Soldiers of Conquest by F. M. Parker Read Free Book Online

quartermasters and teamsters, and Hazlitt’s company of infantrymen. Many of the men were writing letters. Others talked. A number were silent, their thoughts turned inward to their private worlds.
    Grant was watching the Mexican mainland barely half a mile distant. The beach was a bone white ribbon of sand lying squeezed in between the sea and dense brush. On a regular schedule, a Mexican lancer galloped along the water’s edge. The enemy was keeping a close watch on the Americans.
    As he watched the shore, the orange ball sun settled onto the inland mountains, and then fell behind them. In the deepening dusk, he moved along the deck among the men and entered his small cabin. In the light shining from a one-candle lamp in a gimbaled mount, Valere, a large black man and Grant’s servant, was polishing one of his boots.
    Valere also served Hazlitt, and the two officers shared the payment of his salary of six dollars per month. The northern officers used white men or free blacks and paid them. Many of the officers from the slave states had brought one of their slaves as servants.
    Grant opened the chest at the foot of his bunk and took out his saber and brace of cap and ball pistols. The pistols were the standard army issue, .45 caliber, nine inch octagon barrel, weighing 32 ounces with fire blue finish, and a stock of curly maple stained violin red.
    â€œWhat do you think you’re doing?” Hazlitt said entering through the doorway.
    â€œChecking my weapons.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œOh, just in case I have a need for them.”
    â€œDon’t do anything foolish during the landing tomorrow.”
    â€œI don’t intend to.”
    Hazlitt grunted a disbelieving sound. He opened his chest and took out pistols and saber.
    The young warriors cleaned their firearms, and filled their ammunition pouches with paper wrapped powder and ball cartridges. Then for a long time, there was a duet of rasping sounds as they whet the steel blades of their sabers with fine grained sharpening stones.
    *
    Late in the night Grant dreamed of landing with Hazlitt and his men on the white sand Mexican coast. In the dream world where the dead still live, an old man with an ancient flintlock musket was wading ashore beside him. Somehow Grant knew the old fellow was Noah Grant, the grandfather he had never seen, who had fought throughout the Revolutionary War with General Washington.
    â€œGrandfather, are you afraid,” Grant asked.
    The old man’s stride remained firm and straight ahead as he turned his head and aimed penetrating blue eyes at Grant. “No. Are you?”
    â€œNo, sir.” Grant said. That was mostly true, but off in the corner of his mind there was a tinge of concern for he was a logical man and knew no man was immune to the strike of a bullet. He had always recognized that fact when going into battle, but had always been able to set it aside and go on with the fighting.
    Noah nodded. “We Grants are deficient in fear. That’s good if you’re a soldier. Unless it leads you to do something reckless that gets you killed.” Noah smiled at Grant. “But don’t worry too much about death for it’s but a halfway point.”
    The old man dashed ahead and disappeared into a cloud of gunpowder smoke made by hundreds of Mexican muskets being fired at them. Grant plunged into the gunpowder smoke behind Noah.
    Grant jerked awake with the sulfurous-carbon stink of burnt gunpowder that he knew so well in his nostrils. He lay for a long time in the darkness of the ship’s cabin and wondered why he had dreamed of his grandfather. He had never done so before, so why at this point in his life? Was it an omen of his death in the coming battles?

CHAPTER 5
    Lee, dressed in a blue field uniform and with a pistol and saber buckled around his waist, left his cabin on the Massachusetts and came out onto the main deck. He halted in amazement. A swollen red sun had just broken free