Against All Odds by Drew McGunn

Author:Drew McGunn [McGunn, Drew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-07-30T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

1 April 1853

Not much was left standing in Beaumont as Jesse Running Creek led his mount around a wagon piled with lumber. The rebels had fired the town when they retreated. Months later, the sour smell of soot lingered in the air. The Cherokee officer wrinkled his nose as the odor assaulted his olfactory senses. Despite that, constant hammering reminded him the town wasn’t quite dead.

When the rebels retreated, they left a thousand civilians behind, the overwhelming majority were the town’s prewar residents. While nearly all the town’s public buildings had gone up in flames, a majority of the old town remained intact. The new section, around the railroad depot, had suffered the same fate as the depot when the fire spread.

He looked behind him. Men were putting up a wooden frame where the new depot would stand. They moved with a sense of urgency. The bridge over the Trinity was nearing completion, and with it, Beaumont once again would be connected to the rest of Texas’ growing railroad network. Men wearing the blue uniform of a Yankee volunteer infantry regiment stood guard over the construction crew, who were a mixture of captured soldiers and known rebel sympathizers.

As the construction disappeared behind him, Jesse thought the armed guards had more to do with how fast the laborers were working rather than any desire on the part of the construction crew. Soon the army’s supply situation would improve. Construction on the new bridge over the Trinity was nearing completion, and the railhead would come to within a few miles of the border with Louisiana.

He grimaced as he dug his heels into his horse’s flank, cantering out of town. He knew more than he wanted of the army’s shortages. He was on his way back from West Liberty and Trinity Park. On the fields where the rebel army once drilled, nine hundred men were now encamped.

In response to several Southern states ratifying the New Orleans Articles of Secession, General Johnston finally mobilized a majority of the reserves and militia. The army’s near-overnight expansion fueled a need for more engineers, quartermasters, and hospital orderlies. That growth explained how he now found himself in command of a battalion wing of the newly expanded Army Rangers. After being gone for more than a week on behalf of the oversized battalion, he was glad to be back.

Row upon row of orderly tents spread across the coastal plain west of town. More than a decade of service in the Texian army gave Jesse a keen eye, and he let it rove over the encampment. Each company’s tents were in a double line. Like most soldiers, each Ranger had been issued a linseed oiled canvas tent-half that when paired with another identical half, created an A-frame tent.

Twelve company streets ran perpendicular to an old wagon trail which now served as the encampment’s front. Behind the soldiers’ tents were the larger tents of the battalion’s officers. The camp was empty at that moment, and once on the other side of it, Jesse found the entire nine-hundred-man battalion at drill.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.