Fort Pillow

IV

Surviving skirmishers ran back toward the earthen parapet warding Fort Pillow. Hale soldiers helped their wounded friends. Every so often, a man who'd loaded his Springfield before retreating would fire it at the oncoming Rebs to make them keep their heads down.

Lieutenant Mack Leaming watched a couple of Federals go down, but only a couple. Most of the men who'd set out for the earthwork reached it in safety-or as much safety as U.S. soldiers could find anywhere on this field.

A Mini? ball snapped past in front of Leaming's nose, too close for comfort. He flinched. Half a minute later, another near miss made him flinch again. Fifty yards away, troopers from the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry shouted that another officer was down. The Confederates seemed to be taking dead aim-though Leaming wished he didn't think of it quite that way-at anyone inside the perimeter who wore shoulder straps and more than his share of brass buttons.

Though clouds still covered the sun most of the time, Leaming didn't think it could be much past eight o'clock. Looking at his pocket watch never even crossed his mind. The Confederates hadn't been attacking for much more than two hours, and they'd already driven the Federals back inside the fortress proper.

That wasn't good, and Leaming knew it. How could the garrison hold out till reinforcements got here from Memphis? Leaming spotted Major Lionel Booth, who was still going from gun to gun encouraging the colored cannoneers. “Major!” he called. “Excuse me, Major…”

“Yes, Lieutenant?” Booth sounded as calm as if on parade. Leaming didn't think he really was that calm, but even being able to seem so was a valuable asset to an officer. “What do you need?”

“Sir, how many Rebs do you reckon are out there?” Leaming blurted.

Booth considered. He ducked when a bullet cracked past above his head, but he didn't seem especially flustered. “I'd say fifteen hundred, maybe two thousand,” he replied at last. “From the weight of fire, that's about what it feels like to me.”

“Is that all, sir?” Leaming said in amazement.

“Isn't that enough? Two and a half, maybe three times what we've got in here,” Booth said with a wry chuckle. “More than I figured Bedford Forrest could throw at us, I'll tell you that. But does someone else think there are more?”

“When I asked Major Bradford, sir, he said he thought Forrest had six or seven thousand men,” Leaming said.

“Did he now?” Booth started to say something, then visibly changed his mind. What did come out of his mouth after that brief pause was, “Well, Lieutenant, you have to remember this is Major Bradford's first real combat. Your first few times, you're liable to see things that aren't there.” He sounded indulgent, like a father talking about a boy who didn't want to go to sleep without a candle by his bed.

Leaming hoped the fortress commandant felt indulgent about him, too. This was also his first real combat, and he was scared. He was scared spitless-the Sahara couldn't have been drier than the inside of his mouth. The first few near misses, he'd almost pissed himself. That would have been a fine thing for an officer to do in front of his men!

“You're getting along just, fine, Lieutenant, Booth said, so maybe he could seem paternal toward more people than Major Bradford. “I think there are only a few people who aren't afraid on a battlefield and they're men who don't care if they live or die. Nothing wrong with being afraid. The trick of it is to go on doing your job whether you're afraid or not. You're not shirking, and that's all anybody can ask of you.”

“Thank you, sir.” Leaming was no Catholic, but that felt like absolution from a priest.

Major Booth's grin showed crooked teeth. “It's all right. The more Rebs who try to rush this place, the more Rebs we'll shoot, that's all. Let 'em come, by God! How are they going to make it over the parapet? We'll hang on till help from Memphis steams up the river, and then we'll see who runs, and how far.”

Shells from the New Era climbed high over the bluff, slow enough to be easily visible to the naked eye, then rained down someplace not too far from where Confederate troopers were moving. Seeing those bursts and the clouds of smoke rising from them heartened Leaming. Even so, he said, “I wish we had better signal arrangements with the gunboat. The way things are, she's almost firing blind.”

“I won't say you're altogether wrong, but I think we're doing as much as we can,” Booth replied. “Signal flags are about as good as we can manage, I'm afraid, even if they aren't perfect-her crew can't see their targets. The ground up here is too high, that's all, and the Rebs are moving faster than we can let the New Era know where they're moving to. But some of what the gunboat fires off is bound to come down on their heads.”

