself the best soldier I could, I reckon,” Robinson answered. Emboldened by the truce, he answered, “I sure blew some of your sojers to hell and gone while we was fightin'.”

“You lost,” Anderson said.

“Yes, suh. But we put up the best fight we could with what we had,” Robinson said.

The Confederate officer plucked at his beard. “A pity we didn't kill more of you.”

“Me, I reckon it's a shame we didn't kill more of y'all.” Robinson wouldn't have been so bold if the Reb hadn't tweaked him. He also wouldn't have been so bold if the Federal gunboat weren't lying right offshore. He didn't think the Confederate officer would murder him in cold blood with men from the U.S. Navy watching.

When the Confederate's hand dropped to his revolver, Ben wondered if he'd just made his last mistake. But Captain Anderson let it fall to his side. “Yeah, talk big now, nigger. God help you if we ever catch you again, though.”

“I ain't afraid.” Ben Robinson intended that for nothing more than a snappy comeback. But he felt the truth and the power in the words and repeated them, throwing them in Anderson's face: “By God, I ain't afraid!”

Sailors started taking wounded Federals aboard the Silver Cloud and the Platte Valley. The men who came for Robinson didn't have a stretcher-nothing but a plank that they carried between them. They set it on the riverbank by the wounded man. “Climb aboard,” one of them said. “We'll get you back to the gunboat.”

“Thank you kindly,” Robinson said as he gingerly flattened himself on the plank. “I is much obliged to you gentlemen.”

“Doin' our job,” the white man answered, and paused to spit a stream of tobacco juice. Then he said, “You ready, Zeke? We'll lift him on three. One… Two… Three!”

They lifted together. Both of them grunted. Zeke said, “You sure never missed no meals, did you, pal?”

That reminded Ben how ravenously hungry he was. “I ain't had nothin' a-tall for a whole day,” he said. “You got a hardtack you can spare?”

“You want one of those damn things, you must be hungry,” Zeke said.

“Wait till we get you in the boat,” the other bearer added. “Don't want to have to put you down and then pick you up again.”

Robinson couldn't complain about that; it made too much sense.

As soon as they carried him to the rowboat, the sailors each gave him a hardtack. The square crackers tasted like cardboard and weevils, the way they always did. He didn't care. They seemed wonderful.

More wounded Federals filled the rowboat. He was the only Negro in it. Many more whites than colored men seemed to be left alive. The Confederates hadn't murdered so many whites trying to surrender, or after they were already wounded. Oh, they'd killed some, but fewer. The wounded whites were also delighted to gnaw on hardtack.

When the boat was full, sweating sailors rowed the short distance out to the Silver Cloud. More men there hauled the soldiers from Fort Pillow up onto the gunboat's deck. The ship's surgeon took a look at Robinson's wound. “Well, you're not too bad,” he said, and went on to the white corporal next to him.

Ben wasn't offended. In fact, he found himself nodding. As long as he was on a U.S. Navy vessel, as long as Bedford Forrest's troopers couldn't kill him for the fun of it any more, he wasn't bad at all.

The sun was up, bright and cheerful, promising a day much warmer than the one just past. Bill Bradford wished it would have stopped in the sky before it ever rose. But he was no Joshua, to turn his wish into a command. He would have to make the best of things-if he could.

He still had no horse. He hadn't found a chance to steal one. He hadn't even found a place to buy one, though he would gladly have used the double eagle he'd managed to keep in his pocket. Staying on foot, in a country patrolled by Bedford Forrest's troopers, was asking for trouble.

If I can get past Covington… But he'd already had to duck off the road three times to keep mounted Confederates from spotting him. If he was careless even once…

And things could go wrong even if he wasn't even slightly careless. Bradford found that out the hard way early in the morning when a shout rang out behind him: “Hey, you! Yeah, you in the scruffy clothes! Hold up, there!”

He whirled. He almost jumped out of the sutler's clothes he'd taken. Four troopers in butternut and gray came trotting toward him. Two carried rifle muskets, or possibly carbines (he wasn't drawing fine distinctions just then), the other two revolvers. He couldn't possibly have seen them, because they'd just ridden out from in back of a stand of oaks he'd passed himself only a couple of minutes before. They must have turned on to the southbound road from a smaller crossroad, because they hadn't been following him before.

What to do? It boiled down to running or bluffing. If he ran, they would ride him down and shoot him. That was only too plain, for he saw no good hiding places he could reach before they caught him. It would have to be bluff, then.

He waved to the Rebs and waited for them to come up. “Mornin',” he said.

His smile didn't seem to warm their hearts. “Who the hell are you, and what are you doing here?” one of them demanded.

“Well, my name's Joe Peterson.” Bradford picked something ordinary, but not, he hoped, so ordinary that it roused suspicion. “I'm home on furlough from Braxton Bragg's army. And I was out sparking my girl last night, if you want to know the truth.” He smiled again, his expression this time half embarrassed, half ingratiating.

All his acting talents were wasted on the hard-faced Confederate. “On furlough from Bragg's army, are you? Let's see some papers, then.”

Bradford went through his pockets. He found no papers of any sort. Even if he had, he couldn't have displayed them-they would have authorized his presence at Fort Pillow. That was the last thing he could afford to do. It was, he judged, much worse than showing that his name wasn't Peterson.