On the ninth day of February, the troops passed through Qingjian County at noon, entered the Yanchuan boundary in the afternoon, and soon entered the mountainous area at the junction of Qingjian, Yanchuan, Anding, and Fushi counties.
Liu Chengzong and others have already entered their hometown with one foot. The two teams of frontier troops, Team Liu are homeless refugees and Team Cao are all old bandit brothers of Cao Yao, but no one has a clear goal.
At the moment, everyone follows Liu Chengzu wherever they go.
At most, they can rest in the mountains for one night. At the speed of traveling sixty miles a day, they will reach Xingpingli at the foot of Longwang Temple Mountain in Fushi County, Yan'an Prefecture tomorrow.
Their first destination was Xingpingli, the hometown of the Liu brothers.
At this moment, no one had any idea. All they wanted to do was to see how many people could be accommodated by the family and the family, who should work and eat. If the family couldn't arrange it, they could only ask their father, Liu Juren, to go to Yan'an Fucheng to ask.
It would be best if you can form a small group with the support of Fushi County and Yan'an Prefecture. If not, try to do corvee work for others, such as grooms, patrolmen, and soldiers.
You can also look at Minzhuang, the official militia organization of the Ming Dynasty - and secondly, the Tuanlian League of landlords from large households.
If all else fails, the two teams of Liu Chengzu and Cao Yao will have to work together separately. One team will go to the local area to inquire about information, and the other team will recharge their batteries in the mountains, either looking for rich households to collect food, or looking for mountain bandits to suppress bandits.
Reduced to this point, they are completely separated from normal people.
The queue was marching in the valley of northern Shaanxi. Liu Chengzong, who was riding behind, flicked his whip absentmindedly, thinking about how to arrange for Cao Yao and others to return home.
Suddenly, the front team broke into chaos.
People stretched out their arms and looked into the distance, causing Liu Chengzong to raise his eyebrows, which had been drooping almost to cover his eyes.
On the other side of the undulating mountains, several streaks of black smoke rose into the sky.
The first time he saw the black smoke, Liu Chengzong instinctively thought that a village had been burned down.
The excitement in his head made him numb for a while, his whole body trembled as if electrified, and the hair on his arms stood up. He involuntarily clenched his fists, knotted the tail rope of the Yanling knife and hung it on the leather belt.
Liu Chengzong is not a young man who has never seen blood, but it is abnormal at this time. It is abnormal that he should be afraid but is not afraid.
Even if you fight with cold weapons a hundred times, you will still be scared on the 101st time.
Fear is not strange, nor is it shameful. The purpose of military training is to overcome the fear in human nature and use discipline, battle formations, equipment, skills and collective strength to strengthen confidence and overcome fear.
But when I see the black smoke, I think of the burning village. When I think of the village, I think of the tall granary. When I think of the granary, I want to take it for myself.
Therefore, it is shameful to be excited.
A rush of black smoke easily shattered Liu Chengzong's inner illusion of a ritual of burning firewood for meat.
His way of thinking has changed.
The tail rope is also called a knife belt or a hand rope. Whether it is a hole in the ring, a hole in the knife handle, or a section of rope around the knife handle, it has the same function. It prevents the cavalry sword from falling out during a fight, so in normal times, put both ends Tie it up and put it on your wrist in time of war.
Hang it on the left side of the leather belt around your waist. When drawing the sword, pass your right hand through the left tail rope first and then pull out the sword. The sword belt is placed on the wrist. Even if you lose your hand in a fight, the sword will not be lost.
After the liberation, the cavalry of New China also used the saber hand rope as a safety rope for a period of time. After entering the peaceful era, they were worried about hurting people and throwing horses. There were also reasons for using hot weapons to replace the sabers. Eventually, the safety rope was dusted in the long river of history.
After hanging up the hand rope, Liu Chengzong turned to hold the small bow in his hand, clamped the horse's belly and walked through the queue from the side of the road. He stepped forward and pointed the bow at his brother Liu Chengzu: "They are burning the village."
But before he could say anything, Liu Chengzu, the guard, had already raised his hand: "The lion led the scouts over the mountain to look out. Report in advance when they see it. Don't be impulsive."
"Pass, the whole team is in armor!"
Liu Chengzong didn't say anything more. He immediately untied the cat cage, tied up Cang Biao and asked Xiao Liu to find a place, and rode forward with the two scouts. Before leaving, he looked back.
On the loess-filled official road, the border troops dismounted and helped each other put on armor and organize their troops.
There was no fear and little excitement on their faces, but full of eagerness and eagerness to try. This scene diluted the shame in Liu Chengzong's heart.
'It turns out they are all the same as me. '
The border troops in Yansui Town were short of horses, and this was especially true for the two demobilized teams at Yuhebao. Regardless of Liu Chengzu or Cao Yao, their subordinates all had three horses and seven steps.
A dozen war horses might end up in Fushi County, and they would be sold or killed for food in order to make ends meet.
