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By Root 849 0

Memphis. Forrest gave his men two hours leisure. He rested between his two brothers, stretched on the ground. Captain Bill snored. Colonel Jesse fidgeted with a nickel watch and chain. Forrest himself lay with his shoulders propped on the shaggy bole of a cedar, eyes half-shut, with just the whites showing, though it seemed to Henri, who had stretched in the back of the empty wagon, that somehow Forrest was still seeing whatever was there. Matthew, who still showed childish ways once in a while, was playing mumblety-peg with a couple of Hernando boys by the light of a sliver of moon. Since Willie Forrest had been left behind with Chalmers at Oxford, Matthew had seemed easier in his mind.

When the church bell rang out nine o’clock they set off again, with much gaiety—too much maybe, as Forrest kept having to shush their singing. Peas, Peas, Peas, Peas, Eating Goober Peas! No sooner had Matthew been shut up than Dinkins would take it up again, or somebody else further back in the column. But four miles out from Memphis the fog from the river began to roll over them and they marched the rest of the way in strict silence.

All quiet on a Sunday morning, a good two hours before dawn. Forrest called his commanders in: Captain Bill, Colonel Jesse, Colonel Neely. In low harsh whispers the plan was reviewed. With ten men picked from the troop they called the Forty Thieves, Bill Forrest, still wincing at times from the thighbone he’d got broken by a bullet at Sand Mountain, crept further up the Hernando road. When the first picket challenged them, Bill called that he was bringing in Rebel prisoners. With that ruse he was able to get close enough to knock the Federal silently down with the butt of his Navy six. When they reached the second line of pickets, one of them got off a shot, and Forrest’s men returned fire. Yaaaiiiieee! the Rebel yell went up; it always made Henri’s short hairs rise with it. He might scream himself till his throat was raw, yet never hear the sound of his own voice.

Forrest was holding in King Philip, a restless horse said to be as good as two men in pitched battle. He jostled into the bugler Gaus and ordered him to sound the charge. But the horn was almost lost in the yelling and pounding of hooves. They charged right into a muddy slough past the corner of Mississippi and Kerr Street, bogged down for a moment, soon pulled through.

Bill Forrest ran right over a small artillery post and turned his horsemen down Gayoso Street toward the river. Neely swept through an encampment of Federals east of the road, routing sleepy soldiers till after they had run for some distance they rallied at the State Female College and began to shoot back. Dinkins came racing back from that engagement with a huge grin and a pair of new shoes swinging around his neck by their laces, just snatched from a Yankee soldier’s tent pole.

Memphis women were cheering the raiders from their windows, throwing up their sashes and leaning out. Some even dashed out onto the street. One leapt up at Dinkins and gave him a buss, then sprang back abashed at her own audacity—a tousled honey-blonde still warm and flushed from her sleep, tittering around the fingers she’d stuck in her mouth. Pink nipples pressed against the damp cotton of her nightgown, looking out like a second pair of eyes. Ginral Jerry, who’d driven the empty wagon into town on the chance he’d find something to fill it with, gave the gaping Dinkins a nudge.

“Go on,” he said. “Ax her if she got a biscuit.”

Jesse Forrest pounded across Desoto Street to Union to storm the headquarters of General Washburn there. Washburn tumbled out the window in his nightshirt and ran like a rabbit to Fort Pickering, half a mile off on the South Bluffs. Colonel Jesse captured his dress uniform but without any general inside. Captain Bill rode his charger straight into the lobby of the Gayoso Hotel and wheeled, swinging his sword around the chandelier, while his men burst into General Hurlbut’s room. But that officer, to his great good fortune, happened to be spending that night elsewhere. Bill’s