“Here's hoping, sir,” Mack Leaming said. When Booth put things the way he did, the New Era didn't seem so very formidable after all. Leaming was glad nobody else inside Fort Pillow had heard the commandant. That left him the only one to have his spirits lowered.

Major Booth seemed unworried about what the gunboat could or couldn't do. He hardly seemed worried about anything. Touching the brim of his black slouch hat, he went back to encouraging the gunners.

Despite their steady fire, and despite the work of the white and colored riflemen behind the earthwork, Forrest's men steadily worked their way forward. They came close enough to let Leaming hear their officers shouting orders, close enough to let him hear their wounded men groan when they were hit.

They came close enough to let him draw his revolver from the holster and fire two or three shots at them: the first shots he'd ever fired with intent to kill. He couldn't see if he hit anybody. That was probably just as well.

And then, instead of sliding forward, the Confederates slid back. They still kept up a steady and galling fire, but they didn't seem to think they could simply storm the parapet any more.

We taught them respect, by God, Leaming thought. Those loping, caterwauling shapes had been everywhere in front of the fort, or so it seemed to him. He found Major Bradford's estimate of their numbers far easier to believe than Major Booth's. Six or seven thousand Rebs? Looking at them out there, he could have believed there were six or seven million of them.

Not far away, two colored soldiers passed a dipper of sutlers' whiskey back and forth. Both of them grinned. One of them raised the dipper in salute to Lieutenant Leaming. “Want a snort, suh?” he called.

“No, thanks,” Leaming answered. Dutch courage, nigger courage, what difference did it make? And some of the whites from his own regiment were drinking, too. Put a soldier, white or colored, anywhere near whiskey and he'd find a way to get outside it.

One of the Negroes aimed an obscene gesture at the Confederates out there in the distance. His friend thought that was the funniest thing he'd ever seen, and sent the Rebs something even nastier. Several bullets snarled past them. They went right on laughing.

They weren't afraid, anyhow. And they were fighting the enemy. The colored men at the half-dozen field guns kept firing steadily, while the colored soldiers serving as riflemen loaded and shot shoulder to shoulder with the troopers from the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry. Leaming wouldn't have believed it if he weren't seeing it with his own eyes. He had trouble believing it even though he was seeing it with his own eyes.

A Negro let out a shrill screech. He staggered away from the parapet, clutching at his left elbow. “Do Jesus! The surgeon gonna cut off my arm!” he wailed. From what Leaming knew of wounds, he was likely to be right. If a bullet shattered bones, you almost had to amputate. Otherwise, the injured man would die of fever. Shy a limb, he might live.

“Po' George,” one Negro said. “Hard luck,” another agreed.

They both fired their Springfields less than a minute after George got hurt. The other colored soldiers shot at any Confederates they saw, too. Niggers really can fight, Lieutenant Leaming thought in swelling wonder. Maybe it's not a question of keeping them slaves from here on out. Maybe we were lucky to hold them in slavery as long as we did.

By now, the white captain and sergeant nominally in charge of Ben Robinson's twelve-pounder had seen that the colored gun crew knew what it was doing. They gave fewer and fewer orders. They gave fewer and fewer suggestions. The black men were doing plenty all by themselves to give the Confederates out beyond the earthwork a hard time.

When Bedford Forrest's troopers pressed close to the parapet, Sergeant Robinson ordered a couple of rounds of canister on his own. He looked back to Captain Carron after he did it, but the officer didn't say a word. He just beamed and nodded, and Ben Robinson went on fighting the gun.

Each round of canister had sheet-metal sides and a thin wooden plug at the top. It held two or three hundred round bullets. In effect, it turned the twelve-pounder into God's shotgun. At short range, it was supremely deadly.

A man caught by the full fury of a blast of canister might be blown to red rags. He might simply cease to be, torn apart so completely that nothing recognizable as a human being was left. Or he might be killed or maimed in any number of more ordinary ways.

The Rebs didn't want to come close to any gun that was firing canister. No matter how much Ben Robinson hated those Secesh sons of bitches, he couldn't blame them for that. He wouldn't have wanted to make the acquaintance of a canister burst himself. Who would?

