Bill asked the Berry boys if they wanted to go by their old place but neither one did. “Doesn’t feel to me like we ever even lived there,” Butch said. Him neither, Ike said.
Just after sunset they came out of the woods and onto a narrow but well-defined lane. The gathering twilight rendered their faces indistinct under their hatbrims. The soft air was plaintive with the calls of mourning doves. Less than a hundred yards to northward was the boundary fence of Arthur Baker’s farm. The outbuildings already dark but for a weak light at the open barn door. The main house showed bright yellow windows.
“Place does look peaceful and prosperous, don’t it?” Ike Berry said. He spat.
They had reviewed their plan once more as the sun lowered, and now Bill Anderson sat his horse and stared off at the Baker house for a long moment before turning to the others and saying, “Let’s do it.”
Arthur Baker had never met either of the Berry boys, so they’d flipped a coin to decide which of them would go to his door, and Ike won. He followed the lane along the fence to the open gate of the Baker place and then turned onto the wagon path to the house. He dismounted at the porch steps and went up to the front door and worked the iron knocker. A Negro manservant came to the door and eyed him narrowly by the light of an oil lamp in hand. Before Butch could ask for Arthur Baker, the man himself appeared, wiping his chin with a napkin and saying, “Who is it, Grover?”
Ike Berry introduced himself as Alston Berryman and claimed to be assistant to a wagontrain boss. He said they had a train from Independence due to arrive at the Baker store at Roan Creek Crossing within the hour.
“Some of the families who signed on at the last minute are in want of essentials,” Ike said. He patted his shirt pocket and said, “I got a list right here. You can make yourself a nice dollar, Mr. Baker, if you can provision us this evening. Better for my boss too, since it’ll be quicker to supply them at your store tonight than at Council Grove tomorrow. That Council Grove station’s always so damn busy it takes near half the day to get your goods and move on.”
“Mind your language, young sir,” Arthur Baker said. “My wife is within.”
Such exigencies of the wagontrain trade were familiar to store owners all along the Santa Fe, and as men of business they knew that profit did sometimes present itself at an awkward hour. Baker said he would be ready to go in a few minutes and left Ike standing on the porch in wait.
A farmhand brought a pair of saddled horses around to the front of the house. Now Baker returned with a husky young man whom he introduced as his brother-in-law George. The boy’s mouth had a peculiar cast and he stared at Ike with a curious aspect, and Ike figured him for the softbrain Segur son he had heard about. Baker stood in the door with his hat in hand and called into the house: “We’re away, dearest.”
A woman with thick auburn hair bunched and ribboned at the back of her neck came hurrying from the other room, holding her skirts hiked slightly before her. She went to Baker and hugged herself to him. Ike Berry was struck by her prettiness. Over Baker’s shoulder her gaze fell on him for a moment where he stood at the bottom of the porch steps. But her eyes were as unintelligible to him as a foreign language and he had no notion what she might have thought of him, if anything at all, before she cut her look away.
Baker kissed her on the cheek and assured her he would be gone but briefly. The three men mounted up and hupped their horses out to the gate and turned to the south. Ike Berry looked back at the house and saw the woman still standing in the brightly lighted doorway and looking after them. He felt a moment’s touch of pity—and then the sentiment was fled and he did not look back again.
They trotted their mounts down the moonbright lane, the night now fully risen around them. Ike and Baker rode abreast, the softbrain slightly behind. Fireflies wavered on a gentle nightwind and flared greenly yellow against the blackness of the flanking brush. Baker breathed deeply and said, “It’s a lovely evening, don’t you agree, Mr. Berryman?” Ike Berry allowed that it was. The softbrain was humming a tune unheard before by anyone else in the world.
The lane from Baker’s house ended at his store on the Santa Fe, a short mile from the house and a stone’s throw east of Roan Creek. When they got there, the trail showed naught but moonlit emptiness in both directions. To the south, the country was scrub prairie and the only trees were thick and deeply shadowed growths of willows along the creek.
