“Except kill Union soldiers in a cowardly manner.” Porch Man fired up another lantern. The cow kicked her stall. Army Colt holstered his revolver, found a hemp rope hanging on a nail. He uncoiled it, then tossed one end over a rafter.
“This’ll do nicely, Lieutenant,” he said. He didn’t bother trying to fashion a hangman’s knot around the rope.
“Change your mind?” Porch Man asked.
Alistair did not move, didn’t even blink.
“Get on with it, Leslie,” Porch Man ordered. “Tie his hands.”
“Here,” Alistair said, and began shedding the coat the Yanks had pulled down around his arms. “I’m no invalid.”
Lucy cut loose with a pathetic wail, falling to her knees, wrapping her arms around Porch Man’s waist. “Please,” she begged. “Spare ’im. Spare ’im, and I’ll do anything you likes.”
The two Feds heading toward Alistair grinned.
Complacently Alistair put his hands behind his back. One of the guards handed his carbine to the other, withdrawing a leather cord from his trousers pocket.
“Get off me, you wench!” The lieutenant kneed Lucy in her chest, and as she fell onto the hay, the pepperbox pistol in her hand exploded. The blaze temporarily blinded everyone in the barn, except Porch Man, who was already dead.
Bawling, the terrified milch cow kicked her stall again.
Alistair had already drawn the .31-caliber Massachusetts pocket pistol the fool Yanks hadn’t found stuck near the small of his back. First, he shot the Fed holding both carbines in the stomach, then sent a ball just below the left eye of the one carrying the cord. Dropping to his knee, he tried to find Army Colt, but saw only spots from the powder flashes. Thinking he caught a glimpse of the Yank, he pulled the trigger, but heard only a click as the percussion cap misfired.
His vision cleared. He found Army Colt plain as day, leveling the pistol at Alistair’s heart. Alistair dived. The revolver crashed, and Army Colt screamed, dropping his gun, his eyes rolling back. Lucy had split his skull with an axe. Quickly Alistair scooped up the Colt, pausing only long enough to put a bullet in the back of the head of the Yankee he had gut-shot. Hearing the reports of a revolver outside, he raced into the darkness.
By then, the gunfire had ceased. He heard nothing other than the ringing in his ears. Cally and Able Durant ran toward him. Alistair lowered his revolver, looking beyond them. His father and sister stopped, then Alistair turned, saw Lucy stepping out of the barn.
“You all right, Son?” his father asked.
“Yeah.”
“Alistair!” Beans Kimbrough called from the porch.
“I’m all right.” He breathed a little easier.
Beans had listened to Frank James, but Beans was always cautious, had insisted on hanging back, cutting through the woods to make sure everything was fine at the Durant farm.
Alistair moved past his father, warning him and his sister: “Y’all stay out of the barn. We’ll clean things up. But if y’all can take care of Lucy …”
He moved past the privy, glimpsing the dead Yankee leaning against the door. It was too dark to see much about the dead man’s body, which was just fine with Alistair.
His mother had picked up the twins, and rushed them inside. Candles flickered through the window. His mother, trying to calm down the little ones, started a hymn, managing only a few words before having to suck in deep breaths and exhale, then trying again, her voice cracking.
Beans flung one corpse into the back of the wagon. Alistair slid the Army Colt by the dead man’s boots, and helped Beans with the other dead man.
His father stopped by the wagon, staring, his eyes blank as Cally, her arm around Lucy’s shoulder, helped her into the cabin.
“I’m sorry this had to happen,” Alistair said.
“It ain’t …” His father looked away. “Ain’t your … fault.”
“We’ll take the bodies away from here, sir,” Beans said. “Dump ’em at the ferry.” He peered toward the fields, the woods, the creekbed, although it was too dark now to see much of anything. “Must have horses around here somewhere. We’ll fetch ’em up, too. I know a guy up by the mill who ain’t particular what kind of horses and tack he buys. So when Yankees come ’round here askin’ questions, you just say you ain’t never seen no Yanks. Not tonight. Not ever. You ain’t seen your son, neither.”
Without a word, Able Durant turned, quickly disappearing inside the house. The twins sobbed. Candles flickered. Lucy groaned. His mother tried to sing. His sister whispered.
