Abner & Me by Dan Gutman Read Free Book Online Page A

puff on his pipe and glanced over at Alexander sitting in the ditch.
    â€œSure didn’t do him no good,” he said.
    Little John turned away as Joshua and Rufus took off Alexander’s uniform and gave it to me. It wasn’t a perfect fit, but it would do. I slipped the baseball out of my pocket and put it into the pocket of the uniform.
    â€œYou know how to shoot a Springfield, Stosh?” Joshua asked, handing me the dead boy’s rifle.
    â€œNot exactly…”
    Before his accident, my dad taught me how toshoot a gun. It was an old .22 caliber Remington. He used to take me out to a field near our house for target practice. We’d shoot at cans and bottles and stuff. I was pretty good. Mom never approved of my firing guns. It was one of the many things Dad liked to do that she didn’t approve of.
    The Springfield was as tall as I am, and I’m over five and a half feet now. Joshua handed it to me, and it was heavy, maybe ten pounds. He slung a leather bag around my neck that looked a little like a lady’s purse. Joshua called it a “shot bag.”
    â€œYou got twenty cartridges in here,” he said.
    Joshua took one cartridge out. It was about the size of a Chap Stick, and it was wrapped in paper. He put the tip of the cartridge in his mouth, bit it off, and spit the paper on the ground. Then he poured some black stuff—gunpowder, I figured—out of the cartridge and down the barrel of the gun.
    â€œThis is your minié ball,” he said, holding up a bullet, which was also inside the paper cartridge. He dropped it into the barrel on top of the powder.
    â€œThis is your ramrod,” he said, taking a long, thin piece of metal that had been attached to the barrel of the gun. It had a little round thing on one end. Joshua slipped the ramrod into the barrel of the gun and shoved it in there like a plunger two or three times to push the bullet and powder down as far as they would go.
    â€œThat’s all there is to it,” Joshua said, handing me the rifle. “Now you’re ready to shoot some Rebs.”
    Unbelievable! This gun shot just one bullet at a time. It had taken Joshua at least twenty seconds to load the thing. Once it was fired, I’d have to go through the whole procedure all over again.
    I just assumed soldiers always fought wars with machine guns, which can fire hundreds of rounds a minute when you pulled the trigger once. I had to remind myself that this was 1863. No high-tech stuff. No helicopters. No night-vision goggles. No laser-guided smart bombs or drones. The Civil War was a bunch of guys—kids, even—running around with single-shot rifles. They didn’t even have shields, armor, or helmets.
    Heck, the telephone wasn’t even invented yet.
    â€œIf your aim is true,” Joshua said after he handed me the rifle, “you can take down a man from a hundred yards or more.”
    I took the gun hesitantly. I had never fired a gun at a person before. In fact, I had been carefully trained to never even point a gun anywhere near a person. I didn’t want to shoot at people. It didn’t seem right. I didn’t know if I could do it. I hoped I wouldn’t have to.
    Mom was still tending to Willie Biddle, dressing his wounds and so forth. I went over to Little John, the short one with the drum. He told me we had good position, dug into this ditch and up on a hill where we could look down on the Confederates. John wiped some mud off his drum.
    â€œWhat’s the drum for?” I asked him.
    Little John looked at me like I was stupid. “Well, I’m a drummer boy, ain’t I?”
    â€œSo what do you do with the drum?”
    â€œIt’s so the general can signal the men what to do,” he said. “Say, you ain’t never been in a battle before, have you?”
    â€œNo. Why doesn’t the general just tell them what to do?”
    â€œCan’t always hear,” Little John replied.