Wildwood Boys

by James Carlos Blake

  “Hey Captain, I already said, I ain’t no guerrilla.”

  “Liar!” Hart said. “God abhors a liar and so do I. I knew you for a bushwhacker the minute I laid eyes on you.”

  A sudden tightness in his belly, a furious need to piss. “I swear to you I’m not,” he said.

  “You swear,” Hart said sardonically. “You’ll die with the lie on your lips, damn your soul. Suck your last breath, bushwhacker.”

  He gaped into the black pistolmouth and raised his hands as if he would fend the bullet.

  The Colt flinched. “Bang!”

  He staggered backward, so fully expecting to be shot that for an instant he was sure he had been.

  Hart was swaying in the saddle with laughter. He waved the Colt over his head and horsemen materialized from the shadowed woods and hupped their mounts forward at a lope, a dozen of them, some in Federal blue and the others wearing the unmistakable guerrilla shirt, all of them laughing, and he saw that among them were his brother and the Berry boys.

  Jim Anderson swung down off his mount and slapped him on the shoulder, grinning under his thick mustache. He raised a hand toward Hart and said, “Well Billy, I guess you’ve met Captain Quantrill.”

  A SURGERY

  The Yankee uniforms had come from prisoners taken two weeks ago at Independence. They’d proved a fine means for uncovering false southern sympathizers among the citizenry. Some of the local farmers who professed to be secessionist would gladden at the sight of bluejackets and immediately proffer food and information. The bushwhackers delighted in the look on a man’s face in the moment he realized he was confessing his perfidy to the very men he would betray. Minutes later the traitor would be hanging from a tree branch and done forever with duplicity.

  Bill learned these things as they rode to the Vaughn place. His brother introduced him to Jimmy Vaughn, brother to Annette and Hazel, and Bill took a fast liking to him. The dogs trotted close by Edgar Allan, familiar with most of these men from past acquaintance but still growling nervously whenever the distance narrowed between them and Quantrill’s fearsome horse. Bill himself was still chagrined over the joke Quantrill played on him at the clearing. He’d been trying not to let it show, but his brother had detected his pique and whispered to him not to be blackassed, that these men were always pulling tricks on each other, and anybody who chafed too much at being the butt of a joke today would surely be the butt of another one tomorrow.

  Among the men of this small party was seventeen-year-old Tyler Burdette, whose elbow had been shattered by a Fed rifle ball during a skirmish ten days ago. His comrades had done what they could for the wound, but it was a bad one and had worsened in the following days. The nearest doctor to them was in Westport, so Quantrill had set out to take the boy there, leaving the company under George Todd’s command. The boy’s elbow was now black and bloated bigger than a knee. It smelled of rot and Burdette was afire with fever and every man knew there was nothing for it but amputation. Quantrill had decided on the Vaughn place for doing it. They had been feeding the boy on whiskey all morning and he was now stupendously drunk. He rode with his head lolling, softly singing “Barbara Allen.”

  Finley and Black Josh greeted them with backslaps and japes. They helped to ease Burdette off his horse but the whiskey had made rubber of the boy’s legs and they had to carry him into the stable. Quantrill asked after the girls and Black Josh said they had not yet come back from Kansas City and likely wouldn’t until late afternoon.

  Finley set an iron poker in the fire and bellowed up the heat. Burdette still singing in a slur as they laid him on the floor and placed a flat oak slab under his arm and stripped the wound of its filthy bandage. Black Josh produced a broadax sharpened to a shining edge. Quantrill was prepared to do the job himself, but Dave Pool—a big-shouldered man whose mouth was wholly obscured in the wild black growth of his beard and who’d been a hewer for a time—said he was better practiced for the task, and Quantrill deferred to him.

  As Pool rolled up his sleeves he carefully examined Burdette’s arm and agreed with Quantrill that the infection had spread so much that no portion of the limb could be saved. The detachment would have to be made as near to the shoulder as possible. When Finley said the iron was ready, a beefy redhaired man named Coleman Younger, cleanshaved but for chinwhiskers, tightened his grip on the doomed arm stretched across the oak slab. Butch Berry held fast to Tyler’s head, Jimmy Vaughn sat his full weight on the boy’s legs, and a moonfaced man named Will Haller held down his good arm. Pool set his feet and spat into his palms and hefted the ax amid the smells of stock droppings and mansweat and Burdette’s necrotic wound, amid the sounds of Tyler’s drunken singing and horse snortings and the huff of the firebellows where Finley stood watching and ready with a rag-wrapped grip on the poker.

