“Shut that light,” Forrest said as they came up. As the aide closed the metal cover over the lantern’s beam, he reached for Hood’s right hand and clasped it briefly. Hood was a tall man, fair, with a wide fan of beard and deep-set sorrowful eyes, like a bloodhound. His left arm hung limp in a brown-stained sling.
“Proud to see ye,” Forrest said. “Is Longstreet here yet?” Word was that General Longstreet had been dispatched by General Lee from the disaster at Gettysburg, to support Bragg at Chattanooga with the divisions of Hood and McLaws.
“On his way,” Hood said, and began to relay Bragg’s orders, for he had just come from a conference with the chief of the Army of Tennessee. The plan called for Forrest to lead a flanking attack on the Federal left, the first of a series of movements intended to roll the blue line south along the bank of Chickamauga Creek till it would be crushed into McLemore’s Cove.
Forrest listened, but his eyes were on a single shadow approaching him now, up the cleared slope, stepping out over the rows of dried corn stubble, now overgrown with late-summer purslane. “Hold up a minute,” he said to Hood, raising one finger. Matthew came up and leaned into him, whispering as his eyes lingered, over Forrest’s shoulder, on the unfamiliar face of Hood.
“You done good, boy,” Forrest called in a stage whisper as he moved away. Matthew paused a moment, maybe turned his head, but in the floating darkness his expression was illegible; he moved on.
“A fine order of battle,” Forrest said, returning to Hood. “If only the damyankees would jest stick whar they was at last week.”
“What are you thinking?” Hood said.
“Thar’s subject to be a whole lot more of’m up here now on this end of the line than what that d——what General Bragg is counten on.”
“You have intelligence?” Hood said.
“Some,” Forrest said. “Come mornen we’re apt to git all the intelligence we can swaller.” He looked up and down Hood’s long body in the starlight. “How about that arm you got thar?”
Hood shrugged, then winced at the pain the movement brought. “It’ll either get better or I’ll get it sawed off.”
Forrest released a short barking laugh. “I’ll be glad when Longstreet gits in,” he said. “Fer I know he ain’t one to dawdle.” He looked into the dark woods rising into the ridges to the west. From somewhere out there came a few liquid notes of a whippoorwill.
“Hit’s a fine chance we got here, by damn,” Forrest said. “What frets me is, have we already done missed it?”
THERE WAS FOG the next morning and Forrest rode through it, north again in the direction of Jay’s Sawmill, which was more or less due west of Reed’s Bridge, though it was hard to figure just where anything was in the pea-soup atmosphere.
“They can’t see us, anyway,” Anderson responded to Forrest’s cursing of the weather.
“That’s a red-eyed fact, and we can’t see them neither,” Forrest said, and twisted in the saddle to ease his healing wound. Then with a rasping laugh—“Why it’s worse than having to fight in the mountains, by damn—and we still got to fight in the mountains too.”
Near ten the mist lifted to unveil a mass of Federal infantry maneuvering through the woods.
“Sonsabitches won’t stay put, will they?” Forrest said, reining up Highlander. “By damn they’re all the way around our right, or they will be, here in a minute. We’re supposed to flank them and they’re gone to flank us.”
Where the mist still lingered, half a mile to the south, the rattle of rifle fire began. Highlander sidestepped and raised his head toward the sound.
“Devil take’m down to the brimstone pit!” Forrest burst out. “They done hit Davidson’s brigade afore he got set.” He and Anderson had passed Davidson, at the far right of General Pegram’s division, scarcely fifteen minutes before, when the fog was so dense the men were finding each other by touch. “Go get us some help and get it right quick,” Forrest told Anderson. “Don’t and they’re about to do us like we meant to do them.”
Anderson spurred away, and Forrest rode to find Pegram. Between them they got Davidson’s men into some kind of order and held a line till Dibrell’s brigade arrived to support them. By the hardest, the right flank had not yet been turned. Forrest could see just that much as the morning mist began to lift from the struggling lines of battle.
“Dibrell—that’s all you brung me?” Forrest said to Anderson. “I sent for Armstrong’s whole division.”
