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. There are two teams of frontier troops. Team Liu is a homeless refugee, and Team Cao is an old bandit brother of Cao Yao. No one has a clear goal.
Now everyone follows Liu Chengzu wherever they go.
At most, they could rest in the mountains for one night. At the speed of traveling sixty miles a day, they would 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 look at the house first and see if the family could arrange for a few people to live there and 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 support from Fushi County and Yan'an Prefecture. If not, try to be a corvee, groom, patrolman, or soldier for others.
You can also look at Minzhuang, which is the official militia organization of the Ming Dynasty - and secondly, the Tuanlian of the landlords of 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 find out 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.
After reaching this point, they are completely separated from normal people.
As the procession marched through the valleys 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 line broke into chaos.
People stretched out their arms and looked into the distance, causing Liu Chengzong to raise his eyebrows, which had been hanging down 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 made the back of his head go numb for a while, and his whole body trembled as if electrified. The hair on his arms stood up. He clenched his fists involuntarily, knotted the tail rope of the Yanling knife and hung it on the leather belt.
Liu Chengzong was not a young man who had never seen blood, but it was abnormal at this time. It was abnormal for him not to be afraid when he should be afraid.
Even if you fight with cold weapons a hundred times, you will still be scared on the 101st time.
Fear is not strange, and fear is not 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.
It's shameful to be excited because of it.
A burst 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 at the end of the ring, a hole is left on the knife handle, or a section of rope is left around the knife handle, it has the same function. It prevents the cavalry sword from falling out during a fight, so in normal times, tie both ends
Tie it up and put it on your wrist during 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. In the end, 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 raised his bow to point out to his brother Liu Chengzu: "They are burning the village."
But before he could say anything, Liu Chengzu, the team leader, had already raised his hand: "The lion leads the scouts over the mountain to look out. Report in advance and don't be impulsive."
"Pass, the entire team is in armor!"
Liu Chengzong didn't say any 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 official road filled with loess, 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 whether it was Liu Chengzu or Cao Yao, their men only 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 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 their eyes suddenly became clear.
Lying on the hillside, Liu Chengzong clenched his fists tightly. They had indeed encountered bandits.
This is a village located on the bank of a mountain ditch. There are hills on both sides of the ditch on the north and south sides. Because it is far away from the river during the drought period, the cultivated farmland around it is largely cracked. Dozens of houses are scattered from west to east. In the heart of the village are
Earthen enclosure.
He could clearly see from the hillside that within the ten-foot-high loess wall there was a large house 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 could not tell who was the citizen and who was the bandit. They only knew that those who were running for their lives, those who were chasing, those who were intercepting, and those who were besieging were shouting loudly.
They all became red-eyed.
An old man hanged himself from a hanging beam near a farmyard at the edge of the village. Before he could hang himself, he was dragged 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 from a large and good family 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 they surrounded the village with knives, sticks, and torches. There were dozens of them shouting and trying to persuade them to surrender, and more than a hundred of them scattered around the village, going from door to door looking for property, raping, and plundering.
The word "good family" refers not to moral character, but to family status, which 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 hillside, could barely hear what he meant. These thieves were indeed thieves from a stronghold in the mountains. They were related to the landlord in the village. Their name was Erbo.
There was no other reason for the bloodbath in the village.
He asked for food, but was not given.
There was also a white flag 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 relatives home, there is blood everywhere in the village, but there is 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 wearing old 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 fort's military craftsman made for fun, so he knew very well how powerful these things were.
The caliber of the wooden cannon cannot be increased, otherwise it will explode if it is made larger. Therefore, compared with the bowl-mouth cannon, the Franco machine gun 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.
"I'm telling you, brother, there are over 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 thick-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 in response.
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, and 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 was 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, and the huge crowd rushed towards the fort gate. After a loud bang, the sky was filled with smoke.