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.”
“When we have our own country and we chase the damn yankees out of it, we'll be able to make everything we need for ourselves,” Anderson said. “We have the wealth, and we have the tools-or we can get what we need from abroad, anyhow. And we have men who can use them as they need to be used.”
Bedford Forrest frowned. He was so much a part of the war, and the war so much a part of him, that he hardly thought about what might come afterwards. When he did, he feared the Confederacy could not hope to win. There'd been a last bright spot in the west at the end of the past summer, when Braxton Bragg beat Rosecrans at Chickamauga. If the Confederates could have destroyed Rosecrans's army, if they could have retaken Chattanooga…
But they hadn't, and they never would now. The Yankees got their revenge at Missionary Ridge, shattering Bragg's army and-too late — forcing him from his command. When the spring campaigning season started, which it soon would, the Confederates wouldn't be pushing north. The Federals would be driving south instead.
Could Joe Johnston stop them this side of Atlanta? If he couldn't, the war here was lost. He was a good defensive fighter, no man better, but was he good enough? Forrest had his doubts.
And if Johnston lost, if Robert E. Lee lost in Virginia, what was left for the C.S.A.? Forrest saw only one thing: retreating to the mountains and the woods and the swamps and bushwhacking the damnyankees till they got sick of trying to hold down a countryside that hated them and went home. That might take five years. It might take ten. It might take fifty. Forrest faced the idea without enormous enthusiasm, but also without fear. If that was what wanted doing, the South could do it.
The only trouble was, it left little room for Captain Anderson's peaceful Confederacy acquiring the tools it needed to get free of imported goods. Forrest shrugged. That might come one of these days. He didn't think it would come any time soon, no matter what his clever aide-de-camp believed.
He intended to fight as long as the rest of the Confederate States
did-and longer, if he had to. If he had no great faith in a Confederate triumph… in the end, what difference did that make? He couldn't fight the whole war, only his own little piece of it. Today, he'd done that well.
“Have we taken everything we can from this place?” he asked Anderson.
“I believe we have, sir,” the other officer replied.
“Then let's clear out,” Forrest said. “Sure as the Devil, we'll have more Yankee gunboats calling on us come morning, and maybe troopships with 'em. We haven't got enough men to hold the outer line of this fort, and the inner line's not worth holding. I can see that, by God, even if Major Bradford couldn't.”
“We're ready,” Anderson said. “I expect you'll want to leave some pickets behind?”
“I surely will.” Forrest nodded. “They'll warn us when the Federals do come around, and they'll help keep the stinking scavengers away. “
He and Anderson exchanged glances filled with distaste. Not all men who carried guns in this debatable land fought for the Confederate States or the United States. Quite a few fought for themselves and nobody else. Once the armies moved on, the jackals and hyenas moved in, stealing whatever got left behind and slitting throats when they came upon men they didn't care for.
They were impossible to put down completely. Most of the time, they looked and acted like anybody else: like farmers or tradesmen going about their lawful business. But when the sun went down they picked up shotguns or rifle muskets and rode out to raid. Some inclined to one side, some to the other, some to neither. The Federals in Memphis and Nashville hated them all. Forrest liked them very little better himself.