Wildwood Boys (40 page)

 

But once the company set out for Texas, Todd’s attitude had
begun to turn contentious. He argued with Quantrill’s every choice
of campsite. He sniggered at his remarks on the beauty of the daybreak sky or the lonely look of the ravaged countryside. Quantrill
had ignored his attempts to nettle him, but it was obvious to the others that George was not entirely shed of his soreness over the cabin
incident. Some believed his resentment went back to Will Haller’s
election over him as the company’s first lieutenant and Quantrill’s
refusal to hold another vote.

 

In any case, Quantrill had clearly had enough, because this time
he didn’t let Todd’s taunt go unremarked. He looked back at him
and said, “I didn’t say I was scared, George. Do
you
think I’m
scared?”

 

Their eyes held for a moment—then Todd grinned wryly and
said, “Oh hell no, Bill. I wouldn’t be riding with you if I did.”

 

“That’s fine then, George. You ever think I’m scared of anything
or anybody—of
any
man at all—you be sure and speak up.”

 

“I’ll do that, Bill.”

 

Quantrill turned to Bill Anderson and winked, and Bill had to
grin at the man’s coolness. Still, he liked and admired both men and
hoped the bristlings between them would quit.

They forded the Spring River and crossed into Kansas about fifteen
miles from the Indian Territory on a late spring morning under a pale
yellow sun and thinly clouded sky. Dave Pool and his scouts were
waiting in the shade of a stand of dusty cottonwoods on the far
bank. They reported a Federal wagon train a few miles north and
bearing this way along the main road. A troop of one hundred cavalrymen escorting eight supply wagons, a civilian carriage, and one
wagon carrying a damn musical band.

“Must be somebody important,” Dave Pool said, “having his
own musicians with him and all.” If they cut through the woods,
Pool said, they could intercept the Yank train just west of Baxter
Springs.

They debouched from the forest into a wide stretch of brown prairie
cut through by a main wagon road. Quantrill directed the larger portion of the company to keep to the trees and out of sight. The sun
was straight up and there was no lean at all to the shadows.

Trailing a low cloud of fine dust, the Yankee train was a quartermile up the road and coming at a walk, each of the wagons behind a
six-mule team, the cavalry escort flanking it to either side. Bill Anderson fixed his field glass on them and saw that one of the wagons had
been modified to accommodate a colorfully uniformed band of musicians. The bandsmen were laboring with their instruments and the
notes of “Hail Columbia” began faintly to clarify themselves.

“Who in purple hell
are
they?” Cole Younger said.

“Listen!” Fletch Taylor said, just now catching the sound of the
music. He grinned and swung his arms in the manner of a conductor.

 

The other wagons looked to Bill Anderson to be bearing supplies. There were several civilians in the entourage. An officer came
loping up to the fore of the column and gestured toward them as he
spoke with the point riders. He rode a fine gray stallion, and even at
this distance his uniform was dazzling in its riot of gold braiding and
polished brass, its rakish white hat plume. It was the most splendid
Yankee uniform Bill Anderson had ever seen.

 

“There’s the son of a bitch in charge,” he said.

 

Quantrill took a look through his own glasses and said, “Oh my,
he is a regal vision, isn’t he?”

 

The Fed pointmen started toward the guerrillas at a canter.

 

“Coming to say howdy to their fellow bluebellies,” Bill said,
affecting to straighten the lapels of his Federal jacket in the manner
of a fastidious officer. Quantrill laughed. The band was into a rendition of “John Brown’s Body,” the notes carrying more clearly as the
train slowly came on.

 

The pointmen slowed as they drew closer. Bill could see their
faces now and saw their sudden suspicion as they caught sight of the
irregularities in their Union outfits, their long hair and the clutch of
revolvers every man carried. The two Yanks reined up fifteen yards
away.

 

“Howdy, boys,” Quantrill called. He beckoned them forward.
“Come on up.”

 

“Oh shit,” one Yank said. He turned a mournful look on his fellow, a gray-mustached sergeant who leaned out and spat a streak of
tobacco, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and said, “Yep.
And we have stepped square in it.” He hupped his mount ahead
another few yards and the other Yank came up beside him.

 

“Hello, bushwhackers,” the sergeant said. He smiled sadly at his
dark turn of luck.

 

“Partisan rangers of the Confederate nation,” Quantrill said in
the tone of a correcting schoolteacher. “Who’s your commander?”

