Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [102]
With Matthew he cantered back into the trees, now taking the half-dozen horsemen who’d fired on them from the rear. Matthew was screaming like a banshee, firing his Navy six to good effect. Two riderless horses burst out of the woods, galloping toward a line of bluecoats advancing unevenly across another boggy field.
Henri shouted to Matthew, rode back through the trees to the wagon.
“Who’s that?” Ben called from behind the box.
“I don’t know. Rangers.”
“Whose Rangers?”
“How would I know? But there’s regular Yankee army in back of them.”
Ben sat up, eyes widening. “They ain’t supposed to be here.” “We’re not supposed to be here. Nobody is.” Except maybe those children, Henri thought. They might belong. “How many Yankees?” “I don’t know. Thirty. Matthew?”
“I didn’t stay to count them either,” Matthew said. “Too many is all I know.”
“We need to get somewhere,” Henri said.
“Ain’t leaving this meat,” Jerry hissed from where he lay embracing the dead sow.
“Wait a minute,” Henri said. “If they were coming this way they’d already be here.”
As this thought surfaced there was a deep boom of a heavy gun, and the rumbling of hooves off to the north. Yaaiiiiiiyaaaiiiiiih! came the yell.
“That’s ours,” Matthew said, and with Henri he rode to the tree line in time to see the charge of Bill Forrest and his Forty Thieves parting around the cabin, then rejoining to bear down on the Yankee line, which had stopped, aghast, halfway across the cornfield. A gunner bent over his touch hole and the cannon boomed once more, but when he raised up he saw the rest of the bluecoats had broken and run and a rider knocked him down with a sword cut before he could get organized to follow them.
As the pursuit faded into the trees, they saw Bedford Forrest himself, outdistancing his brother. In a moment the pair of them came trotting back. Beside the abandoned eight-pounder they halted their horses.
“Purty little thing,” Bill said.
“Ain’t it the truth?” Forrest grunted. “Let’s hope John Morton can get some use outen it.”
Not far from the cabin he got down to study the insignia on one of the bluecoats that had fallen there, then squinted up at his brother. “Whar’n hell ye reckon they come from?”
“Dunno.” Bill Forrest turned his head to spit on the muddy, hoof-churned ground. “Paducah, maybe.”
Henri and Matthew had ridden up beside them to study the corpse. In a moment all four of them became aware that the two girls and the boy were sitting up staring at them like a family of owls caught out in the daylight. They’d sheltered in a shallow hole below a squatty stone chimney that stood on its lonesome a few yards from the cabin’s side door.
Forrest rode over and looked down. “What is this?” he said.
The boy stood up shakily. “Hit was another room we had.” He wiped his face on remains of a sleeve. “Cannonball knocked it down.”
“A cannonball,” Forrest said. “Y’all fight a battle here ever day?”
“Don’t look like whole lot to fight over,” Bill Forrest remarked. The boy’s eyes narrowed.
“Air you General Forrest?”
“I am.”
“I want to jine up with ye then.”
“Price!” snapped the older girl. “Don’t you—”
The boy was hefting the long awkward rifle.
“Whar’d ye get that buffalo gun?” Forrest asked him.
“I want to jine. I want to jine!”
“Price, is it,” Forrest said. “Well you must be the man I come to see.”
Henri looked at the sky, then the ground. Even on their last run into West Tennessee, Forrest wouldn’t have accepted a recruit like this. He didn’t look any more than