Devil's Dream Part 14

As Roderick lofted over the third and last fence that separated them from the fight, Matthew caught sight of Captain Montgomery Little, six-shooter upraised, turning his astonished gaze their way. A fissure of silence opened in the roar of battle and Matthew looked through it at Captain Little again; he had lost his pistol now and both his arms worked frantically like the legs of a beetle turned on its back and though still standing he had been shot dead-it was only that he didn't know it yet. With his free hand Matthew groped around his waist for a weapon, exchanging a blurry glance with Henri, who seemed to be muscling his own horse around in a vain effort to intercept them. Roderick, his neck stretched long, had caught sight of Forrest and was rus.h.i.+ng to join him where he fought two-handed, hammering a Federal trooper down from the saddle with the b.u.t.t of his empty pistol in his fist. The noise of battle came back with an explosion, which might just have been the shock as Matthew plowed into the ground. He sat up and saw Roderick lying a little in back of him, dead of a fourth bullet, one foreleg spasmodically lifting and loosening.

The fighting seemed to have ended now, with Yankees laying down their arms, signaling surrender with pocket handkerchiefs; somewhere was a larger truce flag on a stick. Forrest dismounted and stooped to reach for the dead horse, but stopped just short of touching him. Willie pounded up, mouth wide open and face chalk-pale.

"Thought I done tolt ye to carry him back." Forrest sank back on his boot heels, wrapping his arms across his chest. Willie, too winded to make any reply, folded at the waist and braced his hands on his knees.

"It's a shame. D'ye hear me?"

Matthew, feeling himself to be included now, thumbed a last trickle of blood away from his nose, and got up to one knee.

"A G.o.dd.a.m.n G.o.dd.a.m.n shame." Forrest shook his head. "Well. Hit cain't be mended." He turned and stalked off toward the area where the prisoners were being gathered up. shame." Forrest shook his head. "Well. Hit cain't be mended." He turned and stalked off toward the area where the prisoners were being gathered up.

Willie coughed and straightened, gasping. "You hurt?" he said.

Shaking his head, Matthew got to his feet. Willie's chest rose and fell. He tried the black points of his mustache with a fingertip and looked down at Roderick's still body.

"That horse was a better man than either one of us," Willie said.

Without thinking Matthew offered his hand across the carca.s.s. It was like he could see Willie's first thought-you don't shake hands with a n.i.g.g.e.r-and by the time Willie decided to reach for the man inside the skin, Matthew had already turned away, stooping to b.l.o.o.d.y himself from the dead horse's wounds and make his hand untouchable to anyone.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR.

April 1864 THEY HAD BEEN FIGHTING around Fort Pillow for hours by the time Forrest himself rode in, grim and weary from more than a day and a night in the saddle-he had ridden over seventy miles since the day before. Henri led him out a fresh horse. Chalmers had launched the first attack on the fort near dawn, and as soon as they swept the pickets from the outer works they had overrun the Federal horse pen and captured the stock. The Federals were just a little more than seven hundred, too few to man the outer works even with the fresh black troops that had just been sent from Memphis, and they had quickly fallen back to the second line of defense, a zigzag breastworks on the top of the hill, with its rear open to the junction of Coal Creek and the Mississippi River. around Fort Pillow for hours by the time Forrest himself rode in, grim and weary from more than a day and a night in the saddle-he had ridden over seventy miles since the day before. Henri led him out a fresh horse. Chalmers had launched the first attack on the fort near dawn, and as soon as they swept the pickets from the outer works they had overrun the Federal horse pen and captured the stock. The Federals were just a little more than seven hundred, too few to man the outer works even with the fresh black troops that had just been sent from Memphis, and they had quickly fallen back to the second line of defense, a zigzag breastworks on the top of the hill, with its rear open to the junction of Coal Creek and the Mississippi River.

With a grunt, Forrest swung astride the captured horse. Captain Anderson joined him for a scout of the perimeter. Henri fully intended to stay where he was, but Forrest beckoned him to follow. Henri climbed onto a brown jenny mule that had caught his eye in the Federal stock pen. The outermost works of Fort Pillow encompa.s.sed several hilltops and the terrain was cut this way and that by ravines. Henri liked the jenny's sure step over the rough ground and he felt too that she had some particular instinct for self-preservation.

