Wildwood Boys (33 page)

A blistering noonday three weeks later.

A Federal cavalry column of a hundred men makes its slow way
back to its post in Kansas City, now but two more miles to northward. From the high branches of the cedar woods to either side of
the road ahead come the risible callings of crows.

The days have been long and sultry and every man of them rides
slumped and haggard, exhausted by lack of sleep and the constant
tension of watching for ambush. Now, drawn so close to Kansas
City, they put aside their fears and snug their carbines into their saddle scabbards and give themselves over to reveries of the good times
to come later this night in the bagnios and saloons.

The guerrillas burst out of the cedars like the very avatar of
nightmare, shivering the air with a rising chorus of rebel yells, shattering the afternoon with a rage of revolverfire. The Yankee horses
plunge and veer, their riders slinging blood, pitching from saddles.
Most of the Federals panic, lash their mounts to a gallop in the other
direction with no purpose in this world save escape, deaf to the shrill
commands of their captain to stand and fight.

The captain sees a beardless bushwhacker bearing on him with
his reins in his teeth and revolvers in each hand—and then feels the
world tip sideways and goes facedown into the dirt without knowing
it or anything else evermore.

An hour later a Federal force from Kansas City will find fortythree of their fellows littering this portion of prairie, many of them
already made eyeless by the crows. In the captain’s mouth they find a
note: “Todd did this. Remember Jim Vaughn.”

Captives

“I’m glad you’re here, Billy.”

you. I’d ruther be off bushwhacking too, if I was you.”

 

“I know it, Joey. You only tell me three times a day.”
“Is that all? I think it a lot more times a day than that.”
“Sometimes you think too damn much is what
I
think.”
“I know you’d ruther be off bushwhacking and I don’t blame

He slapped her lightly on the behind. “You think you know
everything.”

 

“Billy?”

 

“What?”

 

“You know I love you? I mean, you
really
know it?”

 

He turned on his side and stared at her dark form, felt her breath
warm on his face. “Oh, I guess.”

 

She giggled softly and stroked his beard and kissed him.
“You love
me
?”

 

“Course I do—except when I feel like wringing your neck. Now
let’s go to sleep.”

 

“I mean do you
really
?”

 

“Go to
sleep,
dammit.”

 

“I know you
do
.”

 

“Joey, will you
hush up
.”

 

He could sense the grin on her. “Me you too,” she said. “I’ll love
you for always and always. I don’t care we can’t... you know.”

 

They fell asleep holding each other, though they could not, could
never, hold each other close enough.

As it happened, the several members of the Westport Sewing Circle
who’d succumbed to Federal threats of imprisonment and told the
Yankees about the Vaughn girls had also revealed the names of other
members of the club, including those of the Anderson sisters. When
asked where the Anderson girls might be, the informers said they
didn’t know. All they knew about them was that they had once lived
with relatives called Parchman on a farm by Brushy Creek just off
the Blue River.

They were in the kitchen and readying dinner, Jenny fetching water
from the creek. Mary was still darkeyed from hard weeping for
Jimmy Vaughn, and Josephine was trying to cheer her with funny
rhymes she’d heard Bill and Jim tell. Mary managed a small smile at
the first innocuous few, but when Josie began intoning, “There was a
bad girl from the city, who on a poor farm boy took pity; so for only
a dime and a bit of her time, she let him have fun with—” She broke
in, “Josie—don’t you dare!” but was grinning in spite of herself.

Then from out in front of the house Jenny screamed.
Josephine streaked across the room and grabbed up her Navy
from a chair and raced for the front door, Mary already there and
Jenny now hollering, “Let go! Let me

gooo
!”

 

She ran onto the porch and smack into Mary and the Federal soldier who’d seized her. She raised the pistol to shoot him but someone
snatched her arm upward and the round discharged through the
porch roof. The gun was wrested from her by a large corporal with a
potent smell of spoiled onions. She tried to kick him and he slammed
her against the wall so hard she went breathless and her legs quit and
she fell on her rump, mouth ajar and trying to draw air. She saw
Jenny kicking wildly in the arms of a Yankee carrying her toward the
road and the army horses there. Saw Mary crying in pain and fury,
pinioned from behind, being dragged away by a grinning soldier
clutching her breasts.

