Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [23]
“How’s Jeff a-maken it?”
“He’ll live,” Bill Forrest said. “Got a sore bruisen but it aint a-goen to kill him.”
“Would ye take a couple of the boys and go scout out the Nashville road? I’d admire to know what’s out thar, if anything is.”
Bill Forrest nodded to his brother, and turned toward the trees where the horses were hitched. Henri stood up. “I’ll go,” he said. The fire only got one side of him warm anyway, while the other side was frozen numb.
“Too many cooks,” Kelley repeated ruefully, thumbing the edges of his beard. Starnes, sitting to his left, poked a wet stick into the fire. There were three Confederate general officers on the ground at Fort Donelson—Pillow, Floyd, and Buckner—and so far their cooperation had been less than perfectly harmonious.
“You know?” Kelley said to the fire, “The first time I saw him run at the Federals that way I thought there was a good chance he was out of his mind. When he did it today I saw he was right. This army ought to be halfway to Nashville by now.”
“Don’t you know it,” Starnes said.
“Fifteen bullet holes,” Jerry muttered from the depths of a blanket he’d furled over his head. “You’d think Cunnel be satisfied he still alive. But you know he ain’t.”
“I got a bad feeling,” Starnes said, and then they all were quiet.
No sooner had Bill Forrest and Henri found their horses than the mulatto boy Matthew came out to join their scout. Since the weather had turned cold most of the men had been sleeping in pairs to improve their chances of not freezing to death. Matthew had been sharing Henri’s shebang—distinguished by a rubber ground cloth scavenged from the Federals, as well as the square of canvas stretched over a low branch to shed the rain and snow. Henri felt a certain sympathy for the boy, though usually he was sullen. Matthew was supposed to be a teamster, it appeared, but he didn’t seem to be very thick with the other wagoneering slaves, except when somebody needed a harness fixed, for Matthew was handy with that work, and had been trained to it, back in Memphis, it appeared. He had a good pistol, but no sword, and a horse strong enough to keep up with the cavalry, though as a rule he rode toward the rear.
Under chill starlight they rode over the jaggedly torn and trampled snow, trotting their horses outside the Confederate trench lines. They followed the curve of the works to the southeast and once they had crossed the Fort Henry road they halted to look out over the field where the Federals under McClernand had been camped the night before. Tonight a good number of fires were burning brightly in that area.
“What do you think?” Bill Forrest said.
“We were all over there this afternoon, before dark,” Henri said. “Seeing to the wounded and picking up guns and cartridges. There was no enemy left there then, none sound enough to get away.”
“Ain’t none thar now neither,” Bill Forrest said. “That’s the wind blowen up the fires from this mornen, effen ye ast me.”
South of Dover they found the Nashville road flooded from a slough off the Cumberland. A wide expanse of water lay eerily still under the starlight. Bill Forrest rode out into the water, while Henri and Matthew watched him from the bank. Ripples swirled around his horse’s legs. When the bottom of his stirrup touched the water, he reined up and looked over his shoulder.
“Hell yes we can git acrost this,” he said. “And I expect we will.”
FORREST WAS in such a state when they returned to camp that he seemed hardly to listen to their report. “We got ginrals don’t know when they’re a-winnen—and we got three of’m too!” he complained. “They got the idee the Federals all have come back right to whar they were yestiddy—when we just got through runnen’m out of there today. Brother Bill, did ye see anything such as that?”
“No,” Bill Forrest said.
“I’ll wager ye didn’t,” Forrest said. “How much water