XV
After Corporal Jack Jenkins let the sutler pass, he figured his excitement was over for the night. For a couple of hours, he was right. The moon sank toward the Mississippi. Jenkins yawned several times. He didn't lie down. He didn't even squat. He didn't doze-not quite, anyhow. But he'd ridden through the previous night and fought a battle the day before. He wasn't at his brightest and most alert. He didn't think he needed to be.
He yawned again, wider than ever, when the moon set. Darkness came down, a veil of black so thick he could hardly see his hand in front of his face. But he had no trouble picking out the party of horsemen who rode out from Fort Pillow, torches in hand. One of those riders was conspicuously bigger than the rest. If that wasn't Bedford Forrest, Jenkins would have been surprised.
And if that was Forrest… then what? Then something's gone wrong somewhere, Jenkins thought, never imagining that whatever had gone wrong had anything to do with him.
The riders went along the bank of Coal Creek till they came to the northernmost sentry along Fort Pillow's old outer perimeter. Then they started working their way south, toward Jenkins. As they drew closer, he could hear them talking with the sentries, but couldn't make out what they were saying.
They headed his way. Whatever they were looking for, they hadn't found it yet. He showed he was awake and alert by calling, “Halt! Who goes there?” — as if he wondered.
A dry chuckle came from Forrest. “I'm your commanding general, by God!”
“Advance and be recognized sir,” Jenkins said.
“Here I am.” Forrest and his aides slowly rode forward. He held up his torch so that it shone on his face. “Well, soldier? D'you recognize me?”
“Uh, yes, sir,” Jenkins answered hastily.
“Who are you? Can't quite make you out in the darkness,” Forrest said.
“Jack Jenkins, sir, corporal in the Second Tennessee Cavalry, Colonel Barteau's regiment.”
Forrest laughed again. “I know who that regiment belongs to. You'd best believe I do. You were over by Coal Creek before. I've got a question for you, Corporal. Did you let anybody — anybody at all — past you since you came on duty?”
“Yes, sir. One sutler,” Jenkins said.
The officers with Bedford Forrest all exclaimed. He held up a hand for quiet. As usual, he got what he wanted. “When was this? What did the fellow look like?”
“Hour and a half ago-maybe two hours,” Jenkins said. Forrest's aides exclaimed again, in dismay. A couple of them swore. Jenkins went on, “Couldn't hardly see him-he had his hat pulled down kind of low. He sure smelled bad, though; I'll tell you that.”
“I bet he did,” Forrest said. “I don't think he was a sutler at all. I reckon you let a polecat get through. Major Bradford broke his parole, and he's nowhere around.”
“Bradford!” Jenkins said. “That was Bradford? God damn it to hell! If I knew it was him, I'd've got some more blood on my piece.” He held up the rifle musket, which he still hadn't cleaned.
“Don't know for sure yet, but that's the way it looks.” Forrest eyed not the ghastly weapon but Jack Jenkins himself. “Why'd you pass him through?”
“He said an officer inside Fort Pillow told him he could go,” Jenkins answered uneasily. If his own officers wanted to, they could blame him for letting the Federal get away. And what they'd do to him if they did… Trying not to think about that, he went on. “He just seemed like a no-account fellow. And I never reckoned a major could stink like that, neither.”
He got a laugh out of Bedford Forrest, but only a sour one. “Oh, you'd be amazed,” the general said. He turned to the men who'd ridden out with him. “Any point to beating the bushes for the son of a bitch?”
“Not till morning, sir,” one of them answered. “A million places he could hide in the dark. If we didn't trip over him, we'd never know he was there.”
“ About what I figured myself.” Forrest muttered under his breath. “I was hoping you'd tell me I was wrong, dammit.”
Jenkins listened to the mounted men with only half an ear. “Bill Bradford?” he muttered. “I had Bill Bradford in front of me, and he slipped through my fingers? Shit!” Bradford wasn't the worst thorn in the side of West Tennessee Confederates; that dishonor went to Colonel Fielding Hurst, who'd been in business longer. But it wasn't for lack of effort on the major's part.
I could've been a hero, Jenkins thought, angry at himself and even angrier at Bradford for fooling him. Killing ordinary Tennessee Tories and smashing in niggers' heads was all very well, but he would have traded the lot of them for Bill Bradford. How many men would have pounded him on the back? How many would have plied him with cigars and whiskey? When word got out, how many pretty women would have smiled at him to show their gratitude, or maybe more than smiled?
“Shit!” he said again.
“We have men down in the south,” said one of the officers with Forrest.
“Oh, yes, I know,” the general commanding said. “Still and all, I don't much care to have to count on somebody else, not when he shouldn't have got loose in the first place.”
“I'm sorry, sir,” Jenkins said. “I'm sorrier'n I know how to tell you.” He was nothing if not sincere. Had he had the faintest notion who Bradford was, the homemade Yankee's body would lie at his feet. In that case, Bedford Forrest would be congratulating him. The way things were…
The way things were, Jenkins didn't want to meet Forrest's eye. Forrest muttered under his breath, then sighed. “Well, Corporal, you're not the only man who messed things up,” he said. “Bradford poured spirits into the soldier who was guarding him till the fellow passed out. And he likely did fool an officer or two, else he wouldn't have got out of the fort. He was dressed like a sutler, you say?”
“Yes, sir,” Jenkins said. “In ordinary clothes, anyway, not in uniform.”
“I bet he wasn't in uniform,” Bedford Forrest said. “He took a dip in the Mississippi trying to get away from our boys, and came out soaked to the skin.”
“Bastard looked like a drowned rat,” one of the other horsemen said.
“He's a rat, all right,” Jenkins said.
“He's a rat out of the trap, dammit,” Forrest said. “We just have to go on, that's all.” He swung his horse back toward Fort Pillow. His companions followed. Watching them go, Jack Jenkins sighed in relief. Forrest hadn't pounded his head against a rock. But if Bill Bradford got away, Jenkins would be pounding his own head for the rest of his life.
Confederate troopers loaded Springfield after Springfield into a couple of wagons. Nathan Bedford Forrest smiled as he watched the work. “This is more like it,” he said. “Let's get these taken care of, and then let's get the hell out of here. How many did we capture?”
“About 350, sir,” answered Captain Anderson, who as usual had the numbers at his fingertips. He paused significantly. “We brought up 269 of them-that figure is exact, sir-from alongside the Mississippi. “ “Well, I can't tell you I'm very surprised,” Forrest said. “Half the
garrison went down there, did it?”
“More or less, yes, sir.” Anderson gave him a quizzical look.
Forrest looked back, bland as butter. He knew what his aide-de-camp was thinking: how could he cipher out a problem like that when he'd had so little book learning? Forrest let Charles Anderson go right on chewing on it. Being such a precise fellow, Anderson would no doubt picture him doing a formal long-division problem inside his head. Forrest could no more do formal long division than he could fly. But that didn't mean he was foolish about numbers. About 600 Federals had held Fort Pillow. Half of six was three; you didn't need to be any kind of scholar to see that. And 269 was close to 300. Nothing complicated about it-unless you tried to make it that way.
He found a different question: “Where are the rest of the Federals' guns?”
“They threw some of them in the river, sir,” Captain Anderson answered. “A few will have stopped bullets or had their stocks smashed or otherwise become unserviceable. And I suspect a good many of our men have, ah, informally appropriated weapons that took their fancy. “
“Well, I suspect you're right about that,” Forrest allowed. “Our boys are first-rate foragers-and they need to be, dammit.”