 

The corporal yanked her to her feet and pulled her down the
porch steps, her legs flaccid, her strides awkward, and still she could
not breathe. Other soldiers now hurrying from the barn and from
behind the house and all of them converging on the horses. Then her
lungs abruptly inflated and she joined her sisters in howling for their
brothers.

Bill and Jim were breaking horses at the corrals, the bushwhackers
who’d brought the mustangs—Lionel Ward, Hi Guess, Frank James
and Buster Parr—sitting on the rail and watching, when the pistolshot sounded from the house. Bill dropped the hackamore he’d been
about to put on a dappled gray Jim was holding steady, and the
brothers vaulted the corral rail and ran to their horses. The six of
them set off for the house at a gallop with revolvers in hand, following the narrow serpentine trail, branches and shrubs slapping at
them as they went, the horses’ hooves throwing clods.

They pounded into the farmyard and spotted the mounted Federals making their way along the fence-bordered lane leading to the
main trail. There were six of them, and three rode double behind an
Anderson girl. The Yanks saw them coming and reined around with
pistols drawn. Those holding the girls as shields formed up across
the narrow lane in front of their comrades and the guerrillas drew up
a dozen yards from them. A sergeant was clutching Jenny to his
chest, and she shrilled,

“Stand fast!” the sergeant shouted. “You shoot and they die!”
“Billy!”

“Let them loose!” Bill Anderson said. “Do it

Captain Bill
now
!” The flanking
fences prevented them from getting around the Yankees.

 

The big corporal held Josephine, and a soldier sat hunched
behind Mary with his arm hard around her, and both men held pistols to the girls’ sides. Josephine was trying to claw the corporal over
her shoulder and it was all he could do to keep his eyes from her fingers. “Quit, dammit!” he said, grappling with her. “
Quit,
I said!”
“Shoot him, Billy!” Josephine yelled. She tried to hit the corporal’s face with the back of her head. “
Shoot
him!” The corporal got
his forearm around her throat and her eyes widened and she tried to
dislodge his arm with both hands.

 

“You’re throttling her, goddam you!”
Bill shouted, frantic in his
helpless rage.

 

The corporal eased his hold and Josie drew audible breath as he
shifted his grip to pin her arms at her sides and press the muzzle of
his pistol under her chin.

 

“You . . .
bastard,”
Josephine gasped.

 

The other Feds in the party had been slowly backing their horses
and were a good twenty yards down the lane, and now one of them
yelled, “Here’s the company!” He waved his hat at comrades still out
of sight around the bend but they all heard the rumble of the coming
horses.

 

“Shit!”
Buster Parr said. “We got to slide, Bill!”

 

“
Go,
Billy!” Josephine said, disheveled, breathless.

 

“They won’t be harmed, I swear it!” the sergeant said.

 

The lead riders in the Federal column came around into view.

 

“They’re on us, Bill,” Lionel Ward said.

 

“DAMMIT!”
He yanked Edgar Allan around and they all lit out.

 

They were chased until they were into the deeper wildwood and
then the Feds turned back. But the Yanks found the broncos in the
rude corrals and took them too.

When they returned to the Parchman farm they found it untorched,
so eager had the Yankees been to make away with the girls. While
the others swiftly gathered the remaining stores of food and packed
them into their saddle wallets, Bill went to his sisters’ loft and looked
on their beds and trinkets and clothes and he nearly howled in his
outrage. He spied Josie’s black silk ribbon on the rude plank dressing
table. He put it in his pocket and left everything else where it lay.

The others were remounted and waiting.

 

He stood on the porch and looked all around and marveled that
he had once applied his labor to improving this place and making it
what it was meant to be. Then said: “Boys, they took my sisters and
I couldn’t stop them. The shame is my own and no one else’s. Maybe
they’ll do like they said and exile them. I pray they do. Then I’ll collect them and they’ll not be removed from me again, take it for a
vow.” He spat. “But only a fool puts trust in a Union promise. My
intention is to offer Yankee prisoners in exchange for my sisters.
Could be they’ll agree to it.”

