Devil's Dream (17 page)

T
HE GIRL SWUNG
up behind him without missing a beat. In the doorway across the yard her mother dropped her picking basket and raised a hand to the corner of her mouth.

“Emma, what do you mean?” she said. “You cain’t just be a-goen off with such a man as that.”

“Momma …” she began, but Forrest had already swung his horse around in the direction the girl had shown before she mounted. She hung her chin over his right shoulder and pressed her whole long torso snug against his back. In her middle teens, she must have been, and a likely-looking gal, though he had barely looked at her before she jumped on, being more interested in what she had to say.

“Go along the back side of that branch,” she told him, her breath teasing the whorls of his ear as she stretched her arm to show him a line of trees that followed a gulley eastward toward Black Creek. The sun was going down behind them, and the lush green of the pasture was washed in a golden light. He squeezed King Philip in the flanks and brought him into a long easy canter. The girl moved smoothly with Forrest’s movement, like a vine wrapped into a tree in the wind. He remembered the young horsewoman who had ridden a ways with them toward their first fight in Sacramento a couple of years ago. This one would cut as fine a figure in the saddle, he was sure. But there had been no time to saddle her own horse.

When he reached down to check his pistols he grazed the bare skin of her knee. She must have hitched up most of her skirt when she got astride behind him. But she didn’t start at the touch, or giggle
as a light-minded woman might have done. She only tightened the whole of herself deeper into him and the horse.

For the last two days his mind had been burning, but now it was calm and clear. Out of the corner of his mind’s eye he seemed to see a panther on a fast lope up the round of a hill among the gray boles of winter trees. He shook his head and looked at the real world before him.

“The ford’s not far,” Emma told him. “We had best get down, General Forrest, for the Yankees may can see us from the other bank.”

She dropped down herself and walked out ahead of him, stooping just slightly to keep her head below the snarl of bramble on the west bank of Black Creek. There was plenty of small arms firing a couple of hundred yards downstream, where the Federals led by Streight had burned the bridge once they had crossed, using rails from Emma’s family’s fences to start the blaze. As the deeper voice of a cannon belled out among the pistols and the muskets, she parted stalks of cane to look out on the water. He pictured her mother stooping to rake the wild greens she’d been gathering back into the basket she had dropped.
Don’t be uneasy
, he had told her.
I’ll be a-bringen yore gal back safe
.

He drew Emma back by her sleeve and said, “I’m proud to have ye fer a pilot, but I’ll not make a breastworks of ye.” Indeed a few spent balls had begun to plop among the slender cane leaves where they were hid.

“Right there it is.” Emma stood close behind him now, pointing over the creek to a point on the far bank where cane divided around a slope of clay. Black Creek was swollen with spring rain, running fast and deep down by the burning bridge, but here it looked wider and slower too. “There’s a sand bar from one side to the other,” she breathed to him. “Our cows come across it mornen and night. It’s not hardly chest deep on a cow.”

“Well, ain’t that fine?” Forrest said, nodding as he turned back to where he’d hitched his horse to a sapling. He saw his brother Jeffrey riding up, under cover of the trees along the branch where Emma had brought him, the Spanish doubloon on its thong winking at his throat. Behind him, the ball of the setting sun dug into the far fence
row. With Brother Jeff came Henri and Matthew and a handful of Bill Forrest’s scouts, whom people liked to call the Forty Thieves.

“Ain’t ye shown up at jest the right time?” Forrest grinned at them. “Right thar’s yore crossen. Run the boys on over and keep up the skeer. I need to take this handsome young lady home, and I’ll be with ye.”

He mounted and stretched down an arm for Emma, who hardly seemed to need it as she sprang up. Again the old panther loped across a corner of his mind. All his men took off their hats as he rode the girl back the way they’d come.

“Tell me yore name,” he said as she slipped down. He could feel eyes on them from the windows of the house, and he felt that she knew he’d heard her name before, knew that he only wanted it to hear it now in her own voice.

“Emma,” he said. “There’s a good man of mine layen dead thar on yore Momma’s stoop. There’s bound to be a churchyard round here somewhere and I wish ye’d see he gets a fitten burial.”

She nodded, lowering her head a moment before she looked up at him again. The red light of sunset lay across her cheekbone.

