Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [97]
IT TURNED OUT that Forrest had not yet departed for his rendezvous with General Bragg. Henry contrived to get himself and Matthew sent to deliver a dispatch to the headquarters at Missionary Ridge. Arriving late, they’d passed the night there, and as nothing particular pressed them to return, they lingered still. The air was clear and the view was fine and they had got a very generous supper among a company of men they knew, whom General Bragg had recently transferred from Forrest’s command to General Wheeler’s.
Henri was sitting on a broken caisson, resting his back on the bark of a pin oak, dozing with one eye open, when Forrest rode over a crest of the ridge, his dark coat wrapped around him like a storm cloud and his deep-set eyes two holes into the black empty depths of the universe. Doctor Cowan rode to his left, wordless and pale as if he were on his way to a funeral that might be his own.
“I think somebody’s going to get killed,” Matthew hissed.
Both Henri’s eyes were open now, and both he and Matthew had rolled quietly to their feet. Forrest swung down from his dappled gray horse while it was still walking forward and dropped the reins on the ground without looking as he strode toward Braxton Bragg’s tent. Cowan dismounted to bring up his rear. Matthew ran to catch up the reins of the dappled gray and Cowan’s mount and bring them to a halt.
An aide-de-camp popped out of Bragg’s tent, pushing both palms forward as if he meant to block Forrest’s approach. Henri saw Forrest’s eyes assume their feral yellow glow, saw his body begin its automatic compression and coil. But the aide somehow melted out of his way before anything had touched him. Through the raised tent flap Henri saw Bragg starting up from behind his camp table, mouth open, one hand falling to his hip as Forrest transfixed him with an index finger which looked dark with blood. The same forefinger, Henri thought, that Forrest had used to close the hole in his horse’s jugular on the fourth day of Chickamauga.
Cowan followed him in, and the tent flap fell behind them. The walls of the tent shuddered and appeared to glow red, as if everything inside were burning. During one of his crossings of the Central South before the war, Henri had come upon a black bear mauling a coon dog. The sounds that were now coming out of the tent were just the same grumble and crunch and roar of that bear—only he didn’t hear the screams of the dog this time.
At last Forrest stalked out of the tent, black in the face and still shaking with rage. Doctor Cowan stood just out of his reach, watching him carefully, as if in case Forrest should fall in an apoplectic seizure, Cowan would nick a vein with a scalpel in time to stop his heart or brain from exploding. But in a few minutes Forrest’s face had simmered down to something like its normal shade.
“If you meant to get yourself drummed out of this army,” Cowan said quietly, “I expect you might just have done it this time.”
Forrest shook his head. “He’ll never say a word about it.” He took the reins of the dappled gray, just barely registering Matthew with his eyes. Before he swung into the saddle, he spat on the ground. “He’ll be the last man to mention it, and mark my word, he’ll take no action in the matter. I will ask to be relieved and transferred to a different field and he will not oppose it.”
To that Cowan made no reply and no further word was spoken as the two men rode away, the hoofbeats of their horses fading down the ridge toward the river and the lowland.
FORREST HAD GONE on into Mississippi by the time Doctor Cowan rejoined his cousin at LaGrange. He reached the big house at the close of the day, and Mary Ann served him a bourbon and water, with a last green sprig of mint of the season, before she inquired what her husband had said to Bragg.
“Well.” Cowan sipped, tilted his glass to capture a ray of sunset, swallowed. “To the best of my recollection …
“I am not here to pass civilities or compliments with you, but on other business. You commenced your cowardly persecution of me soon after the battle