they are marking you out as a target.”
“Ain’t no man can kill me and live,” Forrest said. “Hit’s a flag of truce besides.”
“Yes, but they claim that we’re moving up men through ravines under the truce.”
“I ain’t moven men through the goddamn ravines any more than they tryen to land men off of their goddamn gunboats—” Forrest broke off. “Yonder he comes.”
It wasn’t Hunter this time but some other junior officer. The note read, General, I will not surrender. Very respectfully yours, L. F. Booth …
“It’s a plain answer anyway,” Forrest said. “Goddamn their eyes! I’m goen up on that hill yonder—and I’ll be a-watchen for the first men over that wall. We got Missouri, Mississippi and Tennessee all here. Let’s see who can git there first. And git after’m—keep after’m, boys, until that flag comes down.”
A gust from the river teased out the cloth of the Union flag above the battlement. It seemed that all of them were looking at it for a second. The darkness rising in Henri’s mind suddenly took on a definite form.
“General,” he said.
Forrest, interrupted, turned on him hotly.
“General—” He saw it plain now, why couldn’t he say it? “Mister Nolan is out in advance of Barteau. In the ravine by Coal Creek.”
Forrest looked at him like he’d lost his mind. “Why wouldn’t he be? Them’s local boys thar with him and they know the lay of the land.”
They have the local-most grudges too, Henri thought, and they mean to be the first ones in there. He was looking for a safe way to say it when Forrest spoke again.
“All right then. Go see about him. If it’s a-worryen ye so.” With a grimace Forrest pressed his sore ribs once more, then wheeled his horse toward the rear.
Henri squeezed his heels to the flanks of his jenny and rushed down toward the Coal Creek ravine. Behind him came the high silver tone of Gaus’s bugle, then the hair-raising keen of the Rebel yell. The crash of artillery replaced the ringing in his ears. Barteau’s men looked up at him as he whipped by, thinking he might be bringing orders as he sometimes did. But Nolan and his followers were already darting up the slope toward the earthworks. Henri jumped down, tied his jenny to a stub of a fallen tree and went after them.
The charging Confederates had thrown themselves into the six-foot ditch at the front of the horseshoe and were climbing all on top of each other in a mad leapfrog to scale the earthen wall. All the defenders’ attention was now concentrated there, and though the angle was too steep for the cannon to be of any use, small arms fire was doing considerable damage.
Nolan’s men meanwhile were making for a point where the earthwork met the bluff on the north side. There the buckskin jacket disappeared, over the bluff itself as it looked. Nolan’s men went over after him … and more than Nolan had with him when he joined their force. As many as fifty West Tennessee guerrillas were going over, and they weren’t flinging themselves into the river either, as Henri saw when he reached the edge. The last of the partisans stretched back a hand to help him, and by scrabbling and clutching at a root sticking out of the clay of the cliff he was able to scramble around the corner of the wall as Nolan and his crowd had done before—each man beginning to fire as he entered the fort. A keg of whiskey had indeed been broached, and more than one of Nolan’s men paused there to dip himself a measure.
The Federals might have seen and stopped them easily enough were they not facing the frontal assault—new riflemen stepping up onto the catwalk behind the battlement to relieve those who stepped down to reload, and all in good order until Nolan and his men disrupted it by shooting the defenders in the back. At once the top of the battlement was covered with a wave of Forrest’s men breaking over it, the wild bone-chilling yell still skirling as they jumped down into the enclosure, slaying every fish that swirled in the barrel.
“Save your lives!” Bradford shouted, without making any suggestion how his men were to do it.
“Let us fight yet,” cried a lieutenant—he was commanding black artillerymen who still served the cannon—but Bradford howled, “It is no more use,” and threw himself over the bluff toward the river. One of the black gunners stood up calmly