“Your train looks to be farther behind than you figured, Mr. Berryman,” Baker said, sitting his horse and peering down the eastern stretch of road. The softbrain leaned forward in the saddle and whispered into the ear of his sagging horse and giggled softly as if sharing with the animal a special joke.
“They’ll be along directly,” Ike said. He dismounted and hitched his horse and took a piece of paper from his pocket. “We can start pulling together some of these necessaries while we wait on them.”
Baker and the softbrain stepped down from their saddles and up onto the porch and Baker worked his key on the lock and they all three went inside. The storekeeper lighted four lamps at various points in the store for ample illumination. The place was full of an assortment of smells but the dominant odors were of coal oil and new leather and freshly sawn lumber. The walls held shelves of canned goods and were hung with harnesses and wagon parts and a variety of farm implements. There were bins and kegs and sacks of every sort of supply necessary to long-distance wagon travelers. The main counter was set toward the rear of the store and faced the front door. Behind this counter were still more shelves of goods as well as the canted door to the cellar where the whiskey barrels were stored.
Baker went behind the counter and hung up his coat and tied an apron around his waist. “All right, then,” he said, fitting a pair of spectacles to his face, “let’s see that list.”
Ike Berry handed it over and the storekeeper studied it a moment and then called out, “Three twenty-pound sacks of sugar.” The soft-brain hastened to that part of the store where the sugar was kept and piled three sacks one atop the other and then hefted the stack back to the front of the store as easily as if it were of feather pillows and set it on the counter.
“Two twenty-pound…” Baker began, and then fell mute at the sound of hooffalls that drew up in front of the store. It sounded to be more than one rider but none reined up before the open door. The chinking of bridle rings carried into the store and a horse blew hard. The small front window showed no one.
Baker took off his eyeglasses and Ike Berry knew he was reckoning where the riders had come from. The road and the open country around them had lain deserted but minutes before. Only someone who’d been hidden in the trees nearby could have arrived at the store so soon after they themselves entered.
“Probably some of the fellas from the wagon train,” Ike Berry said. But he was a bad liar and Baker’s eyes cut to the door and his hands went down behind the counter.
Bootfalls thumped on the porch and Ike turned to see the Anderson brothers come through the door with revolvers in their hands. He flung himself against the wall and both Andersons fired at the same time and Arthur Baker yelped and the shotgun he’d started to bring up from under the counter discharged like a thunderclap before the barrel even cleared the countertop and the load blew through the counter’s front panel and gouged the floor planks and some of the shot ricocheted and sang off a row of spades hung on the wall. Baker ducked below the countertop and Jim Anderson shot at the softbrain and missed as the boy dove behind the counter too. For a moment no one moved. Then the cellar door creaked and the Andersons rushed forward as the door slammed shut and they heard the barlatch within slide home.
They went behind the counter and saw that the door was shaped of thick heavy planking with gaps of perhaps a half-inch between planks. They exchanged looks and shrugs and then Jim Anderson bent and put his eye to one of the gaps. The cellar was in full darkness but he could hear a low whimpering and a soft pained grunting. He straightened up an instant before the shotgu
n blasted and its load slammed against the door and several pellets raised splinters as they passed between the planks and peppered the ceiling.
Jim fell back against the counter, mouth ajar. Ike Berry laughed and said, “Boy, you damn near got some more holes in your face.”
“What the hell’s going on?” Butch Berry said, peering in at the door. He was keeping watch for interlopers and had already put his own saddle on Baker’s good roan mare.
“Let’s take off the damn hinges,” Ike Berry said.
“No, wait,” Bill Anderson said. He looked around him and holstered his Colt. “Let’s weight it down.”
Hefting in concert they set several crates of heavy tools and a large anvil atop the slanted door. No two men pushing together from the awkward angle below could now have raised the door.