  The axhead described a smooth overhead arc and whunked into the board and Tyler Burdette screamed as his arm came off in Cole Younger’s hands. Quick bright blood snaked from the sudden stump and Finley swooped with the blazing poker and slapped it to the wound with a great smoking hiss that reeked of searing flesh and sealed off the arteries. Burdette passed out in mid-shriek.

  They coated the raw stump with grease and carefully bandaged it and then several men carried Burdette off to the house to put him in an upstairs bedroom. Quantrill clapped Pool on the back for a job well done. Cole Younger combed his chinwhiskers with his fingers, said it damn sure was a good job. He said he’d once known a man to amputate a friend’s mangled arm with an ax, but he was so nervous about doing it that for every drink he gave his friend to get him ready he took a drink himself. “Man got so drunk,” Younger said, “that when he finally went to chop the arm off he chopped off a good part of the shoulder too. His friend just laid there cussing him for the half-minute it took him to bleed to death. It wasn’t the handiest show of doctorfying I ever saw.”

  He passed the severed arm to Black Josh and told him to get rid of it. Joshua said he’d bury it in the garden. “It help the flowers grow pretty on its own grave,” he said.

  TALES OF INDEPENDENCE

  The guerrillas built cookfires behind the stable, killed and dressed a dozen chickens and roasted them on spits, baked yams in a covered pit of coals. Bill and Jim Anderson and the Berry boys were joined by Jimmy Vaughn as they sat to their dinner in the shade of a tree. Jim and the Berrys were avid to tell Bill of their adventures with the bushwhackers these past weeks.

  They’d gone with Todd and Gregg to join Quantrill near Independence where a Confederate cavalry company had enlisted the guerrillas’ help to assault the Federals occupying the town. The main Yankee camp was just outside the town, but the Fed headquarters was in a bank building on the main square and Quantrill’s company was assigned to take it.

  “We hit the town before sunup,” Butch Berry said. “Went galloping down the street shooting at everydamnthing and howling to raise hell.”

  “This whitehair bucko is a God-gifted rebel yeller, I mean to tell you,” Jimmy Vaughn said to Bill, pointing his thumb at Ike. “I was riding next to him and his yells almost made me dirty my pants. I thought some wild Indian had snuck up beside me.”

  Ike Berry grinned proudly. “Raised some neck hairs, didn’t I? Gregg says there ain’t a Yankee been born who can do a right rebel yell. Says it has to raise from a southern soul.”

  The Yankees in the bank knew they were trapped, but the building was a solid fortress and for a time they made a fight of it.

  “We must of fired a thousand rounds into that damn bank,” Ike said. “The powdersmoke in the streets was thick as fog. The Yanks were on the second floor and shooting with muzzleloaders. They could only get off about one round for every dozen of ours, and they couldn’t take any aim at all, we were pouring so much fire at them. But they were tucked in that building like a turtle in its shell and all we were doing was tapping on it.”

  Quantrill got frustrated by the waste of ammunition, by the need to dismount and take cover. “He doesn’t like it w
hen we have to get off the horses,” Jimmy Vaughn said. “The captain’s way is to fall on the enemy fast and hard and then make away into the wildwood just as quick.”

  Quantrill finally called out to the Fed commander to surrender or he’d burn the building and every man in it. “The Yanks waved a white flag from a window and hollered out that they didn’t want to burn but they didn’t want to surrender to us either,” Ike said. “Quantrill looked around at us like he couldn’t believe his ears. So he hollers up at the Fed, ‘Well then, I guess all that’s left is we surrender to you? How would that be?’”

  The Yanks were willing to surrender, Jimmy Vaughn explained, but only to an officer of the regular army. They were afraid Quantrill would shoot them if they gave up to him. Back in spring the Feds had declared a no-quarter war and had been executing most of the guerrillas who fell into their hands, so they naturally expected Quantrill to do to them in kind.