“General Polk cannot send more because General Bragg—”
“Damnfool General Bragg wants to fight ’m where they was yestiddy! Don’t he know they’re all up here right now?” Forrest, who had turned his customary fired-brick color during the morning’s action, tore off his hat and made to fling it. When Highlander bridled, Forrest smoothed his hat brim over the horse’s mane. “Hit’s more than one division coming in us right here—” He caught sight of John Morton and subsided slightly, put on his hat and rode over to meet him.
“Good thing at least you got here, John. Now get your puppies up to the front and give the damyankees something to think about.”
Forrest fought his men dismounted, side by side with the infantry. They knew how to use cover and were marksmen enough to make their shots tell. Pushed to the front, Morton’s Bull Pups spat grapeshot to discourage the Federal advance for a time. But the weight of numbers was overbearing. Mistrusting any messenger, Forrest rode for reinforcement himself, and came back shortly with Walker’s brigade to throw into the line.
He’d ordered Pegram to hold his position at whatever cost, and while Forrest was off hunting Walker, Pegram had lost fully a quarter of his men. The Federal tide ebbed for a little when Walker’s brigade slammed into the position. Then it began to rise again.
“Where in the hell do they keep coming from?” Forrest howled at the smoke-blocked sky. “They’re going to run us right into the creek, next thing.”
He sent for General Ector’s brigade and put it in to fill a gap between a line of his dismounted horsemen and another of regular infantry. The fog had long lifted but was now replaced by swirls of gunpowder smoke and the dust the boots and hooves swirled up. Forrest rode to the left, peering into the murk. One of Ector’s aides overtook him as he paused behind John Morton’s battery.
“Sir! General Ector sends me to say he is uneasy about his right flank.”
“He don’t need to worry,” Forrest said, without turning. “Go tell him I’ll look after it.”
The Lafayette road ran parallel to the creek, and Forrest rode up it away to see what chance there might be of turning the Yankee left. All he saw was more and more Federal reserves piling up behind the fighting lines. They kept coming like ants toward a spill of molasses. As he returned to Morton’s battery, the same aide rode up to him again.
“General Ector is concerned for his left flank, sir—”
“Go tell General Ector I am by God here and will see to his left and his right flank both,” Forrest snapped. As the aide rushed away, he brushed at his duster—white that morning, it was now covered with a silt of burnt powder, blood spray and dust. Automatically he cleaned his palm on the sweating hide of Highlander’s shoulder. John Morton was shouting for more ammunition; at that moment Benjamin and Matthew rolled up with a caisson and jumped down to unload it.
Ector’s brigade, though it hadn’t been flanked on either side so far, was being pushed back step by step. That line could only bend so far before it broke. Then there was a rally, for Liddell’s division had just arrived behind Ector, coming in at a run as the Federal line wavered. A break came in the firing from the Yankee side. “By God I think hit’s them runnen low on powder now,” Forrest called to Morton. He swept his sword up to signal a charge.
In the next moment they had overrun a Yankee battery as the gunners fled, and broken out through a last screen of trees, their bark splintered by shrapnel, into a field of corn stubble, snarled with withering pea vine. Liddell’s men pursued at a run, as bluecoa
ts scattered in the next clump of woods to the west. Forrest galloped in a curve across the cornfield, swirling his sword to urge them on.
There was a hitch in Highlander’s stride. They had been fighting for three hours maybe, but it was too soon for this strong horse to tire. Yet he seemed to be fading, his power shrinking between Forrest’s legs, like a blown-up hog bladder with the air rushing out. Highlander was collapsing underneath him, and Forrest swung free, landing hard on his boot heels, as the horse’s big shoulder folded into the ground. One of the snapped reins hung from his hand.
Anderson pulled up behind them, eyes bleak with shock. Forrest looked down. Blood was pulsing out of his horse, soaking the bleached leaves of the crumpled corn. He couldn’t tell where the blood was coming from. It might as well have been coming from everywhere. He wasn’t going to be able to stop it. Highlander might be the finest horse he would ever ride. Rage at the waste of it clouded his mind.
