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 don't catch him. That way, I won't have to make up my mind.”
“Almost?” the surgeon said. Forrest nodded. “Almost.”
Word got around. It always did. Jack Jenkins hated that truth, but knew it was one. As he rode east toward Brownsville, he heard the same question over and over again: “How the hell did you let that Bradford son of a bitch get away?”
“It was dark,” he said at first. “He said he was a sutler. He was wearing a sutler's clothes, and he stunk like a goddamn polecat. How in God's name was I supposed to know who he was?”
That sounded reasonable-to him, anyway. It didn't satisfy any of the men who flung the question in his face. They didn't really want an answer. They wanted somebody to blame… and there he was.
His temper, always short, soon started to fray. Before long, he stopped giving a reasonable answer when people asked him how he let Bradford escape. Instead, he said things like, “It just happened, goddammit. Bad shit happens all the time. This time it happened to me. “
He got no sympathy. He didn't expect any. He wouldn't give anybody else much sympathy for letting Bradford slip through his fingers. The same miserable question came at him even more often.
His answer changed again. He looked around and growled, “Oh, shut up, goddammit!” That did some good. Most of Forrest's troopers were leery of pushing him too far.
“You look like a treed coon,” one of them said.
“I feel like a treed coon, too,” Jenkins replied-that was one of the few things he'd heard that made sense to him. “Got all these bastards around the tree bayin' their damnfool heads off.”
On they rode, into the morning. Every time somebody with a fast horse came up to Jenkins, he heard the hateful question again. And he heard it every time he caught up to somebody with a slow horse. And when they weren't just coming out and asking it of him, they were talking about him and pointing at him. “There's the fellow who…”
“Aw, shit,” Jenkins mumbled. Yes, he was likely to stay the fellow who for the rest of his life. Some mistakes were too damn big to let anybody ever get out from under them. Had he made one of those? He didn't think so, but what he thought didn't matter here. What everybody else thought did. And those nudges and murmurs and pointing fingers went on and on.
“Hey, Corporal, aren't you the one who let Bradford get away?” “Puck you up the cornhole!” Jenkins roared. Only after the words
were out of his mouth did he realized he'd cussed out a captain. The officer started to say something. Then he got a good look at Jenkins's face. His mouth hung foolishly open for a moment, as if he were a frog catching a fly. He booted his horse up to a trot and rode away.
I bet I had murder in my eye, Jenkins thought, not without pride. I know goddamn well I had murder in my heart.
For some little while, nobody bothered him. Oh, people went on pointing and went on talking behind his back, but he knew he couldn't do anything about that. When a newcomer tried to ask him something-and he knew what it would be-somebody softly explained to the man that that wasn't a good idea. Not if you want to go on breathing, it isn't, Jenkins thought.
And then every trooper around was cussing a blue streak, and none of it had anything to do with him. He was swearing, too. Whoever was leading them east had led them astray. The path petered out in the middle of a swamp. They were going to have to double back and try again. “God, I didn't need this,” somebody groaned, and that summed things up just fine.
“How the hell did we bollix this?” Jenkins demanded. “Lord almighty, it ain't like we're the first bunch to go back to Brownsville. Shouldn't whoever was at the front of this bunch have known where he was going, the rotten skunk?”
Whoever had been at the front of that group of soldiers didn't want to admit it. In his shoes, Jack Jenkins wouldn't have wanted to admit it, either. Something nasty would have happened to him if he did.
Because it had to double back, the group of cavalrymen from Barteau's regiment with whom he was riding didn't get to Brownsville till the late afternoon. By then, the people in the small town had had bands of troopers of varying sizes riding in for hours. Some houses still had the Stainless Banner and the Confederate battle flag and the outdated Stars and Bars flying or hanging on their porches, but no ladies were standing in the street offering the soldiers food, the way they had when the regiment rode west to attack Fort Pillow.
“Rein in, boys!” a first lieutenant called. “We may as well spend the night here. We don't need to ride in the dark today, and we'll make it to Jackson tomorrow any which way.”
That was the first piece of good news Jenkins had heard in a long time. Even if he couldn't get a bed for the night-which didn't look likely-he could sleep on a floor or in a shed or somewhere else under a roof. Roughing it was fine when you did it on purpose every once in a while-when you were going hunting, say. When you had to do it day after day after day, it wore thin.
He'd just dismounted when some soldiers came up from the south.
“Y'all got lost worse'n we did,” he jeered.
“We're not lost,” one of them replied. “We're up from Covington with prisoners. We'll take' em on to Jackson in the morning.”
“Prisoners?” Jack Jenkins looked them over. That some wore blue hadn't meant much to him-he'd just thought they hadn't had a chance to dye Yankee plunder. One fellow had on ratty-looking civilian clothes. Jenkins stiffened. He'd seen those shabby clothes before, by moonlight. As casually as he could, he asked, “Need somebody else to help bring 'em in?”