Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [136]
“All right,” Willis said. “He did buy the boy.”
Forrest nodded. “That’s fine,” he said, and reached into his pocket to bring out a sack of gold coins. “I reckon I’ll jest settle with ye now,” he said. “Save Mister Hill that extry trip.”
Willis looked at him uneasily, stirring the loop of the crop in the palm of his hand.
“You don’t mean to say my word ain’t good enough,” Forrest said. “Here’s the money. Let me see that note.”
Hill had got the pair for a thousand, some less than Forrest had first meant to offer. Of course he’d probably pay the difference in buying the both of them back from the firm. He watched till Willis had counted out the sum, then turned to Catharine again.
“You’re coming with me,” he said, and explored her face for some sign of consent, but he couldn’t tell anything one way or the other. What would I do if I were her? He’d never pictured being a woman, much less a black woman who was a slave.
“Strike off that chain,” he said to Willis.
Soon the hammer rang and the shackle jumped free. Forrest’s mind went reeling again, as Catharine stepped clear of the sundered iron ring and he raised his eyes once more to meet hers. He couldn’t have said what he really wanted, but he knew he was going to take the gamble. He knew he would risk everything, for this.
CHAPTER FORTY
September 1863
RIVER OF BLOOD, somebody said, as they crossed the stream. It might have been Matthew who’d asked the question that river of blood was the answer to. That’s what Chickamauga meant in Indian, somebody said. Henry, Forrest thought it might have been—Ornery as he preferred to say it—that colored feller that kept company with Matthew, that some thought looked a little like an Indian himself, and who sometimes acted like he knew what Indians used to think.
It was a stretch to call the Chickamauga a river, though it made a right good-sized creek. They’d crossed over Reed’s Bridge to the west and been happy to find the bridge was there—defended by a handful of Yankee pickets, who offered some hand-to-hand fighting across the planks, though not enough of them were killed to make the stream run red. Forrest reckoned the Indians must have passed some time killing each other here, back when Indians were numerous in these parts, and strong. Blood in this water would flow more or less north, the threads of it twisting and tangling along the winds and bends of Chickamauga Creek till it dumped in the Tennessee River north of Chattanooga.
Now there was another Indian name, and maybe Henry knew its meaning also. It was a curiosity having an eddicated nigger like that in the company … But Forrest’s mind was on other matters now. For days now they had been playing hide and go seek with the different Yankee divisions General Rosecrans had scattered, maybe even got lost from him and each other, in the wooded hills and coves between Chickamauga Creek and the high ridges east of Chattanooga. Lost and confused and ripe for a whuppen. But Braxton Bragg, that no-count mollycoddle, could not get his mind made up to go in and start the job and get it finished with. Forrest caught a wisp of beard in the corner of his mouth and began to grind his teeth on it—a sorry habit that seemed to come over him whenever he had to study on General Bragg. It must be in cases like this, he supposed, that a feller might like to chaw tobacco. Bragg had let himself be outflanked and maneuvered and shoved out of the forage-rich farmland of Middle Tennessee, as if it were his own shadow that had spooked him clear south to Chattanooga, and then he gave that up too when Rosecrans and his army appeared, yielding the town and its critical nexus of railroads without the ghost of a fight, arguing he would lure the Yankees out into the mountains and beat them there.
And that, Forrest thought, was a plan