  “Would he have killed them?” Bill said.

  Jimmy Vaughn shrugged. “Sometimes he does and sometimes he doesn’t. When his blood’s up he’ll quick enough fly the black flag, but sometimes he takes prisoners to try to trade for some of our boys the Feds are holding.”

  On this occasion Quantrill wasn’t of a mind to argue terms of surrender with a bunch of trapped Yankees. He told them they had two minutes to come out with their hands high or he’d put torches to the place. Then a Confederate colonel named Thompson showed up and promised the Yanks they wouldn’t be shot, so they gave up to him and were marched off to a holding pen.

  Not so lucky was the Yankee officer who’d tried to hide in a hotel down the street. Butch Berry and Jimmy Vaughn were crossing to the hotel when they heard somebody yell “Look out below!” and a body landed two feet in front of them. “It was a damned Federal captain,” Butch said. “Some of the boys were searching the place to see what they might find worth taking and they found him. His throat been cut and both his ears gone and the most part of his belly was missing.

  “The men who’d flung him from the upstairs window were looking down and laughing and drinking from whiskey jugs. A graybeard named Larkin Skaggs—the company elder—was at their center. He bellowed, ‘And the great Jehovah shall maketh it to rain dead Federals on the land!’” The men around him laughed like Jehovah Himself had told a joke.

  “Skaggs is one more of them old-time preachers so crazy for blood nowadays,” Jimmy Vaughn said. “He goes back to the first troubles in Kansas. Fought with a gang of ruffians under Atchison and claims he personally cut the throat of one of John Brown’s nephews. He’s got a big German carbine fires a ball the size of a lemon. What he does, he cuts a bunch of deep crosses into every ball. Says he does it to convey the touch of Jesus, but what those cuts do is make the ball bust apart like a little bomb when it hits. He calls that old piece Armageddon and the damage it’ll do a man is something to see.”

  “That’s so,” Butch Berry said. “I saw the hole in that Yank’s belly.”

  The Confederates counted three dozen Yankee dead and took more than one hundred and fifty prisoners, half of them wounded. They were all morning at burning and looting, and the guerrillas joined them at it. They put the torch to buildings belonging to Unionists but spared those owned by secessionist folk. The regulars rustled every good horse in town and loaded a train of twenty wagons with Federal weapons and quartermaster stores. The rest of the booty—furniture, tools, tack, dry goods, all the wagons and teams the army didn’t take—went to Quantrill as reward for his help. Just before the Confederates departed, Colonel Thompson paroled the captured Feds.

  The only horse none of the Confederates laid claim to was a meantempered yellow-blazed roan corraled by itself and pacing around with its ears laid back, snapping at any of the rebs who got too close to the rails. A Yankee corporal who’d served as the company wrangler told his captors he’d found the horse tied to the corral one morning about two weeks ago and had no idea who’d left it there, but it was soon clear enough why its owner got rid of it. The corporal boasted of being the best broncbuster in the regiment but this horse threw him every time—and every time tried to stomp him as he scrabbled out of the corral. Then the animal wouldn’t even let him mount up. It would kick at him and snap at him and one time bit him so bad on the shoulder he couldn’t raise his arm for days after. He’d long since quit trying to break it and said he dearly hoped somebody would steal it or shoot it and he didn’t care which.

  The rebs at the corral were daring each other to try to ride the beast when Quantrill showed up. “The minute that horse saw him, its ears perked and it wouldn’t look at nobody else,” Jim Anderson said. Quantrill climbed into the corral and went up to the animal and stroked its muzzle. He whispered something in its ear and blew soft on its nose and the horse rubbed its yellow blaze against his chest like a cat.

  “Not a man there could believe it,” Jim Anderson said. “It was like that damned thing had been waiting for Quantrill to show up and claim it for his own.”

  “I believe you know the horse your brother’s talking about,” Jimmy Vaughn said, grinning at Bill.

  “That I do,” Bill said. “One of the dogs made its acquaintance and got the bite marks to prove it.”

