Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [70]
The smoke had cleared where they were riding now, along the banks of a good-sized creek that ran south. The hangover from the burning and riot around Okolona had left Henri feeling heavy and dull. He could no longer backtrack the way through all the crossroads that brought him to where he was now. When he looked at Matthew across the mule’s rump he seemed to see clockwork turning inside the boy’s head. If it wasn’t for Matthew he might not go back today, he thought. But he wasn’t sure why Matthew was going back either.
“I ain’t sayen I loves that man,” Ben told them. “Ain’t nobody love a slave-trader. Even they own people don’t. But I seen him give his word to a black man same as he would to a white and I ain’t never seen him break it.”
A burst of cardinals flew up from a thicket some fifty yards ahead, and then came a snapping sound, like dry sticks breaking. It took Henri longer than it should have to work out that the whine past his head was a bullet. Matthew and Benjamin had already dragged their animals down the creek bank into cover.
Those were graybacks crouched to fire out of the tangle of leafless black branches. They must have happened on Jeff Forrest’s men. Henri wanted to shout over to them but his horse was crabbing sideways, hooves slipping on the bank of the creek. With one hand he shortened the reins while raising the other empty as if to catch a bullet. A voice he knew sang out of the thicket and then Nath Boone came riding toward him with Jeff Forrest by his side. The youngest of the Forrest brothers, Jeffrey resembled the rest while looking somehow a little milder, with a more delicate turn to his mouth and a gentler cast to his eye.
“Henry? Matthew? Is that y’all?” Boone slapped his hat against his thigh. “I’ll tell ye what, we like to not known ye—they’s too many crazy niggers runnen around these parts.”
· · ·
FOR MOST of the next day Jeffrey Forrest’s brigade skirmished with the Yankee troopers, falling back constantly with the hope of drawing Smith into a soggy pocket formed by Sakatonchee Creek and the Tombigbee River. By mid-afternoon, Bedford Forrest had arrived on the west bank of the creek. Henri and Matthew crossed at Ellis’s Bridge to report the strength of Sooy Smith to him: near ten thousand mounted men and more than thirty cannon. Forrest had come across hard and fast from Grenada with no more than twenty-five hundred men—and most of them the green recruits from West Tennessee—to head Smith off from his meeting with Sherman at Meridian.
That night he got word that some of the Yankees had crossed Sakatonchee Creek a few miles north of his camp west of the bridge. With sixty men of his escort he raced upstream to fall upon a small detachment of Smith’s men, with a much larger number of their black camp-followers, who were burning a plantation at Siloam. In half an hour he’d made thirty prisoners and scattered the blacks, though the buildings still burned, and the slave quarters too.
“Damn-fool niggers burnen down they own houses,” Forrest shouted. “What in the slobberen blue blazes of Hell do they think they want to do that for?”
“They want to be free,” Matthew said furiously. He’d been boiling over with that, Henri knew, since their ride through Okolona.
Forrest wheeled as if he’d strike the boy. His face was brick-red in the firelight. Matthew stood his ground, unflinching. Henri watched Forrest gradually getting a grip on himself.
“Free,” he said. “You call that free?”
Matthew stared back out of eyes deep-set as Forrest’s own.
“What is that ye want from me, boy?”
Henri watched Matthew watching Forrest, alert as a fox. The idea