It would have been a pleasant spring morning, bright but cool. Outside the stock pen the hillsides were speckled with tiny white star-shaped flowers and the yolky yellow of new dandelions. Moving in a semicircle southeast from the Mississippi, they pa.s.sed Ginral Jerry, just out of range of the guns of the fort, going along at a crouch and gathering the bitter greens. Chalmers had posted sharpshooters on the hills inside the outermost works and they were steadily exchanging fire with the Federals in the inner defenses.

Forrest rode halfway up the hillside and turned to face the river again, gathering the reins with one hand and shading his eyes with the other, though the sun was mostly in his back. Behind the zigzag breastworks, atop a bluff at the river's edge, there was a U-shaped inner fort, refurbished with fresh dug earth, with slits for six cannon belching lead in their direction. They were out of cannon range where they were, but a couple of Federal long rifles carried further. Forrest's unfamiliar horse was restless with the whistle of the b.a.l.l.s, kept squirming sideways and trying to sit down. Henri stroked his jenny's trembling neck, along the lines of the blue-hair cross that grew across her shoulders.

"G.o.ddammit this oughtent to take all G.o.dd.a.m.n all G.o.dd.a.m.n day!" Forrest remarked. "They ain't that many of the scalawags in there nohow. We need to move some more riflemen up to make them sonsab.i.t.c.hes put they G.o.dd.a.m.n heads down." day!" Forrest remarked. "They ain't that many of the scalawags in there nohow. We need to move some more riflemen up to make them sonsab.i.t.c.hes put they G.o.dd.a.m.n heads down."

"Look there," Anderson said, and pointed down the slope. "McCulloch wants you."

Henri could not tell if it was McCulloch or not, but someone was signaling from the zigzag breastworks, which McCulloch's brigade had taken sometime before Forrest arrived. They rode up toward him. Forrest's horse's hooves tore up the gra.s.s and lost purchase in the loosened dirt. He arrived at McCulloch's post at a scramble, and dismounted, tossing Henri the reins of his horse.

The horseshoe ring of the inner fort was no more than three hundred yards from the crest of the ridge, but still a few degrees above the point where they stood. The Confederates had reversed the log breastworks to give themselves some cover, and McCulloch's riflemen were keeping up a frequent fire to discourage the Federals from taking clear aim from the top of the earthen parapet opposite. Beyond the fort Henri could see a Federal gunboat steaming along the river toward them.

"General," McCulloch said. "Look yonder if you would." He pointed down to his left, where the ravine behind them curled around the ridge toward the Mississippi. A string of log cabins lined a cove between them and the inner fort.

"I believe a charge would carry that place," McCulloch said. "And from there we can distress their artillerymen a good deal."

"If them cannon don't blow ye to smithereens first," Forrest said.

"Just look at the angle," McCulloch said. "If we once gain the cabins they won't be able to bring those guns to bear."

Forrest squinted down the hill and nodded. It was the sort of move he favored, bold and no more risky than it needed to be.

"Get after'm," he said briefly. He pulled a nickel-backed watch from his pocket and glanced at the face: not quite eleven.

"General," Anderson called. "Mister Nolan would like a word."

The crash of cannon from the fort almost drowned out what they were saying. Henri's jenny shuddered, revolving her long ears. Nolan clambered up the slope at a crouch, then straightened to cup his mouth to Forrest's ear. He wore a buckskin jacket with the hair still on the hide, except for patches where the bristles had worn away from the greasy, sour-smelling leather. Of course the rest of Forrest's men were scarcely in any better trim. Their gray was ragged and many went shoeless now. Their numbers were thin when they started from Georgia and they had been taking up recruits as they could, over three weeks of a crazy looping progress all up and down West Tennessee. They'd swept in Nolan four days before, along with a couple dozen of his riders, raiders, deserters, bushwhackers-n.o.body knew what they really were and the same went double for Mister Nolan himself. But then it was no time to be choosy, and if Forrest had been as choosy as that he'd have left Henri standing by the Brandenburg road three years before.

They were following Nolan now, continuing the same southeast sweep they'd begun before, on the far side of the zigzag breastworks from the inner fort, across this cheerlessly bare ground, which had all been clear-cut to open fields of fire. Their way was complicated by stumps and logs that still lay where they had been felled. Some undergrowth had begun to return, buck bushes and blackberry bramble, worthless for cover. Anderson's horse stumbled, jumping one of the many shallow gullies. The volume of the cannonade swelled as the Federal gunboat began to lob up sh.e.l.ls from the Mississippi.

