"Thank you kindly, sir," Revelle said. "Good to see an honest man can still make his way, it is indeed."
"When you find one, let me know," Forrest told him. Hardy Revelle scratched his head. Forrest laughed some more.
Here came that damned horse again. Ben Robinson couldn't do anything to get out of its way. He had to lie there while Bedford Forrest rode over him for the third-or was it the fourth? — time. Forrest was telling somebody how he got rich trading niggers in Memphis, which wasn't exactly what the wounded black sergeant wanted to hear.
Don't step on me, he thought. Please don't. The horse didn't. It had missed him every single time. If it got him, wouldn't that be what they called adding insult to injury? He'd heard the phrase before, but never understood it till now. Getting stepped on by a horse was insulting, sure as hell, and he was already injured.
If he had to get shot to grasp a subtlety of the English language, he would just as soon have stayed ignorant. The wound to his leg hurt worse than anything that had ever happened to him before. It had finally stopped bleeding, or at least slowed down, but he didn't want to do a whole lot of moving around. He was sure that would start it again. Of course, with a gouge bitten out of his thigh he damn well couldn't do a whole lot of moving around.
And, at that, he was luckier than most. He could have been screaming for his mother, the way some horribly wounded soldier down by the Mississippi was. Or he could have been dead, the way so much of the Federal garrison was. Every so often, a new body would thud into the ditch beyond the rampart that hadn't helped.
He must have dozed off, because he almost jumped out of his skin when somebody said, "Here's another one of these goddamn nigger sons of bitches. "
"Well, you take his feet, and I'll take his head, and we'll fling him in the ditch," another Reb said. "The buzzards and the pigs can squabble over who gets more meat off him, and just what he deserves, too."
"Please don't throw me in dat ditch!" Robinson said. "I ain't dead-I'm only shot."
"Hell," one of the Confederates said, at the same time as the other was going, "Aw, shit." The first one added, "We can kill the bastard pretty damn quick. He ain't dead, but he's sure shot. It ain't like he can fight back."
Ben Robinson got ready to try. How he could fight when he couldn't even walk was beyond him, but he aimed to give it his best shot. Maybe he could pull one of them down, and then… And then what? he wondered. Then they shoot me or stick me, that's what. But he couldn't just let them murder him.
"General Forrest says we've killed enough of 'em for now," the second Reb said. Ben had never thought he would bless Bedford Forrest's name, but he did then.
The first trooper said something unflattering to his commanding officer. But he said it in a low voice, as if he didn't want Forrest to have any chance of hearing it. Robinson wouldn't have wanted Forrest to hear anything like that, either. The Reb went on, "Well, what the devil shall we do with him, then?"
"There's that hut over yonder, not too far," his friend answered. "We can tote him over there, leave him for the night, and kill him in the mornin'. Nobody'll give a damn about it then, chances are."
"Sounds like a pretty good scheme," the first trooper said, an opinion Robinson didn't share. "Let's do it."
They half carried, half dragged him to the hut. He bit his lip against the pain, but didn't cry out. He was damned if he wanted to show weakness in front of these white men. His wound did start bleeding again; he felt the warm blood trickling down his leg. But there didn't seem to be that much of it. If he could lie still for a bit, he thought it would stop.
When the Rebs got him inside, they dropped him like a sack of potatoes. He did groan then-he couldn't help it. "So long, nigger," one of the troopers said. They vanished into the night.
In spite of the torment from his wound, Ben Robinson started to laugh. Whites reckoned blacks were stupid. As often as not, that meant whites thought they could talk around blacks as freely as if they were by themselves. And thinking they could talk so freely made whites as stupid in truth as they thought blacks were.
We can put him in the hut. We'll come back tomorrow and kill him. Did Forrest's troopers really imagine he'd stick around once he heard that? If they did, they were dumb as rocks. Maybe they figured he was too badly hurt to move. Any which way, they'd be mighty disappointed when morning came and they found their blackbird had flown the coop.
Robinson still couldn't walk. That didn't mean he couldn't move. He wouldn't stick around here for anything, not if he had to crawl on his belly like a reptile to get away. And he damn near did: he hitched himself along on his elbows and one knee. They'd be raw and bloody before he got very far. He didn't care. He'd be a lot bloodier if he didn't get out while the getting was good.
Which way? he wondered once he made it out of the hut. Up on top of the bluff, the Rebs were still doing whatever they wanted. Things seemed quieter down by the Mississippi. And if rescue ever came, it would come by way of the river. Down, then.
Mosquitoes buzzed around him. They came out at dusk. They'd be worse a little further into spring, but they were bad enough now. He didn't care. Confederates with guns were worse than mosquitoes with pointy beaks.
When he went down the side of the bluff, he went slowly-slowly even for a crawling man. He could have rolled down the steep slope in nothing flat, but he didn't know what he'd fetch up against on the way to the bottom. He wasn't in a hurry. Every minute farther away from the hut and those Rebs felt as if it added another year to his life.
Here and there, wounded men groaned in the darkness. Once, Ben heard someone say, "Oh, shut the hell up, you goddamn nigger son of a bitch bastard!" The noise that followed might have been a rock falling on a pumpkin from a tall roof. It might have been, but it wasn't. It came again and again and again. Then the white man grunted-the sort of animal noise he might have made as he spent himself inside a woman-and said, "He ain't makin' any more noise."
Another Confederate's voice floated out of the dusk: "You heard what Lieutenant Pennell said about killing people, Jack."
"Yeah, I heard it. So what?" Jack answered. "That's Pennell. You gonna tell me a nigger in a Yankee uniform's a person? My ass! A nigger in a Yankee uniform is a snake, is what he is, an' I kill snakes every chance I get."
And snakes'll bite you, too, Ben Robinson thought. He knew damn well he'd killed and wounded his share — more than his share — of Bedford Forrest's troopers, both with the twelve-pounder and in the melee after the Rebs swarmed into Fort Pillow. He knew plenty of other colored soldiers had, too. Yes, they'd lost. But his fellow Negroes hadn't fought any worse than the whites who battled alongside them. The garrison was badly outnumbered, and commanded by a major who wasn't fit to carry General Forrest's boots. Of course they'd lost.
If he lived, if his leg healed up, Ben Robinson was ready to take on the Rebs again. He hated the trooper who'd just beaten a helpless black man to death. He hated him, yes, but he understood him, too. If he got the chance, he'd bite the Confederate States even harder next time.
Ragged wisps of cloud scudded past the moon, now hiding it, now letting it shine down on Fort Pillow. Nearing first quarter, it rode high in the sky, a little west of south. Its pale light would have been better suited to a happier scene, but Bill Bradford couldn't do anything about that.
His head spun. He wasn't so steady on his feet as he wished he were. He'd had to drink a good deal of the vile whiskey he took from the sutler's stall. He'd had to drink a good deal, yes, but he drank a lot less than he pretended to. He might be tiddly, but he wasn't smashed.