• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 809 0

of Shiloh, and you have kept it up ever since. You did it because I reported to Richmond facts, while you reported damned lies. You robbed me of my command in Kentucky and gave it to one of your favorites—men that I armed and equipped from the enemies of our country. In a spirit of revenge and spite, because I would not fawn upon you as others did, you drove me into West Tennessee in the winter of 1862 with improper arms and without sufficient ammunition, although I had made repeated applications for the same. You did it to ruin me and my career. When in spite of all this I returned with my command well equipped by captures, you began again your work of spite and persecution and have kept it up, and now this second brigade, organized and equipped without thanks to you or the government, a brigade which has won a reputation for successful fighting second to none in the army, taking advantage of your position as the commanding general in order to humiliate me, you have taken these brave men from me. I have stood your meanness as long as I intend to. You have played the part of a damned scoundrel, and are a coward, and if you were any part of a man I would slap your jaws and force you to resent it. You may as well not issue any more orders to me, for I will not obey them, and I will hold you personally responsible for any further indignities you may endeavor to inflict upon me. You have threatened to arrest me for not obeying your orders promptly. I dare you to do it, and I say to you that if you ever again try to interfere with me or cross my path it will be at the peril of your life.”

By the time he got to the end of his recitation, Mary Ann was laughing softly, in spite of herself. “Did he say it as pretty as that?” she said. “Is that just how he put it?”

“No,” Cowan said, and nuzzled his drink. “He didn’t put it exactly that way.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

December 1862

THAT’S DAMASCUS STEEL,” John Morton said helpfully, as Forrest flexed the blade of the sword he’d just picked up from the Federal stores at Trenton. “It’s imported, General.”

“Is that a fact?” Forrest stroked his calloused palm beneath the blade, studying the intricate whorls of the many-times-folded metal.

Morton beamed back at him, his face as round and friendly as a biscuit. He’d been gamboling around Forrest, glad as a puppy, since Forrest had changed his mind and accepted him, theoretically, as a gunner, which hadn’t gone so smoothly at first. Forrest already had a perfectly good captain of artillery in S. L. Freeman, and he didn’t care to have that arrangement interfered with. I’d like to know why in HELL Bragg sent that tallow-faced boy to take charge, Henri had heard Forrest snarl when Morton first reported. Whereupon Morton rode a hundred-mile round-trip to get his orders confirmed by General Wheeler, and did it in just under twenty-four hours. Forrest stopped backbiting after that, for it was the kind of thing he might have done himself. Just nineteen years old, Morton was tougher than he looked, resilient, jovial, hard to dislike.

Forrest raised his head and glanced around the depot. “Hit’s a shame,” he remarked. “We’ll have to burn up half this stuff.”

“What for?” Morton asked him, suddenly crestfallen.

“Don’t have men enough to haul it out of here,” Forrest said shortly. “If hit ain’t one thang hit’s another.”

“Ain’t it the truth,” Nath Boone said, exchanging a look with John Freeman, the artillery captain whose barrage had helped induce the Federal surrender earlier that same day. Forrest’s men had been going hell for leather all over West Tennessee, since they’d crossed the Tennessee River at Clifton a week or so before, with two thousand men but a terrible shortage of caps for their firearms. Since then Forrest had been scavenging one day at a time, finding caps enough to fight a handful of small fierce engagements, dividing his forces again and again to make them seem to be everywhere in the region at once, ripping up railroad and bridges wherever they went. At night they burned five times as many fires as they needed and Forrest