Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [85]
“Save your lives!” Bradford shouted, without making any suggestion how his men were to do it.
“Let us fight yet,” cried a lieutenant—he was commanding black artillerymen who still served the cannon—but Bradford howled, “It is no more use,” and threw himself over the bluff toward the river. One of the black gunners stood up calmly away from his piece, with no more weapon than his ramrod, which he held at his side like a staff. Henri remembered his face from the other side of the parapet, one of the sober, serious ones, and he was still looking at Henri now, ignoring Nolan, who walked up to him slowly and shot him pointblank between the eyes. Others were on their knees holding up their hands for mercy now but they were shot down just the same, by the partisans who’d entered over the bluff or equally by Forrest’s men coming over the wall. He had seen Forrest blood-maddened often enough but never had it affected so many; every man who came over the wall had murder blazing in his eyes. “Kill every last one of the varmints,” somebody cried. “That’s Forrest’s word!” Others were toasting the slaughter from the whiskey keg. The Union flag still snapped on its pole and Henri thought of cutting the lanyard but there was too much fighting there by the flagstaff and it would be better to go and go quickly—
He scrambled back the way he had come, half-falling down the steep slope to the spot where the jenny grace à Bon Dieu was still tethered; not bothering with the knot but breaking the dry-rotted reins with a snap of his wrist. He rode, wondering what help to expect. Forrest at least saw the value in a slave. He wouldn’t go slaughter so many of them any more than he would the same number of horses or mules. Wasn’t that right? Not quite a year back, in May ’63, some of Forrest’s scouts had captured a handful of black Federals and quietly sold them down the river. They hadn’t exactly told the Old Man about that one, but they had lived high for a while on the money. Then again, when they entered the town of Purdy a few weeks ago, Forrest had set a guard from his own escort to protect the wife and family of Colonel Fielding Hurst—not only from Confederate soldiers but from the rage of ordinary citizens all around, for Hurst was a Union man who’d just burned down half his own hometown, and was generally thought responsible for horrors on the order of the torture and murder of Dobbs. Forrest had promised to wipe Hurst off the face of the earth if he could catch him, but he normally shielded even Union sympathizers, so long as they didn’t have arms in their hands. The truth of it was, Henri had no notion if Forrest would stop this killing or not but he knew Forrest was the only man who could stop it.
He jumped off the jenny while she was still trotting. Forrest leaned against a tree, twirling the coin on its thong as he looked toward the battle, or sometimes cupping it in his palm to study more closely. That old Spanish doubloon that Jeffrey Forrest had plowed up somewhere in Mississippi and ever after worn around his neck. Forrest had carried it since his brother was killed, and it wasn’t an especially good sign when he commenced studying it this way.
“General,” Henri gasped. “You must come.”
Forrest looked up at him half-unseeing. “Come whar?”
“The fort—” Henri leaned forward, braced hands on his knees in hope of relieving a stitch in his side. “They’re killing, down there—just killing.”
Forrest pointed, the coin swinging from the heel of his hand. “Without they strike that goddamn flag they can good goddamn well expect to get kilt.”
“They’ve surrendered!” Henri said. “There’s no fight left in them anyhow. There’s men being killed with empty hands.”
Forrest put the coin away in his pocket, and looked