Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [28]
CHAPTER EIGHT
December 1861
THAT FIRST CAMP CHRISTMAS in Kentucky, Forrest was in a genial mood, for his wife had come up from Memphis to join him for the holiday, and he and their boy were all quartered together in a big warm tent with a partition and an iron stove and a plank floor. Better yet, there were floored and heated tents for all the men in his command. December 23 they’d shot some wild geese and come back to camp with a couple of dozen to hang and tenderize for a Christmas feast. There was a keg of brandy too, though Forrest didn’t touch a drop of it. He was flushed and expansive anyway, maybe from horseracing just before dinner, when he’d won some money on son Willie’s ride.
A pair of fiddlers had been found, and they rosined their bows for the country dances. Forrest handed his wife a little jealously around the square—a few ladies had turned up from the Hopkinsville area but not enough to make even couples. The bugler Gaus played fanfares to mark the figures, though more than a little off-key from the strings. When the fiddles struck up “Devil’s Dream,” the breathless dancers took their seats, leaving Forrest dancing a hornpipe alone to the quickening tune, capering and clicking his heels and somehow finding wind all the time to pronounce a long brag of how he and his Rangers would whup the Yankees and drive them home; counting off their heroic virtues one by one. When the tune had ended, Forrest fell into his chair (there was still a loaded plate before him), but he wasn’t quite done yet with the roster—
“Old Ornery here,” Forrest stabbed the air between him and Henri with his fork, “ye’d not think hit to see him now, but when I first come acrost him he was a-walken barefoot … and now ye couldn’t dream of a finer-looken sojer.” Henri only smiled and thumbed the nap of his butternut lapel and flexed his toes inside the fat leather of his new high-topped boots and toasted his captain with an inch of brandy in his enameled tin cup. The eyes of the company flicked across him briefly, then returned to Forrest, lately promoted to colonel and happily holding forth—he’d bought most of them uniforms out of his own pocket, the same as he’d paid for the five hundred revolvers, Colt Navy sixes all shiny and new and one of them snug now in Henri’s waistband, the grip of it denting into his belly as it swelled out with hot goose. He and couple of the others who’d met him that day with Forrest on the Brandenburg road had toted the pistols under their dusters (Forrest issued Henri a good linen duster straight away) from the warehouse to a Lexington livery stable where they were packed in old potato sacks, a few taters on top of each load for show … By the time they left Louisville, there was word that a couple of companies of Union Home Guard meant to waylay them on the road south. But by then Forrest had strengthened his hand with ninety-some recruits under the name of Boone’s Rangers. He passed every man a pair of pistols and rode to the town of Nolin with a huge Confederate flag flying back over his column. At the Nolin station enough of the people turned out to watch that Forrest’s number looked three times what it really was to passengers whipping through on a southbound train—who carried word of a large, fierce and well-equipped Rebel army to every whistle-stop on the way to Nashville. Forrest carried his guns and men back to Tennessee without seeing a ghost of the Union Home Guard …
By December 28 the goose had worn off enough that Henri’s pistols rode more comfortably in his belt. Forrest had parted from Mary Ann at Hopkinsville, and he and his men were riding up the road to Sacramento, following a report of five hundred Federal cavalry in those parts. The people in the little town of Rumsey came out in a state of high excitement to see them pass, children and dogs racing at the heels of the horses for a quarter-mile, and a young woman came riding out on a horse almost as fine as Forrest’s own. All the men took off their hats as she overtook them (she was an able rider too) and as she