Forrest seemed oblivious to it. Now and then he reined up his horse to beckon sharpshooters to nearer positions. The Federal riflemen, meanwhile, had corrected their tendency to overshoot and were beginning to bring their rounds much closer to the scouting party. Anderson was just turning to Forrest to say who knew what when a ball crashed through the forehead of Forrest's horse. The animal reared, went into convulsions, and fell over backward, rolling over the rider.

Henri jumped down and sheltered himself beside the shoulder of his jenny, holding her close under the jaw and stroking her velvet nostrils in hope of keeping her calm. He watched Forrest's mount as it kicked itself to death in the ditch where it had fallen, the geyser of blood slowing to a trickle between its eyes. A hullo went up from the Confederate lines to the west and Henri looked over to see Matthew rus.h.i.+ng pell-mell toward them astride a fresh horse he was bringing to Forrest. The boy rode well, though he'd not taken time to put his feet in the stirrups. But Forrest had maybe been crushed to death, it appeared. Or no, Anderson was helping him up from the springy clump of buck bushes that had cus.h.i.+oned his fall. Forrest pressed one hand to his side, then straightened.

"For G.o.d's sake, General!" Anderson said. "If you must carry on, let's do it on foot."

"I'm as like to get shot afoot as on horseback," Forrest snarled. "And I can see one h.e.l.l of a whole lot better from the saddle."

And he got up as quickly as Matthew hopped down. The boy looked up at him, panting, his eyes wide and a little gla.s.sy. His caramel-color face had paled a shade.

"Git outa here!" Forrest told him out of the side of his mouth. "Git back under cover. Henry, carry him back to the line."

Gladly, Henri thought in a prayerful silence. He sprang onto the jenny and stretched down a hand for Matthew to scramble up behind him. Forrest and Anderson had resumed their course, following Nolan northeast toward Cold Creek. The fire on their party had paused for a moment, thanks to McCulloch's rush on the cabins in the cove. Henri rode gratefully toward cover.

"He never even looked at me," Matthew hissed into his ear.

"Calm down," Henri advised him. "It might just be he doesn't want to see you killed."

AN HOUR LATER Forrest returned, on foot after all (for his second horse had been shot out from under him too), limping from the effects of his first fall, and in a still more p.r.i.c.kly humor than before. Forrest returned, on foot after all (for his second horse had been shot out from under him too), limping from the effects of his first fall, and in a still more p.r.i.c.kly humor than before.

"Got holt of yore penstaff?" he asked Anderson. "Good, set this down. You lowdown bellycrawlen horsethieven n.i.g.g.e.rstealen pa.s.sel of murderen rapen renegades have got your sorry a.s.s in a slipknot now! I'd as lief kill ever man in the place, contraband n.i.g.g.e.rs and bushwhackers too, and if ye ain't got the good sense to give up and quit I will d.a.m.n well do it and do it barehanded for I don't mean to waste no more powder on ye!" You lowdown bellycrawlen horsethieven n.i.g.g.e.rstealen pa.s.sel of murderen rapen renegades have got your sorry a.s.s in a slipknot now! I'd as lief kill ever man in the place, contraband n.i.g.g.e.rs and bushwhackers too, and if ye ain't got the good sense to give up and quit I will d.a.m.n well do it and do it barehanded for I don't mean to waste no more powder on ye!"

"Yes sir." Anderson held his paper to the light. "Let me just read that back."

Headquarters, Forrest's Cavalry Before Fort Pillow, April 12, 1864Major Booth, Commanding United States Forces, Fort Pillow Here Anderson paused to clear his throat, while Henri's mouth opened like the mouth of a fish; he had to make a conscious effort to close it. In the course of the morning he had seen Major Booth arrive in the land of the Old Ones, struck in the heart by a long lucky shot, while inspecting the inner fort's batteries.

Major, - the conduct of the officers and men garrisoning Fort Pillow has been such as to ent.i.tle them to being treated as prisoners of war. I demand the unconditional surrender of this garrison, promising that you shall be treated as prisoners of war. My men have received a fresh supply of ammunition and from their present position can easily a.s.sault and capture the fort. Should my offer be refused, I cannot be responsible for the fate of your command.N. B. Forrest Major General Commanding "Close enough, I reckon," Forrest said as Anderson folded the letter. He reached into his watch pocket but instead of the watch he produced the drilled coin on its leather thong, which he looked at for a moment before raising his eyes to Captain Goodman.

