Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [53]
“I wish ye would give me a lock of yore hair,” he said.
Smiling, she lifted a chestnut strand, then cocked an eyebrow. He leaned from the saddle and cut it with his belt knife and wound the lock around his finger. By the time he figured out that neither of them knew what to do next she had broken away and was running back toward the light of her doorway as a much younger child might have done.
He tucked the lock into his watch pocket and rode back toward the creek bank with a fond smile half-hidden under his beard. It was good dark now and about half of his men still fit to fight had already crossed the ford she’d shown them. He shortened his stirrups to keep his boots dry.
The Federals broke within a few minutes once Forrest’s men rode down on them screaming out of the dark. Streight had left no more than a few there anyway, a screen for his rear as he stumbled toward Rome, which was still some fifty miles away, across the state line from Alabama into Georgia. They’d been fighting a running battle for three days now with scarcely a break.
The rush had been hard on Forrest’s command too. He’d set out with more than a thousand men but only six hundred had kept up the pace. They’d come more than a hundred miles since they started. Bill Forrest was hurt and captured at Sand Mountain, and of his Forty Thieves some twenty were still standing.
Forrest sent them out now to keep harrying Streight, while he remained on the bank of Black Creek to superintend the crossing of his cannon. The creek was so deep the guns and their carriages were completely submerged and he could only judge where they were by watching the angle of the ropes and obscure swirls on the starlit surface of the water. Someone had broken open a case of wet biscuit that Streight’s men had lost in the haste of their crossing. Forrest chewed his square of hardtack slowly, absently brushing crumbs from his beard. In the trees behind him a couple of screech owls carried on their weird throaty whistling. The last of his men on the far bank had gone up to the ford that Emma had showed him, to carry their powder across high and dry. At least it wasn’t raining now, as it had been for several days of the chase. He only wished it were raining on Streight.
In the morning they overtook Streight at Gadsden, where Forrest’s scouts let him know that the Federals had had no more than thirty minutes to forage and round up fresh mounts. Too hoarse for shouting, Forrest signaled the charge by windmilling his left arm. Cannon brought a bass line up under the rebel yell as they galloped into the town. Streight ordered a few small commissaries set afire before his men made their hasty departure. Some of Forrest’s men jumped down to help the townsfolk douse the flames. Unperturbed by fire or smoke, Ginral Jerry emerged from a burning depot with four sides of bacon hanging across his shoulders by the heavy wires that had swung them to the rafters. Two of them were burning at their fatty corners, wreathing Jerry’s skinny hips in cheerful yellow flames. Matthew batted at the bacon fire with the remains of his hat.
“Let that alone, son,” Jerry grumbled as he swung the bacon up into the wagon and began smothering the fire with straw still wet from the Black Creek crossing. “You want sumpn to do go fetch me that mule yonder … This’n here’s about give out.”
Matthew looked over where Jerry had aimed his jaw. One of the ugliest mules he’d ever seen was tossing his ax head in a corner of two houses. The “U.S.” brand on his hindquarter was still raw.
“That thing is wild as a bobcat,” Matthew said.
“Sho he is,” Jerry said. “You think a Yankee know how to gentle a mule?”
Matthew did have a way of quieting an animal, and he had just got a hand on the mule’s forelock when Willie Forrest caught its lip in the loop of a twitch and began dragging it to Jerry’s wagon that way.
“You didn’t need to do that,” Matthew said.
Willie spat on the ground and said without looking back. “You’d of took all day the way you were about it.”
The mule reared in the traces