• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 822 0

of his ear as she stretched her arm to show him a line of trees that followed a gulley eastward toward Black Creek. The sun was going down behind them, and the lush green of the pasture was washed in a golden light. He squeezed King Philip in the flanks and brought him into a long easy canter. The girl moved smoothly with Forrest’s movement, like a vine wrapped into a tree in the wind. He remembered the young horsewoman who had ridden a ways with them toward their first fight in Sacramento a couple of years ago. This one would cut as fine a figure in the saddle, he was sure. But there had been no time to saddle her own horse.

When he reached down to check his pistols he grazed the bare skin of her knee. She must have hitched up most of her skirt when she got astride behind him. But she didn’t start at the touch, or giggle as a light-minded woman might have done. She only tightened the whole of herself deeper into him and the horse.

For the last two days his mind had been burning, but now it was calm and clear. Out of the corner of his mind’s eye he seemed to see a panther on a fast lope up the round of a hill among the gray boles of winter trees. He shook his head and looked at the real world before him.

“The ford’s not far,” Emma told him. “We had best get down, General Forrest, for the Yankees may can see us from the other bank.”

She dropped down herself and walked out ahead of him, stooping just slightly to keep her head below the snarl of bramble on the west bank of Black Creek. There was plenty of small arms firing a couple of hundred yards downstream, where the Federals led by Streight had burned the bridge once they had crossed, using rails from Emma’s family’s fences to start the blaze. As the deeper voice of a cannon belled out among the pistols and the muskets, she parted stalks of cane to look out on the water. He pictured her mother stooping to rake the wild greens she’d been gathering back into the basket she had dropped. Don’t be uneasy, he had told her. I’ll be a-bringen yore gal back safe.

He drew Emma back by her sleeve and said, “I’m proud to have ye fer a pilot, but I’ll not make a breastworks of ye.” Indeed a few spent balls had begun to plop among the slender cane leaves where they were hid.

“Right there it is.” Emma stood close behind him now, pointing over the creek to a point on the far bank where cane divided around a slope of clay. Black Creek was swollen with spring rain, running fast and deep down by the burning bridge, but here it looked wider and slower too. “There’s a sand bar from one side to the other,” she breathed to him. “Our cows come across it mornen and night. It’s not hardly chest deep on a cow.”

“Well, ain’t that fine?” Forrest said, nodding as he turned back to where he’d hitched his horse to a sapling. He saw his brother Jeffrey riding up, under cover of the trees along the branch where Emma had brought him, the Spanish doubloon on its thong winking at his throat. Behind him, the ball of the setting sun dug into the far fence row. With Brother Jeff came Henri and Matthew and a handful of Bill Forrest’s scouts, whom people liked to call the Forty Thieves.

“Ain’t ye shown up at jest the right time?” Forrest grinned at them. “Right thar’s yore crossen. Run the boys on over and keep up the skeer. I need to take this handsome young lady home, and I’ll be with ye.”

He mounted and stretched down an arm for Emma, who hardly seemed to need it as she sprang up. Again the old panther loped across a corner of his mind. All his men took off their hats as he rode the girl back the way they’d come.

“Tell me yore name,” he said as she slipped down. He could feel eyes on them from the windows of the house, and he felt that she knew he’d heard her name before, knew that he only wanted it to hear it now in her own voice.

“Emma,” he said. “There’s a good man of mine layen dead thar on yore Momma’s stoop. There’s bound to be a churchyard round here somewhere and I wish ye’d see he gets a fitten burial.”

She nodded, lowering her head a moment before she looked up at him again. The red light