"Well, git ye a white rag and carry that note on over," he said.

Goodman saluted and reached for the paper. Forrest put the coin back into his pocket. "Henry," he said.

Henri, who had just stretched out on the green springy earth, raised up on onto his elbows.

"I want ye to go too," Forrest said.

Why, Henri thought, but there was no telling.

They rode up along the top of the ridge south of the inner fort's horseshoe, bearing a borrowed white s.h.i.+rt raised on a musket barrel. At the sight of the truce flag the guns all fell silent; to fill that vacuum, Henri's ears began to ring. From the height they had reached he could see well enough that Forrest was really not bluffing this time. The ammunition wagons had in fact arrived from Brownsville long before. McCulloch, from the position he'd taken among the cabins of the cove, had completely silenced three cannon of the fort and the others were much troubled by sharpshooters Forrest had moved up from the hills to the east. There was more than one Federal boat on the river, but Anderson was just now marching three companies into trenches dug at the foot of the bluff, to forestall any attempt at a landing. On the north side of the fort, Henri could just make out Nolan's buckskin jacket creeping forward through the ravine beside Coal Creek. A couple of his raiders were visible crawling along after him and all his men were probably there somewhere. It was Nolan who had shown Forrest this weak spot and got his leave to be first to exploit it. Henri couldn't quite fix on what about this situation troubled him so.

With the cease-fire, the heads of black soldiers had begun to pop up above the parapet. Soon enough they got the confidence to show all of themselves, and the parapet was lined with them like birds alit on a rail. They looked very well in their blue uniforms, which mostly had not yet seen hard use. A half-dozen or so stood easily, their arms at parade rest almost, looking at Henri with a calm curiosity. He could feel the force that was latent in them. Where were you in 1859? he thought. Or the year after that. Or the year after that. They were here now, anyway. He thought suddenly that Forrest might have attached him to this party so that he could be seen by these black men. And yet, he merely puzzled them. In Louisiana, New Orleans especially, anyone who looked at Henri would form a notion of what he was, but these men, whose African strain was more pure, hardly knew what to make of him. In these western states he was taken for a half-breed Indian half the time anyway. It would have made more sense to send Jerry, or Ben. If Forrest had even had such a purpose.

Some of the other black men on the parapet had begun to call insults to the Confederate soldiers below-not a good idea, Henri thought. There had been black Federals at Paducah too, two weeks before, and he'd seen the knuckles of Forrest's men go white on the grips of their weapons then. All over West Tennessee there was a dumb rage among white people at the very idea of black Federal troops-astonishment even, as if their own mules and oxen had somehow thought to take up arms against them. A few months earlier General Cleburne had suggested the South muster slaves into its dwindling armies, but no one wanted to hear that, even now.

Not all of the blacks on the parapet were in uniform. Indeed, the loudest among them were not. Runaways had been migrating to this place ever since the Federals had first captured it. There had never been troops enough to man the three-mile-long outer earthworks, but blacks who wandered in from wherever had made themselves at home within this defense. Some carried on trade from up and downriver, dealing whiskey and other contraband. And they were called "contraband" themselves, by whites in the region. The black runaways were not alone there either. The cabins McCulloch had just occupied had over several months filled up with a queer mix of ex-slaves and white renegades of one kind or another: deserters from either army alongside men who'd profited from the unsettled times to turn bandit. Fort Pillow had the name of a vipers' nest, and no doubt some of the tales of rape and robbery were true.

Things had turned ugly in West Tennessee since their last gallop through here in 1863. From the war's beginning the land had been combed over too many times for supplies and recruits. And from one farm to the next it was split between Confederate and Union sympathizers. The confusion opened all kinds of chances to settle scores that had nothing to do with the war. Not three weeks earlier, they'd come across the carca.s.s of their own Lieutenant Dobbs, who'd gone home to Henderson County to raise a few men he knew there, with his face skinned out and his nose cut off and other mutilations too dreadful for Henri's mind to dwell upon. They had to go through his pockets to guess who he was. In Jackson a committee had come to Forrest to claim that Fort Pillow was nothing but a hideout for marauders who did such ugly things as that, and what did he mean to do about it? Fort Pillow had become such a plague on the region that Forrest had trouble keeping his West Tennessee men riding with him, for all wanted to stay home to defend their own families.