“Look at 'em run!” Charlie Key yelled. “You ever reckon you see Secesh run?”

Some of the Confederates couldn't run. Some of them would never run again. The rest… didn't want that to happen to them.

“Give 'em anudder round, jus' like de last one!” Charlie yelled.

Robinson shook his head. “They outa range now,” he said mournfully. “Don't want to waste the canister. We ain't got but a few rounds.”

“Too bad,” Charlie said. “How come dey don't give us mo'? Powerful good 'munition. Ain't nothin' else make the Rebs scamper like dat.” He mimed scampering himself. He was a dangerous mimic.

“Canister shift damn near anything-anything up close,” Robinson said. “Out past a couple hundred yards, though, it ain't much. So we got us dese shrapnel rounds an' shot fo' de long-range work.”

A twelve-pound iron ball would tear a fearful hole in a tight-packed group of men. Since the Rebs weren't fighting that way, shrapnel bursts did more damage here. Ben Robinson knew he could hurt the white men who'd done so much to make his life a misery. Sell me away from home, will you? he thought furiously as he lowered the altitude screw on the gun carriage. Sell me at all, will you? Treat me like a piece of meat, will you? Treat my sister like a piece of meat, will you? That was a separate outrage, one that burned all by itself.

Sergeant Clark pulled the lanyard. The shrapnel round roared away. The gun rolled back. As Sergeant Robinson put his shoulder to the carriage to wrestle it forward again, he hoped some of the iron fragments from that round blew a white man's balls off. Let's see you come round the slave cabins with a bulge in your pants then, God damn your scrawny soul to hell.

The reloading ritual began once more. It felt almost like a dance. Only the music was missing, and the gun crew didn't really need it. They could go through the steps with no accompaniment but the boom of the Springfields to either side and the whine and crack of enemy minnies darting past.

Like any soldier of any color, Robinson had hated all the hot, sweaty hours he spent on the drill field learning how to handle a cannon. He knew the rest of the colored men in the crew felt the same way. He'd hated white sergeants screaming at him. Dumb-ass coon! Clumsy fool! And those were some of the nicer things they said. But they turned raw black recruits into a real gun crew, something that was more than the sum of its parts, and he owed them a reluctant debt of gratitude for that.

He'd also heard that drill sergeants were just as merciless toward whites. That made him feel a little better. Fair was fair.

“Give 'em hell, boys!” Major Booth came up behind the crew. The gunners worked harder than ever under the commandant's eye. That, no doubt, was exactly what he had in mind. When the gun was ready, he tipped his hat to Sergeant Clark and asked, “May I do the honors?”

“Uh, yes, sir.” Clark handed him the lanyard. Booth gave it a hearty tug. The gun thundered. Looking pleased with himself, Booth returned the match to the sergeant.

A couple of bullets thumped into the earthwork close by. More cracked past. Enemy fire always picked up when Major Booth was around. “Suh, you wants to be careful,” Ben Robinson told him. “They got sharpshooters out there tryin' to pick you off.”

Booth laughed lightheartedly. Ben always remembered that-how cheerful the commandant sounded, as if he'd just heard a good joke. “They can try, Sergeant,” he said-he was always careful to use colored underofficers' ranks when he spoke to them. “The bastards have been trying for a while, but they haven't got me yet.”

“Yes, suh.” Ben didn't see how he could say anything else. He couldn't very well tell Major Booth to go somewhere else because when the Rebs were shooting at Booth they were also shooting at him. He wanted to, but he couldn't.

And then he heard the unmistakable wet slap of a bullet striking flesh. “My God! I'm hit!” Major Booth exclaimed-a cry more of disbelief than of pain. Booth's hands clutched at his chest. Bright blood welled out between his fingers. “My God!” he said again, more weakly this time. Blood bubbled from his mouth and nose, too. That meant it was a bad wound, about as bad as a wound could be. The thought had hardly crossed Ben's mind before Major Booth's legs gave out and he crumpled to the ground.