Then they doused the store with coal oil. Soaked all of the floor and splashed all the shelves and walls. Drenched everything of cloth. The smell was smothering. They stood just outside the front door and Butch Berry broke a lucifer off a match block and struck the match alight and put it to the remaining matches and the bunch of them burst into flame. But before he could toss the torch inside, Bill Anderson caught his hand.
“It was our daddy the man killed,” Bill said. He carefully took the incendiary from Butch and then looked at Jim and his brother nodded and Bill lobbed it through the door.
Fire sprang from the floor and streaked to all corners and ran up the walls to the rafters. In less than a minute the interior of the store was infernal. Flames billowed from the door and drove them off the porch. They mounted up and set themselves to watch every side of the building in case the two within might yet escape by some hidden exit. But there was no hidden exit and in quick order the outer walls were sheeted in fire, the roof ablaze, flames flailing and leaning in the wind, the surrounding night illuminated by a quivering jaundiced dreamlight shot through with black shadows. The front window burst with the heat and they drew back still farther to calm their horses and avoid being blistered. Now came several muted thumps in succession and they knew the fire had found the whiskey stores. Flaring embers went streaking on updrafts into the black nightsky. Twenty yards from the house and through the cacophony of crackling wood and breaking glass and popping tins they faintly heard the screams of the pair trapped in the cellar.
“He shouldn’t have brought the softbrain,” Bill Anderson said loudly to be heard above the sparking crash of roof timbers. In the wavering firelight, each man looked to the others both horrified and exultant.
From the cellar of the burning store came a muffled report. No sounds now but the rendings and mastications of the fire.
“Shotgun,” Bill Anderson said. “Heat must’ve fired it. They’re done for sure—let’s go.” He touched his heels to Edgar Allan and they galloped away.
None of them would ever know that Arthur Baker’s charred bones would be found in the ashes with the shotgun muzzle between his teeth and his blackened skull absent its rear portion. Or that the hardmuscled halfwit in a frenzy of terrified digging with bare hands did manage at the last to burrow through the cellar wall and out of the fire raining upon him. Without witness save the indifferent moon and stars he crawled through the grass, a smoldering half-cooked effigy of humanity, crawled all the way to the creek and there lowered into the shallow water in effort of easing the unreckonable pain which he could not even give proper cry for the seared ruin of his voicebox. Those who found him at daybreak and raised his yet living remains from the water could not bear to look on him. He was nearly two days more in dying, the cords sometimes standing on his neck but his screams no more than raspy hisses to his last breath. A hapless child of God, not the first to perish horribly in this region of the republic in these crimson years of malice, and far from the last.
II
The Company
1862
FLIGHT
They rode hard under the high moon and met no other travelers on the road but twice caught sight of wagon train campfires. Night-guards sat their horses near the road in the ghostly moonlight and watched them go by. They crossed the Marais des Cygnes in gray dawnlight and at daybreak they left the Santa Fe in favor of downcountry traces. They fed on jerky as they went, at times halted to take water at the creeks they crossed and let the horses recruit themselves.
That afternoon they came on a medicine man driving his wagon in desultory route over the countryside to stop at isolate farms and hawk his various elixirs. The huckster allowed that hard experience with towns had taught him the wisdom of plying his trade among folk of less suspicious nature. The bright pink splotches on his face and the backs of his hands bespoke recent burns, and portions of his raw face were yet pitted blackly. None of them had seen a man tarred and feathered but they’d heard stories, and they were curious about particulars such as how much it hurt and how long it had taken to pluck and peel himself clean, but basic politeness kept them from asking. In the course of their exchange, they discovered that the fellow had whiskey in his stores and they bought a jug.