 

“General Jim Blunt,” the sergeant said. “On his way to Fort Gibson. He’s going to be sore disappointed about this. He thought you
boys were a welcome party sent out to escort us the rest of the way.”

 

“Blunt?”
Quantrill said. “
James G.
Blunt?”

 

“Listen, boys,” the sergeant said, “I hope you’re of a mind to
take prisoners because I surrender.”

 

Bill Anderson grinned at him. “The selfsame Blunt who put in a
newspaper that the only choice he’d ever give a guerrilla was the
kind of rope to be hanged with?”

 

The sergeant made a rueful face and nodded. The younger Yank
looked near to tears.

 

“Well now,” Quantrill said. His elation was manifest. He signaled for the rest of the men to come out of the trees and form a double battle line to either side of him.

 

In the distance, the fancy Federal officer threw up his hand to
halt the train. The band had just struck up “Tenting on the Old
Campground” but then abruptly fell mute. The fancy officer peered
through his binoculars and then hurriedly ordered the cavalry column into a battle line of their own. A civilian couple in a buggy
drove up to speak to the officer and a moment later turned the buggy
around and hastened back to the rear of the wagons.

 

“I’d say they’re on to us, Bill,” Bill Anderson said.

 

“Bill?”
the young Yankee said, gaping at Quantrill. “Lord
Jesus—you ain’t
Bloody
Bill?” It was more plea than question.

 

Quantrill scowled. “Hell no, I’m too handsome to be him.” He
nodded at Bill and said, “That’s your man right there.”

 

Bill’s Navy was already in his hand. The young Federal threw up
his hands and babbled something no one understood or cared to.
The sergeant went for his own sidearm in a futile but necessary try.
Bill Anderson’s revolver cracked twice and the Fed horses spooked
and bolted as their riders tumbled.

 

Quantrill raised his Colt high and bellowed, “No prisoners!”

In fifteen minutes it was done with. Ninety-one Yankees lay scattered
over the prairie in a dust-and-gunsmoke haze. Bill Anderson tied
eight new knots in Josephine’s ribbon. The company lost one man.
Lionel Ward, liked by everyone, had been shot dead by a trooper
who then tried to get away with the bandsmen on their wagon. John
Jarrette led a dozen men in pursuit for half-a-mile before the wagon
lost a wheel and overturned, scattering men and musical instruments
and yanking the entire shrieking team of mules down too. The guerrillas killed every broken man of them and so many times shot the
trooper who’d killed Ward that the man was rendered faceless. They
set the wrecked wagon afire and flung the Yankee bodies into the
flames and the air was soon steeped with the smell of their roasting.

Among the few who escaped were the couple in civilian dress.
The man and woman had scrambled from the buggy and mounted
on horses and galloped off side by side. The guerrillas didn’t want to
risk shooting the woman in trying to bring down the man and so
both of them had got away.

Butch Berry shot down the horse of the fancily uniformed officer,
who staggered to his feet and offered up his pistol in surrender. Butch
laughed and pointed his pistol in his face and said, “Tell the devil
Butch Berry says hello, General.” The man’s look in that instant
struck him as so comical he laughed harder. “Wait! Not me! I’m—”
and Butch shot him dead. Then took his scalp. Then rode over the
battleground, waving the dripping trophy above his head and shouting that he’d killed General Blunt and receiving his fellows’ cheers
for it.

They turned out every Yankee pocket and made quick inspection
of their horses and rejected them all. They found a wagonload of
tinned rations and sat to a gluttonous feast of beef hash and lima
beans, sardines and stewed tomatoes, peaches and spiced apples.
Someone made the gladsome discovery that the Fed canteen he’d
confiscated contained whiskey. Within minutes every canteen on the
field had been tested and more than half were found to be holding
spirits too.

“These goddam Yanks!” Buster Parr said with a wild whiskey
grin. “I love them so!”

 

A full gallon demijohn of brandy was found in the abandoned
buggy and the men presented it to Quantrill as a gift. He thanked
them and poured drinks for his gathered officers. They drank toast
after toast as they fed on the fine Yankee rations, and in short order
not a man of them was sober.

 

“We did it, boys,” Quantrill said. “We whipped Blunt. The regulars never whipped him, but we did, by God—we did!” It occurred
to Bill Anderson that he had never seen Quantrill even mildly drunk
before.

 

“I deserve some damn credit,” Quantrill said. “A promotion! I
deserve to be a major.”

 

“Hell, why not a colonel?” Bill Anderson said.

