Ride Proud, Rebel! Page 19

  "Yes, suh!" Drew agreed. "While I was laid up, Privates Croff and Webb took turns on scout, suh. They located some of our men hidin' out—stragglers from the retreat. They also rounded up a few of the bushwhackers' horses and mules."

  Forrest nodded. "You returned to our lines with some fifteen men and ten mounts, as well as information. Your losses?"

  Drew stared at the wall behind the General's head.

  "One man missin', suh."

  "You were unable to hear any news of him?"

  "No, suh." The old weariness settled back on him. They had hunted—first Croff and Webb—and then he, too, as soon as he was able to sit a saddle. It was Weatherby's fate all over again; the ground might have opened and gulped Kirby down.

  "How old are you, Sergeant?"

  Drew could not see what his age had to do with Kirby's disappearance, but he answered truthfully: "Nineteen—I had a birthday a week ago, suh."

  "And you volunteered when—?"

  "In May of '62, suh. I was in Captain Castleman's company when they joined General Morgan—Company D, Second Kentucky. Then I transferred to the scouts under Captain Quirk."

  "The big raids ... you were in Ohio, Rennie? Captured?"

  "No, suh. I was one of the lucky ones who made it across the river before the Yankees caught up—"

  "At Chickamauga?"

  "Yes, suh."

  "Cynthiana"—but now Forrest did not wait for Drew's affirmative answer—"and Harrisburg, Franklin.... It's a long line of battles, ain't it, boy? A long line. And you were nineteen last week. You know, Rennie, the Union Army gives medals to those they think have earned them."

  "I've heard tell of that, suh."

  The General's hand, brown, strong, went to the officer's hat weighing down a pile of papers on the table. With a quick twist, Forrest ripped off the tassled gold cord which distinguished it, smoothing out the loop of bullion between thumb and forefinger.

  "We don't give medals, Sergeant. But I think a good soldier might just be granted a birthday present without any one gittin' too excited about how military that is." He held out the cord, and Drew took it a bit dazedly.

  "Thank you, suh. I'm sure proud...."

  A wave of Forrest's hand put a period to his thanks.

  "A long line of battles," the General repeated, "too long a line—an end to it comin' soon. Did you ever think, boy, of what you were goin' to do after the war?"

  "Well, there's the West, suh. Open country out there—"

  Forrest's eyes were bright, alert. "Yes, and we might even hold the West. We'll see—we'll have to see. Your report accepted, Sergeant."

  It was plainly a dismissal. As Drew saluted, the General laid his hat back on the tallest pile of papers. Busy at the table, he might have already forgotten Drew. But the Kentuckian, pausing outside the door to examine the hat cord once more, knew that he would never forget. No, there were no medals worn in the ragged, thin lines of the shrinking Confederate Army. But his birthday gift—Drew's fist closed about the cord jealously—that was something he would have, always.

  Only, nowadays, how long was "always"?

  "That's a right smart-lookin' mount, Sarge!" Drew looked at the pair of lounging messengers grinning at him from the front porch of headquarters. He loosened the reins and led the bony animal a step or two before mounting.

  Shawnee, nimble-footed as a cat, a horse that had known almost as much about soldiering as his young rider. Then Hannibal, the mule from Cadiz, that had served valiantly through battle and retreat, to die in a Tennessee stream bed. And now this bone-rack of a gray mule with one lop ear, a mind of his own, and a gait which could set one's teeth on edge when you pushed him into any show of speed. The animal's long, melancholy face, his habit of braying mournfully in the moonlight—until Westerners compared him unfavorably with the coyotes of the Plains—had earned him the name Croaker; and he was part of the loot they had brought out of the bushwhackers' camp.

  As unlovely as he appeared, Croaker had endurance, steady nerves, and a most un-mulelike willingness to obey orders. He was far from the ideal cavalry mount, but he took his rider there and back, safely. He was sure-footed, with a cat's ability to move at night, and in scout circles he had already made a favorable impression. But he certainly was an unhandsome creature.

  "Smart actin's better than smart lookin'," Drew answered the disparagers now. "Do as well yourselves, soldiers, and you'll be satisfied."