“I wish ye would give me a lock of yore hair,” he said.

Smiling, she lifted a chestnut strand, then cocked an eyebrow. He leaned from the saddle and cut it with his belt knife and wound the lock around his finger. By the time he figured out that neither of them knew what to do next she had broken away and was running back toward the light of her doorway as a much younger child might have done.

He tucked the lock into his watch pocket and rode back toward the creek bank with a fond smile half-hidden under his beard. It was good dark now and about half of his men still fit to fight had already crossed the ford she’d shown them. He shortened his stirrups to keep his boots dry.

The Federals broke within a few minutes once Forrest’s men rode down on them screaming out of the dark. Streight had left no more than a few there anyway, a screen for his rear as he stumbled toward Rome, which was still some fifty miles away, across the state line from Alabama into Georgia. They’d been fighting a running battle for three days now with scarcely a break.

The rush had been hard on Forrest’s command too. He’d set out with more than a thousand men but only six hundred had kept up the pace. They’d come more than a hundred miles since they started. Bill Forrest was hurt and captured at Sand Mountain, and of his Forty Thieves some twenty were still standing.

Forrest sent them out now to keep harrying Streight, while he remained on the bank of Black Creek to superintend the crossing of his cannon. The creek was so deep the guns and their carriages were completely submerged and he could only judge where they were by watching the angle of the ropes and obscure swirls on the starlit surface of the water. Someone had broken open a case of wet biscuit that Streight’s men had lost in the haste of their crossing. Forrest chewed his square of hardtack slowly, absently brushing crumbs from his beard. In the trees behind him a couple of screech owls carried on their weird throaty whistling. The last of his men on the far bank had gone up to the ford that Emma had showed him, to carry their powder across high and dry. At least it wasn’t raining now, as it had been for several days of the chase. He only wished it were raining on Streight.

In the morning they overtook Streight at Gadsden, where Forrest’s scouts let him know that the Federals had had no more than thirty minutes to forage and round up fresh mounts. Too hoarse for shouting, Forrest signaled the charge by windmilling his left arm. Cannon brought a bass line up under the rebel yell as they galloped into the town. Streight ordered a few small commissaries set afire before his men made their hasty departure. Some of Forrest’s men jumped down to help the townsfolk douse the flames. Unperturbed by fire or smoke, Ginral Jerry emerged from a burning depot with four sides of bacon hanging across his shoulders by the heavy wires that had swung them to the rafters. Two of them were burning at their fatty corners, wreathing Jerry’s skinny hips in cheerful yellow flames. Matthew batted at the bacon fire with the remains of his hat.

“Let that alone, son,” Jerry grumbled as he swung the bacon up into the wagon and began smothering the fire with straw still wet from the Black Creek crossing. “You want sumpn to do go fetch me that mule yonder … This’n here’s about give out.”

Matthew looked over where Jerry had aimed his jaw. One of the ugliest mules he’d ever seen was tossing his ax head in a corner of two houses. The “U.S.” brand on his hindquarter was still raw.

“That thing is wild as a bobcat,” Matthew said.

“Sho he is,” Jerry said. “You think a Yankee know how to gentle a mule?”

Matthew did have a way of quieting an animal, and he had just got a hand on the mule’s forelock when Willie Forrest caught its lip in the loop of a twitch and began dragging it to Jerry’s wagon that way.

“You didn’t need to do that,” Matthew said.

Willie spat on the ground and said without looking back. “You’d of took all day the way you were about it.”

The mule reared in the traces as Jerry set about hitching it. “You ain’t hardly broke at all, is you?” he said to the animal. Then as he noticed Matthew and Willie glaring at each other, “Whynt y’all go find some Yankees to quarrel with?”

A
T
B
LOUNT
P
LANTATION
, fifteen miles out of Gadsden, Streight stopped again to try to feed his men and stock. They’d barely got their rations out when the rear guard was driven in upon them and Streight was forced to form a battle line.

It was mid-morning when the battle joined, just beginning to get hot. Forrest ordered a charge on the Yankee center, which bowed but a little and finally held.
“Goddamn
his liver and lights to the
Devil!”
Forrest screamed. “Sonofabitch knows how to fight.”

“Amen to that,” Kelley responded, and then when Forrest sent him a fishy look, “Well, what do you want me say?”

