Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [38]
Cheatham’s infantry was pounding up, shouting out gleefully as the men took charge of the captured cannon. They joined Forrest at the back end of the peach orchard.
“Hit’s a hornet nest shore nuff and we done busted it!” he hollered. “Boys, we have got’m on the run.” Forrest’s chest heaved. A man ran up and caught his saddle skirt.
“Captain,” he cried out, “give me a gun. This battle hasn’t got no rear!”
When Forrest registered his blue uniform he put his hand on the Federal’s shoulder. “You’re a prisoner, boy,” he said. “I reckon ye done laid down yore arms a’ready. Yore crowd may not have no rear but ourn is thataway.”
He laughed out loud when the prisoner had gone, then suddenly went still. “Where’s Willie.”
No one had an answer to offer him. Forrest turned a semicircle to survey the ground they’d just passed over, where still warm bodies lay anonymous, blue or gray. Snarls of blackjack closed the view in most directions that he looked.
“Ole Miss’ll have my hide if—” Forrest seemed to bite his tongue. His face had lost all of its color, only the two small pitted scars glowed red above his eyebrow.
“Henry, Matthew. Go hunt for Willie, y’all. Don’t stop till ye find him neither. Rest of us got to keep up the skeer.” He turned his horse, a speckled gray. “Come on, let’s get after’m.”
The battle sweat cooling on Henri’s skin had an unpleasant bitter tang. He raised his throbbing thumb to his mouth. During their careen through the thickets a thorn had run up under his nail and snapped off where he couldn’t reach it. He tried and failed to grasp it with his teeth; the effort sent a jolt of pain to his elbow.
“Be damned to Willie,” Matthew was grumbling, as their horses picked through the thicket back the way they had come. Henri stopped himself looking at corpses too closely. He only wanted to find Willie alive.
“You don’t wish him dead,” he told Matthew.
“I never said that.” Matthew twisted in the saddle to stare back at him, eyes ringed with white. “Do you think he’d’ve sent Willie out of a fight to hunt for me?”
Henri didn’t much think so, in fact. He was still hesitating when Matthew burst out, “I don’t mean to miss this one—not when we’re whuppen!” He spurred his horse in the direction Forrest had gone, toward the not very distant crash of artillery.
Henri rode in the other direction, though really he felt concerned for Matthew more than for Willie now. The white son was likable enough, but often reckless, and it was true he took a great many things for granted. Henri came into a clearing where some stragglers from Cheatham’s regiment were stripping dead Federals of their tunics. Jerry was trudging diagonally across, gunnysack slung over his shoulder, still damp.
“Seen Willie?” Henri called to him, and Jerry replied without turning his head, “No I ain’t.”
Henri licked at his transfixed thumbnail. It didn’t help. Ahead of him Benjamin sat on the box of the ammunition wagon he drove. His mule had lowered its head to crop at a patch of spring grass and wild garlic that somehow had survived the recent trampling. When Henri asked him after Willie, Benjamin merely shook his head. The mule dragged the wagon a wheel turn forward, pursuing the path of its grazing. Henri bit at the splinter again, and winced.
“Let me see that,” Ben said, and reached for the hurt hand. His touch was gentle, warmly soothing. Henri became aware of the breath of his horse between his thighs. Ben’s head cocked to one side as he inspected the wound. Henri looked at the scar that crooked out of his close-cropped hair and struck down like a lightning bolt across his temple and down past his ear.
“This’ll