“I’ll fetch the other bodies,” Beans said. “They all dead?”
Alistair could barely nod.
“Take that lantern over yonder. See if you can find their mounts. Must be hid in the woods or somewheres. We gots to get rid of anything the Yanks brung here.”
Dumbly Alistair nodded. Suddenly he realized that his side no longer throbbed. He felt no pain. No remorse, no sickness or shame, no regret. He feared, however, that he was beginning to feel nothing.
Just like Beans Kimbrough.
Already Beans sat in the wagon, grabbing the reins, releasing the brake, moving the vehicle toward the privy to pick up the dead man there. “Like I say, we’ll dump the bodies far from here. At the ferry, I think. And we’ll ride on.”
Ride on. Alistair sighed. Ride on.
After tonight, he could never return home.
Chapter Ten
The world passed by in a whirlwind.
Less than a week after they buried Tommy Cobb, President Jefferson Davis signed into Confederate law the “Partisan Ranger Act of 1862,” giving guerrillas like Quantrill and his men some legitimacy. Yankees, of course, usually still executed captured irregulars on the spot.
Quantrill did the same with Feds. Well, he might hold a regular soldier hostage, maybe for barter, trying to exchange a prisoner. But jayhawker or redleg? They never lived long. Like the time after they captured ten of Jennison’s raiders. One of the Kansans had an Enfield rifle, so sixteen-year-old Dill McCoy made the prisoners stand close together in a straight line, just to see how many bodies an Enfield’s bullet could shoot through. The answer? Eight. Arch Clements shot the other two in the head with his revolver.
They robbed mail carriers, ambushed Yankee patrols. They captured a steamboat, the Little Blue, which happened to be carrying forty sick Yanks. That turned into a regular jollification after Jim Cummins called out: “Hey, Capt’n, let’s make ’em walk the plank.”
So they fashioned a plank, and prodded those who could walk to step over the side and into the river. Those too sick to stand were flung overboard like fish too small for frying. When the doctors protested, the boys made those white-frocked sawbones step into the river, too. Criminy, it was only five feet deep or thereabouts. Wasn’t like they were drowning anybody, and Beans Kimbrough helped fish one sick Fed out of the river when they realized the fool couldn’t swim. After such a grand time, the boys didn’t even torch the side-wheeler.
Usually things weren’t so fun.
In July, they tangled with troops from the First Iowa and Seventh Missouri. That little fracas had been almost like a real fight, not an ambush. Until Quantrill ordered the boys to retreat into a ravine, and the Yanks followed.
Summer had turned savagely hot, relentlessly humid. Briars and branches scratched Alistair’s face, knocked his hat off as he slid six feet down the bank. A bullet singed his long locks. He turned, fired, but all he hit was the trunk of an oak. A soldier landed to his right. Their eyes met, and the Fed raised a saber, but only wedged the blade between two limbs. Alistair shot him in the head, pulled himself into a crouch, and moved through the brush.
“Get down!” Frank James yelled from up ahead, and Alistair dropped flat.
A volley cracked behind him, Minié balls whistled over his head, thudded into trees, spanged off rocks. He scrambled to his fee
t as the Feds reloaded. Took shelter behind a slab of rock. Heard a Yankee scream: “Charge!”
A mass of bluecoats appeared in the brush, bayonets catching the rays of sunlight that crept through the thick overgrowth deep in the ravine.
“Look at ’em all!” someone shouted. “Why …?” His words were lost in a battery of revolver shots.
Badly wounded, Ezra Moore, shot off his horse, was trying to crawl away, and a bluecoat plunged a long bayonet through the small of his back. Ezra cried out in agony, and the Yank stuck him again. When the trooper pulled out that big blade, Ezra rolled over on his back, and sent a bullet in the trooper’s stomach. As he fell, the Yank jammed the bayonet in Ezra’s heart, and dropped dead on a log to Ezra’s left.
A Rebel yell filled the ravine, echoing off the rocks, through the brush. The boys met the charging Yanks in one savage affair.
Alistair rose to his feet, felt the Navy buck in his hand, and suddenly he was screaming, too, emptying one .36, then another, smashing a bluecoat’s face with the walnut butt. He found his Bowie, slashed, hacked. Blood splashed across his face, and he could taste it—warm, sticky, salty. He rammed the blade through a leather belt, heard a pitiful wail.