  Croaker started off at a trot, sniffling, his good ear twitching as if he had heard those unfriendly comments and was storing them up in his memory, to be acted upon in the future.

  January and February were behind them now. Now it was March ... spring—only it was more like late fall. Or winter, with the night closing in. Drew let Croaker settle to the gait which suited him best. He would visit Boyd and then rejoin Buford's force.

  The army, or what was left of it hereabouts, was, as usual, rumbling with rumor. The Union's General Wilson had assembled a massive hammer of a force, veterans who had clashed over and over with Forrest in the field, who had learned that master's tricks. Seventeen thousand mounted cavalrymen, ready to aim straight down through Alabama where the war had not yet touched. Another ten thousand without horses, who formed a backlog of reserves.

  In the Carolinas, Johnston, with the last stubborn regiments of the Army of the Tennessee, was playing his old delaying game, trying to stop Sherman from ripping up along the coast. And in Virginia the news was all bad. The world was not spring, but drab winter, the dying winter of the Confederacy.

  Wilson's target was Selma and the Confederate arsenal; every man in the army knew that. Somehow Bedford Forrest was going to have to interpose between all the weight of that Yankee hammer and Selma. And he had done the impossible so often, there was still a chance that he could bring it off. The General had a free hand and his own particular brand of genius to back it.

  Drew's fingers were on the front of his short cavalry jacket, pressing against the coil of gold cord in his shirt pocket. No, the old man wasn't licked yet; he'd give Wilson and every one of those twenty-seven thousand Yankees a good stiff fight when they came poking their long noses over the Alabama border!

  "He gave you what?" Boyd sat up straighter. His face was thin and no longer weather-beaten, and he'd lost all of that childish arrogance which had so often irritated his elders. In its place was a certain quiet soberness in which the scout sometimes saw flashes of Sheldon.

  Now Drew pulled the cord from his pocket, holding it out for Boyd's inspection. The younger boy ran it through his fingers wonderingly.

  "General Forrest's!" From it he looked to the faded weatherworn hat Drew had left on a chair by the door. Boyd caught it up and pulled off the leather string banding its dented crown. Carefully he fitted on Forrest's gift and studied the result critically. Drew laughed.

  "Like puttin' a new saddle on Croaker; it doesn't fit."

  "Yes, it does," Boyd protested. "That's right where it belongs."

  Drew, standing by the window, felt a pinch of concern. He found it difficult nowadays to deny Boyd anything, let alone such a harmless request.

  "The first lieutenant comin' along will call me for sportin' a general's feathers on a sergeant's head," he protested. "Nothin' from Cousin Merry yet? Maybe Hansford didn't make it through with my letter. He hasn't come back yet.... But—"

  "Think I'd lie to you about that?" Boyd's eyes held some of the old blaze as he turned the hat around in his hands. "And what I told you is the truth. The surgeon said it won't hurt me any to ride with the boys when you pull out. General Buford's ordered to Selma and Dr. Cowan's sister lives there. He has a letter from her sayin' I can rest up at her house if I need to. But I won't! I haven't coughed once today, that's the honest truth, Drew. And when you go, the Yankees are goin' to move in here. I don't want to go to a Yankee prison, like Anse—"

  Drew's shoulders hunched in an involuntary tightening of muscles as he stared straight out of the window at nothing. Boyd ha
d insisted from the first that the Texan must be a prisoner. Drew schooled himself into the old shell, the shell of trying not to let himself care.

  "General Buford said I was to ride in one of the headquarters wagons. He needs an extra driver. That's doin' something useful, not just sittin' around listenin' to a lot of bad news!" The boy's tone was almost raw in protest.

  And some of Boyd's argument made sense. After the command moved out he might be picked up by a roving Yankee patrol, while Selma was still so far behind the Confederate lines that it was safe, especially with Forrest moving between it and Wilson.

  "Mind you, take things easy! Start coughin' again, and you'll have to stay behind!" Drew warned.

  "Drew, are things really so bad for us?"

