Devil's Dream (16 page)

“Glad to have you, Ginnal Forrest. Stay longer when you come next time.”

J
ESSE
F
ORREST
came thundering back down from Union Street to the Gayoso, chivying along a handful of Washburn’s staff he had made prisoner. His men broke into any stable they passed and brought along whatever horses they could find. Women were still leaning out the windows in their nightdresses to cheer the raiders, or coming down to the street to run after them.

“No time to tarry!” Jesse called, squinting back over his shoulder at the brightening sky. Half an order, half a recommendation. Bill Forrest was rallying the Forty Thieves in front of the Gayoso. From the direction of Fort Pickering, a cannon thumped.

“Where’s Washburn, Brother,” Bill said.

“He run off.” Jesse held up the uniform.

“Well, that’s purty.” Bill turned his head and spat into the muddy street. “Much good it’ll do us.”

“You got Hurlbut, I guess.”

“I damn well did not. He never even slept here,” Bill said.

“Buckland, then?”

“That’s him back yonder I reckon,” Bill said, jerking his thumb
to the north, where, a couple of blocks distant, Federal soldiers were being called to formation to advance on the raiders.

“You don’t mean it, Brother Bill,” Jesse said. “We didn’t get a lick of what we come for.”

“I don’t know about that,” Bill said. “This ought to fetch A. J. Smith back out of Mississippi, if I don’t miss my guess.”

“We don’t mean to wait till he gets here do we?” Jesse said, peering around. The fog was still heavily swirling, but had turned very bright; soon the sun would cut through, and they’d all be exposed.

“No, but where’s Bedford?”

Jesse shrugged. “Wasn’t he laying back with Neely and them?”

“When was he ever a one to lay back?”

A rhetorical question. Henri opened his mouth to speak, but Dinkins, who’d crossed a leg over the pommel of his saddle to lace on the second shoe he had requisitioned, was ahead of him.

“General Forrest was with us as far as Beale Street.”

“Beale Street,” Bill Forrest ran a thumb along the bone beneath his beard. “You don’t say. …”

“We got a passel of horses and prisoners here,” Jesse said. “I think we better get a move on, Bedford or not. He’s bound to be somewhere.”

S
TUMBLING TOWARD
the river and Fort Pickering, General Hurlbut blessed his guiding star that he’d spent the night with a friend, and his lady friends, instead of bunking in the Gayoso, but he cursed the corn whiskey he’d been drinking till late, and which made his head hammer louder than the cannon in the fort, which were blazing at nothing since no raiders were near.

“Will you for Chrissake hold your fire?” Hurlbut yelled, and the guns hushed as he came to the gate. “They aren’t coming here! They’ve got no artillery. You won’t fight them off sitting inside this fort!”

Inside the gate he found Washburn, his face purple as a beet, struggling to stuff his nightshirt into a pair of borrowed britches too small for him. An adjutant drew Hurlbut aside to report.

“Well if that doesn’t beat …” Hurlbut narrowed his eyes at the furious Washburn, and spoke to the adjutant behind his hand.
“They had him relieve me because I couldn’t keep Forrest out of West Tennessee, but it looks like he can’t keep Forrest out of his own damn bedroom.”

F
ORREST OVERTOOK
his brothers at a battery on the edge of town. They’d overrun it on the way in but couldn’t spare men to set a guard, and the Federal gunners had returned. Their nerves seemed none too steady, though. Forrest raised a whoop and a holler and rode down on them with a Navy six in one hand and saber in the other, piloting King Philip with his knees alone, as the warhorse stretched out his long neck and spread his yellow teeth to bite. The gunners dropped their matches and scattered without getting off a shot.

“Brother, you look full of piss and vinegar,” Bill Forrest said.

“Obliged,” Forrest said, panting. A couple of the riders were dismounting now to spike the cannon, while others herded horses and prisoners down the road running south out of town.

“Whar’s them three generals,” Forrest said.

