Andersonville by Edward M. Erdelac Read Free Book Online

said.
    “There, y’see? You try, but it ain’t quite right,” Clemis went on, narrowing his eyes. “I bet the white folks can’t tell the difference, but I can. You ain’t talk like one of them New England Ne-groes. You ain’t no field hand, but you don’t strike me as no house nigger, neither. I can’t figure out what you is.”
    “Maybe you ought not to try,” Barclay said.
    “Only thing I know for sure,” Clemis went on, “you ain’t Earl Stevens.”
    Barclay worked his jowls and looked back at the man seriously for once.
    “So what you do with the genuine Earl Stevens?” Clemis asked, his tone low and threatening.
    One of the Rebel guards gave a yell just then.
    “Got a runner! Runner!”
    The dogs began barking excitedly.
    Far up the line, one of the black soldiers knelt on the ground, his face drawn, eyes popping in terror. He had his palms turned up and hands outstretched and was shaking his head.
    “I told him not to! I told him!”
    Turner stood up among the dogs and stretched his arms in a leisurely way, then took his shotgun from his assistant.
    Though the dogs yipped and turned and nipped one another, the five spotted Cubans did nothing. The whole pack of slavering dogs seemed to defer to the authority of the five, and those five stood, stately, staring silently in the direction the man apparently had gone into the pines. In this, they almost mirrored the Confederates, as the privates were nearly jumping in place to go into the woods after the fugitive. Sergeant Turner stood calm with a lazy half smile on his dog-slimed lips.
    But the spotted hounds were more somehow more regal than their repulsive master and waited, completely calm.
    “Awright, Spot. Go get ’em!” Turner said.
    The five bloodhounds exploded into motion. They bounded across the clearing and plunged into the forest, the pack baying and stumbling over one another to catch up.
    One of the privates bounced in place and looked anxiously at Turner.
    “Awright, George,” Turner said in the same tone he’d used for the dogs.
    George gave a hoot and went off after the dogs.
    “Let the dogs have ’im,” he called after him. Then he turned to the rest of the work detail. “You boys sit tight. Gonna show you all something.”
    No one dared to speak or move. The only sound in the still clearing at the edge of the woods was the dwindling barking of the dogs and the huffing breath of the man whose work partner had fled. He was in danger of hyperventilating, but no one moved to his side.
    The barking of the hounds grew faint as they topped some hill and swept down. Barclay for a moment imagined the man, conjuring him in his mind, smashing through grasping branches, blood thundering in his ears, not daring to look over his shoulder but hearing all that snarling wildness getting closer, bearing down on him.
    Then there was a series of unearthly howls such as no dog Barclay, no dog any man in the line, had ever heard. It was a ragged, tortured sound like the call of some ravenous beast roaring in the belly of hell, riled at the fear scent of the damned. It was followed quickly by a single, almost laughably pitiful wail. Then the howling, the roaring, the cacophony of barking, drowned it out.
    Turner chuckled.
    “Sounds like they got him.”
    Turner ambled over to the place where the pursuers had disappeared just as George emerged, cussing the dogs and dragging a limp burden behind him.
    The curs were nipping and leaping at the carcass of the fugitive, which George pulled with effort by what looked to be the heel of a brogan till he deposited it in the clearing in front of them.
    Barclay could see little of the man who had been. The dogs had reduced him to no more than a side of beef dressed in a blood-soaked tunic for a joke, with a lolling, fleshless head, one leg, and one ragged arm still attached. That horrible grinning face! The dogs had torn most of the skin from it, leaving the bright red muscle hanging from the bloody bone. The