“Well,” he said, “let's go.”
Matt Ward poured down one cup of black coffee after another. It made him feel like a wide-awake drunk. He was paying for letting Bill Bradford slip away. He was paying in all kinds of ways. His head pounded; he knew the hangover would get worse later, but it was bad enough now. And he had the joy of realizing Bradford had played him for a fool.
If I could shoot him now… But, however tempting that thought was, he shoved it aside. If he fired his Enfield now, he feared his brains would blowout through his ears.
“You awake, Ward?” A second lieutenant from the Second Missouri Cavalry (C.S.) named Tom Bottom sounded as if he would do something dreadful if he didn't get the answer he wanted.
“Yes, sir.” Ward sighed. He knew he'd let himself in for this. That made him put up with it, but didn't make him enjoy it.
“You'd better be,” Bottom growled. “I'll come round again pretty damn quick to make sure you stay that way.”
“Yes, sir,” Matt Ward repeated. Bottom was one of the handful of officers left behind with the pickets now that most of the Confederate force had pulled out of Fort Pillow. He was acting as if that made him something altogether grander than a miserable second lieutenant. Were things otherwise, Ward would have called him on it. With his headache and with his even more painful knowledge of his own failure, he kept quiet.
Not everybody who'd stayed behind by the fort was so constrained. “Yeah, I'm awake, you whistleass peckerhead,” another trooper rasped. “Are you?”
“What's your name?” Bottom said furiously. “I'll put you on report!”
“My name is Stonewall Jackson, and you can do whatever you damn well please. But you better not turn your back on your own men if you try it.”
Had Bottom had more nerve, he might have arrested the mocking soldier. He didn't. He just walked on. Maybe the man's threat unnerved him. Everybody heard stories about unpopular officers shot by the soldiers they commanded. Ward had no idea how many of them were true-probably not many. If Tom Bottom didn't want to take a chance on this one, though, who could blame him? Bottom wasn't a coward — he'd fought well enough in the fall of Fort Pillow — but he wasn't a fool, either.
As for Ward, he stayed on his feet and kept his rifle musket on his right shoulder. The lieutenant couldn't complain as long as he went on doing that. His headache got worse as the night wore along, and then worse still. He wished for a hair of the dog that bit him. That might ease the pain. But he didn't ask if any of the other pickets had a jolt in his canteen. If Lieutenant Bottom caught him doing that, the lieutenant would start roaring at him, and he would deserve it.
And word might get back to Bedford Forrest. Forrest had gone easy on him for letting Major Bradford escape, but if the general commanding got the notion he was a drunk… He didn't know just what would happen then, and he didn't want to find out, either. It wouldn't be pretty. He was only too sure of that.
Here and there, down by the Mississippi, wounded Federals still groaned. Ward couldn't tell whether they were white or colored; all wounded men sounded pretty much the same. Some of them would be dead by the time the sun came up. Others… If the Federals sent gunboats up to Fort Pillow soon enough, they might be able to take away the survivors.
“Gunboats,” Ward muttered. He shivered, though the night was mild enough. With the blood throbbing inside his sodden brain every time his heart beat, he didn't want to think about cannon going off. If a shell burst close by, he feared his head would fall off regardless of whether any fragments struck him.
The moon sank toward the western horizon. Even its light seemed uncommonly bright, which told him how badly hung over he was. When the sun came up, he wondered if he would bleed to death through his eyes.
“Are you still with us?” Lieutenant Bottom tried to sneak up on him.
Matt Ward thought about coming back with a smart answer, the way Stonewall Jackson had-the way he would have himself had he felt better. But his headache wasn't the only thing that held him back. He had yet to earn the right to do that again, and Lieutenant Bottom did have the right-indeed, the duty-to check up on him. Feeling uncommonly small, Ward said, “Yes, sir, I'm still here.”
“Good.” Bottom nodded and walked on toward the next picket. Was it? Ward rubbed his throbbing temples, which didn't help much. If he felt this bad now, how much worse would he be come morning? He tried not to think about that. But a long, miserable night loomed ahead.
A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse! Bill Bradford remembered some ranting fool of a Shakespearean actor bellowing out the line when a traveling company put on Richard III in Memphis. The actor would have done best on a horse that usually pulled brewery wagons, for he was built like a beer barrel himself.
But the cry! The anguished cry! Bradford felt the truth of that, felt it in his very marrow, as he splashed and squelched south through the Hatchie bottoms, heading toward Memphis once again.
He was still wearing his shoes. The mud hadn't pulled them off yet, though it had certainly tried at least half a dozen times. His feet were soaked. In the darkness under the trees, or even out in the open when the moon went behind a cloud, he couldn't see puddles before he stepped in them. Half the time, he couldn't see his hand in front of his face. Pretty soon, the moon would set. He wanted to curl up under the nearest broad-spreading oak and sleep till morning.
He wanted to, but he didn't dare. Bedford Forrest's men would be looking for his trail, sure as hounds went after a raccoon. He'd broken his parole, so he had to make good his escape. The sport they had with him before they finally let him surrender gave a taste of what they'd do if they caught him now.
If he never saw another Confederate soldier, if he never heard the Rebel yell again, that wouldn't break his heart. So he thought for a moment, anyhow. But then he shook his head. Theodorick lay in the cold, wet ground, a shroud the only thing that kept the dirt out of his mouth and nose. The Rebs thought they were getting their revenge for what the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry had done to them, did they? Well, he aimed to show them they were nothing but amateurs when it came to revenge.
Maybe-no, probably-General Hurlbut wouldn't give him any sizable command, not after he'd lost Fort Pillow. But if he could have, oh, a company's worth of men who hated the Confederate States and everything they stood for and most especially hated all the people who followed the Stainless Banner just as much as he did… If he could have a company of men like that, what a vengeance he would wreak!
“I know where they live,” he muttered, and then swore when a hanging vine hit him in the face. And he did. He knew who the leading Confederate sympathizers were, from Paducah, Kentucky, all the way down to Pocahontas, Tennessee. He knew where their brothers lived, and their sons-yes, and their sisters and daughters, too. He hadn't ordered any outrages against their womenfolk. He hadn't, and he wouldn't. But if some happened anyway, he wouldn't shed a tear.
First, though, he had to get to Memphis. Remember that, Bill, he told himself sternly. One thing at a time. If he made a mistake on the road south, all his hopes for vengeance would go glimmering.
He kept hoping he would run across some homestead out in the middle of nowhere, some place where a farmer scratched out a living with a few crops and whatever he could shoot or trap in the swamps. If the bumpkin had any kind of nag…
But he didn't come across any farmhouses, or even trapper's huts. No one seemed to live in these swamps. He knew people did. But one of the reasons they lived in a place like this was that they didn't want anybody from the outside world bothering them. They didn't come out much, and the outside world didn't come in. Bill Bradford suddenly understood why it didn't. It couldn't find anybody here.
Something slithered over one of his shoes. Copperhead? Cottonmouth? Rattler? Only a garter snake? A figment of his overheated imagination? It could have been anything. Whatever it was, it didn't bite. And he didn't yell his head off, though he couldn't say why he didn't. He shuddered and pressed on.