The Outlaw Josey Wales (5 page)

The narrow gorge was choked with brush and scuppernong vines. Elm, oak, hickory, and cedar grew profusely. It was in a sheltered clump of thick cedar that he threw blankets and Jamie, lying in the warm quietness, fell asleep. Josey unsaddled the horses, grained and picketed them near the spring. Then close to Jamie he dug an “outlaw’s oven,” a foot-deep hole in the ground with flat stones edged over the top. Three feet from the fire no light was visible, but the heated stones and flames beneath quickly cooked the pan of side meat and boiled the jerky broth.

As he worked he attuned his ears to the new sounds of the ravine. Without looking, he knew there was a nest of cardinals in the persimmon bushes across the branch; a flicker grutted from the trunk of an elm and the brush wrens whispered in the undergrowth. Farther back, up the hollow, a screech owl had taken up its precisely timed woman’s wail of anguish. These were the rhythms he placed in his subconscious. The high wind whining above him… the feathery whisper of breeze through the cedars… this was the melody. But if the rhythm broke… the birds were his sentinels.

He had eaten and fed Jamie the broth. Now he heated water and wet the poultices. When he took the old bandages from around Jamie, the big hole in his chest was blotched with blue flesh turning black. “Proud” flesh speckled the wound in puffy whiteness. The boy kept his eyes from the mangled chest, looking steadily up to Josey’s face.

“It ain’t bad, is it, Josey?” he asked quietly.

Josey was cleaning the wound with hot rags “It’s bad,” he said evenly.

“Josey?”

“Yeah.”

“Back there, on the Grand… thet was the fastest shootin’ I ever seed. I never shaded ye. Na’ar bit.”

Josey didn’t answer as he placed the poultices and wrapped the bandages around the boy.

“Iff’n I don’t make it, Josey,” Jamie hesitated, “I want ye to know I’m prouder’n a game rooster to have rid with ye.”

“Ye are a game rooster, son,” Josey said roughly, “now shet up.”

Jamie grinned. He closed his eyes, and the shadows quickly softened the hollowed cheeks. In sleep he was a little boy.

Josey felt the heavy drag of exhaustion. In three days he had slept only in brief dozes in the saddle. His eyes had begun to play tricks on him, seeing the “gray wolves” that weren’t there… and hearing the sounds that couldn’t be. Time to hole up. He knew the feeling well. As he rolled into his blankets, back in the brush, away from Jamie and the horses, he thought of the boy… and his mind wandered back to his own boyhood in the Tennessee mountains.

There was Pa, lean and mountain-learned, settin’ on a stump. “Them as won’t fight fer their own kind, ain’t worth their sweat salt,” he had said.

“I reckin,” the little boy Josey had nodded.

And there was Pa, layin’ a hand on his shoulder when he was a stripling… and Pa wa’ant give to show feelin’s. He had stood up to the McCabes down at the settlement… and them with the sheriff on their side. Pa had looked at him, close and proud.

“Gittin’ on to be a man,” Pa had said, “Always re’clect to be proud of yer friends … but fight fer sich as ye kin be prouder of yer enemies.” Proud, by God.

Well, Josey thought drowsily … the enemies was damn shore the right kind, and the friend … the boy … all sand grit and cucklebur. He slept.

A brief splatter of rain wakened him. There was the ghostly light of predawn made dimmer by dark clouds that rushed ahead of the wind. Light fog trapped in the ravine added to the ghostly air. It was colder. Josey could feel the chill through his blanket. Overhead the wind whined and beat the treetops. Josey rolled from his blanket. The horses were watering at the spring. He grained them and coaxed a flame alive in the fire hole. Kneeling beside Jamie with hot jerky broth, he shook the boy awake. But when his eyes opened, there was no recognition in them.

“I told Pa,” the boy said weakly, “that yaller heifer would make the best milker in Arkansas. Four gallon if she gives a drop.” He paused, listening intently … then, a chuckle of laughter. “Reckin that red bon’s a cheater, Pa … done left the pack and jumped that ol’ fox’s trail.”

Suddenly he sat up wildly, his eyes frightened. Josey placed a restraining hand on his shoulder. “Pa said it was Jennison, Ma. Jennison! A hunnert men!” Just as suddenly he collapsed back onto the blankets. Sobs racked him, and great tears ran down his cheeks. “Ma,” he said brokenly, “Ma.” And he was still … his eyes closed.