“Missed’m,” said Bill.

“You don’t mean it.” Forrest holstered his pistol and cocked a hand on his hip.

“Well, maybe you run acrost them somewhere,” Bill said, looking at him hard. He was as big a man as his elder brother and some few believed him possibly the tougher of the two. “Wherever you was at.”

Bill’s face was gray from the pain of his half-healed thigh wound, but Bedford was first to break the gaze.

“Well look yonder, would ye.” He gestured with his blade. The Sixth Illinois was just turning the corner, in order of battle and stepping out smartly.

“Aye,” Bill said. He swung his horse to face the enemy.

Forrest studied him. “Ye look about blowed,” he remarked. “I’m fresher’n you are, I spec. Ye best herd them horses on down the road. We’ll give these folks their jollification and be right along—Ornery!” he called.

Henri spurred up, as Bill Forrest, biting his pale lower lip, turned around and rode to the rear. The newly shod Dinkins came along on his right. Henri looked back once, a little wistfully, at Ginral
Jerry, who was driving the wagon away down the road, now loaded with sacks of meal and kegs of whiskey. Ahead, the Federals came marching toward them, pale and sweaty, clutching their muskets. Left of their line rode their commander, tall on a big black horse.

“Whar’s John Morton,” Forrest inquired.

“You sent him back to Oxford,” Henri reminded him. And the cannon all the men called the Bull Pups had gone with their commander.

“That I did. Well then …” But the gunners had figured it out on their own. The first of their two cannon fired, tearing a hole in the Federal line. As the sun burned through the fog, Henri felt his horse rock forward, following King Philip into the charge. Somewhere behind them, the second cannon coughed. Forrest’s double-edged blade whined in the wind. Colonel Starr crashed down from the black horse, wrapping his good arm around a deep gash on his shoulder. A couple of infantrymen came to bear him up. The rest had scattered for cover of the buildings, some flinging down their weapons as they ran.

“Fall back,” Forrest called, signaling. The sun gleamed on the whetted edges of his saber, braided now with blood. Henri and Dinkins wheeled their horses and retreated.

Forrest stood in his stirrups, beaming in the sudden sunlight. There was a joyful aspect on him that Henri had not seen in a long time.

“What’s got into him, I wonder?” Dinkins said. “He ain’t lost a horse all day.”

September 1863

H
E’S HIT
.” Willie’s voice seemed to quaver as he said it, and Cowan, looking where the boy pointed, saw Forrest’s long back waver in the saddle. Heat shimmer? It wasn’t hot enough for that. Cowan’s whole field of vision trembled, then came clear for him to see the blood-slick soaking through Forrest’s coat and spreading over the left hindquarter of his horse. Forrest had been gesturing with his sword to troopers he had just dismounted on the slopes of Tunnel Hill, but now as he swayed in the saddle Cowan saw that he might fall. He rode up quickly and put his own shoulder under Forrest’s left armpit as the sword arm sagged and Forrest slumped into him.

“Huh,” Forrest said, turning his head to look at Cowan from an inch away, the light in his eyes abruptly fading.

“Good Lord,” said Cowan. “Help me! Willie, we’ve got to get him down.”

Willie was reaching, ineffectually, for Forrest’s shoulder on the other side; meanwhile Matthew had come up from somewhere and caught the reins of Forrest’s horse beneath the bit. Anderson appeared, dismounted, and took some of Forrest’s weight on his own back as Forrest came down from the saddle. Cowan jumped down from his horse, leaving it for Willie to hold. He turned up the tail of Forrest’s coat and pressed the butt of his palm against the blood spurt.