 

John Jarrette thought a colonelcy was a damn right notion and
raised his whiskey cup in toast of it. Cole Younger said he wouldn’t
follow another order from Quantrill if he was anything
less
than a
colonel.

 

Quantrill was beaming. “Well hell, Coleman—then colonel it is!”

 

Every man in the party cheered the self-awarded promotion and
took another drink to celebrate it.

Drunken Riley Crawford, a canteen of whiskey in one hand and a
Yankee saber in the other, was slashing and thrusting at the air all
about him, bellowing that he was Captain Kidd. the meanest pirate
on the Seven Seas. Several bushwhackers sat nearby, eating and
drinking and taking mild entertainment from Riley’s besotted play.
Now Crawford was backing up, swordfighting with several opponents at once and cursing them for Spanish dogs, and he stumbled on
a Yankee corpse and nearly fell. He glowered at the dead man and
said, “Sneak up on me from behind, will ye? Take this!” And thrust
the saber into his chest.

His audience applauded, and one man called out, “You got him
good, Riley!”

 

Crawford whirled about and narrowed his eyes at another Federal sprawled nearby and cautiously stalked toward him, saying,
“And
you
! Trying to slip up on me flank, hey?” He slapped the Yankee across the shoulders with the flat of his blade. “Get up, you son
of a bitch! Get up and take it like a man!”

 

And up the Yankee rose in a terrified scramble, thinking the boy
had seen through his ruse of pretending to be dead. The blood of a
head wound had run down and encircled his eyes so that he
appeared to be wearing scarlet spectacles, and whether he or Riley
was the more terrified would have been hard to say. The onlooking
bushwhackers burst out laughing and one said, “Lookit! Young
Crawford’s raised the dead!”

 

Riley flung aside the saber and drew his Navy Colt and shot the
man in the chest and knocked him supine again. Then stepped up
and shot him five times more.

 

His audience was gasping with laughter. “Say, Riley,” Hi Guess
said, “are you
sure
he’s done for?”

 

“Poor fella come back from the grave just so Riley could put him
right back in it,” Dave Pool said.

 

“Ain’t it the drizzling shits, though?” Archie Clement said. “I
remember shooting that rascal myself. Thought sure I killed him.”

 

Riley Crawford, sobered to some degree by the harrowing experience, glared at Arch and said, “Well, you sureshit didn’t kill him
enough,
did you?”

As always, among the effects they found on the dead Yankees were
letters from home, and as they sat on the ground, gorging on Federal
rations and toping on Federal drink, they scanned the missives to see
if any might be worth reading aloud. By now most letters sounded
the same, especially those from mothers, which too often reminded
them of their own mothers and made them homesick and so they no
longer cared to read mother-letters, never mind hear them aloud.
Most sweetheart letters were also largely forged of sentiments so
conventional it was hard to distinguish one from another—yet they
sometimes contained salacious detail and so were always worth a
quick scan. A company favorite was the letter Cole Younger took off
a dead Yank in early summer and had since read aloud many times
and still carried in his shirt, stained and creased to tatters. It contained an Illinois girl’s wonderfully graphic reminiscence of the
farewell fellatio she’d granted her doomed soldier boy under a walnut tree in the evening shadows while her unsuspecting parents kept
to the house. It still put Cole’s listeners in a hormonal agitation
whenever they heard it. And there was the one John Jarrette carried,
a Boston lassie’s letter telling the cavalryman whose brains Jarrette
splattered onto an elderberry bush that she couldn’t wait to be naked
with him again and be attended by The Captain, the name she’d
bestowed on his member. Every time Jarrette read the passage
expressing her delight in her beau’s lapping attention to the “cherries” on her “milk puddings,” the men yowled and bayed like
hounds.

Blunt’s troops, however, seemed to be sorely lacking for intrepid
ladyloves. Their letters were quickly run through and discarded as
yawning bores. Only Ike Berry made an interesting find, but he
revealed it to no one other than his brother and the Andersons. He
took them aside and showed them a small oval photograph he’d
found in the jacket of a Federal corporal, a likeness of a young
blonde beauty with brave dark eyes and full lips, wearing a black
choker around her neck. Jim let a low whistle and Bill said she sure
enough looked like something to fight a war for. There’d been no letter nor anything else in the corporal’s effects to say who she might
be, but the back of the picture bore an ink drawing of an artist’s easel
with the canvas showing an eyeball, and underneath the drawing the