I Travel by Night Read Online Free PDF Page B

know you travel by night. He does too.
    And the missive was signed, Your friend, John .
    Phoenix went on. The moon moved across the sky. The forest pulsed with life unseen, though Lawson caught the occasional shape of an animal out in the dark. The ground was still firm, not yet swampy. Above his head the canopy of trees blotted out the stars. Lawson had the small oil-painted portrait of Eva Kingsley—painted two years ago, when she was seventeen—in his head; he would know her when he saw her, if she was not much changed.
    Forward …
    He was drowsing a bit, letting Phoenix lead the way. He could smell the damp of morning in the sultry air.
    Forward, Nineteenth Alabama…!
    And just that fast, it was upon him.
    It had been a confused meeting of weary soldiers, on that early evening of April 6 th , 1862, with the sun sinking down over the bloody forest and fields of Shiloh and the red-tinged Owl Creek swamp. “Forward, Nineteenth Alabama!” had been the cry sent up by a young Confederate captain who’d been a lawyer not so long before, but who had enlisted to do his duty for the Southland, been trained and stationed at Mobile for three months. He and his men had first seen the “elephant” this morning, as the grays attacked the blues to push them back into the swamp’s embrace. The day’s fighting had been long and brutal. Captain Lawson had already received the graze of a rifle ball across the meat of his right shoulder and a hole in his hat. The balls sounded like hornets as they passed, a deadly hum and whine that ended with the cries of many young men falling to their knees with their brains spilling out or the blood pooling where they lay. Waves of gunsmoke floated through the trees. In some places soldiers were nearly face-to-face in the deepening gloom before they recognized the colors of the enemy and pulled their triggers or swung their swords. Forward went the men of the Nineteenth Alabama, and forward to meet them in the darkening thickets came the men in Union blue.
    Shots erupted along the ragged line. Fire and sparks flew into the tormented air. Lawson squeezed off a shot from his Navy Colt and was answered by a rifle slug that nearly kissed the right side of his face. Cannonfire boomed in the distance, cavalry horses shrieked and fell, and with his next step Lawson found himself boot-deep in a young soldier’s entrails as the Union soldier sat on his knees and tried dazedly to push the red coils back in where they belonged.
    “On the left! Riders on the left!” someone shouted. Lawson saw the enemy cavalry coming from that direction between the trees, sabers carving the air. He got off a shot and saw a man in an officer’s uniform grasp at his throat and topple. The rebel soldier three feet to Lawson’s left lost the top of his head to a gleaming saber, and Lawson fired into the rider’s face but the horse was quickly past him and gone.
    “Forward! Forward!” Lawson shouted, but what they were going forward to he did not know. Those were the orders. Forward, ever forward, and not a step back until the Yanks are neck-deep in the Owl Creek swamp . This day and now into the dusk he had seen carnage beyond his imagining. He had thrown up his guts, but at least they were still in his body.
    Over the riflefire and shouting and the sound of horses and men being killed he heard the cannons speak in their deadly tongues of flame, and suddenly the blasts began on all sides. Plumes of dirt and broken rocks shot into the air. “Forward!” Lawson hollered, but he knew no one could hear. He staggered onward, with maybe a dozen of his men around him, and with a few paces taken they broke through the burning underbrush and into a hail of Union lead.
    Soldiers fell to Lawson’s left and right. One man grabbed at his arm as he went down, shot through the lung and bubbling blood. Lawson fired into the haze of smoke, the Colt kicking in his grip. A fierce pain stabbed his right thigh above the knee and stole