In minutes, the Federals were running back, climbing out of the ravine, leaving the dead and dying. An eerie stillness filled the woods.
Alistair sank onto his buttocks, wiping his face with a bandanna. A canteen lay beside him, and he picked it up, pulled out the cork, and drank greedily.
“God A’mighty!” He coughed up the whiskey, turned to his side, and gagged.
“What’s the matter?” George Todd asked him. “Too damned bloody for you?”
Alistair pitched the canteen to the rocks. “That ain’t water,” he said. “It’s forty-rod.”
“Well, hell’s bells, boy.” Todd laughed and grabbed the canteen, taking a long pull, then smiling after wiping his lips with the back of his hand.
“Whiskey!” Clell Miller laughed. “That’s how come ’em bluebelly dogs fight so hard.”
Alistair pushed himself up.
Bill Anderson kneeled next to a dead Yank, working his skinning knife. The scalp popped as Anderson jerked, then eased the bloody trophy into a pocket on his bushwhacker’s shirt.
“How many did you get this time, Bill?” Todd called out.
“Only three,” Anderson answered grimly, and began tying knots in the silk cord he carried.
Looking down, Alistair realized he was sitting on a corpse. Sightless eyes stared up at him, the mouth open in a terrifying but silent scream, and Alistair vomited, pushed himself up, dropping the knife onto the body.
“Too much whiskey, kid?” Arch Clements snorted.
“Too much blood,” George Todd said.
“Leave him be.” It was Cole Younger, and few of the boys were dumb enough to disobey Cole Younger. The big man picked up one of Alistair’s Navy Colts, slid it into the holster, turned Alistair around, and gave him a gentle nudge.
“Yanks’ll be regroupin’,” Younger said. “We best ride.”
“Let ’em come,” Anderson said. “I’ll kill thirty more today.”
“We ride!” Quantrill yelled. “Mount up.”
Alistair took in a deep breath, saw the bloody rag wrapped around the captain’s thigh. The former schoolteacher grimaced as Beans Kimbrough helped him into the saddle. Gripping the reins, Beans led horse and rider up the steep slopes out of the ravine.
Alistair and Cole stepped over bodies—bushwhackers and Feds—some lying atop each other. Behind him came the occasional shot of one of the boys finishing off a dying soldier. Alistair stopped, stared at two boys, maybe his age, locked together in death.
“God,” he said.
“Keep movin’, Durant.” Cole pushed him toward the tethered horses.
“Doesn’t this bother you, Cole?” Alistair asked.
“Boy, Yanks murdered my pa,” Cole answered. “Dumped his body in a bar ditch. Drove me to the brush just like they done you. They brung the wrath of God upon themselves.”
He had called Alistair boy. Cole Younger was eighteen, only a year older than Alistair, whose seventeenth birthday had come and gone without notice. Bill Anderson was in his early twenties, George Todd maybe around the same. Frank James, nineteen. Beans Kimbrough, seventeen. Jim Cummins looked even younger than Alistair. By thunder, Quantrill himself couldn’t be older than twenty-five.
Cole lifted Alistair’s left boot into the stirrup, then pushed him, as Alistair grabbed mane and rein, into the saddle. Alistair stared down into the Cole’s beard-stubbled face.
Cole Younger looked over the cantle at Anderson, Todd, and the others, gathering whiskey-filled canteens, revolvers, wallets, and scalps. Finally his blue eyes locked on Alistair.
“But if it don’t bother you, boy …”—Alistair could see the blood on Cole’s brow and cheeks, his face hard, but those pale eyes red rimmed from sweat and gunpowder, and, maybe, just maybe, some remorse and pity—“then you’re already dead. Like Todd, Anderson, maybe even the capt’n hisself.”
* * * * *
They ambushed more mails, more Yankee patrols. They hanged three redlegs under a bridge. They raided Independence. They met up with some regular Confederate officer at a farm west of Lone Jack, where the colonel made everything official, mustering Quantrill and the boys into the Confederate Army. As Partisan Rangers.
“This mean we get paid?” Dill McCoy asked.
“In Confederate script,” a gray-coated captain said with a grin. “Whenever the paymaster happens by.”
