by Harold Keith
Finally on the first of July, 1861, the command was sufficiently trained to cross the Missouri River on the military ferry and bivouac in the big timber beyond. There Jeff liked the hard, rugged training in the open. It was getting him nearer his first battle.
But David Gardner liked no part of it. He never seemed to understand the commands. The officers scolded him constantly, and the other recruits hazed him. Soon he became the loneliest volunteer in camp. Jeff helped him all he could. But David never seemed to adjust to army life.
One night Jeff found him sobbing in his bunk.
“I’m lonesome,” David blurted, miserably. “I want to go home and see Ma. Goshallmighty, Jeff, I ain’t cut out to be no soldier. I was a fool to ever leave the farm.”
“Corn, Dave,” Jeff said, in alarm, “you can’t just walk off from the army once you’ve joined it. That’s desertion. You know the penalty for desertion. They’ll stand you up against a wall and shoot you.”
David’s pinched face looked pale. His eyes were red. He clenched his teeth with desperation. “I’m jist about homesick enough to chance it,” he said, defiantly. Then his mood softened. “It’s just about time to harvest the wheat at home. How’s Ma gonna manage with me gone? Onless I’m there to help her, they’ll likely starve, come winter.”
“No, they won’t, Dave,” argued Jeff. “Pa will help her. And so will the other Free State families.” David stopped sniffing, but he didn’t seem comforted.
At night the soldiers had lots of time on their hands. The veterans, who had already drawn their pay, gambled it away. There were all kinds of card-playing, foot-racing, long-jumping and side-hold wrestling.
Bill Earle, a corporal in Jeff’s company, had a rich tenor voice. He was from Bluemont Central College, a Methodist school at Manhattan. He would sing to the boys whenever they asked him after supper. Once they discovered an open-air revival in progress behind a small sod schoolhouse near the bivouac spot. Most of Jeff’s outfit attended, and several of the boys became converted, including all the tough ones.
Because of the hard daytime training in the woods and on the prairie, the soldiers never seemed to get enough to eat. They were served bacon, beans, hardtack, and coffee three times a day but soon began to yearn for more variety.
One hot night in mid-July they discovered a large patch of ripe watermelons in an open field. Unfortunately, a soldier stood guard over them. For nearly a week Jeff’s company marched back and forth past the field, their mouths watering.
One of the men in Jeff’s outfit was Noah Babbitt, a tramp printer from Illinois. He was a tall, droll fellow, whose skin was tanned dark as mahogany from his long travels in the open. He had set type in newspaper offices all the way from Illinois to San Antonio, Texas, traveling by foot across Indian Territory. Even the longest marches failed to tire him. He was always soaking his long, gnarled feet in salt water to toughen the skin for the long jaunts. He read everything he could get his hands on.
“Boys, I’ve got it,” Noah said, late one hot afternoon after they had been dismissed from maneuvers. “Get ready to eat those watermelons.”
“I’ve been ready for a week,” said Jeff, dropping his knapsack and canteen into the sand by his feet. Pulling off his shoes, he lay on his back in the shade, wriggling his bare toes in the cool south breeze.
“How we gonna git past thet guard?” asked a private from Lecompton.
Babbitt lowered his voice, looking cautiously around him. “Tonight I’ll go on guard myself in the melon field. One of you can hide in the brush along the fence. I’ll roll the melons out to you.”
“Yup,” frowned Ford Ivey, “but the field’s already got a guard. What you gonna do about him?”
Babbitt ignored the remark. He said, “I’ve got to have help. Who’ll volunteer to snake the melons out from under the fence to the timber after I roll ’em out of the field under the fence? It’ll be open moonlight.” Everybody looked at everybody else but nobody answered.
“How about Jeff?” somebody proposed.
“Shore. He’s jist the man.”
“Jeff’s little. They’ll never see him.”
Jeff rolled suddenly to a sitting position. “Now wait, boys,” he protested. “You can’t do this to me. It’s against the articles of war. It’s against the constitution.” But they persuaded him.
After dark they all walked quietly to the melon field. The moon was so bright that Jeff could see the light stripes on the big green melons as they lay amid the vines in the sandy soil.