 

“Could be they might, Bill,” Frank James said, “if you make a
fair offer of three Yanks for each girl.”

 

There were grins all around.

 

“Any man of you who cares to join me in catching Yanks is welcome,” Bill said.

 

“Before I answer you on that, Bill,” said Lionel Ward, “I got two
questions.”

 

“Ask them.”

 

“Well sir, I’ve rode with Jarrette and Todd and Yeager, all three,
but I always knew the band was still part of one company and Bill
Quantrill was the captain of it. What I want to know is, would you
still be part of Captain Quantrill’s company?”

 

“I would, Lionel,” Bill said. “What is your other question?”

 

Lionel Ward shifted the chaw in his jaw and spat and wiped his
mouth with his sleeve. “Hell,” he said, “I disremember.”

 

“What say the rest of you boys?” Bill said.

 

“Count me in,” Hi Guess said, and Buster Parr said, “I ride with
you, Captain Bill.”

 

It sounded so natural that it took a moment for him to realize
he’d heard it. He saw by Jim’s smile that he had caught it too. And
Lionel. All of them now grinning at Captain Bill.

 

“Well, I’d say
nobody’s
gonna ride with you,
Captain,
” Frank
James said, “if we don’t quit all this yammering and
get
to riding.”

 

Bill laughed with them and went lightfooted down the steps and
swung up onto Edgar Allan and they made away into the wildwood.

Two days later they added another pair to their band—Dock and
Johnny Rupe—brothers met over a dinner table where they’d been
invited to sit down by a family of secessionists known to Buster Parr.
Buster had not seen the Rupes in eight months, and in that time the
brothers, sixteen and seventeen, had gained their growth. Their
mother knew she could keep them from the war no longer. But the
boys would have to ride double on the family’s old mare until they
could get proper mounts.

The following afternoon they ambushed a militia patrol of seven
men on the Blue River road west of Raytown. But the Unionists
fought desperately, and the guerrillas were obliged to kill them all.

“That’s gonna be the problem with getting prisoners,” Frank
James said. “They figure we’ll kill them anyway, so why surrender?”

 

They stripped the militiamen of their uniforms and put them on,
and the Rupe brothers selected the two best of the soldiers’ horses.
Then they rode on.

 

They spied various Federal patrols over the following two weeks
but all of them too large to engage, and then came a span of five days
in which their luck was excellent. They came on three Federal patrols
on the open range along the borderline and not more than ten men in
any of them. In each instance they rode right up to the Yanks, raising
their hand in greeting, and then shooting them at point-blank range
before the Feds kenned to them as bushwhackers. In the three
attacks they took a total of six prisoners—though two of them fell
dead off their horses over the next two days.

They were crossing the Blue River near Little Santa Fe, all of them
wearing Federal blue, when they were almost ambushed by Dick
Yeager’s bunch. Dick recognized the Andersons just in time to check
his boys, then came out of the trees and hallooed them. It took Bill
and Jim a moment to recognize him too—most of the right side of his
mustache was gone and the bared portion of lip showed a raw scar.
He told them it had been shot off a few weeks earlier in a fight with
redlegs in Cass County. “Closest shave I ever had,” he said, showing
big yellow teeth.

When Bill explained his plan to trade prisoners for his sisters,
Yeager offered to help him, and the two bands, thirty men strong, set
out to hunt for Yankees.

They fell on a camp of militia scouts just west of the Little Blue,
killing two and capturing three. The following day they sat their
horses in the silent shadows of a willow thicket hard by a rippling
creek and watched a militia patrol coming down the road. When the
soldiers drew abreast of them, they charged out of the trees, rebelyelling and shooting, and they had to laugh at the looks on the militiamen’s faces. Most of the soldiers fled for their lives, and the others
went down—except for a handful who threw up their hands and surrendered, but in their excitement the bushwhackers killed some of
them too. They dispatched the militia wounded, took the uniforms
off the dead, tied the six new prisoners to their saddles and hastened
away with them, leaving behind a few wounded horses and a dozen
naked dead men staring blindly at the descending crows under a pale
and unpitying sun.