Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [55]
“I’ll go,” Willie Forrest said then, forcing his voice husky and deep.
“The hell you will,” Forrest grunted. “You stay right here by me.”
Ginral Jerry gave Henri and Matthew a cup of warm mush each as they set out, tilting the skillet to flavor the cups with grease of the half-cooked bacon. They rode into the thickening dark, licking cornmeal from their fingers.
“Nom du diable,” Henri said, as he licked out the cup and shoved it down in a cloth bag strung to his saddle skirt. “How did you talk me into this?”
“I never said a word about you,” Matthew pointed out.
“I must have been dreaming,” Henri muttered to himself. He thought it over in the midst of a yawn. Like the rest of the men he had not slept more than a snatch in three days. “Maybe I’m dreaming the whole thing still.”
Matthew’s faint chuckle was interrupted by the scream of a panther well away in the woods to their left. They pulled up their horses and looked toward each other, though no feature of either could be seen in the darkness under the pines. Then Henri clucked softly to his mount and they rode on.
FORREST TOURED his camp as dusk turned to dark, swapping a word or a laugh with anyone he happened to meet. Men were falling asleep with their bacon and biscuit still in their hands. He reminded himself that Streight had been spooked into running all night in no clear direction, that tomorrow his own men would be fresh to hit the Yankees again when they caught them.
By the campfire Ginral Jerry sat with his head thrown back against the bole of pine, snoring, though the whites of his eyes showed a little. Willie lay near him, feigning sleep. Forrest squinted at him for a second, judged the boy would be asleep for real in another two or three minutes or so.
He stretched on the blanket Jerry had unrolled for him, shifting hip and shoulders to loosen the sand underneath. Was there something to think about? No, it would keep.
Forrest twitched and smiled in his sleep. His hard hand thumped the dirt beyond the blanket’s edge. Sitting with his knees drawn up, Willie studied him cautiously until he had stilled. A cloud of mosquitoes hovered over Forrest’s head, looking for a way in through wild hair and beard. Willie got up and crept barefoot toward the horses, his boots clamped under one elbow and his pistol belt in the other hand.
The panther slipped from tree to tree through Forrest’s dream. On some other ridge the dogs were singing, but Forrest was nearer to his prey than the dogs were, and he could see plain as day despite the dark. That was because he was dreaming, of course. While his aunt inspected the dressing of the wounds on his mother’s back, Bedford set his mouth in a pale line, lifted the octagon-barreled rifle and the powder horn down from the pegs, and went on the big cat’s trail without a word, though his aunt called for him not to go. Sister Fanny knew better than to say anything, and the least ones were busy playing with the chicks on the puncheon floor. His mother said nothing. She was lying facedown with her chin hanging over the edge of the pallet, her eyes big and dark, biting her lower lip against the sting of the turpentine on the red furrows the panther had plowed down her back.
Outside the dogs found sign at once and raced after it bugling, but Bedford scarcely attended to their racket. It seemed to him that there was a clear lucid filament passing through the woods to join his mind to the mind of the panther so that he already knew when and where the animal would be brought to bay and had only to keep walking steadily toward that time and place, his eyes as wide and round as the moon would have been. But it was a moonless night.
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“HELL AND I wasn’t shore it was you!” Willie said when he found Henri and Matthew in a clearing. “It’s loose niggers running all over these woods.”
Henri picked out Matthew’s profile against a patch of starlit sky. The boy’s lower jaw stuck out a little from the strain of clenching his teeth.
“Well, it’s true,” Willie said to their backs.
They rode on through a silence that slowly surrendered