Babbitt advanced on the uniformed guard, climbing boldly over the wooden fence.
“Halt! Who are you? I’m on guard here,” challenged the sentry, raising his weapon.
Babbitt’s deep voice answered in demanding tones, “Whose command do you belong to?”
“To Graham’s battery,” the man answered.
“That’s funny,” grumbled Babbitt, pretending to be confused. “Wonder why they need two guards? I’m from McGregor’s company. I’m assigned here for guard duty, too. Well, you watch that end. I’ll watch this.” The first guard grunted an assent and moved to the upper end of the field.
Soon Babbitt was rolling several big melons under the fence to Jeff, who transported them, crawling, to the fringe of the nearby woods, where hungry hands reached for them in the dark.
Later they cut and divided the tasty booty and all went quietly to bed. The incident convinced Jeff that privates were as capable of strategy as officers.
Next morning they were told that after one more week of training, they would depart for Missouri. There General Sterling Price had organized thousands of Missouri state troops into a rebel army. It was reported Price had gone into Arkansas to meet the Confederate General Ben McCulloch and urge him to aid the Missouri Confederate cause. Jeff was elated by the news.
A short furlough had been granted the volunteers living within seventy-five miles of the fort. That meant David and Jeff could make a quick trip home to see their families. John Chadwick decided to stay at the fort.
“If I go home, I’ll just have another big brawl with Pa over joinin’ up, and he’ll whop me,” John grumbled.
Two days before the furlough began, Jeff awoke early. He drew in a long, luxurious breath. He liked the pungent, early-morning smell of the sandbar willows and the tamaracks. He liked to see the white river mist crawling slowly along the surface of the water.
He looked at David’s bed and felt a vague alarm. David wasn’t there. His clothing was gone. His army knapsack and canteen lay on his folded bedding. His rifle, brightly polished, was neatly stacked.
Something white was pinned to the bed. It was a torn-off fragment of notebook paper. On it rudely printed in pencil was this note: “jeff i cant stand it no longer i have goned home to see ma. david.”
Jeff was stunned. How could David leave the army and its excitement, its promise of glorious adventure? Where was he now? As Jeff hurriedly thrust his legs into his pants, he tried to calculate. David would probably travel alone, swimming the river and skirting the fort until he encountered the military road leading south to Linn County.
Jeff resolved not to report him. That way they wouldn’t miss him until after the morning roll call, and he would have at least two hours’ head start toward home.
“I don’t understand why he didn’t wait,” he told John Chadwick. “We were both going home in two more days. I just don’t understand.”
5
Furlough
“Jeff!”
His younger sister was the first to see him as he strode wearily into the yard just before sundown. Barefoot, she was sweeping the rock porch. She threw down her straw broom and with a glad shout ran to the house to tell the rest of the family. Then she returned, slamming the door behind her, to throw both arms around Jeff’s waist and hide her brown head under his arm.
Bess and his mother ran out to join the happy homecoming and found Ring leaping and bounding all over Jeff. The big gray dog was so glad to see his young
master that he grasped a cottonwood stick in his mouth and, whining and moaning with pleasure, ran around and around the woodpile with it, scattering the chips and kicking up small clouds of dust.
Mary shouted with laughter. Emory Bussey hurried up from the barn. Grinning, he held out his hand.
They sat up that night until nine o’clock while Jeff told them all about his new life in the army. To Jeff’s surprise, his father remembered Clardy from the Mexican War.
“He had the makings of a good officer, but he was a strange, vindictive fellow whom nobody trusted,” Emory recalled. “He turned very bitter when his own regiment, the Mississippi Volunteer Rifles, elected Jeff Davis colonel. Clardy wanted the job. He had set his heart on it. When they elected Davis, Clardy left the regiment and moved away from the South forever.” Jeff leaned forward, listening carefully. So that was why Clardy hated the mention of anything Southern.
The family had more news for him. David Gardner wasn’t home. Jeff’s heart missed a tick when he heard that. Had David drowned, trying to swim back across the wide Missouri? Had he been captured by the soldiers or murdered by the bushwhackers?