“We can do better than that,” Chris Kennard said.
“But don’t worry,” George Todd said, “the bluebellies will still hang us anyway.”
“Not iffen we die game,” Beans Kimbrough said.
Quantrill was officially elected captain. The boys voted William Haller as first lieutenant, which riled George Todd considerable. Todd had been voted second lieutenant, and William Gregg third lieutenant. Within minutes after the announcement, Frank James and Oll Shepherd were separating Todd and Haller. A regular Confederate sergeant had to knock a pistol out of Todd’s hand.
“Captain!” the colonel shouted. “Arrest those two officers.”
“I don’t think so, Colonel,” Quantrill said mildly.
The officer’s face flushed with anger, his hands balled into fists, and he stood there shaking. For a moment, Alistair thought there might be a fight between the regular army and the boys, but the bearded colonel let out a long breath, and, with contempt, said: “Your men lack discipline.”
Quantrill, still favoring his left leg, grinned. “But they fight, Colonel. They fight like the devil himself.”
Indeed, they fought. At Lone Jack. On the Little Blue. On lonely roads. At once prosperous farms. They even covered the rear as the Confederate Army retreated south toward Arkansas to join up with General Jo Shelby. Which was fine with the boys. They never cared much for fighting with the regular army anyway. Too many orders. Not enough killing.
They hid in the ravines, in the thickets, in caves. They raided Olathe, Kansas, and murdered Yankee prisoners. Payback for the execution of one of the boys at Fort Leavenworth.
Still, every now and then, Frank James, Dill McCoy, Beans, or Alistair would ride to Watkins Mill. Trying to find out about Alistair’s or Frank’s family, catch up on news, and, if only briefly, touch humanity.
On the first week of November, Beans Kimbrough rode into camp at Red Bridge near the Kansas border. He had been gone three weeks, so long some of the boys were taking bets on whether he’d been captured and killed.
“It pains me to see you alive, Beans,” Henry Wilson said lightly. “You done cost me a five-shot Bulldog revolver.”
Alistair started to rise from the campfire, but the look on Beans’ face caused him to slip back to the ground. He fingered the ri
m of his coffee cup.
Beans stepped near the fire, easing his saddlebags to the ground, and sliding into a seat on the log next to Frank James, who asked: “How are things back home?”
“Not so good,” Beans said. “Yanks have arrested some womenfolk.”
Cole Younger rose angrily. “What in tarnation for?”
“Because they’re Yanks!” Bill Anderson roared.
“Your sisters are among them, Bill,” Beans said.
The look flashing through Anderson’s eyes tied Alistair’s stomach in knots. Slowly Anderson began to stand, his hands resting on the butts of his revolvers.
“Sit down, Bill.” Quantrill had walked from his tent to the fire.
“Be damned if I will.”
“You are already damned, Bill. Sit, I say.” Quantrill’s jaw jutted toward Beans. “What is this, Beans?”
So Beans explained. Yanks had arrested several sisters of men known, or merely suspected, to have ridden with Quantrill. Called them spies. Had them locked up in an old building on Grand Avenue in Kansas City that they’d converted into a women’s prison. Josephine, Jennie, and Mary Anderson—“Jennie ain’t but ten years old!” Bill Anderson roared—John McCorkle’s sister and sister-in-law. A bunch of others. Slowly Beans turned to Alistair. “Cally’s in there with them,” he said softly. “So’s Lucy.”
A coldness swept over Alistair, almost paralyzing him.
“They wage war now on our women!” Quantrill shook his head, and let out a bitter laugh. “Well, I shall write a letter of protest to General Ewing.”
“I say, Capt’n,” Bill Anderson said, his voice sinister, “that we mount up right now and ride to Kansas City. We free our women. We kill every Yankee, every Unionist …”
“You do that, Bill, and you’ll get all those girls kilt.” For once, even George Todd sided with Captain Quantrill. Even rarer, Bill Anderson listened.
“I read in the Times, Alistair, that they suspect you was involved in them horse soldiers getting kilt,” Beans said, changing the subject, which brought everyone, even Quantrill, up short. They merely stared. “Thought I had fixed that by dumpin’ them bodies by the ferry,” Beans added.
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