Wildwood Boys

by James Carlos Blake

  There was laughter all around. Then they heard the smothered giggling at the door and Bill rushed to it and jerked it open and the girls shrieked and fled like spooked birds, still cackling over Cole’s story.

  But Cole had some sad news too. After Todd drove him out of the company, Will Haller had joined with a band of guerrillas up in Gentry County, then shortly afterward was wounded and captured by Federals. They stood him against a barn wall and shot him dead, then hanged his noseless and earless remains from a tree alongside a main-traveled road as a warning to all other bushwhackers in northwest Missouri.

  “It’s a mean war, boys,” Cole Younger said, “and it’ll get meaner yet, you mark me.”

  YEAGER’S RAID

  The days warmed. The early morning hills were hung with blue mist. The rains came briefly every afternoon and the air smelled of the newly ripening earth. The first grasses broke ground. Buds sprouted, fattened, opened to leafery. Bloodroot unfurled its white flower in the meadows and oozed its deadly sap….

  They were now going to the woods every day to shoot their pistols. They worked their horses hard, the animals as high-strung as their riders with winter’s pent energy. They sometimes recounted to each other the raid on Olathe, remembering the exhilarations of that night, and they saw in each other’s faces an eagerness for more.

  Finley brought rumors from town that Quantrill and the company were on their way back from Arkansas, traveling in small bands, that some had already arrived and were encamped in various regions of Jackson and Lafayette Counties. But still no word from Quantrill himself.

  They watched the greening world around them and waited. As she hugged to Bill in the night, Josephine could feel his readiness to go.

  One morning at breakfast they heard Josh shout, “Riders coming!” They rushed to the window to see a band of horsemen loping out of the woods, nine of them, every man wearing a slouch hat and bush shirt and hung with various revolvers and knives.

  They ran out to greet them like children set free of the schoolhouse. At the head of the column, Dick Yeager grinned broadly through his muleskinner mustache. “We’re bound for Kansas,” he said. “You boys care to come?”

  “Quantrill’s making a Kansas raid?” Bill said.

  “This got nothing to do with him,” Yeager said, “and I ain’t got time to jabber. You coming or not?”

  They rode through the forest in a column of twos, a boy named Buster Parr far ahead on point. Word had come to Yeager that the jayhawkers who’d stolen his family’s wagons and teams had sold them all to a stationmaster in Diamond Springs, a man named Howell, who’d known Dick’s father and surely recognized the property as belonging to him.

  “He ought have refused to buy Daddy’s goods from thieves who killed my brother and nearly did for Daddy too,” Yeager said. “I guess he couldn’t pass up a jayhawker bargain price. Now he’ll know the real price of it.”

  When Yeager told them he was going to Diamond Springs, the Andersons looked at each other and knew they were thinking the same thing. “There’s a ranch a small ways from there,” Bill told Yeager. “Belongs to a man named Segur. We’d surely like to pay him a quick visit. Be worth your while too—he’s got some fine horses.”

  “Well then, we’ll just swing by there,” Yeager said. “You can give the man your regards and maybe he’ll see fit to let us have a horse or two as a gesture of good fellowship.” They all grinned.

  They made camp that night near the border and within sight of the Santa Fe. Before dawn Yeager began sending the men into Kansas in twos and threes, spacing them at least a half-hour apart so they would not attract undue attention. They were to rendezvous on Neosho Creek, in the woods at the outskirt of Council Grove.

  Three afternoons later the band had come together again. Their scout reported no sign of Federals in the vicinity, and the locals seemed completely unaware of the guerrillas’ proximity. But Yeager had a torturous toothache. The molar had been bothering him off and on for months, and then two days ago it had flared up again and thereafter steadily worsened. By the time he arrived at the meeting place, his jaw was so swollen it looked like he had a chaw in his cheek, and his eyes were cherried with pain. There was nothing for it but to see a dentist, and he knew one in Council Grove.

  The sun was halfway down a western sky reefed with red clouds when the bushwhackers reined up at the edge of town. “If we ain’t back out in a half-hour,” Yeager said to Lionel Ward, “ride in there and kill every manjack you see and burn the place to the last stick.”