  The scout came away from the window. "Maybe the General can hold off Wilson ... this time. But it can't last. Look at things straight, Boyd. We're short on horses; more'n half the men are dismounted. And more of them desert every day. Men are afraid they'll be sent into the Carolinas to fight Sherman, and they don't want to be so far from home. The women write or get messages through about how hard things are at home. A man can march with an empty belly for himself and somehow stick it out, but when he hears about his children starvin' he's apt to forget all the rest. We're whittled 'way down, and there's no way under Heaven of gettin' what we need."

  "I heard some of the boys talkin' about drawin' back to Texas."

  "Sure, we've all heard that big wishin', but that's all it is, just wishin'. The Yankees wouldn't let up even if they crowded us clear back until we're knee-deep in the Rio Grande. It's close to the end now—"

  "No, it ain't!" Boyd flared, more than a shade of the old stubbornness back in his voice. "It ain't goin' to be the end as long as one of us can ride and hold a carbine! They can have horses and new boots, their supplies, and all their men. We ain't scared of any Yankee who ever rode down the pike! If you yell at 'em now, they'd beat it back the way they came."

  Drew smiled tiredly. "Guess we're on our way now to do some of that yellin'." The end was almost in sight; every trooper in or out of the saddle knew it. Only some, like Boyd, would not admit it. "Remember what I say, Boyd. Take it slow and ride easy!"

  Boyd picked up Drew's hat again, holding it in the sunlight coming through the window. The cord was a band of raw gold, gleaming brighter, perhaps, because of the shabbiness of the hat it now graced.

  "You don't ride easy with the General," he said softly. "You ride tall and you ride proud!"

  Drew took the hat from him. Out of the direct sunbeam, the band still seemed to hold a bit of fire.

  "Maybe you do," he agreed soberly.

  Now Boyd was smiling in turn. "You carry the General's hatband right up so those blue bellies can get the shine in their eyes! We'll lam 'em straight back to the Tennessee again—see if we don't!"

  But almost three weeks later the Yankees were not back at the Tennessee; they were dressing their lines before the horseshoe bend of the defending breastworks of Selma. Everything which could have gone wrong with Forrest's plans had done just that. A captured courier had given his enemies the whole framework of his strategy. Then the cavalry had tried to hold the blue flood at Bogler's Creek by a tearing frantic battle, whirling Union sabers against Confederate revolvers in the hands of veterans. It had been a battle from which Forrest himself broke free through a lane opened by the action of his own weapons and the concentrated fury of his escort.

  Out of the city had steamed the last train while a stream of civilian refugees had struggled away on foot, the river patrolled by pickets of cavalry ordered to extricate every able-bodied man from the throng and press him into the struggle. Forrest's orders were plain: Every male able to fight goes into the works, or into the river!

  Now Drew and Boyd were with the Kentuckians, forming with Forrest's escort a small reserve force behind the center of that horseshoe of ramparts. Veterans on either flank, and the militia, trusted by none, in the middle. Thin lines stretched to the limit, so that each dismounted trooper in that pitiful fortification was six or even ten feet from his nearest fellow. And gathering under the afternoon sun a mass of blue, a vast, endless ocean....

  The enemy was dismounted, too, coming in on a charge as fearless and reckless as any the Confederates had delivered in the past. With the sharpness of one of their own sabers, they slashed out a trotting arc of men, cutting at Armstrong's veterans in the earthworks to be curled back under a withering fire, losing a general, senior officers, and men. But the rebuff did not shake them.

  A second Union attack was aimed at the center, and the militia broke. Bugles shrilled in the small reserve, who then pushed up to meet that long tongue of blue licking out confidently toward the city. This time there was no stopping the Yankee advance. The reserve neither broke nor followed the shambling panic-striken flight of the militia, but were pushed back by sheer weight of numbers to the unfinished second line of the city's defenses.

  Blue—a full tidal wave of it in front and wedges of blue overlapping the gray flanks and appearing here and there even to the rear—

  Having thrown away his rifle, Drew was now firing with both Colts, never sure any of his bullets found their targets. He stood shoulder to shoulder with Boyd in a dip of half-finished earthwork when the bugle called again, and down the ragged line of gray snapped an order unheard before—

  "Get out! Save yourselves!"

