Devil's Dream (44 page)

It wasn’t snoring, then. It was what a cat that size did instead of purr.

He could see the ears now, just the tips of them, revolving forward. He thought of other cats he had seen stalk. But if he were the thing being stalked, then the panther would certainly have seen him move. Would be thinking it over now, considering its chances.

Come on, Forrest thought. Come ahead and let’s see what you’re made of.

The panther stood up, shoulders hunched high, the head still low. It looked jet-black, though that was only because of the darkness. Forrest had heard tell of jungle panthers in South America who really were that color.

One of the embers broke in the fire and a little flame shot up, catching the yellow gleam of the panther’s eyes. Forrest held the look, for a long moment. Then the panther raised its head and looked away, shrugging almost, like any cat pretending it never really cared for its quarry. Just stretching …

Like that it had turned and was going away. Long tail still switching. Forrest caught his gun belt free of his blanket roll as he stood up, and slung it over his left shoulder. The second pistol, in its holster, slapped against his heart. He ran lightfooted to the tree line, stopped. The panther had opened up a long lolloping stride and was well away, high on a slope of trampled pasture, above where Forrest stood staring after it. In the brighter light of the open area, the big cat looked more gray than black, except the black spot he could now make out on the very tip of its tail.

He watched it go, feeling his own edge soften, half-regretting he hadn’t shot the panther, half-glad of it. A varmint, troublesome—but there were Yankees aplenty yet to be killed and no need to spend powder and shot on a varmint.

He strapped on his belt and holstered the pistol in his right hand, then yawned and rolled his shoulders. That wound in his back itched him now, but the itch only told him it was healing. The itch that couldn’t be scratched was that he’d let Cowan buffalo him into
taking a drink of medicinal whiskey, soon after he’d been hit. Well, let that go.

It would be an hour yet until dawn. Forrest turned back to the campfire, concentric rings of sleeping men, lying there quiet as children. A memory of little Fan flashed upon him and he sent it away with a quick sharp hand clap.

The sleeper came up alert from the stone. Willie turned over, coughed, still dreaming.

“Boots and saddles!” Forrest called. He had not taken off his own boots to sleep. And Jerry was already bringing him a fresh horse: a big, stout-looking bay, with a blue-black mane. I won’t bother given this’n a name, Forrest thought. The death of Highlander, two days before, still lay heavy on his mind.

He rode with some four hundred men at his back, in varying states of readiness, some already keenly focused on the horizon ahead them, others still rubbing sleep from their eyes, blinking into the predawn darkness. The moon had long since set, and mist on the fields confused the starlight. The Yankees would be running for the pass over Missionary Ridge at Rossville, Forrest thought, trying to calculate what gain they might have made in the dark. With the right will and enough men in the right spot, the rest of the whole Yankee army could still be scattered or destroyed. Git thar fustest with the mostest. Forrest didn’t have near enough men for the job, but he’d worry on that when the time came.

They rode fanned out through groves raked all the previous day by minié balls and grapeshot from the cannons. Wood of the torn trunks stood out stark and pale among the dark boles of undamaged trees. Everywhere the scent of wounded wood mingled with the odor of slow-drying blood. Anderson leaned sideways from the saddle to pluck a splinter for a toothpick, made a light remark and laughed as someone hushed him. Overhead the canopy of leaves was fracturing into fine blue lines like cracks in a china teacup, as dawn washed out the weak light of the stars.

Just ahead through a thinning of the trees the downhill slope of another pasture glowed, steeped in dew. At the bottom where there might be a creek, where certainly there were remains of a disintegrating rock-wall fence, enemy horsemen circled, clustered, faced Forrest’s party as it began to break into the open.

“I don’t make’m many,” Forrest said, squinting in the faint light as Anderson and Major Strange pulled up either side of him. “I don’t make’m worth slowen down fer.” He’d have called the Yankee cavalry at between a hundred and a hundred and fifty, though of course more might be hidden where the thickets began again, halfway up the swell of the next rise.