“We’ll turn his right for him,” Forrest said. He gave the order, but Streight’s right held stubbornly as the center had, and Forrest called a halt, to wait for a few more of his men to arrive on the field. The Federals had him outnumbered by near three to one, though Forrest was pretty sure Streight didn’t know it.

By the time they were set to press the attack, Streight had rolled up his line and was withdrawing again, leaving only skirmishers to cover his rear. They’d been skirmishing all the way across from Gadsden,
anyway. In a barn lot on Blount Plantation, Forrest skipped down from his horse to inspect a scatter of cartridges fanned out from a box. The damp paper unraveled from the one he picked up.

“He’s got his powder wet, God rot him,” Forrest said. “Well,
now
we’ll see.”

Along with skirmishers the woods and pastures they crossed were sprinkled with runaway mules and with packs of the slaves that had been following Streight’s camp all the way from East Port, some of them. Forrest told these latter to go home, if they could find the way. “This ain’t no time to go see-en the world,” he told them.

Presently the road they were following made a dogleg turn through a dense stand of pines. At the second bend the Federals had raised a barricade. Gun barrels glinted amongst the brush and timber. It seemed logical to turn from that situation and cross an open field where an invitingly thin-looking line of skirmishers waited in the knee-high grass just short of a low rise.

“Hold up,” Forrest said. “We been bit thataway one time too many.” He shaded his eyes with his hand and stared toward the horizon of the field. “Boone!” he called sharply. “I want you to ride a hunnert men through those pines to the left thar. He’s filled’m up with sharpshooters, I don’t miss my guess. Knock down anything blue and don’t leave’m time to draw a bead, d’ye hear me? Mister Kelley, you do the same on the right. And
then
we’ll see what’s t’other side of that-air rise.”

Once gunfire and screaming had taken a good hold in the pines, Forrest slapped his mount with the flat of his sword and led the charge across the field. The skirmishers melted away, firing hardly a shot. The five hundred riflemen lying in wait beyond the grassy crest of the rise were struck from three directions and demolished, their commander killed. Some few survivors ran pell-mell toward Rome, flinging down their guns and ammunition.

At dusk they pulled up by a copse of oaks on the crown of a hill. There they’d stay, Forrest told them, to feed and rest their horses and themselves. He was satisfied Streight had been buffaloed into another all-night march, so best they should be fresh when they jumped back on his trail next morning. Only he would need a few details and scouts to go ahead. Somebody had to be sure to beat
Streight to the bridge across the Coosa River to Rome. And there was a ferry crossing somewhere on the Chattooga River, which still lay between the Yankees and the Coosa.

“I’ll go,” Matthew said.

“Boy, you don’t know this country …” Forrest looked at him, considering. “I ain’t sending you alone no way.”

“I’ll go with him.” Henri couldn’t believe he’d just heard himself say that. In his mind he had already fallen off his mount into a blind ten-hour sleep.

“I’ll go,” Willie Forrest said then, forcing his voice husky and deep.

“The hell you will,” Forrest grunted. “You stay right here by me.”

Ginral Jerry gave Henri and Matthew a cup of warm mush each as they set out, tilting the skillet to flavor the cups with grease of the half-cooked bacon. They rode into the thickening dark, licking cornmeal from their fingers.

“Nom du diable,”
Henri said, as he licked out the cup and shoved it down in a cloth bag strung to his saddle skirt. “How did you talk me into this?”

“I never said a word about you,” Matthew pointed out.

“I must have been dreaming,” Henri muttered to himself. He thought it over in the midst of a yawn. Like the rest of the men he had not slept more than a snatch in three days. “Maybe I’m dreaming the whole thing still.”

Matthew’s faint chuckle was interrupted by the scream of a panther well away in the woods to their left. They pulled up their horses and looked toward each other, though no feature of either could be seen in the darkness under the pines. Then Henri clucked softly to his mount and they rode on.

F
ORREST TOURED
his camp as dusk turned to dark, swapping a word or a laugh with anyone he happened to meet. Men were falling asleep with their bacon and biscuit still in their hands. He reminded himself that Streight had been spooked into running all night in no clear direction, that tomorrow his own men would be fresh to hit the Yankees again when they caught them.