“Lawd!” Ben Robinson whispered. Major Booth wasn't just the commandant here. He was the man who'd turned the Negroes he led from field hands into soldiers. If Booth couldn't go on leading, command would fall to Major Bradford. And Booth couldn't-that wound looked sure to kill him, and to kill him fast. As for Major Bradford.. A lot of the men in the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry had no more use for colored soldiers than the Confederates had. They didn't fight for the U.S.A. because they wanted emancipation; they fought for the U.S.A. because they couldn't get along with their neighbors who fought for the C.S.A.

Captain Carron came out of the horrified trance that seemed to grip everyone around the fallen Major Booth. “Take him to a surgeon!” he said. “Maybe the sawbones will be able to do… well, something, anyway.” His voice trailed off. A surgeon couldn't do much for a chest wound, any more than he could for one in the belly. A man either got better or he died.

Major Lionel Booth was going to die. The way he plucked at Robinson's sleeve when the Negro started to lift him told him as much. Booth tried to say something, but more blood came out instead of words. He fought to breathe-he was drowning in his own blood.

When Robinson and two other soldiers from the gun crew laid him in front of the green-sashed surgeon, the white man said, “Good God, it's the major!”

“Yes, suh,” Robinson said. “Help him if you can, suh.”

“Help,” Major Booth echoed feebly. “Please help. Please…” His eyes rolled up in his head.

“He gone?” Charlie Key asked.

The surgeon felt for a pulse at Booth's wrist. “Not yet,” he answered. “He's-” He broke off, then said something vile, aimed not at the Negroes but at fate. “Now he's gone.”

“Lawd!” Robinson said again. “What is we gonna do?”

Major William Bradford felt the weight of the world crashing down on his shoulders. He'd resented Major Booth when the younger officer brought his colored artillerymen up from Memphis. He'd resented him, yes, but he'd come to lean on him, too. Booth knew more about soldiering than he did, and that was all there was to it. Booth didn't get stuffy about passing on what he knew, and Bill Bradford knew he'd learned a lot in the couple of weeks since Booth arrived.

Rather more to the point at the moment, Lionel Booth had kept his head when the Confederates attacked-and when Bradford was on the edge of losing his. Now he was down. Now Fort Pillow was in Bradford's hands again, no matter how much he wished it weren't.

We can hold on. We will hold on, Bradford thought. And maybe

Booth isn't hit as badly as people say.

No sooner had that hopeful thought crossed his mind than a soldier came pelting toward him from where the surgeon was working. “He's dead!” the man shouted. “He's dead, sir!”

Well, so much for that, Major Bradford thought unhappily. It's all mine now. It was his before Booth and his coons got here. He didn't want it back, not like this, but what he wanted didn't seem to matter. He gathered himself, or tried to. “Keep firing!” he shouted to the embattled garrison, and immediately felt a fool. What were they going to do? Stop? Not likely, not with Bedford Forrest's wolves prowling out there. Bradford tried again: “We'll whip' em yet!”

“You tell 'em, Major!” That was one of his own troopers. They would follow where he led. But what about the niggers? They'd have to, wouldn't they? He was the senior officer left alive, no matter how little he wanted the distinction to land on him at this time in this way.

“Major! Major! Major Bradford, suh!” This time, one of Major Booth's colored soldiers-one of his colored soldiers now, for better or worse-dashed toward him from the parapet as if all the furies of hell were at his heels.

“What is it?” Bradford asked. What is it now? he almost said, but he swallowed the last word in the nick of time. It would have sounded too much like panic. He felt panic hammering hard inside him, but didn't want to show it. That would only make it spread.

“Suh, the Secesh done shot Lieutenant Hill through the head out by the old barracks,” the Negro answered. “He fall down, he twitch a few times, an' he dead now jus' like Major Booth.”

“Oh, good God!” Bradford exclaimed. “One thing on top of another!” Hill was-had been-Booth's adjutant, which meant he'd become post adjutant when Booth took command. Now… he hadn't outlived his superior by more than a couple of minutes.

“Yes, suh-one thing after another. But I reckon we's hurting the Rebs, too,” the Negro said. He still showed fight. That was good.