He glanced back and caught sight of Willie’s pale, excited face as he came riding out of the grove behind them. A dark spot on his cheekbone might have been a bruise or a scrape from one of his scuffles with Matthew—and why did those boys seem to need a session of stomp and gouge even after a long day of battle? Or no, they’d given up all that foolishness lately, hadn’t they?—so Willie’s smudge might just as well be something else, and anyway Matthew was riding well off to the left, so that for the moment Forrest held his horse between them.

“Sir?” Anderson was saying.

“They won’t stick. Not where they’re at. Not even thinken about it,” Forrest said. “Come on and let’s give’m a dare.”

The yell went up as he dug his heels into the flanks of the unnamed horse. His throat hurt but he couldn’t tell what part of the whole wildcat scream was his. It seemed to float above them all, like the lifting, dissipating morning mist.

The Yankee horsemen wheeled, clustered, rode across the damp ditch line beyond the remnants of rock wall, twenty yards or so up the next rise, and then they turned. Would they have a mind to charge to meet him? No. But now they were close enough for him to see their weapons as they raised them. Long guns. Forrest’s horsemen were still too far out for their Navy sixes to count for much and so the men were holding their fire.

At the first volley he heard the thump of metal penetrating flesh, and turned for an instant to see that the colored feller he’d picked up by the side of that Kentucky road had been shot dead in the saddle. Henry. Ornery, in his odd French way of pronouncing it. He’d taken the bullet on the bridge of his nose and the shock had rocked his whole upper body back, but now it slumped forward into the horse’s mane, where his copper-colored fingers still convulsed on the reins.

Forrest faced front, where the Yankees surprised him with a second
volley hard on the first. By damn they must have got holt of some of the brand-new Spencer repeaters—he needed to get some of them for his own folks. Six-guns among his own party were beginning to pop here and there, though the range was still a shade long for them. Forrest, like the better disciplined members of his troop, continued to hold his fire.

His horse leapt over some stones of the wall, more clumsily than it should have done, missing a stride as it came down, then partially recovering. There was in fact a little creek beyond the wall, narrow enough some of the horses jumped it too, but Forrest’s mount plunged straight in—it wasn’t more than fetlock deep. The bottom was paved with smooth flat stones; when he looked down he thought he even saw a crawdad. There was blood mixed in the spray the hooves splashed up, and in a flash of disbelieving outrage Forrest saw a slim column of blood spurt from the throat of his cantering horse.

He leaned forward and closed the hole with his right index finger. As he did so he seemed to feel another bullet skim down the whole length of his spine. That much was lucky. Be damned if he’d stop to change horses now.

He was near enough to see the faces of the Yankees. The frost of alarm passing over them as they began to grasp that the horse, though certainly shot dead, was not going to stop carrying Forrest with his arms and his rage into their midst. In fact the unnamed horse was moving smoothly now. Through the wound that united them, Forrest could feel the heartbeat of the animal flowing into his own.

Had he lost one of his pistols, when he stooped to stop the blood-gush? No he must have dropped it into a coat pocket, where he could feel it now bouncing against his hip … another sore spot there, where Gould had shot him back in June. His right hand was busy but he could still reach the other pistol with his left. He drew the double-edged sword instead and whipped it once around his wrist. The flexible Damascus blade sang as it sliced through the rushing air.

The Yankees could have, should have, got off a few more shots at him, but by now they must have cottoned onto the idea that no number
of bullets would be enough to stop this charge. The Yankees turned and whipped their horses away toward Missionary Ridge.

Keep up the skeer
—Forrest didn’t know if it was him yelling it or Anderson or Strange or any of the many others to whom he’d taught the phrase and concept; maybe he was just hearing it inside his own head. He spurred up the slope. The Yankees were scattering into the thickets. He locked onto one of them, the nearest, who sensed the pursuit, looked back once to see it coming, his mouth a little red ring of fear. The Yankee rider whipped his horse faster, twisting and turning through the briars of the thicket like a rabbit on the run.

