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The preparations were necessarily hasty in the extreme, but this was the essence of the whole plan, viz., to reach Vicksburg as it were by surprise, while General Grant held in check Pemberton's army about Grenada, leaving me to contend only with the smaller garrison of Vicksburg and its well-known strong batteries and defenses.
But that wasn't on account of Pemberton, though he was agreeable, but on account of Madge Pemberton. Madge and I were agreed, and Pemberton was agreeable, but I was restless and keyed high in those days, resembling pups, as stated. "No anchoring to Pemberton's chimney for me," I says. "No digging clams and fishing for small fry in Long Island Sound for me. I'm going to sea."
The cavalry was used in this advance in reconnoitring to find the roads: to cover our advances and to find the most practicable routes from one command to another so they could support each other in case of an attack. In making this move I estimated Pemberton's movable force at Vicksburg at about eighteen thousand men, with smaller forces at Haines' Bluff and Jackson.
It was eight o'clock when I came out and started for Pemberton's. I came past McCulloch's fence, and heard some one speak near by, and there was a man sitting on the top rail near the corner. It was considerable dark. "Been in to see King Solomon?" he says. "What's that?" I says. "Major General McCulloch," he says. "Why, I believe you stayed to tea! Why, I haven't fetched that in three months!"
The winter passed away in fruitless labors to make some sort of a water passage to the rear of Vicksburg, either above, via the Yazoo, or around through Louisiana to some point below the city, whence the army could cross again to the Vicksburg side of the Mississippi and strike Pemberton's stronghold from the southeast.
We went on east, and left him here, boarding at Pemberton's. He said he liked Pemberton's and would stay there a bit.
She hated herself as what she called a "quitter," but now, in January, 1910, she was at an impasse. She could just stagger through each day of S. Herbert Ross and office diplomacies. She had been at Pemberton's for a year and a third, and longer than that with Mrs. Lawrence at the flat. The summer vacation of 1909 she had spent with Mrs. Lawrence at a Jersey coast resort.
The ball was directly in front of goal. "Sturgis is a dub if he doesn't try it now," said the big fellow on Pemberton's left. "But he couldn't do it from the forty-yard line, could he?" asked Pemberton. "Search me; but from what he's done so far to-day I guess he could kick a goal from the other end of the field. Nothing doing, though; they're trying right guard again. There goes Crocker."
Neither my orders to General Sherman, nor the correspondence between us or between General Halleck and myself, contemplated at the time my going further south than the Yallabusha. Pemberton's force in my front was the main part of the garrison of Vicksburg, as the force with me was the defence of the territory held by us in West Tennessee and Kentucky.
But at the bottom of Pemberton's heart was the recognition of his probably being strong enough to live and not yet strong enough to struggle or to thrive. Morgan himself at any rate was in the first flush of the rosiest consciousness of adolescence, so that the beating of the tempest seemed to him after all but the voice of life and the challenge of fate.
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