They rode on. Under a cloudless blue sky they once more traversed a lake of sunflowers and then debouched onto a prairie of green and yellow grasses leaning in a soft wind. Their shadows drew up from behind and passed under their horses and lengthened before them as the sun lowered at their backs to enflame the western sky. Each man followed his own shade into the rising darkness. Just before nightfall they put down in a hickory grove. They made a fire and supped on the last of their jerked meat and passed around the whiskey jug.
At first light they were moving again, in no hurry now and walking their horses as often as not. Midmorning they struck the Dragoon and followed it east to a shallow ford above its juncture with the Marais, and in the early afternoon they arrived at Pomona hamlet. In the town’s sole cafe they made short work of platters of beefsteak and fried potatoes, then went to the general store and bought a supply of coffee and beans and jerky. They camped that evening in country owning no distinction but grass and lying flat to every point of the compass and cast pale blue in the light of the gibbous moon. A wind rose out of the south and their fire twirled and lunged in the vagrant gusts and loosed chains of sparks to vanish in the darkness. A distant coyote raised a high lonely cry to be echoed by another from a far corner of the night. The tethered horses nickered and stamped nervously and the men called soothing words to them. Butch Berry pulled up a handful of grass and went to his new mare and fed her from his palm and told her there was nothing to be spooked about. He’d named her Jay and the others had smiled that he hadn’t dared to give her but a portion of Josephine’s name.
They bore northeast all the next day under a sky endless and empty but for the ferocious sun, the air unstirring, and settled for the night beside a creek in Johnson County, within sight of the Santa Fe and of a wagoncamp’s firelights a half-mile downstream. After supper they lay back and studied the waning moon and spangled sky and Butch Berry well endured the others’ grinning remarks about the possibility that some poor fool on one of those stars might be sitting at his own campfire and looking up at the gleam of earth and wondering if some sorry specimen like himself was sitting here and pining for a sweetheart who didn’t much pine for him.
A STREET AFFRAY
Noon of the next day saw them trotting into Olathe, a prosperous town of some eight hundred souls. Ike Berry had persuaded the others that they would long rue the day if they neglected this opportunity to take dinner at Coogan’s Restaurant, reputed to serve the best fried chicken in Kansas. They trotted their mounts down the main street through a boisterous traffic of wagons and horsemen and found the eatery on a street off the courthouse square. They hitched their horses at the sidewalk post and went inside.
The room was loud with talk and the clatter of dishware, the air hot and rich with savory aromas. They took a table near the back wall but with a clear view of the front of the room. A half-hour later the table was covered with platters of chicken bones amid congealing white gravy and
remnants of roast potatoes and biscuits. They paid the bill and were contentedly at work with toothpicks as they exited to the sidewalk.
Six men stood beside the horses and one had unhitched Ike Berry’s gray and held it by the reins. One brandished a two-barrel shotgun and the others except one had pistols in hand. They were all young except the one holding no firearm, and they were all looking at the Andersons and Berrys and none of them smiling.
“That’s him right there, Sheriff,” one of them said to the older man. Red hair showed under his hatband and his face was rife with raw sores and he was pointing at Ike Berry. “That’s the one rode in on the gray.”
“This your horse, son?” the sheriff asked Ike. He wore heavy drooping mustaches and there was about him an air of tiredness.
“Surely is,” Ike Berry said. He spat away his toothpick and looked narrowly at the young man holding the horse by the reins. “You catch this fella trying to steal him?”
“I asked Junior to hold him till Mr. Porter has a look at him,” the sheriff said. “I sent a man to fetch him from the Jefferson Hotel. Won’t take but a minute to settle this.”
“Settle what?” Bill Anderson said. “Who’s Porter?” A small audience of townfolk was assembling to both sides of them on the sidewalk.
“Harrison Porter,” the sheriff said. “Owns a ranch north of town.” He nodded at the redhead deputy. “Cyrus used to wrangle for him and was out there when a bunch of horses got stole last year. One of them was a gray with a white stocking just like this one here. It was Mr. Porter’s favorite pony and Cyrus is sure this is the one.”
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