The black smoke looked close, but was far away when running. Liu Chengzong led two scouts through the mountain, but the black smoke was still in the distance. It was only when they climbed up the second hill that the sight suddenly became clear.
Lying on the hillside, Liu Chengzong clenched his fists tightly. They had indeed encountered a bandit.
This is a village located on the bank of a mountain ditch. There are hills on the north and south sides of the ditch. Because it is far away from the river during the drought, the cultivated farmland around it is largely cracked. Dozens of houses are scattered from west to east. In the heart of the village are A earthen enclosure.
He could clearly see from the hillside that within the ten-foot-high loess wall there was a large house with three rooms wide and three rooms deep, complete with stables and granaries.
The fighting outside Tuwei has come to an end.
Thick black smoke rose from both ends of the village. The country roads were littered with corpses, and there were bandits waving weapons and holding torches everywhere, spreading the fire into the village.
The chaotic crowd couldn't tell who was the civilian and who was the bandit. They only knew the shouts of those fleeing, chasing, intercepting, and besieging.
They all became red-eyed.
An old man hanged himself from a cantilever beam near a farmyard at the edge of the village. Before he could hang himself, he was pulled down by two gangsters who jumped over the fence and slashed his neck with a knife, splattering red all over the ground.
There are thirty or forty people in the big and good families in Tuweizi. The men are holding spears and spears on the wall, while the women and children are busy carrying bricks, tiles, wood and stones in the courtyard.
The rogue bandits were so powerful that there were dozens of them surrounding the village with knives, sticks, and torches, shouting and cursing to persuade them to surrender, and more than a hundred of them spread out in the village, going from door to door looking for property, raping, and plundering.
A good family is not about their moral character, but their family status. It refers to a wealthy family with money, land and food. In Shaanxi in these days, only landlords were good families.
The thieves outside Tuwei yelled and cursed at the top of their lungs. Liu Chengzong, who was more than 300 steps away on the hill, could barely hear what he meant. This group of thieves were indeed thieves from a stronghold in the mountains. They were related to the landowners in the village. They were called Erbo. There was no other reason for the bloodbath in the village.
Asked for food, but was not given.
A white flag was erected in the place where most people gathered. On the flag was a crooked word "eagle", which was probably the nickname of the bandit leader of the village.
Calling them relatives, there was blood everywhere in the village, but there was no mercy at all.
The people inside would not open the door until they were dead, but the people outside were even better at doing things and were obviously well prepared. The leader shouted and cursed at the front, and the people at the back gathered together. A few deserters in worn armor put down the sacks on their shoulders and fell to the ground. Stone eggs are poured into the trunk of the tree.
He recognized that the four-foot-long thing that was surrounded by people and could be hugged by one person was a wooden cannon.
Yuhe Fort has cast iron cannons, cast copper cannons, and wooden cannons that the military craftsman in the fort made for fun, so he knew very well how powerful these things were.
The caliber of the wooden cannon cannot be increased, and it will explode if it is made larger. Therefore, compared with the bowl-mouth cannon, the Fran machine cannon, and even the Hongyi cannon in Liao Town, it is like a big toy.
But as long as you don't think of it as a cannon, it is still a very threatening large weapon, like a single-shot large sprayer that can hit sixty or seventy meters.
"Immediately tell my brother, there are more than a hundred thieves, at least six deserters, and a wooden cannon. The rich families in the village cannot be defended."
Liu Chengzong looked at the caliber of the wooden cannon, which was about the same as a fist, and then looked at the two heavy-looking wooden doors in Tuweizi, and he could already guess what would happen next.
Lying on the hilltop, he didn't think about anything. He just watched quietly, watching the line of loess separating two worlds of different colors.
Outside the earthen wall, a crowd gathered wearing tattered clothes with no visible original color, only the ashes of earth and the red of blood.
Inside the wall, anxious people were wearing various brightly colored fabrics, and their clothes had alternating light and dark patterns.
Just as the scout mounted his horse to report the news, a man with a hairpin on his head came around to one side and raised his bow. This man was very skilled in setting up his bow and arrow. He took aim and let out an arrow. The man who shouted in front of the circle shot him down.
Then he fired three arrows in succession, killing two people and injuring the armored deserter who was in charge of loading the wooden cannon.
The people above Tuwei cheered loudly, while the thieves below Tuwei suddenly dispersed.
The thieves were nothing more than a mob. With just three arrows, hundreds of thieves outside Tuwei were panicked.
Witnessing this scene, Liu Chengzong clenched his fists involuntarily and stared outside the wall. He saw that the deserter who had been shot did not run away. He seemed to be aroused by the arrow wound. Although he could not fight, he held his stomach. He raised his arms and pushed away Pao Ze who came to help, pointing at the wooden cannon and yelling.
The wooden cannon was still lifted up, and the huge crowd rushed towards the fort gate. After a loud bang, the sky was filled with smoke.
Liu Chengzong's long frown relaxed.
