• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 922 0

Yankee papers had been painting him with ill repute. They made him out a mean vindictive cruel and unscrupulous man who often whipped his slaves to death and kept a black concubine in his house to quarrel with his wife. There were rumors too that Negro troops at Memphis had sworn blood vengeance against Forrest and all his men. Worst of all, Forrest’s plan to attack Sherman’s rear as Sherman moved from Nashville south toward Georgia had been thwarted by as many as ten thousand Federal troops who had come out from Memphis, under command of General Samuel Sturgis, to divert him. For the last eight days they had been playing hide and seek with Sturgis in the rain.

Above the pelting on his peaked square of canvas, Henri heard voices calling across the camp, and presently Bill Witherspoon raised a wet corner of his shebang.

“Come on, Hank, let’s have some fun!”

The rain was too heavy for Henri to make out Witherspoon’s lopsided grin. “What kind of fun,” he said.

“Pea-picking, corn-husking. Find out when we get there. We’re all going over to Stubbs Farm.”

Beside Henri, Matthew sat up, silent, alert, ready. He checked his pistols in the dark.

“It’s wet out there,” Henri said.

“No more than it is in here,” said Witherspoon. “Come on.”

Henri crawled out from under the dripping shebang and shook himself like a wet dog. He exchanged a glance with Matthew in the dark. They went to find their horses. In ten minutes they were riding south from Ripley, Mississippi, treetops sagging under the rain in the groves that fell away down the slopes from the ridge where the road ran. Witherspoon took up a song, his pale face raised into the rain.

Come on boys, let’s go find’m

Come on boys, let’s go find’m

Come on boys, let’s go find’m

Way down yonder in the pawpaw patch.

Finally someone shut him up. Then the rain began to slack. On the western horizon was a glimmer of the quarter-moon and through gaps in the clouds came starlight enough to illuminate their exchanges of fire with the Federals camped around Stubbs Farm. More fun than a pea-shelling, Witherspoon considered, except you couldn’t meet the girls. At daylight when they rejoined Forrest up at Boonetown, the weather had cleared completely and promised to be very hot, and they were able to say of a near certainty that the enemy was headed down the railroad line through Guntown toward Tupelo, Okolona and the fields of ripening corn on the black prairie there.

“Let’s get after’m,” Forrest said briefly. He looked haggard in the thin dawn light, his thin lips buried in tendril of his untrimmed beard. “Catch’m quick and hit’m hard.”

“General,” Colonel Rucker said. “He’s got eight thousand men over there already, and we have scarce got two.”

“When did that kind of a thang start to worry ye,” Forrest snapped. Then in a more considered tone, “It ain’t about how many they is. Never was—won’t never be. I’d take one of ourn over ten what they got, any day of the week and twicet on Sunday. Damyankees ain’t got thar yet today and they got yet a ways to go. It’s comen up hotter’n hell already and oncet they run five miles through that sucken mud they’ll be so beat we’ll ride right over’m.”

Where’s there, Henri thought, exchanging a glance with Witherspoon, and then he thought that maybe he knew. Forrest’s orders were to fall away south and join Stephen Lee, perhaps Chalmers also, to defend Okolona and the fields of unharvested grain. But considering last night’s reconnaissance they’d have a good chance to find the enemy at a much nearer point, somewhere between Stubbs Farm and Guntown. Last night he, Matthew, Witherspoon and the rest had returned toward Boonetown across a bridge over Tishomingo Creek, and passed through Brice’s Crossroads. There were thickets of blackjack oak all about to cover their approach.

A younger voice piped up. “General Forrest, sir?”

With a shade of impatience Forrest turned his head.

“They say hit’s a passel of niggers come out with the Yankees, gone carry you back to Memphis in chains like what you put on them. Say they gone burn you, and skin you alive.