Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [71]
Matthew turned and walked toward his horse. Forrest stood facing him as he mounted, cocking his two fists on his hips. “The world ain’t made accorden to my notions,” he said. “I just have to live in it. Fight in it. Die in it. No different from you.”
Matthew turned in the saddle. The horse side-stepped and Matthew patted its neck as he looked back.
“Go on, blood,” Forrest said. “Make yore ownself free.”
FORREST had expected reinforcements from Stephen Lee, but these didn’t come. Still, winning with a third of his enemy’s force was nothing new to him by now. He wanted to draw Smith further down into the cul-de-sac of the two streams, but Smith was just barely too shy to be drawn. The morning after the raid on Siloam, Smith engaged Jeff Forrest’s brigade east of Ellis’s Bridge. Forrest reinforced his brother as fast as he could from the west side of the creek and after two hours’ fighting Smith was in retreat, meaning to choose his own ground to defend.
“Keep up the skeer!” Forrest cried, one more time, ordering out small squads of his escort to press the receding Yankee rear. Matthew rode in the forefront of these, with Henri barely able to keep up with him and maybe not entirely willing to—he felt cold and empty as a washed-out jug since their tour of the riot around Okolona—but Matthew was burning, burning, or it was Forrest’s words that burned inside him. Make yore ownself free.
What Henri feared was that the boy would find a way to make his ownself dead before the day was done. Whatever fire got a good start in Forrest would burn to the very borders of his being—like the fire that had consumed that manor house outside of Okolona. Today it seemed the same fire burned in Matthew, just as bright. He followed Matthew, but not too close. There was a smell of death in the air, which of course made sense in the midst of pitched battle, but somehow what he sensed today was worse.
Smith’s men made a number of small stands as they moved north, all of them rolled up quickly by Forrest’s horsemen. They kept up the chase well into the night, and in the darkness and confusion it once occurred that two parties of Forrest’s men fired on each other for a minute or so. By great good fortune none were killed. Though Matthew caught a crease on his upper arm he would not even stop to have it dressed, but joined a scout with Henri and Major Strange around two in the morning when the other pursuers finally stopped to rest: they found Smith’s men were resting too, a mile or so south of Okolona.
The next morning’s first charge drove the Federal rear guard straight through what remained of the town. Smith had drawn up an imposing battle line just the north side of Okolona, but Forrest soon flanked him out of this position and put him on the run again. What at first looked like a total rout settled into an organized retreat. A couple of miles north of the point where Sakatonchee Creek trickled away to nothing, Smith rallied his men into a strong position among the fences and outbuildings on the top of Ivy’s Hill.
Jeff Forrest’s brigade took over the attack here, relieving Bell’s brigade, which had been chasing at a run for a hard nine miles. The bugle blew and the horsemen charged through the pale winter sunlight toward the crest of the ridge where Smith had ranged the first of his two battle lines behind stacked fence rails. Many of Smith’s men were armed with the new breech-loading rifles and so could sustain a more rapid fire than before. The Rebel yell ripped back along the charging line, shredded by the wind of forward motion, but Jeff Forrest’s cry was stopped short by the bullet that struck him in the throat. He fell backward out of the saddle, arms jerking like the forequarters of a slaughtered hog, dead before he hit the ground.
Bedford Forrest reached him almost before he had landed, tearing the knees out of both pants legs as he skidded to his brother’s side, and Doctor Cowan was there too, searching for a pulse in