come. A small force of
mounted men, scouts, and volunteers from various commands were bait. It
was their job to make a short stiff resistance, then fly in headlong
retreat, enticing the Union riders into the waiting ambush.

"Who's this heah Dilly?" Kirby wanted to know. "Some Yankee?"

Drew laughed. "Might be." He sagged a little in the saddle. Sleep during
the past ten days had come in small snatches. Twice he had caught naps
lying in stalled wagons waiting for fresh teams to arrive, and both
times he had been awakened out of dreams he did not care to remember, to
ride with gummy eyelids and a sense of being so tired that there was a
fog between him and most of the world. It was two days now since Buford
had been wounded. The news was that the big Kentucky general would
recover. And it was a whole twenty-four hours since he watched the
Christmas fires Forrest had lit in Pulaski, the fires which had devoured
what they no longer had the animal power to save.

Here in the mouth of the gorge the silence was almost oppressive. He
heard a smothered cough from one of the waiting men, a horse blow in a
kind of wheeze. Then came the call of a bugle from down the road.

Theirs, not ours, Drew thought. Hannibal shook his head vigorously, as
if bitten by a sadly out-of-season fly. The captain commanding their
company of bait signaled an advance. And they followed the familiar
pattern of weaving in and out of cover to enlarge the appearance of
their force.

Firing rent the quiet of a few minutes earlier. Drew snapped a shot at
the Yankee guidon bearer, certain he saw the man flinch. Then, with the
rest, he sent Hannibal on the best run the mule could hold, back into
the waiting mouth of the hollow. They pounded on, eager to present such
a picture of wholesale rout that the Union men would believe a soft
strike, perhaps an important bag of prisoners, lay ahead, needing only
to be scooped in.

Perhaps it was the reputation for wiliness Forrest had earned which put
the Yankee commander on his guard. There was no headlong chase down the
ambush valley as they had hoped and planned to intercept. Instead,
dismounted men came at a careful, suspicious pace, cored around a single
fieldpiece, a small answer to their trap.

But when that blue stream funneled into the hollow, the jaws snapped
away. Canister from Morton's guns laid a scythe along the Union advance,
cutting men to ground level. The Yell shrilled along the slopes, and men