was beginning to get hot, and he could smell the sweat of men and of horses and the raw blood smell of the doe under the sun. He worked the last dry crumbs of cornbread down his throat. They had ridden no more than a mile when one of the white riders turned toward his captain and said, “That’s some kind of a foreigner you just now took up.”
The captain didn’t answer. Clop-clop went the hooves of the horses on the corduroy road. A minute passed and the same rider spoke again.
“He ain’t just only a foreigner but a nigger to boot.”
The captain didn’t bother to turn his head. Henri looked at the back of that white rider’s head, a greasy lock of brown hair spilling from under the hat and the red tip of a boil rising between the tendons of his neck. If I were you I’d let it go, he thought, just before the brown-haired rider spoke for the third time.
“Do you not see that man’s a nigger?”
“Well don’t let it worry ye, Monty.” Forrest said, and spat into the roadway. “That man’s a volunteer.”
CHAPTER TWO
September 1863
WHEN HENRI WOKE he felt the eyes of the General on him, though it was yet too dark to see them or anything else, but he felt that Forrest had not closed his eyes all night. For three days they’d been fighting around Chickamauga Creek and yesterday the Federals finally broke and ran away as far as Chattanooga. Forrest was still in an evil temper because his superior, Braxton Bragg, had given no order to pursue. The time to whup somebody, Forrest said, is when they runnen, and how he hated to miss that chance.
Eight days before, at Tunnel Hill, Forrest had taken a bullet in the back at the end of a long fight with Federal infantry under Crittenden. The wound still made it difficult for him to lie down at his ease, but what irked him even more was that the sawbones Cowan had persuaded him to rally himself with a dram of whiskey when he was first hurt and it was a great point of pride with Forrest that he never ever took a drink.
And twenty-four thousand men between both armies killed for nothing. A battle that nobody won. Unless ye calculate the Yankees won it because they kilt a couple thousand more than they lost. And yet the Yankees had been driven from the field.
It was too early even for the birds. Away to the west a lone screech owl chittered loopily in a high branch of a dead tree. Henri couldn’t see the owl but he had marked the tree in his mind before he lay down. He could just begin to see the black sky fracturing along the edges of the leaves of the oak under which they sheltered.
“Henry,” said Forrest, just above a whisper.
“I’m here.”
“Saddle up.”
When the light had just begun to turn blue they were riding four hundred strong down the Lafayette-Rossville Road. Henri rode half a length back of Forrest’s right shoulder, his usual position, the place he liked best. There was not enough light yet to see it but he knew Forrest was biting his lips under his beard to master the pain of the wound in his back. By the time the birds did begin to sing, he had warmed to the saddle and loosened his jaws. At cockcrow they came upon a troop of Federal cavalry just outside of the village of Rossville.
“Well, boys,” Forrest said, grinning now and happy. “What say we give’m a dare?”
Now the light was cool gray and the mist just rising from low rolling pastures either side of the road. As they spurred up, the high wild skirling of the Rebel yell rose all around and above them, eerie as the shrieking of the predawn owl. Henri could not get his lips or throat or larynx to make that sound, any more than the men he rode with could ever manage to pronounce his name. He would only let his jaws drop open so that the screaming would meet no obstacle as it ran through him; it came from outside, certainly, but at the same time seemed to inhabit his whole body. Whenever he felt that cry ring in him, his blood turned cold and his eyes turned clear and fear was driven from his body and flew out ahead of him to stoop down on the enemy. That he stretched out along his