FORT PILLOW

“I'm doing it,” Chalmers repeated. This time, he smiled a little. “I've got sharpshooters picking off the Union officers whenever they see the chance, too.”

“There you go,” Forrest said. “That's what we need. If those coons and galvanized Yankees haven't got anybody to tell 'em what to do, they won't tend to something that needs tending, and we'll get the bulge on 'em that way. “

He started to ride on toward the Mississippi, but a minnie caught his horse in the neck. Blood gushed forth, hideously red and stinking like a smithy. Forrest tried jamming a finger in the wound, a trick that had kept another mount of his alive for some little while. This horse writhed and thrashed and reared, then crashed to the ground, pinning Forrest's leg beneath it.

Pain shot through him. He roared out curses, kicked at the animal with his free leg, and beat it with his fists. It rolled off him and thrashed away its life, kicking slower and more weakly as blood rivered out of it.

General Chalmers ran up to Forrest. “Are you all right, sir?” he asked, alarm making his voice almost as shrill as a woman's. “Can you get up?”

“Don't rightly know.” Forrest made himself try it. His breath hissed out between his teeth. Moving hurt like fire. But he could move, anyhow. “Don't reckon anything's broken,” he said.

His right trouser leg was torn. His flesh was bruised and scraped and battered. The whole leg would be purple and black and swollen tomorrow, if it wasn't already. But it bore his weight even if it screamed. He took a couple of limping steps. Yes, he could manage.

“You were lucky,” Chalmers said as he tried to walk off the worst of it.

“Lucky, my ass,” Forrest ground out. “If I was lucky, that damned Yankee minnie would've missed my horse. If it did hit the stupid critter, he wouldn't have fallen on me. That there's luck, General. This you can keep this.”

“The fall could have broken your leg-or your neck,” Chalmers said. “The minnie could have hit you instead of the horse.”

“All that would have been worse,” Forrest agreed. “Don't mean what happened was good.» He glowered at the beast that had brought him from Jackson. Its writhing was almost over now. Its blood pooled on the muddy ground and started soaking in. A man had an amazing lot of blood in him-you found out how much when he spilled it all at once. A horse had even more. Forrest had had plenty of horses shot out from under him, but he didn't think he'd ever had one hurt him so much when it went down. “Got to get me another animal. Will you tend to that for me?”

“Yes, sir,” Chalmers said, and then, stubbornly, “You'd still be safer on foot.”

“I'd be slower on foot,” Forrest said. “Nothing else matters now. And you don't think dismounted men are getting hit?” A wounded trooper howled and cursed as his friends led him back toward the surgeons. Forrest pointed to him the way a schoolmaster would have pointed to an example on the blackboard. He chuckled when that occurred to him, because his own acquaintance with teachers and blackboards was so brief and sketchy. He could read. He could write, too-after a fashion-however little he cared to do it.

Even if he had no education, he owned other talents in abundance. He had nerve and a fierce and driving energy. He also had an unfailing knack for seeing what needed doing at any given moment. And he could make people listen to him and take him seriously and do what he told them to do. Set against all that, knowing how to spell didn't seem so important. He had men under him who could spell. He was the one who set them in motion.

“A horse!” James Chalmers shouted now. “Get General Forrest a horse! “

One of the troopers brought up a large, sturdy-looking beast. A horse needed to be of better-than-average size to bear a man of his weight. “Thank you kindly, Edgar,” Forrest said.

“You're welcome, General!” Edgar's face glowed with pride: Bedford Forrest knew him well enough to call him by name! Edgar didn't know Forrest could call most of his men by name. He learned names quickly, and they were the easiest handle you could grab to get somebody to follow you.

Mounting hurt. It would have hurt worse if the blamed horse had fallen on his other leg. Jim Chalmers would have said he was lucky it didn't. Forrest didn't give a damn what Chalmers would have said. Almost getting his leg broken wasn't lucky, not so far as he could see. When he booted the horse into motion, riding hurt, too.

But walking would have hurt worse. And it would have been slower, and speed counted now. Speed always counted to Bedford Forrest. Plenty of people knew how he talked about getting there first with the most. If you got there first, sometimes having the most didn't even matter.

Over the next hour, he painstakingly reconnoitered from the Mississippi to Coal Creek. Like General Chalmers, Captain Anderson begged him to do the job on foot so he would offer the Yankees less of a target.