Distantly he registered that concentrated firing had taken up again, not far to the west, where the Yankees must have been reinforced, or re-formed their lines without reinforcement. He could see himself, stark as a scarecrow, his reflection curving over the dim orb of the horse’s eye. He had just drawn his pistol to put an end to it, when a movement to the west distracted him. A lone grayback popped out of the trees to the west, weaponless, head down, fleeing the slaughter.
“Whar the damn hell ye think ye’re goen?” Forrest turned the pistol on the runaway, bracing his right hand over left wrist. A trace of breeze stirred the tails of his duster. He drew back the hammer with his thumb.
“General Forrest! Think what you’re doing—”
Anderson’s voice. Forrest wheeled toward him. Cocked pistol solid in his hand, sighted on Anderson across Highlander’s carcass. He needed to satisfy his feelings someway. “Let one start in to runnen and the rest of ’m will too,” he said. “How can you tell me not to shoot him? Son of a bitch is too sorry to live.”
“I never told you not to shoot him,” Anderson said levelly. “I asked you to think about it, is all.”
The barrel of Forrest’s pistol sank slowly. The weight of it dragged down his arm like a plumb weight. He noticed the scrap of leather still in his left hand and tossed it away. A couple of bluebottle flies had arrived to whir around the horse’s dead eye. With an effort Forrest raised his pistol and settled it back into the holster.
“I know you, General,” Anderson said. “I’d not tell you to do anything or not do it. If I had, you’d have shot him and me both.”
BETWEEN MIDNIGHT and morning Forrest woke with the certainty someone, something, was watching him. A wild bristling scent on the chilly night air. He hadn’t slept at all, more like, beyond an episode of very fitful dozing. If it had been all up to him he wouldn’t have taken even that much a lie-down, but his men were spent from a hard afternoon fighting dismounted through the thickets west of Chickamauga Creek. And Bragg of course was of no mind to recognize the victory others had won for him, much less to pursue it.
About the clearing lay the huddled shapes of other men. Willie, he thought, and Major Anderson. But the watching eyes were else-where—directly behind him, he sensed—he could feel them, boring into the crown of his head.
A horse whickered in the trees nearby, and took a hobbled step, and under cover of those faint sounds Forrest rolled away from his pallet and came up on one knee, his right hand aiming a pistol into the sector of darkness where the watcher must be, left fingertips grazing the hilt of the sword. At first he saw nothing, then the trunks of two cedars, with a shelf of limestone jutting up from the point between them. One of his men was lying there, the one with the queer taste for sleeping on stone, and soundly too, for Forrest could hear the rasp of his snores.
Or maybe it wasn’t snoring at all. To the right of the stone shelf there was something, low and dark against the ground, pressed against it, and above and behind this faint black shape, something switched tensely from side to side. Forrest made that out before the rest: the flicking tip of the panther’s tail, clear now against a patch of starlight between the thinning trees.
It wasn’t snoring, then. It was what a cat that size did instead of purr.
He could see the ears now, just the tips of them, revolving forward. He thought of other cats he had seen stalk. But if he were the thing being stalked, then the panther would certainly have seen him move. Would be thinking it over now, considering its chances.
Come on, Forrest thought. Come ahead and let’s see what you’re made of.
The panther stood up, shoulders hunched high, the head still low. It looked jet-black, though that was only because of the darkness. Forrest had heard tell of jungle panthers in South America who really were that color.
One of the embers broke in the fire and a little flame shot up, catching the yellow gleam of the panther’s eyes. Forrest held the look, for a long moment. Then the panther raised its head and looked away, shrugging almost, like any cat pretending it never really cared for its quarry. Just stretching …
Like that it had turned and was going away. Long tail still switching. Forrest caught his gun belt free of his blanket roll as he stood up, and slung it over his left shoulder. The second pistol, in its holster, slapped against his heart. He ran lightfooted to the tree line, stopped. The panther had opened up a long lolloping stride and was well away, high on a slope of trampled pasture, above where Forrest stood staring after it. In the brighter light of the open area, the big cat looked more gray than black, except the black spot he could now make out on the very tip of its tail.
He watched it go, feeling his own edge soften, half-regretting he hadn’t shot the panther, half-glad of it. A varmint, troublesome—but there were Yankees aplenty yet to be killed and no need to spend powder and shot on a varmint.