“We'll just have to carry on the best way we can,” Bradford said, and then, “Thank you for letting me know.”

“Yes, suh,” the colored sergeant answered. He gave Bradford a salute that would have won the heart of any drill sergeant on a practice field. Bradford tried to return it as smartly; he'd already seen the Negroes set more stock in such gestures than did the troopers he led. His salute was spoiled when a minnie cracked past overhead. Both he and the colored man ducked. He would have been humiliated if he did and the artilleryman didn't. As things were, they smiled at each other, both admitting that bullets could scare a man no matter what color he was.

After a bob of the head, the Negro trotted back to his station. “Lieutenant Leaming!” Bradford shouted, and then, when that didn't accomplish anything, “Mack! Where in damnation are you?”

“Right here, sir,” Leaming said. “What do you need?”

“A nigger just told me the Rebs have killed Lieutenant Hill outside the works. That makes you post adjutant again,” Major Bradford answered.

“Good Lord!” Leaming said. “I think their sharpshooters really are trying to pick off our officers. We're losing them too fast for anything else to make sense… Are you all right, sir?”

“Yes,” Bradford lied. He'd always been proud of his major's tunic with its two rows of seven brass buttons each. Now, like Joseph's coat of many colors, his tunic with the many shiny buttons-he made sure they stayed shiny-was liable to land him in danger. He imagined some skinny, mangy Rebel drawing a bead right between the rows, squeezing the trigger, and… He flinched, though no bullet came close.

“What are your orders, sir?” Lieutenant Leaming asked.

“What else can we do but keep on with what we've been doing?” Bradford replied. “Major Booth was sure help would come from Memphis. We just have to hang on till it gets here, that's all.”

“Yes, sir.” Leaming stepped closer to Bradford so he could lower his voice: “Damned if the coons aren't fighting, sir.”

“I wouldn't have believed it, either,” Bradford said. “A good thing, though. Without 'em, we couldn't have held this place ten minutes against that swarm of Rebs out there. Thousands of those bastards! Thousands! “

“Sir, Major Booth didn't think there were all that many of them,” Leaming said. “He guessed fifteen hundred, maybe two thousand at the outside.”

“Nonsense!” Major Bradford said. “Look at them. Just look at them. They've got more soldiers running around than a dog has fleas. And if Major Booth were as smart as he thought he was, he wouldn't have walked into a minnie, now would he?”

“I… guess not, sir,” his adjutant answered.

“However many Rebs there are doesn't matter anyhow,” Bradford said. “Can you imagine what they'd do to us if we surrendered? They hate colored soldiers, and they hate Tennessee Union men. They could have the Army of Northern Virginia out there, and we'd still have to fight. Isn't that right, Lieutenant?”

“Yes, sir, I guess it is, when you put it like that,” Leaming answered.

“All right, then. We'll fight on, just the way we would have if Major Booth were still here.” Bradford hesitated, then blurted, “I wish he still were.” But Fort Pillow was his again, no matter what he wished.

Nathan Bedford Forrest rode toward the sound of the gunfire ahead. It was somewhere near ten in the morning. He'd been in the saddle since setting out from Jackson. He was so tired, he could hardly see straight. His horse had to be every bit as weary. The ideal cavalry trooper was a little bandy-legged fellow who didn't weight more than 140 pounds. Well over six feet tall and somewhere close to 200 pounds, Forrest didn't fit the bill. But he was what he was, and the horse had to put up with it.

He knew exhaustion would fall away from him like a discarded cloak once he got to the battlefield. Most of the time, he was a quiet, soft-spoken man. In a fight, everything changed. His voice rose to a roar that could span the field, no matter how wide. He became a furious and ingeniously profane swearer. Some men turned pale when they fought-they were afraid of what might happen to them. Forrest went hot and ruddy, like iron in a smith's forge. Instead of being hammered, though, he smashed the damnyankees himself.

His nostrils twitched. Yes, that was the brimstone reek of gunpowder in the air. It smelled like Old Scratch coming up from the infernal dominions for a look around. Forrest's lips skinned back from his teeth in a fierce, mirthless grin. He intended to make Fort Pillow into hell on earth, all right.

