FORT PILLOW

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 Some houses still had the Stainless Banner and the Confederate battle flag and the outdated Stars and Bars flying or hanging on their porches, but no ladies were standing in the street offering the soldiers food, the way they had when the regiment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?”

The shabbily dressed prisoner jerked on the horse to which he was tied. He recognized Jenkins's voice. The Confederate captain in charge of the captives nodded. “Sure, Corporal. You can come along.” Jenkins smiled like Christmas.

XVIII

MATT WARD HAD WATCHED THE Silver Cloud and the Platte Valley steam away late the afternoon before. Chugging north against the current, the gunboat and the steamer she escorted weren't very fast, but they looked as if they would get where they were going.

Here today, Fort Pillow wasn't a fort any more. It was nothing but a bluff next to the Mississippi. Captain Charles Anderson looked around and nodded in satisfaction. “That about does it,” he said to Ward and the rest of the Confederates still at the battle site. “I reckon we've done every single thing we set out to do.”

Bedford Forrest's aide was bound to be right about that. Forrest's men hadn't just taken the place. They'd run off the Federals' horses and captured all the cannon here. They'd taken more than three hundred rifle muskets; the rest probably lay in the river. They had as much of the rest of the movable property as they could carry away. And now they'd wrecked and burned all the buildings and huts in and around the fort. The Federals wouldn't have anything at all to use if they tried to put men in here again.

Another Federal steamer went by. Maybe it would find Union soldiers who'd got away and were hiding along the river. Ward eyed the smoke pouring from its stack, which mixed with the smoke still in the air from the fires of the day before. “We ought to have boats on the Mississippi ourselves,” he said.

Captain Anderson still stood close enough to hear him. “We've got a few,” he said. “We can move things across from Louisiana and Arkansas now and again. But we have to sneak, because we can't make ironclads to fight the damn yankees.”

“Why not, sir?” Ward said. “They can do it.”