Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [50]
“Whar’s John Morton,” Forrest inquired.
“You sent him back to Oxford,” Henri reminded him. And the cannon all the men called the Bull Pups had gone with their commander.
“That I did. Well then …” But the gunners had figured it out on their own. The first of their two cannon fired, tearing a hole in the Federal line. As the sun burned through the fog, Henri felt his horse rock forward, following King Philip into the charge. Somewhere behind them, the second cannon coughed. Forrest’s double-edged blade whined in the wind. Colonel Starr crashed down from the black horse, wrapping his good arm around a deep gash on his shoulder. A couple of infantrymen came to bear him up. The rest had scattered for cover of the buildings, some flinging down their weapons as they ran.
“Fall back,” Forrest called, signaling. The sun gleamed on the whetted edges of his saber, braided now with blood. Henri and Dinkins wheeled their horses and retreated.
Forrest stood in his stirrups, beaming in the sudden sunlight. There was a joyful aspect on him that Henri had not seen in a long time.
“What’s got into him, I wonder?” Dinkins said. “He ain’t lost a horse all day.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
September 1863
HE’S HIT.” Willie’s voice seemed to quaver as he said it, and Cowan, looking where the boy pointed, saw Forrest’s long back waver in the saddle. Heat shimmer? It wasn’t hot enough for that. Cowan’s whole field of vision trembled, then came clear for him to see the blood-slick soaking through Forrest’s coat and spreading over the left hindquarter of his horse. Forrest had been gesturing with his sword to troopers he had just dismounted on the slopes of Tunnel Hill, but now as he swayed in the saddle Cowan saw that he might fall. He rode up quickly and put his own shoulder under Forrest’s left armpit as the sword arm sagged and Forrest slumped into him.
“Huh,” Forrest said, turning his head to look at Cowan from an inch away, the light in his eyes abruptly fading.
“Good Lord,” said Cowan. “Help me! Willie, we’ve got to get him down.”
Willie was reaching, ineffectually, for Forrest’s shoulder on the other side; meanwhile Matthew had come up from somewhere and caught the reins of Forrest’s horse beneath the bit. Anderson appeared, dismounted, and took some of Forrest’s weight on his own back as Forrest came down from the saddle. Cowan jumped down from his horse, leaving it for Willie to hold. He turned up the tail of Forrest’s coat and pressed the butt of his palm against the blood spurt.
A bullet, awkward as a bumblebee, whined between his head and Forrest’s and flumped into a cedar trunk a few steps up the hill. For hours they’d been in a running fight with two divisions under Crittenden, who’d crossed Chickamauga Creek at the Red House bridge … thus cutting themselves off from the rest of the Yankee army. Forrest had seen the golden chance to wipe them out altogether but he didn’t have a quarter the force required to do it by himself, and no reply had come to his urgent messages to Bragg. Tunnel Hill was the first place terrain favored them to make a stand. Where they’d stopped now, shallow ridges of limestone jutted out among the cedars—pale chips of rock scattering from them as more Yankee bullets buzzed in from down the slope. Cowan jerked his head, aiming the point of his beard to a thicker clump of trees not far above them, and Anderson helped him drag Forrest toward this shelter.
“Look in my saddlebag,” Cowan called back to Willie. “There ought to be some—” Willie was running up already with the saddlebags slung over his shoulder. The points of the little black mustache he had recently grown stood out against the sudden pallor of his face.
Cowan was probing the wound for a projectile and not