Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [45]
IT WAS STILL DARK when they reached Panola, but the rain had stopped at last and the birds were starting to tune up in shrubs and trees by the side of the road. They stopped to shed horses and men too weak to continue. Forrest sent back two cannon as well. The two remaining needed double teams to drag them through the mud. They crossed the Tallahatchie River with the rising sun warm on their faces and continued north, a slingshot west of the railroad track. Men who hadn’t seen the sun for days cheered up as their clothes began to dry, and started to brag of all they’d do in Memphis.
Above Senatobia, Forrest pulled up his horse and glared at swollen Hickahala Creek. On the far side a flatboat had drifted into a flooded field and snagged on a couple of hackberries in a fence row. Captain Bill reined up beside his brother.
“Where do you reckon Smith is at?” he said.
“Sixty miles back of us by this time,” Forrest said. “I ain’t worried about Smith. But we cain’t set here and wait for this crik to go down.” He turned toward the corn wagon. “Henry!”
In an hour’s time they’d stripped plank from every gin mill and shack for a mile around and were making a bridge lashed together with grapevine, using the salvaged flatboat for a pontoon. Forrest spent the delay culling out more men and horses that couldn’t hold the pace. He sent about fifty more back under command of John Morton, calculating this detachment should serve as a decoy if Smith had scouts alert enough to have spotted his quick movement north. In two more hours they’d trundled across the creek, toting their last pair of cannon by hand.
Seven miles on they struck the same situation at Coldwater River, a ford too flooded for them to cross. This water was wider and it needed more time to makeshift a bridge. A red fox came out of a canebrake along the bank and watched them as they worked. Henri watched back, a little uneasy. A fox was a shy creature normally speaking, and it was the season of hydrophobia. But this fox seemed in perfect possession of itself, sitting down quietly and licking its paws. When it had looked its fill it got up and went calmly back into the cane with the red brush of its tail waving high.
This bridge was longer, and thinner on planks. The horses went fetlock deep, boards bending under them as the men led them cautiously over, and one of the two remaining cannon nearly foundered the whole rig.
“Best leave this wagon,” Major Strange said. “I do believe it’s too heavy to make it across.”
“I’ll be goddamned if I’ll leave this corn,” snapped Forrest, who had been pacing the bank like a caged wolf for the last hour. “Horses are all half-starved as it is—they got to have a feed afore we go to Memphis.”
“Suit yourself,” Major Strange said. “This wagon is apt to sink and the bridge along with it.”
“Unload it then.” Forrest was already reaching into the bed, wrapping his long arms around near a bushel of corn in the shuck. “Come on, boys. Step lively.”
Matthew was quick to grab an armload and follow. Henri did the same and others fell in behind them. Matthew was near as tall as Forrest, and had the same long back and long legs, Henri noticed, as he crept over the bridge behind the two of them.
“Any man drops an ear is swimmen to git it,” Forrest announced, without turning his head.
In fifteen minutes the empty wagon had crossed and been reloaded. By dusk that day they were riding into Hernando, where the people came out hallooing to greet them, and not only because it was Forrest’s hometown. Smokehouses were opened to them all over the place, and as the cooking began the men fell to shelling corn for the horses. Men cooked bacon wound around sticks, holding hoecakes beneath to catch the dripping.
Legs hanging off the back of the empty wagon, Dinkins chewed happily, jaws glossy with fat. “One thing I like about the Old Man—” He looked around to be sure Forrest wasn’t in earshot. “If he eats, we eat too.”
They’d come a long way in a large hurry, with twenty-five miles yet to travel to reach