For supper that night, Jeff’s mother fried wheat biscuits in a pan and roasted sweet potatoes in the fireplace ashes. Best of all, she baked a delicious green-grape cobbler in her fireplace oven. For breakfast next morning they had “sweet toast,” home-baked wheat bread toasted in a pan over the fireplace coals. There was hot milk to cover it, and butter, salt, and sugar to add for taste.
“Mama, the army hasn’t got any cooks near as good as you,” Jeff told her loyally between gulps.
She looked anxiously at him. “I don’t see how you can tell. You’re eating too fast to taste the food.”
Jeff said, “I’m tasting it when it goes down.”
His brief leave of one day and two nights at home passed all too quickly. He spent the morning helping his father thresh the wheat by hand, using two hickory clubs tied together with buckskin and letting the wind blow out the chaff. Early in the afternoon he helped Bess pack the eggs in bran, so they would be ready to take to the trading post. He went to the springhouse with Mary and helped her skim the cream off the cool milk and churn the butter. He helped his mother plait lampwicks and fry refuse pork, out of which to make the fuel oil for the lamps.
Although all four of them were putting up a great show of being brave, Jeff couldn’t help noticing how they kept stealing pensive sidelong glances at him, as though they didn’t want to forget what he looked like. He wished he had thought to have a daguerreotype made at the gallery in Leavenworth so he could give it to them. Neither he, nor Bess, nor Mary had ever had their pictures made.
Just before bedtime, Jeff took a short walk outdoors with Ring. He looked thoughtfully at each well-known object as it lay sleeping in the bright Kansas moonlight: the little creek where he had trapped skunk and muskrat, his duck blind on the riverbank, the big oak tree where he had twisted the rabbit out with a forked stick. Now they seemed unimportant and far-away, like a child’s toys.
A coyote’s melancholy wail floated in from across the river. Jeff saw the hair rise on Ring’s back. The big dog growled deep in his tawny throat, then whined and looked inquiringly at Jeff. But Jeff just reached down and patted him, then turned back toward the house. There wasn’t time for a hunt now.
Next morning at sunup he was back on the military road, headed for Fort Leavenworth. As he passed John Chadwick’s place, he saw gray smoke curling from the chimney.
Old Man Chadwick and one of his boys were yoking the oxen to the tar-hubbed wagon. Probably getting ready to go to the trading post, Jeff thought. He stopped a minute to tell them how John was getting along.
John’s mother was anxious for news and gave Jeff a big drink of cold clabber milk. But the rest of the family seemed to regard him coldly, as though he had persuaded John to join up. He was glad to be back on the road again.
Then the road became rockier, and the soil lighter and thinner. He was approaching the Gardner place. The brown corn had made a fair stand and was nodding in the warm wind. But the rows were so crooked you could tell that a woman had done the planting. Jeff glanced at the mean one-room log house and thought he heard voices. Then he stopped in surprise.
David and his mother were standing in the yard. Mrs. Gardner looked tired. Apparently her faded blue sunbonnet failed to protect her plain, florid face from the sun. Like David and all the rest of her homely brood, she was red-haired, with splashes of orange freckles running over her face, neck, and arms.
Glad that David was home safely, Jeff ran beneath the trees toward the house. As he came closer, he saw that David’s face was dirty and tear-begrimed, and his clothing torn, as though he had been living in the brush. Apparently he had just arrived.
Mrs. Gardner was looking fiercely determined. Her red face was flushed, her mouth a tight line. Two of her children stood behind her, listening with curious concentration. Bobby was playing in the mud by the horse trough. Nobody paid any attention to Jeff.
Mrs. Gardner said to David, “You walked sixty miles away from me to enlist and now you come crawlin’ back to tell me thet you’re tired of it and thet you wanta come back home. Well, it’s too late now to come back home. You’re in the army. That’s what you always wanted, so go on back to the army.”
David’s blond brows wrinkled with anger.
“I won’t go back,” he almost screamed. “I’ll go up into the hills an’ live before I’ll go back to the fort again.”
