FORT PILLOW

Could Joe Johnston stop them this side of Atlanta? If he couldn't, the war here was lost. He was a good defensive fighter, no man better, but was he good enough? Forrest had his doubts.

And if Johnston lost, if Robert E. Lee lost in Virginia, what was left for the C.S.A.? Forrest saw only one thing: retreating to the mountains and the woods and the swamps and bushwhacking the damnyankees till they got sick of trying to hold down a countryside that hated them and went home. That might take five years. It might take ten. It might take fifty. Forrest faced the idea without enormous enthusiasm, but also without fear. If that was what wanted doing, the South could do it.

The only trouble was, it left little room for Captain Anderson's peaceful Confederacy acquiring the tools it needed to get free of imported goods. Forrest shrugged. That might come one of these days. He didn't think it would come any time soon, no matter what his clever aide-de-camp believed.

He intended to fight as long as the rest of the Confederate States

did-and longer, if he had to. If he had no great faith in a Confederate triumph… in the end, what difference did that make? He couldn't fight the whole war, only his own little piece of it. Today, he'd done that well.

“Have we taken everything we can from this place?” he asked Anderson.

“I believe we have, sir,” the other officer replied.

“Then let's clear out,” Forrest said. “Sure as the Devil, we'll have more Yankee gunboats calling on us come morning, and maybe troopships with 'em. We haven't got enough men to hold the outer line of this fort, and the inner line's not worth holding. I can see that, by God, even if Major Bradford couldn't.”

“We're ready,” Anderson said. “I expect you'll want to leave some pickets behind?”

“I surely will.” Forrest nodded. “They'll warn us when the Federals do come around, and they'll help keep the stinking scavengers away. “

He and Anderson exchanged glances filled with distaste. Not all men who carried guns in this debatable land fought for the Confederate States or the United States. Quite a few fought for themselves and nobody else. Once the armies moved on, the jackals and hyenas moved in, stealing whatever got left behind and slitting throats when they came upon men they didn't care for.

They were impossible to put down completely. Most of the time, they looked and acted like anybody else: like farmers or tradesmen going about their lawful business. But when the sun went down they picked up shotguns or rifle muskets and rode out to raid. Some inclined to one side, some to the other, some to neither. The Federals in Memphis and Nashville hated them all. Forrest liked them very little better himself.

“Well,” he said, “let's go.”

Matt Ward poured down one cup of black coffee after another. It made him feel like a wide-awake drunk. He was paying for letting Bill Bradford slip away. He was paying in all kinds of ways. His head pounded; he knew the hangover would get worse later, but it was bad enough now. And he had the joy of realizing Bradford had played him for a fool.

If I could shoot him now… But, however tempting that thought was, he shoved it aside. If he fired his Enfield now, he feared his brains would blowout through his ears.

“You awake, Ward?” A second lieutenant from the Second Missouri Cavalry (C.S.) named Tom Bottom sounded as if he would do something dreadful if he didn't get the answer he wanted.

“Yes, sir.” Ward sighed. He knew he'd let himself in for this. That made him put up with it, but didn't make him enjoy it.

“You'd better be,” Bottom growled. “I'll come round again pretty damn quick to make sure you stay that way.”

“Yes, sir,” Matt Ward repeated. Bottom was one of the handful of officers left behind with the pickets now that most of the Confederate force had pulled out of Fort Pillow. He was acting as if that made him something altogether grander than a miserable second lieutenant. Were things otherwise, Ward would have called him on it. With his headache and with his even more painful knowledge of his own failure, he kept quiet.

Not everybody who'd stayed behind by the fort was so constrained. “Yeah, I'm awake, you whistleass peckerhead,” another trooper rasped. “Are you?”

“What's your name?” Bottom said furiously. “I'll put you on report!”

“My name is Stonewall Jackson, and you can do whatever you damn well please. But you better not turn your back on your own men if you try it.”

Had Bottom had more nerve, he might have arrested the mocking soldier. He didn't. He just walked on. Maybe the man's threat unnerved him. Everybody heard stories about unpopular officers shot by the soldiers they commanded. Ward had no idea how many of them were true-probably not many. If Tom Bottom didn't want to take a chance on this one, though, who could blame him? Bottom wasn't a coward – he'd fought well enough in the fall of Fort Pillow – but he wasn't a fool, either.