The Bells of El Diablo Read Online Free PDF

and crouched over his brother. “I’m gonna carry you up to our camp, Willie.”
    Willie’s eye moved up and down his older brother, and he chuckled. “What’s the matter—the Confederacy too poor to clothe its soldiers?”
    James grabbed his brother’s right hand, but Willie pulled it away. “Leave me, brother. I’m a goner.”
    “Ain’t gonna leave you, Willie.”
    He pulled Willie up by one hand, but as he drew his younger brother up over his shoulder, Willie broke out in a coughing fit. James felt the warmth of his brother’s blood dribble over his shoulder and down his back. He eased Willie back down to the ferns, then snaked his arms under the young lieutenant’s arms and knees and lifted him and began to carry him up the slope through the pines.
    Crosseye and the other soldiers followed at some distance, the others conferring quietly. Only once did James glance down at the bridge, the center of which had been blown out by the dynamite. It was a ragged hulk in the darkness. At least, James’s men had accomplished that much.
    James carried his brother up the steep slope a hundred yards before swinging left and walking along a deer path, moving upstream to the point where he and Coker and Krieg had first come down from their redoubt on the ridge.
    Coker, like Krieg, was most certainly dead, as the bullets had come at him from both directions. The man James was now carrying back to their camp could very well be the man who’d killed poor Lawrence, who’d made it through so much only to die here, albeit in an effort to keep Sherman from getting his hands on any more guns. Maybe the Raiders had even delayed Sherman’s receiving any more of those sixteen-shot Henry repeaters that hopelessly outmatched anything the Confederates were wielding.
    “Made a fool out of you tonight, James.” Willie’s voice sounded like sandpaper as he stared up from his brother’sarms, choking back coughs, breathing hard, his muscles tensing as he writhed.
    “I reckon you did, Willie.”
    “Don’t mean just this.”
    “What, then? That shipment of guns and ammo is gonna have to backtrack. Might not get to Sherman before he reaches Atlanta.”
    “Ah, shit, James,” Willie said, mouth twisting in a weird grin between coughs. “Sherman’s done already in Atlanta. Might be on his way east to the ocean by now.”
    James didn’t say anything. He winced when his bare left foot came down on a sharp spur of rock pushing up out of the deep, aromatic forest duff. His brother was likely delirious from blood loss.
    “Yessir, we was just hangin’ back to clean up the little Confederate raidin’ parties the main army done left behind.”
    James frowned down at his brother.
    Willie said, “There wasn’t no supply train, James. McClellan meant for that information to be intercepted by them dunderheaded Reb spies—so we could set up an ambush and clean you dogs out of the henhouse once and for all, so’s you wouldn’t be bedevilin’ General Sherman all the way to the ocean. The general, you see, is the cantankerous sort, and he’s just sick to shit of you yaller-bellies!”
    James thought of his raiders and the several other packs of Confederate guerillas that were also on missions to blow up bridges or railroad lines this very evening. He was more concerned right now with his brother, whom he could feel growing cold in his arms, but the information was hard to swallow, for he’d builtup so much hope for turning Sherman back from Atlanta. A faint hope, but a hope just the same.
    Now, if Willie’s Union word could be trusted, he not only hadn’t accomplished that, but he’d murdered his brother in the bargain. He was strong, but he felt his arms and legs growing weak as he climbed the last stretch of the slope toward the rocks showing pale through the dark columns of the pines. They’d set up a redoubt there in the rocks capping the ridge, on the backside of the mountain from where the supply wagons had been supposed to