His mother put her hands on her hips and stared at him with disgust. “You’ll go up into the hills!” she mimicked him scornfully. “You couldn’t live a week by yoreself up there. You’d starve or you’d get homesick. Or somebody’d turn you in as a deserter jest to make the thirty dollars the government would pay to anybody turning you in. Or the bushwhackers’d find you an’ kill you like a dog.”
David sniffed and wiped his red eyes with the knuckles of both his dirty hands. His manner changed from defiance to pleading.
“Please let me stay here, Ma,” he begged. “I don’t wanta go to war. I git too homesick.”
She shook her head and pointed to the road. “If yore brave enough to leave us and run off an’ join the army, then yore brave enough to go on back to the army. There’s the road. Take it.”
The wretched boy looked at her incredulously, then broke into a fresh torrent of tears.
“You’re agin me, Ma,” he bawled bitterly. “I never thought my own ma’d go agin me like that.”
Jeff felt sorry for David, felt sorry for them all. But he was glad to see that David had somehow reached home safely. He walked slowly up to them, feeling embarrassed to interrupt.
“Howdy, Dave,” he said. “Howdy, Miz Gardner.”
Both of them looked at him, but neither spoke. Jeff walked a step closer.
“You can go back with me, David,” he offered. “I’m on my way to Leavenworth now. If you came back with me, they might let you off light. I’ll sure talk to them about it. Pretty soon the lonesomeness will all wear off, and then you’ll like it in the army, David. I know.”
David looked once at Jeff, then at his mother.
“I guess I’ll have to go with you, Jeff,” he said brokenly, his voice still rough with anger. “Nothin’ else I can do.”
Again he looked accusingly at his mother. Calmly but firmly she met his look and conquered it.
“Better go down to the crick, Davey, and wash yoreself,” she said, her voice softer but still stern. “Then you can come to th’ house, ef you want. It’s a long walk to the fort. You’ll need a fresh change of clothes. I’ll cook you some breakfast an’ pack you a lunch fer the trip.”
Obediently David turned and trudged off dejectedly toward the creek.
For a moment a look of tender compassion crossed her face. He was her own flesh and blood, the only man she had left in the world. Jeff swallowed as he watched her. He knew how hard it must be for her to send David back to the war. But Ka
te Gardner never hesitated. Chin up, she walked with a firm stride back into the house and began rattling the pots and pans.
While David washed and ate in silence, Jeff dropped his bundle and pitched into the Gardner chores. He finished milking the cow and toted the filled pails to the springhouse. He turned the cow out and cleaned her stall with a pitchfork, scattering fresh straw on the hard, dirt floor.
Half an hour later he and David were again on the road. This time there was little talk between them.
6
March
A week later they broke camp and began the long battle march from Fort Leavenworth to Springfield, Missouri.
The bugles blew at three o’clock in the morning. Jeff didn’t hear them but when the orderly sergeant shook him, he got right up, washed his eyes in cold water, and began to pack.
Tents were pulled down and rolled up and, with mess boxes and camp kettles, packed into the baggage wagons. Mules were fed and harnessed, horses saddled, cannon and ammunition trucks backed into line. Soldiers hurried to the creek, filling their canteens with fresh water.
“Fall in!” barked Millholland, the sergeant, pointing with his arm to indicate the right of the line. Shortest man in his squad, Jeff went automatically to the left end of the line. He had learned long ago that the tall men always took their places on the right and the short ones on the left, so it was easier for each to find his place.
“Count off! Remember your numbers! Don’t swap places!”
The night was black and still. A cloud bank was rising in the west and when fiery threads of lightning veined suddenly across it, Jeff saw them reflect dimly off the cannon, some of the guns showing black, others brassy bright. Behind him, the artillery gun drivers had their teams hitched and were standing patiently at attention, ready to mount at the word. Jeff felt a flush of excitement. Unlike the bivouac in the Missouri river bottoms, this was the real thing.
At Grand River the Kansas Volunteers were to join General Nathaniel Lyon. Their combined force of a little more than five thousand men was the only Federal command between Rolla and the new state of Kansas, representing the forlorn hopes of all the Union people in that vast area.