Forrest was riding out toward them now, forking his third horse of that day, pulling where the truce flag whipped from the gun barrel at the same time a messenger arrived from the fort: Lieutenant Alexander Hunter, commanding a detachment of the Second U.S. Colored Light Artillery, and with him Captain Young of the Twenty-fourth Missouri Cavalry. Young raised his hat to Forrest, for he had seen him in the field before today. Lieutenant Hunter showed the note that Anderson had written.

"Can you a.s.sure me that my Negro soldiers will be treated as prisoners of war?" he said.

"That's jest what it says thar on that paper don't it?" Forrest said shortly. "They'll be prisoners of war if you surrender right this red-hot minute right this red-hot minute. Dawdle, and they're subject to be treated like dead folks."

Lieutenant Hunter looked a young man, his face the color of cold biscuit dough. There was a crack in the corner of his mouth, and a dark furrow in between his eyebrows. "Your Confederate Congress has put it out that Negro soldiers will be sent back to slavery if captured. Their officers executed." He tried a thin smile. "And that would be me."

"Confederate Congress ain't here so they don't git no say," Forrest told him. "Ye'll be treated fair if ye strike yore flag. Don't and ye're like as the next man to get kilt in the fight."

"Major Booth asks for more time," Young told him.

"He d.a.m.n well caint have it," Forrest snapped. "p.u.s.s.yfoot around and I won't be responsible. I need me an answer and I need it right quick."

The two Federal officers nodded and rode back to the fort. Why were they dealing in a dead man's name, Henri wondered. But maybe he knew ... Bradford was a West Tennessean himself but he'd made a bad reputation since he came to Fort Pillow. His orders were to live off the land and he'd followed them to the point of pillage. Old scores of his own to settle, perhaps. And there were insults to women on Bradford's watch, the kind that can only be washed out in blood. Major Booth had arrived at the fort so recently he'd not had the time to make himself hated.

"They hopen to get some he'p out of them gunboats," Forrest muttered, reaching under his coat to finger a bruise where his ribs had slammed a stone in his fall. "Well, we ain't got all G.o.dd.a.m.n day to set around and let that happen."

Captain Young appeared on the parapet among the black soldiers there. He pointed and said something to one of the more excitable troopers, who capered and kicked out a leg. "Wooo, thas Ole Bedford sho' nuff. We knows him! Yes we do." And then the man jumped behind the wall to shelter himself from Forrest's baleful stare. But Forrest didn't look altogether displeased. He'd come out here to be recognized, Henri realized, or at least that would be part of his reason. A little while back Colonel Duckworth had bluffed a garrison in Union City to give itself up with surrender-or-die threats written over Forrest's name-when Forrest himself was on his way to Paducah. Fort Pillow's commanders would be more likely to take those warnings seriously if they knew Forrest really was here in person, and there were apt to be others besides Captain Young who had run up against him somewhere before.

Lieutenant Hunter returned to them, alone this time, his features more drawn than they had been before. He pa.s.sed Forrest a sc.r.a.p of paper with the name of Major Booth forged to it, then turned to Goodman and said something to him in a low voice.

"Your note does not produce the desired effect," Forrest spelled out slowly. He looked up at the envoy. "I don't know whoever in there is setten down this horses.h.i.+t but tell him if the next one ain't wrote in plain English I'll come in there and poke it down his throat with a ramrod." Forrest spelled out slowly. He looked up at the envoy. "I don't know whoever in there is setten down this horses.h.i.+t but tell him if the next one ain't wrote in plain English I'll come in there and poke it down his throat with a ramrod."

"I'll do what I can to satisfy you," Hunter said. He nodded to Forrest and returned toward the fort.

"That man smelt of whiskey, I swan," Forrest said. He crumpled the note and threw it down. "Even this G.o.dd.a.m.n paper stinks of whiskey."

Henri looked again at the walls of the parapet, where some of the capering, catcalling blacks did appear to be a little tipsy. Maybe Bradford would be drinking too, to keep his courage up. Through one of those queer windows in his mind he could see men standing with tin cups and gourds around a keg.

"We will have this place come h.e.l.l or high water," Forrest said. "If everbody up there has done drunk hisself senseless it's jest gone be too bad."