Josey looked down at the boy. He knew Jamie had come from Arkansas, but he had never discussed his reasons for joining the guerrillas. Nobody did. Doc Jennison! Josey knew he had carried his Redleg raids into Arkansas where he had looted and burned so many farmhouses that the lonely chimneys left standing became known as “Jennison Monuments.” The hatred rose again inside him.

As he raised Jamie’s head to feed him the broth the nightmare had passed, but he could feel that the boy was weaker as he lifted him into the saddle. Once more he lashed Jamie’s feet to the stirrups. He figured sixty miles to the border of the Nations, and he knew that troops and posses were gathering in growing numbers to block his reckless ride.

“Reckin they figger me fer plumb loco,” Josey muttered as he rode, “fer not takin’ to the hills.” But the hills meant sure death for Jamie. There was a narrow chance with the Cherokee.

His simple code of loyalty disallowed any thought of his own safety at the sacrifice of a friend. He could have turned into the mountains on the off chance that help could be found for the boy… and he himself would have been safe in the wildness. For men of a lesser code it would have been sufficient. The question never entered the outlaw’s mind. For all their craft and guerrilla cunning, tacticians would consider this code as such men’s greatest weakness… but on the other side of the coin the code accounted for their fierceness as warriors, their willingness to “charge hell with a bucket of water,” as they were once described in Union Army reports.

The tactical weakness in Josey’s case was apparent. The Union Army and posses knew his partner was desperately wounded. They knew he could get medical help only in the Nations. His mastery of the pistols, his cunning born of a hundred running fights, his guerrilla boldness and audacity, had carried him and Jamie through a roused countryside, but they also knew the code of these hardened pistol fighters. Where they could not divine the mind and tricks of the wolf, they knew his instinct. And so horsemen were pounding toward the border of the Nations to converge and meet him. They knew Josey Wales.

Chapter 7

The cold dawn found them riding across an open space of prairie ground, the mountains to their left. Before noon they forded Horse Creek and continued southwest, staying close to the timbered ridges, but Josey keeping the horses on dangerous open ground. Time was the enemy of Jamie Burns. Shortly after noon Josey rested the horses in thick timber. Placing strips of jerky beef in Jamie’s mouth, he gruffly instructed, “Chaw on it, but don’t swaller nothin’ but juice.”

The boy nodded but didn’t speak. His face was beginning to take on a puffiness, and swelling enlarged his neck. Once, far to their right, they saw dust rising of many horses, but the riders never came into view.

By late afternoon they had forded Dry Fork and were crossing, at an easy canter, a long roll of prairie. Josey pulled to a halt and pointed behind them. It appeared to be a full squad of cavalry. Although they were several miles away, the soldiers had apparently spotted the fugitives, for as Josey and Jamie watched, they spurred their horses into a gallop. Josey could easily have sought shelter in the wild mountains not a half mile on their left, but that would mean hard… slow traveling, rather than the five miles of prairie they had before them. In the distance a tall spur of mountain extended before them over the prairie.

“We’ll make fer that mountain straight ahead,” Josey said. He brought his horse close to Jamie. “Now listen. Them fellers ain’t shore yet who we are. I’m goin’ to make ’em shore. When I shoot at ’em… you let that little mare canter… but ye hold ’er down. When ye hear me shoot agin… ye turn ’er loose. Ye understand?” Jamie nodded. “I want them soldier boys to run them horses into the ground,” he added grimly as he slid the big Sharps from the saddle boot.

Without aiming, he fired. The echoes boomed back from the mountain. The effect was almost instantaneous on the loping cavalrymen. They lifted their arms, and their horses stretched out in a dead run. The mare set off in an easy canter that rapidly left Josey behind. The big roan sensed the excitement and wanted to run, but Josey held him down to a bone-jarring, high-step trot.

There was a distance of a half mile… now three-quarters… now a mile separating the cantering mare from him. Behind, he could hear the first faint beating of running horses. Still he jogged. The drumming of hooves became louder; now he could hear the faint shouts of the men. Slipping the knife from his boot, he carefully cut a plug of tobacco from the twist. As he cheeked the wad the hoofbeats grew louder.

“Well, Red,” he drawled, “ye been snortin’ to go…” he slid a Colt from a holster and fired into the air, “…now RUN!” The roan leaped. Ahead of him, Josey saw the mare gather haunches and settle lower as she flew over the ground. She was fast, but the roan was already gaining.