The ground around the fort was only indifferently cleared. A good many trees still stood, and stumps; fallen trunks lay scattered every which way. Even inside the outermost perimeter, plenty of cover still remained. He watched his men use it to good advantage, scooting forward from one stump to another as if they were in an Indian fight from the days before he was born.

Seeing a trooper not far away, Forrest called, “Where's General Chalmers?”

“Who wants to know?” the man answered, not looking up from the revolver he was reloading.

“Bedford Forrest, that's who.” Forrest's voice crackled with danger, the way the air will crackle just before lightning strikes. When the battle fit hit him, he was almost as hard on his own men as he was on the Federals. “Now where is he, you son of a bitch?”

The trooper hadn't been pale. Why should he be, when he was safely out of enemy rifle range? But he went white when he raised his head and saw General Forrest. He almost dropped a percussion cap, and had to fight to say, “He-He-He's over yonder, sir.” He pointed west and a little south.

“All right,” Forrest said. “I don't see you in the fight once you finish loading that hogleg, though, you'll answer to me, man to man. You hear?”

“Y-Y-Y-Yes; sir,” the man answered-not the first time Nathan Bedford Forrest had reduced a man from his own force to frightened stammering. But what he did to the Federals…

He found Brigadier General Chalmers about where the trooper said he would. Chalmers was urging his men forward-always a good thing for a general to do, especially when he wasn't far from the firing line himself. Nothing encouraged soldiers like officers who shared their risks.

“How's it look, Jim?” Forrest asked.

James Chalmers whirled. Even in the informal world of the Confederate army, even in the extra-informal world of Forrest's command, an officer who led a brigade didn't expect to be addressed by his Christian name… unless a superior did it. “Hello, sir,” Chalmers said, saluting. “So you finally made it up here, did you?”

“No, but I reckon I'll get here pretty soon,” Forrest answered dryly.

His brigade commander blinked, then decided he was joking and laughed. “Well, I'm glad to hear that, sir. We can use you.”

“It looks pretty good, from what I've seen of it,” Forrest said.

“I think so.” Brigadier General Chalmers nodded. “They sent out skirmishers after we started driving in their pickets, but we shifted them, too. Just about all the Federals are back inside the main position there. They should have hung on to some of the knobs around it. They should have, but they damn well didn't. Now we've got men on, em, and we can shoot down into their works. This isn't the best place for a fort with a small garrison, no matter what General Pillow thought when he set one here. “

“Already knew that myself,” Forrest said. “If the Yankees can't figure it out, too damn bad for them. The riffraff they've got in there, they're asking for everything we give 'em.”

A bullet cracked past. Chalmers flinched. So did Forrest; he was no more immune to that reflex than most of his soldiers were. It annoyed and angered him, but he couldn't do anything about it. However little he cared to admit it, even to himself, he was made of flesh and blood like any other man.

Straightening, Chalmers said, “You might do well to get down from that horse, sir. It makes you a target for the bastards holed up in there. You wouldn't want some damn nigger to be able to say he shot the great General Forrest, would you?”

“No, but I'm not going to worry about it, either,” Forrest answered. “And I want to see this place for my own self from one end to the other, and the horse'll tote me around faster'n I could go on shank's mare.” He always carried out his own reconnaissance when he could. More than once, he'd seen things nobody else did. He went on, “You keep crowding our boys forward, you hear, Jim?”

“I'm doing it,” Chalmers said shortly.

“I know you are. Keep doing it. Do more of it. Get' em close to the enemy. Use that high ground. I don't want the Federals moving around a lot in there. They should ought to be scared to death to step away from that parapet.”

“I'm doing it,” Chalmers repeated. This time, he smiled a little. “I've got sharpshooters picking off the Union officers whenever they see the chance, too.”

“There you go,” Forrest said. “That's what we need. If those coons and galvanized Yankees haven't got anybody to tell 'em what to do, they won't tend to something that needs tending, and we'll get the bulge on 'em that way. “

He started to ride on toward the Mississippi, but a minnie caught his horse in the neck. Blood gushed forth, hideously red and stinking like a smithy. Forrest tried jamming a finger in the wound, a trick that had kept another mount of his alive for some little while. This horse writhed and thrashed and reared, then crashed to the ground, pinning Forrest's leg beneath it.