Locust thorns clawed at Forrest’s coat sleeves. He saw the Yankee break his crop on his horse’s backside, then fling the useless handle away. The blue coat billowed, catching air like a sail. Forrest squeezed an ounce more speed from his horse, raised his sword and howled as he struck. The enemy squealed as the coat parted and the sword’s tip drew a red groove in the flesh to the right of his spine, all the way down from neck bone to coccyx. A shallow wound, hardly worth holleren over so. Forrest thought of the claw marks on his mother’s back, and different niggers he’d had to whup—it was damn awkward to swing a sword out of this crouch and yet he dursn’t straighten up for then his finger would come out of the horse’s neck and then the horse would bleed out and die.

Swop his damn head off Goddammit right now, Forrest told himself, spurring up to close again. The tail of the Yankee’s horse lashed across his face and he spat out a thread of coarse hair as he cut again with the sword, the blade chopping into the other man’s shoulder this time, instead of the throat as he’d intended—hard enough to knock the Yankee out of the saddle, though Forrest didn’t much think he had killed him.

He rode past, thinking irritably that he’d still have to claim an enemy life for this dead horse he was still flogging forward. They broke out onto the open road, and here the Yankees had picked up speed, the dust of their departure just settling around the next bend. One of the new Spencers lay by the roadside, trigger guard snagged by a twig of a sapling, and Forrest wanted to stop to retrieve it, but there was the same problem about the hole in his horse’s throat and anyway somebody coming behind would get it—the Yankees
were throwing down so much as they ran it would take all day to get everything picked up.

He could hear some of his own men clattering around the bend and took a quick glance over his shoulder, remembering the last time he’d done so that he’d seen Henry dead in the saddle. That might have been one of my sons kilt, he thought, but no, there was Willie coming on now, with no holes in him to be seen, and Matthew riding one place away now, with one of the younger troopers, Witherspoon maybe, between them. He remembered how Henry used to put himself between Willie and Matthew sometimes. That was a good man he had lost this morning. He had lost, would lose a passel of good men, afore all was said and done.

Matthew, now he thought Matthew might make a good man too if he lived to get good grown—and Forrest had to mash down that idea right quick because they wouldn’t let Matthew be what a son of his ought to be, with his qualities. No matter how the war turned out, they wouldn’t let him. But who was
they?

Cain’t afford to think about it. He was striking the crest of the ridge right now, pulling his horse up under a patch of tall pines, atop which some Federal forward observers were turning their field glasses this way and that. Some looked out over the road to the west where Forrest’s men were coming, while others peered down the eastern slope along the path their own comrades were pounding toward Chattanooga, abandoning the observers there like so many treed raccoons.

Here in a minute, he’d climb up there himself and have a looksee.

Meanwhile, he still needed to kill a Yankee to pay for his lost horse. He sheathed his sword and drew a pistol with his free left hand. But hell it was damn near next to impossible to draw a bead up a damn tree when he had to crouch down across his horse’s neck all the time.

By damn, Forrest said to himself, I might jest spend this entire war tryen to hold the whole world together with one finger.

Matthew and Willie and more and more of the others were reining up now, forming a loose circle around where Forrest had halted. A riderless horse broke through the ring, blood on the saddle, mane clotted with blood. Forrest recalled how Henri liked to ride
stretched out along his horse’s neck, like he thought he was a wild Indian or I don’t know what. Like he thought that style would spare him a bullet.

He stuck his pistol in the holster and squinted up at the treetops again.

“Might as well come on down,” he called. “Y’all prisoners now. Ye won’t be harmed.”

He sat up straight and dismounted quickly. The blood spurt from his horse’s throat was not half the strength it had been at the start. Forrest’s right hand was black with drying blood. His left just speckled from his swordplay a couple of minutes before. He used the left hand to stroke the unnamed horse’s forehead. As the horse’s legs melted out from under it, Forrest cradled the whole head in his right arm, still stroking rhythmically with his other hand.

His mother had taught him to hate waste—sometimes with reason, sometimes with a strap. Softly as he could he laid the dead horse’s head down on the stony surface of the roadway.

“That there’s a horse done give everything he’s got.”

His mounted men faced him, haggard, exhilarated.

“And ye know that’s all I ask of the lot of ye—”

One hand pressed to the small of his back, he straightened up and looked across at his people.