A bullet, awkward as a bumblebee, whined between his head and Forrest’s and flumped into a cedar trunk a few steps up the hill. For hours they’d been in a running fight with two divisions under Crittenden, who’d crossed Chickamauga Creek at the Red House
bridge … thus cutting themselves off from the rest of the Yankee army. Forrest had seen the golden chance to wipe them out altogether but he didn’t have a quarter the force required to do it by himself, and no reply had come to his urgent messages to Bragg. Tunnel Hill was the first place terrain favored them to make a stand. Where they’d stopped now, shallow ridges of limestone jutted out among the cedars—pale chips of rock scattering from them as more Yankee bullets buzzed in from down the slope. Cowan jerked his head, aiming the point of his beard to a thicker clump of trees not far above them, and Anderson helped him drag Forrest toward this shelter.

“Look in my saddlebag,” Cowan called back to Willie. “There ought to be some—” Willie was running up already with the saddlebags slung over his shoulder. The points of the little black mustache he had recently grown stood out against the sudden pallor of his face.

Cowan was probing the wound for a projectile and not finding one; he groped behind himself into one of the bags and pulled out a wad of clean cotton rag. A flask came out with the rest and clanked against the limestone shelf where Forrest was being supported as Cowan staunched his wound. Matthew’s coppery face leaned gravely in, close against Willie’s pale one.

“Hand me up that whiskey,” Cowan said to the boys. “I think we got the bleeding stopped.”

“Never tetched hit,” Forrest said blearily. “Never will.”

Major Strange ran up, eyes widening as he took in the situation, then dashed back down, calling out, “Hold’m, boys!” Troopers who’d been anxiously peering up to see the condition of their general lowered their heads to the work of fighting once more.

“Don’t want no goddamn whiskey no-way,” Forrest said.

In the course of the summer Cowan had been obliged to lance a boil on Forrest’s backside, which he counted as his most dangerous duty in the war so far. Forcing whiskey on the man might rival it. He spun the cap off the flask with his thumb.

“You’ve lost a lot of blood,” he said. “If you don’t—”

Forrest fainted, slumping back into Anderson’s arms, and a low cry came from Matthew or Willie, perhaps both of them. Cowan jammed the rim of the flask against Forrest’s teeth and tipped it up. Some ran out, spilling over his knuckles, but some had run in for he
saw the Adam’s apple pump. He handed the flask back to Willie and picked up Forrest’s limp left hand, running his fingertips to the inside of the wrist.

Forrest’s eyes came open and he coughed and struggled to sit up straighter. “Ye don’t need to go holden my hand,” he said. “I ain’t so bad off as that till yet.”

“All right,” Cowan said. “What if I’m just hunting a pulse?”

“I’ll let ye know I got a damn pulse,” Forrest said. “I ain’t no baby needs a nursen.”

“No,” said Cowan. “But comes a day in your life when you need to let somebody take care of you if you don’t want to die. And nothing you can do about it.”

“I’m obliged to ye,” Forrest said, “for that thought.”

And never mind stopping another hole in you, Cowan said to himself. Behind them Matthew rose, then offered a hand to help Willie up. It was remarkable how the notorious hostility between the two seemed to have dwindled in the last few months.

Forrest clambered to his feet and reached around to feel the bandage on his back.

“I’ll counsel you to let that plug alone,” Cowan said. “You don’t have a lot of blood left in you.”

Forrest grinned at him. There was a bit of whisky-shine in his eyes, for he was truly unaccustomed to it. Matthew handed him his sword, and Forrest closed his hand on the hilt.

“Whar’s my horse at?” he said. “Don’t tell me I had another horse shot out from under me this mornen.”

Willy pointed to where the horse stood snuffling at the stony dirt.

“That much to the good then.” Forrest winced slightly as he stooped to gather the reins from the ground. “Ain’t I done tolt ye not to let the leathers trail thataway?” he snapped. “Well, never mind. Hit’s still a fight on our hands, ain’t it.”

Cowan watched him as he mounted, then began to repack his saddlebag. He thought of other times when there was nothing Forrest could do about whatever it was. There weren’t very many but it hurt to recall them. He took a small dram of whiskey for himself before he put the flask away.

April 1863