  Boyd fired, then threw his emptied Colt into the face of a tall man whose blue coat bore a sergeant's stripes. His own emptied guns placed in their holsters, Drew caught up the carbine the Yankee had dropped. He gave Boyd a shove.

  "Run!"

  They dodged in and out of a swirling mass of fighting men, somehow reaching the line of horse holders. Drew found Croaker standing stolidly with dragging reins, got into the saddle, and reached down a hand to aid Boyd up behind him. In the early dusk he saw General Forrest—his own height and the proportions of his charger King Phillip distinguishable even in that melee—gathering about him a nucleus of resistance as they battled toward the city. And Drew headed Croaker in the General's direction.

  Boyd pawed at his shoulder as they burst into a street at the bone-shaking gallop which was the mule's fastest gait. A blue-coated trooper sat with his back against the paling of a trim white fence, one lax hand still holding the reins of a horse. Drew pulled Croaker up so Boyd could slip down. As he pulled loose the reins the Yankee slid inertly to the ground.

  A squad of blue coats turned the corner a block away, heading for them. Somewhere ahead, the company led by the General was fighting its way through Selma. Drew was driven by the necessity of catching up. The two armies were so mingled now that the wild disorder proved a cover for escaping Confederates.

  Twilight was on them as they hit the Burnsville road, coming into the tail end of the command of men from a dozen or more shattered regiments, companies, and divisions, who had consolidated in some order about Forrest and his escort. These were all veterans, men tough enough to fight their way out of the city and lucky enough to find their mounts or others when the order to get out had come. They were part of the striking force Forrest had built up through months and years—tempered with his own particular training and spirit—now peeled down to a final hard core.

  In the darkness their advance tangled with a Union outpost, snapping up prisoners before the bewildered Yankees were aware that they, too, were not Wilson's men. And the word passed that a Fourth United States Regulars' scouting detachment was camped not too far away.

  "We can take 'em, suh." Drew caught the assurance in that.

  "We shall, we certainly shall!" Forrest's drawl had sharpened as if he saw in the prospect of this small engagement a chance to redeem the futile shame of those breaking lines at Selma.

  "Not you, suh!"

  That protest was picked up, echoed by every man within hearing. Finally the General yielded to their angry demands that he not expose himself to the danger of the night attack.

 
They moved in around the house, and somehow confidence was restored by following the old familiar pattern of the surprise attack—as if in this small action they were again a part of the assured troops who had fought gunboats from horseback, who had tweaked the Yankees' tails so often.

  Drew and Boyd were part of the detachment sent to approach the fire-lighted horse lot, coming from a different angle than the main body of the force. It was the old, old game of letting a dozen do the work of fifty. But before they had reached the rail fence about that enclosure, there was a ripple of spiteful Yankee fire.

  "Come on!" The officer outlined against one of the campfires, lurched and caught at the rails as the men he led crawled over or vaulted that obstruction, overrunning the Union defenders with the vehemence of men determined to make up for the failure of the afternoon. It was a sharp skirmish, but one from which they came away with prisoners and a renewed belief in themselves. Though they did not know it then, they had fought the last battle of the war for the depleted regiments of cavalry of the Army of the Tennessee. The aftertaste of Selma had been bitter, but the small, sharp flurry at the Godwin house left them no longer feeling so bitter.

  "Where're we goin'?" Boyd pushed his horse up beside Croaker as they swung on through the dark.

  "Plantersville, I guess." But something inside Drew added soundlessly: On to the end now.

  "We're not finished—" Boyd went on, when Drew interrupted:

  "We're finished. We were finished months ago." It was true ... they had been finished at Franklin, their cause dead, their hopes dead, everything dead except men who had somehow kept on their feet, with weapons in their hands and a dogged determination to keep going. Why? Because most of them could no longer understand any other way of life?

  There was that long line of battles General Forrest had named.... And marching backward through weeks, months, and years a long line of men, growing more and more shadowy in memory. Among them was Anse—Drew tried not to think about that.