“Well, what if I do?” Dud said. “It ain't against the law or nothin'. An' if! get the chance to see her, that'd be right nice.”
“See her?” the other soldier said. “Wouldn't you sooner tup her?” He might have been talking about a ram and a ewe. Most soldiers came off farms. He was probably more used to talking about animals than about men and women.
“Never you mind what I'd sooner,” Dud said. “Let's ride, that's all.”
They rode. The rest of the U.S. prisoners had it easy. They bantered back and forth with Bedford Forrest's troopers, giving as good as they got. Nobody seemed to hold anything against them. They were out of the war now, and they were glad of it. The Rebs seemed willing to let bygones be bygones.
Not with Bill Bradford. The C.S. troopers snarled at him whenever he said something. They didn't want to let him down off his horse to ease himself. “Go ahead and piss your pants,” Dud said. “Serve you right. “
“Aw, let him down,” another soldier said. “Al?' d be right ticked if his saddle got piss stains on it. Can't say I'd blame him, neither.”
And so, for the saddle's sake if not for his own, Bradford was untied and allowed to go between a tree. He wasn't allowed to go alone, though. Dud covered him with a revolver as he unbuttoned his fly. “You try and run and I'll blow it right off you.” The Reb sounded as if he looked forward to it.
After that, relaxing enough to do what he'd come for wasn't easy, but Bradford managed. He gave Dud no excuse to pull the trigger, no matter which part of him the Reb aimed at. When he walked back to the horse, the Rebs tied him on as securely as before.
They rode on through the Hatchie bottom country toward Brownsville. How had Forrest got his men through this ghastly terrain ahead of the news of their coming? By driving them like cattle before him, Bradford supposed. If Forrest wasn't a demon in human shape, a man possessed of superhuman energy and determination, Bradford had never seen anyone who was.
“Boy, this is fun,” Dud said as his horse squelched through mud. The other Rebs laughed. So did a couple of the Federal prisoners. Bill Bradford didn't. He just did more marveling. If the roads were bad now, they would have been worse when Forrest and his men came through, because it was raining then. These miserable, narrow tracks had had a day and a half to dry out since the Confederates swarmed west along them.
And how had the Rebs ever found their way through this maze of tracks? Without a guide, chances were they would still be wandering in the swamp. That man Shaw, Bradford thought: the Rebel sympathizer who'd escaped from Fort Pillow a day or two before Forrest descended it. Bradford couldn't prove that; he didn't remember seeing Shaw in the fight. But it seemed all too likely.
He wondered if he would meet a gloating Shaw in Brownsville. He wondered if he would meet Bedford Forrest there, too. Forrest wouldn't be gloating. Forrest would be… what? An educated man, Bradford didn't need long to come up with the right word. Forrest would be vindictive, that was what he would be.
Nathan Bedford Forrest's body felt like one big bruise. He hated staying in the saddle, but he was too stubborn to climb down from his horse. Maybe Captain Anderson could have persuaded him to dismount and rest, but Anderson was still settling affairs back at Fort Pillow. And so Forrest rode on.
He came into Brownsville at the van of his army-and he rode out the other side a few minutes later. “You always were a man in a hurry,” J. B. Cowan remarked.
“You ought to know,” Forrest told the regimental surgeon. Cowan was his wife's first cousin. The general commanding went on, “Getting there ahead of the other fellow counts for more than almost anything.” “Even if you wear yourself down to a nub doing it?” Cowan asked.
“Even then. Especially then,” Forrest replied. “If you do more than the enemy figures you've got a prayer of doing, you hold him in the palm of your hand.”
“It's a hard road,” the surgeon observed.
“It's the only road I know,” Forrest said. “I started with nothing you know that, dammit-and I made myself a man to be reckoned with. I joined the Army as a private soldier, and I'm a major general now. I'm not so young as I used to be; I haven't got much time to waste. I will take the hardest road I have to, as long as it's the quickest one.“
He wondered whether Cowan would go on arguing with him, but the regimental surgeon held his tongue. He knows better than to try and talk me around} Forrest thought with an inward smile.