There was never any doubt. The big horse bounded like a cat over shallow washes, never breaking stride. Josey leaned low in the saddle, feeling the great power of the roan as he flew over the ground, closing the gap on the mare. He was less than a hundred yards behind her when she made the heavy timber of the ridge. As Josey pulled back on the roan, he turned and saw the cavalrymen… they were walking their horses, fully two miles behind him. Their mounts had been “bottomed out.”

Jamie had pulled up in the timber, and as Josey reached him the heavy clouds opened up. A blinding, whipping rain obscured the prairie behind them. Lightning touched a timbered ridge, cracked with a blue-white light, and the deep rumbling that followed caught up the echoes and merged with more lightning stabs that made the roar continuous. Josey pulled slickers from behind their cantles.

“A real frog-strangler,” and he wrapped a slicker around Jamie. The boy was conscious, but his face was twisted and white, and his body rigid in an effort to cling to the saddle.

Josey gripped his arm, “Fifteen, maybe twenty miles, Jamie, and we’ll bed down in a warm lodge on the Neosho.” He gently shook the boy. “Well be in the Nations, another twenty miles… we’ll have help.”

Jamie nodded… but he did not speak. Josey pulled the reins of the mare from the clenched hands that held the saddle horn, and leading, moved the horses at a walk upward into the ridges.

The lightning flashes had stopped, but the rain still came, whipped into sheets by the wind. Darkness set in quickly, but Josey guided the roan with a sureness of familiarity with the mountains. The trails were dim now, that sought out the cuts between the ridges; that headed straight into a mountain only to turn and twist and find a hidden draw. They were still there… the trails he had followed with Anderson, going into and coming out of the Nations. The trails would carry him through the corner of Newton County and onto the river flats of the Neosho, out of Missouri.

The temperature fell. The rain lightened, and the breath of the horses made puffs of steam as they walked. It was after midnight before Josey called a halt to the steady pace. He saw the campfires below him… the half circle that hung like a necklace… enclosing the foothills of these mountains between him… and Jamie… and Neosho Basin a few miles away.

There was still some movement around the fires. As he squatted in the timber he could see an occasional figure outlined against the flame… and so he waited. Behind him the roan stamped an impatient foot, but the mare stood head down and tired. He dared not take Jamie from the saddle… there were only a few miles across the flats to the Nations… and a few more miles to the Neosho bottoms. There was a bitter-cold bite now in the wind, and the rain had almost stopped.

Patiently he watched, jaws slowly working at the tobacco. An hour passed, then another. Activity had died down around the campfires. There would be the pickets. Josey straightened and walked back to the horses. Jamie was slumped in the saddle, his chin resting on his chest. Josey clasped the boy’s arm, “Jamie,” but the moment his hand touched him, he knew. Jamie Burns was dead.

The realization of the boy’s death came like a physical blow, so that his knees buckled and he actually staggered. He had known they would make it. The riding, the fighting against all odds… they HAD made it. They had whipped them all. Then for fate to snatch the boy from him… Josey Wales cursed bitterly and long. He stretched his arms around the dead Jamie in the saddle… as if to warm him and bring him back… and he cursed at God until he choked on his own spittle.

His coughing brought back sanity, and he stood for a long time saying nothing. His bitterness subsided into thoughts of the boy who had stubbornly followed him with loyalty, who had died without a murmur. Josey removed his hat and stepping close to the mare placed his arm about the waist of Jamie. He looked up at the trees bending in the wind. “This here boy,” he said gruffly, “was brung up in time of blood and dyin’. He never looked to question na’ar bit of it. Never turned his back on his folks ’ner his kind. He has rode with me, and I ain’t got no complaints…” he paused, “Amen.”

Moving with a sudden resolve, he untied the saddlebags from the mare and lashed them to his own saddle. He unbuckled the gunbelt from Jamie’s waist and hung it over the roan’s pommel. This done, he mounted the roan and led the mare, with the dead boy still in the saddle, down the ridge toward the campfires. At the bottom of the ridge he crossed a shallow creek and coming up from its bank found himself only fifty yards from the nearest campfire. There were pickets out, but they were dismounted, walking from fire to fire at a slow cadence.

Josey pulled the mare up beside the roan. He looped the reins back over the head of the horse and tied them tightly around the dead hands of Jamie that still gripped the saddle horn. Now he sidled the roan close, until his leg touched the leg of the boy.