He strapped on his belt and holstered the pistol in his right hand, then yawned and rolled his shoulders. That wound in his back itched him now, but the itch only told him it was healing. The itch that couldn’t be scratched was that he’d let Cowan buffalo him into taking a drink of medicinal whiskey, soon after he’d been hit. Well, let that go.
It would be an hour yet until dawn. Forrest turned back to the campfire, concentric rings of sleeping men, lying there quiet as children. A memory of little Fan flashed upon him and he sent it away with a quick sharp hand clap.
The sleeper came up alert from the stone. Willie turned over, coughed, still dreaming.
“Boots and saddles!” Forrest called. He had not taken off his own boots to sleep. And Jerry was already bringing him a fresh horse: a big, stout-looking bay, with a blue-black mane. I won’t bother given this’n a name, Forrest thought. The death of Highlander, two days before, still lay heavy on his mind.
He rode with some four hundred men at his back, in varying states of readiness, some already keenly focused on the horizon ahead them, others still rubbing sleep from their eyes, blinking into the predawn darkness. The moon had long since set, and mist on the fields confused the starlight. The Yankees would be running for the pass over Missionary Ridge at Rossville, Forrest thought, trying to calculate what gain they might have made in the dark. With the right will and enough men in the right spot, the rest of the whole Yankee army could still be scattered or destroyed. Git thar fustest with the mostest. Forrest didn’t have near enough men for the job, but he’d worry on that when the time came.
They rode fanned out through groves raked all the previous day by minié balls and grapeshot from the cannons. Wood of the torn trunks stood out stark and pale among the dark boles of undamaged trees. Everywhere the scent of wounded wood mingled with the odor of slow-drying blood. Anderson leaned sideways from the saddle to pluck a splinter for a toothpick, made a light remark and laughed as someone hushed him. Overhead the canopy of leaves was fracturing into fine blue lines like cracks in a china teacup, as dawn washed out the weak light of the stars.
Just ahead through a thinning of the trees the downhill slope of another pasture glowed, st
eeped in dew. At the bottom where there might be a creek, where certainly there were remains of a disintegrating rock-wall fence, enemy horsemen circled, clustered, faced Forrest’s party as it began to break into the open.
“I don’t make’m many,” Forrest said, squinting in the faint light as Anderson and Major Strange pulled up either side of him. “I don’t make’m worth slowen down fer.” He’d have called the Yankee cavalry at between a hundred and a hundred and fifty, though of course more might be hidden where the thickets began again, halfway up the swell of the next rise.
He glanced back and caught sight of Willie’s pale, excited face as he came riding out of the grove behind them. A dark spot on his cheekbone might have been a bruise or a scrape from one of his scuffles with Matthew—and why did those boys seem to need a session of stomp and gouge even after a long day of battle? Or no, they’d given up all that foolishness lately, hadn’t they?—so Willie’s smudge might just as well be something else, and anyway Matthew was riding well off to the left, so that for the moment Forrest held his horse between them.
“Sir?” Anderson was saying.
“They won’t stick. Not where they’re at. Not even thinken about it,” Forrest said. “Come on and let’s give’m a dare.”
The yell went up as he dug his heels into the flanks of the unnamed horse. His throat hurt but he couldn’t tell what part of the whole wildcat scream was his. It seemed to float above them all, like the lifting, dissipating morning mist.
The Yankee horsemen wheeled, clustered, rode across the damp ditch line beyond the remnants of rock wall, twenty yards or so up the next rise, and then they turned. Would they have a mind to charge to meet him? No. But now they were close enough for him to see their weapons as they raised them. Long guns. Forrest’s horsemen were still too far out for their Navy sixes to count for much and so the men were holding their fire.
At the first volley he heard the thump of metal penetrating flesh, and turned for an instant to see that the colored feller he’d picked up by the side of that Kentucky road had been shot dead in the saddle. Henry. Ornery, in his odd French way of pronouncing it. He’d taken the bullet on the bridge of his nose and the shock had rocked his whole upper body back, but now it slumped forward into the horse’s mane, where his copper-colored fingers still convulsed on the reins.
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