Pain shot through him. He roared out curses, kicked at the animal with his free leg, and beat it with his fists. It rolled off him and thrashed away its life, kicking slower and more weakly as blood rivered out of it.

General Chalmers ran up to Forrest. “Are you all right, sir?” he asked, alarm making his voice almost as shrill as a woman's. “Can you get up?”

“Don't rightly know.” Forrest made himself try it. His breath hissed out between his teeth. Moving hurt like fire. But he could move, anyhow. “Don't reckon anything's broken,” he said.

His right trouser leg was torn. His flesh was bruised and scraped and battered. The whole leg would be purple and black and swollen tomorrow, if it wasn't already. But it bore his weight even if it screamed. He took a couple of limping steps. Yes, he could manage.

“You were lucky,” Chalmers said as he tried to walk off the worst of it.

“Lucky, my ass,” Forrest ground out. “If I was lucky, that damned Yankee minnie would've missed my horse. If it did hit the stupid critter, he wouldn't have fallen on me. That there's luck, General. This you can keep this.”

“The fall could have broken your leg-or your neck,” Chalmers said. “The minnie could have hit you instead of the horse.”

“All that would have been worse,” Forrest agreed. “Don't mean what happened was good.» He glowered at the beast that had brought him from Jackson. Its writhing was almost over now. Its blood pooled on the muddy ground and started soaking in. A man had an amazing lot of blood in him-you found out how much when he spilled it all at once. A horse had even more. Forrest had had plenty of horses shot out from under him, but he didn't think he'd ever had one hurt him so much when it went down. “Got to get me another animal. Will you tend to that for me?”

“Yes, sir,” Chalmers said, and then, stubbornly, “You'd still be safer on foot.”

“I'd be slower on foot,” Forrest said. “Nothing else matters now. And you don't think dismounted men are getting hit?” A wounded trooper howled and cursed as his friends led him back toward the surgeons. Forrest pointed to him the way a schoolmaster would have pointed to an example on the blackboard. He chuckled when that occurred to him, because his own acquaintance with teachers and blackboards was so brief and sketchy. He could read. He could write, too-after a fashion-however little he cared to do it.

Even if he had no education, he owned other talents in abundance. He had nerve and a fierce and driving energy. He also had an unfailing knack for seeing what needed doing at any given moment. And he could make people listen to him and take him seriously and do what he told them to do. Set against all that, knowing how to spell didn't seem so important. He had men under him who could spell. He was the one who set them in motion.

“A horse!” James Chalmers shouted now. “Get General Forrest a horse! “

One of the troopers brought up a large, sturdy-looking beast. A horse needed to be of better-than-average size to bear a man of his weight. “Thank you kindly, Edgar,” Forrest said.

“You're welcome, General!” Edgar's face glowed with pride: Bedford Forrest knew him well enough to call him by name! Edgar didn't know Forrest could call most of his men by name. He learned names quickly, and they were the easiest handle you could grab to get somebody to follow you.

Mounting hurt. It would have hurt worse if the blamed horse had fallen on his other leg. Jim Chalmers would have said he was lucky it didn't. Forrest didn't give a damn what Chalmers would have said. Almost getting his leg broken wasn't lucky, not so far as he could see. When he booted the horse into motion, riding hurt, too.

But walking would have hurt worse. And it would have been slower, and speed counted now. Speed always counted to Bedford Forrest. Plenty of people knew how he talked about getting there first with the most. If you got there first, sometimes having the most didn't even matter.

Over the next hour, he painstakingly reconnoitered from the Mississippi to Coal Creek. Like General Chalmers, Captain Anderson begged him to do the job on foot so he would offer the Yankees less of a target.

Voice testy-maybe the pain was talking through him-Forrest answered, “I'm just as apt to be hit one way as another.” And he had that sturdy horse shot out from under him (though it was only wounded), but got yet another remount and finished the reconnaissance. When he did, his smile was purely predatory. “We've got 'em,” he said.