“What will you do when you get to Jackson?” Cowan asked after a while.
“Rest. Let the rest of the men come in-I know they won't all stick up with me.” Forrest knew that for a while he would have men scattered all across the seventy miles between Fort Pillow and Jackson, and he couldn't do much about it. Sooner or later, they'd come in. He went on, “Once they're all gathered, I'll cipher out what to do with 'em next-or maybe I'll get orders. Who knows?”
“Will we be able to stay up here in Tennessee any which way?” Cowan inquired. “After what you did at Fort Pillow, the damnyankees will be fit to be tied.”
“That was the idea.” When Forrest said it, it sounded more like idear. “If it gets too hot round those parts, we'll slide on down to Mississippi, that's all. But if they think they can keep me out of Tennessee for good, or even out of Memphis for good, they'd better think again, is all I've got to tell you.”
“Out of Memphis? How would you get in there? It's fortified to a fare-thee-well. “
“I'll get in.” Forrest spoke with supreme confidence. He didn't say how he would get into Memphis, because he had no idea. When the time came, he would come up with something. The West Point men against whom he fought made their plans well in advance. They figured out every little thing before they went and did it… and then they thought they would take you by surprise.
Bedford Forrest laughed softly. Once you'd fought one of those fellows, you'd fought all of them. They'd all learned the same way of fighting, and they all had the same bag of tricks. They never figured out that you might know ahead of time what they'd try. The way they were trained, they were supposed to think alike.
The Confederacy had a lot of generals and colonels who'd learned at West Point, too. Couldn't they see that the Yankees could read them like a book? Evidently not-and a lot of time both sides seemed ignorant of how predictable they were.
Because Forrest had never learned all the fancy West Point rules and regulations, he was as far beyond the regular officers' ken as a hawk was beyond a snapping turtle's. Things seemed very simple to him. You moved faster than the man you were fighting. You hit him where he wouldn't expect it, where he was weak. You used fear as much as you used bullets. A frightened enemy was an enemy who gave up too soon or who made mistakes that let you lick him. And once you got him scared and jittery, you never let up.
That thought made Forrest mutter into his chin beard. Instead of going all-out after the beaten Yankees at Chickamauga, Braxton Bragg let them retreat into Chattanooga-which meant the only victory that sour-souled son of a bitch ever won turned out not to be worth spit. He had his chance, his single, solitary, glorious chance to bring the war in the West back to life, to make the Confederate presence in Tennessee and Kentucky more than a matter of cavalry raiders. He had it, and he dropped it, and he broke it, and the Confederacy wasn't likely to be able to pick up the pieces ever again.
“I should have killed him,” Forrest said. “By Jesus, I should have.” “Who are you talking about, sir?” J. B. Cowan asked. “Major Bradford?”
“What's that?” Bedford Forrest blinked, brought back from what might have been to what was. “No, I wasn't thinking about Bradford-not that he doesn't rate killing now. I had somebody else in mind.”
“Must be Colonel Hurst, then.” The regimental surgeon sounded very sure of himself.
“That's right-Fielding Hurst.” Forrest let his wife's cousin down easy. Why not? Every Confederate in Tennessee knew Fielding Hurst needed killing. Stories were going round that Forrest had come within inches of challenging Braxton Bragg to a duel, but most people thought they were only stories. Forrest didn't say anything different. What point to it? If the Confederate generals fought among themselves, who gained but the Federals? Still and all, he knew the stories were true-were, if anything, less than the whole truth.
Dr. Cowan grinned, pleased with his own cleverness. Bedford Forrest grinned, amused the other man was so easy to fool. If you let people believe what they wanted to believe anyhow, you could get them to do almost anything.
But then Cowan asked, “What will you do with Bradford if our boys catch him?”
The question was unpleasantly sharp. “Don't rightly know,” Forrest said, an admission he seldom made. “I hated the son of a bitch before he broke his parole, and he gave me plenty of reasons for it, too. I almost hope we