He rode west along the bluff, peered out at the river, rode back. Rarely had Henri seen him so fidgety. This fort was about as stout as the one at Paducah. There they had sacked the town with no trouble, commandeered a few hundred horses, captured all manner of supplies and destroyed whatever they couldn't carry. They'd had the pleasure of burning a steamboat, and the dock where it was moored. The fort, however, they failed to take. "If I have to storm your works, expect no quarter," Forrest had written when he demanded surrender. The Federal commander called the bluff and when Forrest's men charged they were thrown back, and their leader, A. P. Thompson, killed. Forrest gave up and went away, with his men feeling rightly enough they'd been whipped by n.i.g.g.e.rs, though none of them said anything out loud.

It wasn't going to go like that this time. It would be different, and in the worst way.

Not all of the blacks in the horseshoe fort were drunk. The handful of men who had been studying Henri from the beginning were still sober and serious, and someone had just handed them up a very long rifle with an octagon barrel.

"You ought to go back, General," Captain Goodman said, motioning toward the long rifle. "I think they are marking you out as a target."

"Ain't no man can kill me and live," Forrest said. "Hit's a flag of truce besides."

"Yes, but they claim that we're moving up men through ravines under the truce."

"I ain't moven men through the G.o.dd.a.m.n ravines any more than they tryen to land men off of their G.o.dd.a.m.n gunboats-" Forrest broke off. "Yonder he comes."

It wasn't Hunter this time but some other junior officer. The note read, General, I will not surrender. Very respectfully yours, L. F. Booth ... General, I will not surrender. Very respectfully yours, L. F. Booth ...

"It's a plain answer anyway," Forrest said. "G.o.dd.a.m.n their eyes! I'm goen up on that hill yonder-and I'll be a-watchen for the first men over that wall. We got Missouri, Mississippi and Tennessee all here. Let's see who can git there first. And git after'm-keep after'm, boys, until that flag comes down." after'm, boys, until that flag comes down."

A gust from the river teased out the cloth of the Union flag above the battlement. It seemed that all of them were looking at it for a second. The darkness rising in Henri's mind suddenly took on a definite form.

"General," he said.

Forrest, interrupted, turned on him hotly.

"General-" He saw it plain now, why couldn't he say it? "Mister Nolan is out in advance of Barteau. In the ravine by Coal Creek."

Forrest looked at him like he'd lost his mind. "Why wouldn't he be? Them's local boys thar with him and they know the lay of the land."

They have the local-most grudges too, Henri thought, and they mean to be the first ones in there. He was looking for a safe way to say it when Forrest spoke again.

"All right then. Go see about him. If it's a-worryen ye so." With a grimace Forrest pressed his sore ribs once more, then wheeled his horse toward the rear.

Henri squeezed his heels to the flanks of his jenny and rushed down toward the Coal Creek ravine. Behind him came the high silver tone of Gaus's bugle, then the hair-raising keen of the Rebel yell. The crash of artillery replaced the ringing in his ears. Barteau's men looked up at him as he whipped by, thinking he might be bringing orders as he sometimes did. But Nolan and his followers were already darting up the slope toward the earthworks. Henri jumped down, tied his jenny to a stub of a fallen tree and went after them.

The charging Confederates had thrown themselves into the six-foot ditch at the front of the horseshoe and were climbing all on top of each other in a mad leapfrog to scale the earthen wall. All the defenders' attention was now concentrated there, and though the angle was too steep for the cannon to be of any use, small arms fire was doing considerable damage.

Nolan's men meanwhile were making for a point where the earthwork met the bluff on the north side. There the buckskin jacket disappeared, over the bluff itself as it looked. Nolan's men went over after him ... and more than Nolan had with him when he joined their force. As many as fifty West Tennessee guerrillas were going over, and they weren't flinging themselves into the river either, as Henri saw when he reached the edge. The last of the partisans stretched back a hand to help him, and by scrabbling and clutching at a root sticking out of the clay of the cliff he was able to scramble around the corner of the wall as Nolan and his crowd had done before-each man beginning to fire as he entered the fort. A keg of whiskey had indeed been broached, and more than one of Nolan's men paused there to dip himself a measure.

The Federals might have seen and stopped them easily enough were they not facing the frontal a.s.sault-new riflemen stepping up onto the catwalk behind the battlement to relieve those who stepped down to reload, and all in good order until Nolan and his men disrupted it by shooting the defenders in the back. At once the top of the battlement was covered with a wave of Forrest's men breaking over it, the wild bone-chilling yell still skirling as they jumped down into the enclosure, slaying every fish that swirled in the barrel.

