He wondered what these nice women thought of the idea of nigger bucks with guns in their hands. Wouldn't they use those guns to outrage Southern womanhood? He'd wanted to outrage Southern womanhood himself only a couple of minutes earlier, but that was different. And he knew exactly how it was different, too: he wasn't a black.
Up ahead, Black Bob McCulloch was shouting, “A guide! We need a guide to Fort Pillow!” His thick, dark beard, with luxuriant mustaches that almost swallowed his mouth, helped give him his nickname.
“I should say you do,” a woman told him. “All the swamps and bogs and marshes and I don't know what all between here and the Mississippi, you'd get lost faster'n greased lightning if you tried to go without one.”
“Yes, ma'am.” The brigade commander lowered his voice to answer her, then raised it again to a bellow that could carry across a battlefield: “A guide! We need a guide!”
Other officers took up the call, till Brownsville seemed to echo with it. Mter what the local woman said, Ward hoped they found one. If they bogged down… He didn't want to think about what General Forrest would do to them then. He was far more afraid of his own commanding officer than of the damnyankees, and he wasn't ashamed to admit it.
“I can get you there.” The answer came almost from Matt Ward's elbow. The man who made it looked as if he'd been through the mill. He wore a collarless shirt with no jacket and a ragged pair of homespun trousers. His eyes were wild in a pale face; his hair stuck out in all directions.
“Who the devil are you?” Ward said.
“My name is Shaw, WJ. Shaw,” the wild – eyed man replied. “That Bradford son of a bitch had me shut up in Fort Pillow till yesterday. I managed to sneak off, and I just got here this morning. You bet I can take you back there. Give me a rifle and I'll shoot some of those bastards myself. “
He wanted to do it. The eagerness all but blazed off him. It was so hot, Matt Ward was surprised Shaw didn't steam in the rain. The trooper raised his voice: “Colonel! Hey, Colonel! Here's your man, I reckon! “
Black Bob McCulloch had to fight his way back against the tide of cavalrymen moving west. Even when he shouted at the men to get out of his way, they couldn't always. And quite a few of them weren't inclined to, either. Confederate soldiers were always convinced they were just as good and just as smart as the officers who led them.
When McCulloch finally did get to talk with W.]. Shaw, he didn't need long to decide that Shaw was the man they needed. “Give this man some food!” he yelled. “Get him a horse – get him a good horse, goddammit! Get him a rifle and some cartridges! “
“Much obliged, sir,” Shaw said with his mouth full – one of the ladies on the street was feeding him Brunswick stew. “I'll pay you back for your kindness. And I'll pay that Bradford shitheel back, too, only the other way. Oh, you bet I will.”
“Mr. Shaw, we aim to be at Fort Pillow by sunup tomorrow morning,” McCulloch said. “You lead us there on time and we'll be in your debt, sir, not the other way around.”
“I can do it, but you'll have to ride through the night,” Shaw said. “You're damn near forty miles away, you know.”
McCulloch nodded. “Oh, yes, Mr. Shaw, I know that very well. But wherever you go, we'll go with you. You don't need to worry about that, not one bit. Some of us rode all through last night. If we have to do it again to clear those niggers and homemade Yankees out of Fort Pillow, we will.”
“Colonel, we have a bargain.” W.J. Shaw stuck out his hand. Robert McCulloch leaned down in the saddle to clasp it. Shaw went on, “I'd be honored to join this force, not just to guide it.”
“And we'd be honored to have you,” McCulloch replied. “You do what you say you can do and you won't join as a soldier, either – you'll be an officer straight from the start.”
“That's right kind of you,” Shaw said. “Right kind.” Somebody led up one of the remounts – not a great horse, but not an old screw, either. He swung up into the saddle. Colonel McCulloch nodded. So did Matt Ward. A glance was plenty to show that Shaw knew what to do on horseback.
Black Bob thumped Ward on the shoulder. “Reckon you found us a good one, Matt.” Before Ward could answer, the colonel cocked his head to one side. He looked east. “Something going on back there. You make out what?”
Ward looked back the way he'd come, too. Somebody was… A broad grin spread across his face. “General Forrest's here, sir!”
Nathan Bedford Forrest stayed happy about sending someone else off to deal with Fort Pillow while he stayed behind in Jackson for about ten minutes. After that, he started to fume. After that, he started another round of restless pacing. And after that…
He could feel that he was wearing himself down. “If you want something done right, do it yourself,” he muttered, there in the parlor of the house that had held General Grant and now held him.
He'd lived by that notion his whole life long. He'd had to, since his father died young and left him the man of a large family. He'd farmed that way, he'd bought and sold slaves that way – and he'd got rich doing it, too – and he'd used the same rule when he was on the Memphis city council not long before the war.
And he'd used that rule when he fought. He'd enlisted as a private. Now, less than three years later, he was a major general. He had no formal military training. He had next to no formal education of any sort, which was why he so disliked picking up a pen. He couldn't hold a train of thought when he wrote, and he spelled by ear. He knew no other way to do it, but he also knew educated men laughed when someone spelled that way. If he hated anything, it was being laughed at.
But regardless of whether he could spell, he could damn well fight. He'd whipped uncounted officers trained at West Point. They all thought the same way. They all did the same things. They all looked for their foes to do the same things. When somebody did something different, they didn't know how to cope with it.
He had nothing against Jim Chalmers except his – Forrest-like problem with subordination. The Virginian made as good a division commander as he had. In the end, though, Forrest lost the struggle with himself. If you want something done right, do it yourself
He shouted for Captain Anderson and Dr. Cowan and the rest of his staff officers. “What the devil are we sitting around here for?” he shouted. “We need to get them damnyankees and our runaway niggers out of Fort Pillow.”
The surgeon held out his hand to Forrest's chief of staff. “Told you so,” he said. Anderson ruefully passed him a brown Confederate banknote.
Forrest turned away so they wouldn't see him smile. So Cowan had expected he wouldn't be able to stay away from a fight, had he? Well, they'd all served with him for a while now, surgeon and chief of staff, paymaster and engineering officer, and the more junior men as well. They had a pretty good notion of how he thought.
He swung back toward them. “What are you waiting for?” he said. “Get your horses saddled up. We've got some powerful riding to do if we're going to catch up with McCulloch's brigade.”
Dr. J. B. Cowan gave him a courtly bow. “Sir, most of us have our horses ready. We've been waiting on you.”
“Well… shit,” Forrest said, and the officers laughed. He went on, “While I'm saddling my beast, gather up as much of the Nineteenth Tennessee Cavalry as you can. We'll take some of Colonel Wisdom's regiment along with us so nobody can say we just came along for the fight. “
“Even if we did.” Dr. Cowan enjoyed poking fun at him, and probably did it more than anyone else had the nerve to.
“Even if we did,” Forrest agreed good-naturedly. “Come on. Let's move.”
Riding hurt. It had for some time now, and he feared it would till the end of his days. He'd taken several wounds, including one at Shiloh the doctors had thought would kill him and one from the pistol of a junior officer of his. He'd thought that one had killed him, and he'd given the lieutenant a knife wound in the belly that brought his end from blood poisoning. Forrest himself, meanwhile, went on.