  The guerrillas bore their plunder from Independence to the farm of a supporter named Ingraham. Some of the booty would go to guerrilla kinfolk or to families who regularly helped the bushwhackers, but most would be sold to agents of various Kansas City and Saint Louis businessmen whose only interest was in profits and never mind which side in the war provided them on a given day.

  Some days later a Confederate colonel arrived at Ingraham’s and with the authority of the Richmond government officially mustered Quantrill’s company into rebel service as partisan rangers. The men held an election of officers and Quantrill was chosen as captain, Will Haller as first lieutenant, George Todd and W. J. Gregg as second lieutenants.

  “Todd wanted to be first lieutenant but lost it by two votes,” Jimmy Vaughn said. He looked around to be sure they were not being overheard. “George was mad enough to spit bullets. There’s never been love lost between him and Haller. He calls Haller punkinhead. Haller hates him but he’s scared of him. I think some who voted for Haller thought it’s what Quantrill wanted because Will’s been with him the longest. Thing is, Quantrill and Haller ain’t all that close, and I do believe the captain himself would’ve preferred Todd for first lieutenant. Todd thought so too, and he called for another vote, but Quantrill said no. He said if they took a new vote every time somebody didn’t like the outcome of the last one there’d be no end to it.”

  Jimmy Vaughn took another quick glance around. “Truth to tell, I don’t believe George has got over it. He’s real unhappy the captain didn’t back him for a new vote. And the looks he keeps giving Haller, I’d have to say the results of the election might not be all that final, not just yet.”

  OF TRUTH AND QUANTRILL

  W. J. Gregg and his scouting party of six arrived in midafternoon. He and Quantrill moved off toward the woods to talk while the scouts fed on what chicken and yams remained on the fires. Jim Anderson and the Berrys introduced Bill to each of the new arrivals. The scouts had brought newspapers with them and jugs of busthead whiskey and it was no contest which commodity was in greater demand by their fellows.

  After a time Bill went to the vegetable garden and pulled several large carrots and took them to the stable to feed to Edgar Allan, whom he had not properly tended since the morning’s adventures. Cole Younger’s gray mare and several of the Vaughn horses were installed there too, all of them made nervous by Quantrill’s horse, even though it was standing quietly in a barred stall and paying heed to none of them.

  Charley’s stall was opposite Edgar Allan’s, and Bill stood with his back to the big roan as he fed the carrots to the black. But the Charley horse caught scent of them and began snorting and stamping, bobbing his big head. His sudden agitation unnerved the other horses, and they whickered and stepped about in their sta
lls. Edgar Allan rolled his eyes and bolted the last of the carrots as if fearful the roan might break free of its stall and come lunging for them.

  Bill patted the black and spoke soothingly to him, told him to pay no attention to the creature across the way. “You’re just smelling the meanness off that thing,” he said softly. “Meanness and craziness. But you now—you’re a noble genius is what you are. Why, I bet if you could hold a pen you’d write a poem so grand it would break the heart of every mare to hear it read. I bet you could do arithmetic. That crazy thing behind me can’t tell you two letters of the alphabet is how damn dumb it is. But I’ll bet if you—”

  “You shouldn’t fault Charley so freely, William T. You might hurt his feelings.”

  Bill turned to see Quantrill leaning on Charley’s stall, arms crossed, hat pushed back on his head. He had shed the Federal jacket and wore a guerrilla shirt and a black slouch hat. A Navy was holstered on each hip, another under his arm, a fourth tucked in his belt. “You know how to talk to a horse, though,” he said. “Horse likes a low voice. It’s what makes him a naturalborn guerrilla. You have to talk low in the bush.”

  “You’re some quiet yourself with them cat feet,” Bill said. “Can’t but wonder if you’re part Indian—no offense.”

  “Wouldn’t bother me a bit if I were,” Quantrill said. His eyes were half-closed, making him look sleepy, but Bill Anderson knew the look was deceptive. The man’s eyes missed nothing. “I lived with Indians for a time. An Indian saved my life once.”

  “I heard that story,” Bill said. “About your big brother being murdered by jayhawks and the Indian saving you and you joining the Montgomery men and one by one killing all of them who’d killed your brother.”

  Quantrill smiled.

  “I’ve always wondered is it true.”

  The smile faded. “That’s a brave thing to ask, William T.”