Free The Bloody Ground - Starbuck 04 by Bernard Cornwell Page B

despised unit in all the Confederate army. They were the Yellowlegs, the lowest of the low, and no one thing was more symptomatic of their status than the guns they had been issued. Those weapons were still in store, but Starbuck had found the key hanging behind the office door and had unlocked the armory shed to find it filled with crates of old smoothbore muskets. Starbuck had brushed the dust off one musket stock and lifted out the weapon. It felt clumsy, while the wooden shaft beneath the barrel had shrunk over the years so that the metal barrel hoops were loose. He peered at the lock and saw the word "Virginia" stamped there, while behind the hammer was written "Richmond, 1808." The gun must have been a flintlock originally and at some time updated by conversion to percussion cap, but despite the modernization it was still a horrible weapon. These old muskets, made for killing Redcoats, had no rifling inside the barrel, which meant that the bullet did not spin in its flight and so lacked the accuracy of a rifle. At fifty paces the big-bore 1808 musket might be as lethal as an Enfield rifle, but at any greater range it was hopelessly inaccurate. Starbuck had seen plenty of men carrying such antiquated guns into battle and had felt sorry for them, but he knew for a fact that thousands of modern rifles had been captured from the North during the summer's campaign, and it seemed perverse to arm his men with these museum pieces. Such antique weapons were a signal to the Special Battalion that they were on the army's hind teat, but that was probably a truth the men already knew. They were the soldiers no one else wanted.
    Sergeant Case had seen the open armory door and come to investigate. His tall body filled the doorway and shadowed the dusty room. "You," he had said flatly when he saw Starbuck.
    "Me," Starbuck agreed pleasantly enough.
    "Got a habit of poking your nose where it don't belong, Lieutenant," Case said. His menacing presence loomed in the dusty shed while his flat, hard eyes stared at Starbuck like a predator sizing up its kill.
    Starbuck had thrown the musket to the sergeant, thrown it hard enough to make Case step back a pace as he caught it. "You'd want to fight Yankees with one of those, Sergeant?" Starbuck asked.
    Case twirled the musket in his big right hand as though it weighed no more than a cornstalk. "They won't be doing no fighting, Lieutenant. These men ain't fit to fight. And that's why you were sent to us." Case's small head jerked back and forth on the ludicrous neck as he spat his insults. "Because you ain't fit to fight. You're a bloody drunkard, Lieutenant, so don't give me any talk of fighting. You don't know what fighting is. I was a Royal Fusilier, boy, a proper soldier, boy, and I know soldiering and I know fighting, and I know you ain't up to it else you wouldn't be here." Case threw the musket hard back, stinging Starbuck's hands with the impact of the weapon. The tall sergeant stepped further inside the armory and thrust his broken-nosed face close to Starbuck. "And one other thing, boy. You pull rank on me one more time and I'll nail your hide to a tree and piss all over it. Now put that musket back where you found it, give me the armory key, and bugger off where you belong."
    Not now, Starbuck had told himself, not now. This was not the time to put Case right, and so he had merely put the musket in its box, meekly handed Case the key, and walked away.
    Now, at the supper table, Starbuck was again the butt of bullies only this time it was Thomas Dennison and his cronies who had their sport with a man they believed was a weakling. Captain Lippincott rolled a peach to Starbuck. "Reckon you'd prefer a brandy, Potter," Lippincott said.
    "Reckon I would," Starbuck said.
    "Sir," Dennison said immediately.
    "Reckon I would, sir," Starbuck said humbly. He had to play the fool so long as he decided against revealing his identity, but it went hard on him. He told himself to stay calm and to play