cross those dang-blasted
ordnance wagons, we won't know 'em from a side of 'dobe anyway."

They had reined in on the edge of a mud hole in which men sweated--in
spite of the sleet which plastered thin clothing to their gaunt
bodies--swore, and put dogged endurance to the test as they labored with
drag ropes and behind wheels encrusted with pendulous pounds of mud, to
propel a supply wagon out of the bog into which it had sunk when the
frozen crust of the rutted road had broken apart. The Army of the
Tennessee, now fighting storms, winter rains, snow and hail, was also
fighting men as valiantly, engaged in General Hood's great gamble of an
all-out attack on Nashville. They had a hope--and a slim chance--to
sweep through the Union lines back up into Tennessee and Kentucky, and
perhaps to wall off Sherman in the south and repair the loss of Atlanta.

Hannibal brayed, shifting his weary feet in the churned-up muck of the
field edge. The ground, covered with a scum of ice at night, was a trap
for animals as well as vehicles. Breaking through that glassy surface to
the glutinous stuff beneath, they suffered cuts deep enough to draw
blood above hoof level.

Drew called to the men laboring at the stalled wagon.

"Ordnance? Buford's division?"

He didn't really expect any sort of a promising answer. This was worse
than trying to hunt a needle in a stack of hay, this tracing--through
the fast darkening night--the lost ordnance wagons, caught somewhere in
or behind the infantry train. But ahead, where Forrest's cavalry was
thrusting into the Union lines at Spring Hill, men were going into
battle with three rounds or less to feed their carbines and rifles.
Somehow the horse soldiers had pushed into a hot, full-sized fight and
the scouts had to locate those lost wagons and get them up to the front
lines.

A living figure of mud spat out a mouthful of that viscous substance in
order to answer.

"This heah ain't no ordnance--not from Buford's neither! Put your backs
into it now, yo' wagon-dogs! Git to it an' push!"

Under that roar the excavation squad went into straining action. Oxen,
their eyes bulbous in their skulls from effort, set brute energy against
yokes along with the men. The mud eventually gave grip, and the wagon
moved.

Drew rode on, the two half-seen shapes which were Boyd and Kirby in his
wake. A dripping branch flicked bits of ice into his face. The dusk was
a thickening murk, and with the coming of the Nov