"Save your lives!" Bradford shouted, without making any suggestion how his men were to do it.

"Let us fight yet," cried a lieutenant-he was commanding black artillerymen who still served the cannon-but Bradford howled, "It is no more use," and threw himself over the bluff toward the river. One of the black gunners stood up calmly away from his piece, with no more weapon than his ramrod, which he held at his side like a staff. Henri remembered his face from the other side of the parapet, one of the sober, serious ones, and he was still looking at Henri now, ignoring Nolan, who walked up to him slowly and shot him pointblank between the eyes. Others were on their knees holding up their hands for mercy now but they were shot down just the same, by the partisans who'd entered over the bluff or equally by Forrest's men coming over the wall. He had seen Forrest blood-maddened often enough but never had it affected so many; every man who came over the wall had murder blazing in his eyes. "Kill every last one of the varmints," somebody cried. "That's Forrest's word!" Others were toasting the slaughter from the whiskey keg. The Union flag still snapped on its pole and Henri thought of cutting the lanyard but there was too much fighting there by the flagstaff and it would be better to go and go quickly- He scrambled back the way he had come, half-falling down the steep slope to the spot where the jenny grace a Bon Dieu grace a Bon Dieu was still tethered; not bothering with the knot but breaking the dry-rotted reins with a snap of his wrist. He rode, wondering what help to expect. Forrest at least saw the value in a slave. He wouldn't go slaughter so many of them any more than he would the same number of horses or mules. Wasn't that right? Not quite a year back, in May '63, some of Forrest's scouts had captured a handful of black Federals and quietly sold them down the river. They hadn't exactly told the Old Man about that one, but they had lived high for a while on the money. Then again, when they entered the town of Purdy a few weeks ago, Forrest had set a guard from his own escort to protect the wife and family of Colonel Fielding Hurst-not only from Confederate soldiers but from the rage of ordinary citizens all around, for Hurst was a Union man who'd just burned down half his own hometown, and was generally thought responsible for horrors on the order of the torture and murder of Dobbs. Forrest had promised to wipe Hurst off the face of the earth if he could catch him, but he normally s.h.i.+elded even Union sympathizers, so long as they didn't have arms in their hands. The truth of it was, Henri had no notion if Forrest would stop this killing or not but he knew Forrest was the only man who could stop it. was still tethered; not bothering with the knot but breaking the dry-rotted reins with a snap of his wrist. He rode, wondering what help to expect. Forrest at least saw the value in a slave. He wouldn't go slaughter so many of them any more than he would the same number of horses or mules. Wasn't that right? Not quite a year back, in May '63, some of Forrest's scouts had captured a handful of black Federals and quietly sold them down the river. They hadn't exactly told the Old Man about that one, but they had lived high for a while on the money. Then again, when they entered the town of Purdy a few weeks ago, Forrest had set a guard from his own escort to protect the wife and family of Colonel Fielding Hurst-not only from Confederate soldiers but from the rage of ordinary citizens all around, for Hurst was a Union man who'd just burned down half his own hometown, and was generally thought responsible for horrors on the order of the torture and murder of Dobbs. Forrest had promised to wipe Hurst off the face of the earth if he could catch him, but he normally s.h.i.+elded even Union sympathizers, so long as they didn't have arms in their hands. The truth of it was, Henri had no notion if Forrest would stop this killing or not but he knew Forrest was the only man who could stop it.

He jumped off the jenny while she was still trotting. Forrest leaned against a tree, twirling the coin on its thong as he looked toward the battle, or sometimes cupping it in his palm to study more closely. That old Spanish doubloon that Jeffrey Forrest had plowed up somewhere in Mississippi and ever after worn around his neck. Forrest had carried it since his brother was killed, and it wasn't an especially good sign when he commenced studying it this way.

"General," Henri gasped. "You must come."

Forrest looked up at him half-unseeing. "Come whar?"

"The fort-" Henri leaned forward, braced hands on his knees in hope of relieving a st.i.tch in his side. "They're killing, down there-just killing."

Forrest pointed, the coin swinging from the heel of his hand. "Without they strike that G.o.dd.a.m.n flag they can good G.o.dd.a.m.n well expect to get kilt."

"They've surrendered!" Henri said. "There's no fight left in them anyhow. There's men being killed with empty hands."