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until the onrushing enemy was virtually in their laps before firing their first volley. At close range, the barricade seemed too high for a jumping horse to clear. Not a single raider tugged on his reins.
    Ty watched leaping horses fall short, smash into the breastworks, and slew sideways in a mass of thrashing hoofs and flailing human arms and legs as their riders struggled to avoid the crushing impact of a nearly two-thousand-pound animal. Other horses cleared the barricade without difficulty, their riders firing downward at defiant militia while in the air.
    Ty sensed Reb gathering his legs beneath him; then the big gray soared upward. He leaned forward, too busy maintaining his seat in the saddle to search for targets beneath the gray’s belly. Reb’s rear hoof clipped the top rail of the barricade. They landed with Ty still in the saddle and galloped onward through terrified home guards desperate to avoid Reb’s iron shoes.
    The scurrying crowd bumped into each other, and the gathering crush of bodies slowed Reb to a walk. Fingers trying to drag Ty from the saddle clutched his sleeves and pants leg. Realizing he would quickly be overwhelmed on the ground, Ty fired a bullet into the crowd and wheeled Reb on his rear legs, scattering home guards like windblown leaves.
    A coal-black gelding cut in front of Reb, his rider’s huge nine-round LeMat pistols shooting left and right simultaneously. Somehow Lieutenant Shannon’s shout was louder than the roar of guns. “They’re blowing ‘Recall.’ Follow me.”
    The killing whirlwind on horseback cleaved a clear path to the home guard barricade. Ty was so anxious to escape capture, he even forgot his Remington contained four live rounds. There was no hoof clipping of the top rail this jump.
    Hunched low in the saddle to present the smallest possible target, Ty and Shawn Shannon maintained a full gallop until they were beyond rifle range.
    Now that the excitement and uproar had ended, the danger was past, and they were safe, Ty was shaking all over.
    â€œWell, lad,” Lieutenant Shannon called out, grinning. “You’ve looked the elephant in the eye. Right big, ain’t he?”

CHAPTER 6
    T y’s adventures wielding a pistol were finished for the day.
    General Morgan arrived and agreed with Colonel Johnson, of the Second Brigade, that the Corydon breastworks were too high and too well defended for mounted cavalry to breach. The resulting strategy was the encirclement of both flanks of the barricade, while an on-foot frontal assault, supported by two howitzers, occupied its defenders.
    At Lieutenant Shannon’s suggestion, an intrigued General Morgan agreed to Ty serving as his “eyes” from the low hill overlooking the battlefield. Ty had stopped shaking from his close brush with death and looked forward without any qualms to watching the conclusion of the battle from safer ground. A hero he was not.
    The home guard center repulsed two charges by dismounted raiders before they wilted under heavy cannon and small-arms fire and their flanks collapsed. Realizing their situation was hopeless, the green militia enlistees panicked and fled, discarding weapons, accouterments, and any other possession that might hinder their hasty departure. Ty cheered with General Morgan and the general’s fellow officers at the sight of so many Indiana citizens in full flight.
    After a quick reconnaissance of the battlefield by their subordinates, Colonels Duke and Johnson informed General Morgan that preliminary counts, yet to be confirmed, indicated raider losses of eight killed and thirty-three wounded and the taking of 340 prisoners. The front lines of the raiders were at that moment in hot pursuit of the retreating enemy not already under guard.
    â€œGentlemen, mount up,” General Morgan said. “We have a town to subdue, prisoners to parole, and dinner to find.”
    The subduing of Corydon proved a minor affair.