  Bill Anderson rode in with him. The band had been spotted by now and word of their presence had spread. Half the town was on the sidewalks and watching the pair of them in an eerie silence broken only by their horses’ steady hooffalls. Yeager reined up in front of a door bearing the words, J.H. BRADFORD, D.D., and a painting of a large white molar directly below them.

  The doctor had seen them through the window and now came to the door and said, “Dick Yeager! I thought it was you!” He had serviced Yeager teeth before, in the days of the family’s wagon train business when Dick and his brother and daddy had often came through Council Grove.

  “Got a tooth needs rooting out, Doc,” Yeager said. He walked in and sat in the patient’s chair. Bill took a seat by the window so he could keep an eye on things outside.

  Dr. Bradford remained standing at the open door. He looked from Yeager to the townsmen gathered across the street and watching his office, then back at Yeager. “If I do it, Dick, will you spare the town?”

  Yeager arched an eyebrow.

  “Oh, I’ll pull it anyway,” the dentist said. “I’m not brave enough to say no. But I’d take it as a professional courtesy if you’d spare the town in exchange for my service.”

  Yeager turned to Bill Anderson. “You ever been asked for a professional courtesy?”

  Bill smiled and shook his head.

  The grin Yeager showed the dentist was lopsided for the swollen state of his jaw. “Let’s get to it,” he said.

  Fifteen minutes later, they were mounted up again and headed back down the street, Yeager’s jaw now minus a tooth and still swollen, but his pain sweetly blunted by the cherry-flavored opiate solution Dr. Bradford had provided in a small bottle. As they trotted past the gawking townsfolk, Yeager said loudly, “You sons of bitches ought to make that man your mayor for saving your sorry asses.”

  The band rode away to eastward until they were beyond sight of town, then turned downcountry into the high grass and rode for more than a mile before again navigating west and passing well below Council Grove.

  Splashings and suckings of hooves in a night black as a grave, chill with drizzling rain, smelling of mud. The guerrillas reined up and studied the lightless form of the Diamond Springs station. Their sloping hatbrims ran with rainwater. Whickerings came from the corral behind the station and there was an agitation of stamping and darting as the horses there caught the scent of the guerrillas’ mounts. Some of the bushwhackers rode around to the rear of the stationhouse as Dick Yeager and the Anderson brothers dismounted and went to the front door and Yeager began a steady hammering on it with the heel of his fist.

  Finally the front window went bright with lamplight and a man’s face, hair disheveled, showed itself behind the glass, eyes asquint, trying to make out the visitors. “Who’s there?” he called.

  “Federal cavalry bound for Leavenworth,” Bill Anderson said loudly. “Sorry to raise you from your bed, mister, but one of our mounts has taken lame and we need to buy a horse from you right now. Open up.”

  The face left the window and they heard the scraping of the doorbolt being removed from its holders. The door opened and the man Yeager had come seeking stood there with his nightshirt half tucked into his pants and his suspenders dangling off his hips. He raised the lantern and saw Dick Yeager’s wolfish grin. “Howdy there, Howells,” Yeager said.

  Howells backed up into the store and Yeager stepped in after him and the Andersons came behind, all of th
em with Colts in their hands. Howells’ wife had been standing at an inner doorway, and when she saw the guns she rushed to get between her husband and Yeager, hugging hard to the stationmaster and saying, “No, no, no!”

  Yeager tried to pull her away with his free hand so he might have a clear shot at Howells, who held tight to her and cried, “Don’t hurt her, Dick, don’t hurt her!”

  They turned round and round like an intimate threesome at a lewd and clumsy dance as Yeager tried to detach the woman, but the couple clung to each like they were in a fearsome windstorm, the woman whimpering, keeping herself between the men.

  “Dammit!” Yeager shouted. He stepped back and aimed carefully and the woman screamed and put both hands over her husband’s head and tried to swell herself to cover as much of him as possible. The gunblast shook the room and the round hit Howells in the side and he cried out and sagged in his wife’s embrace, the woman shrieking with fear and rage. The next bullet passed through both her hand and her husband’s head and sprayed bloody hair and bone bits over a shelf of canned goods. The sudden dead weight was too much for her to hold one-handed and the body slipped through her arms, smearing her with blood. She knelt with it, hugging her husband’s head to her breast, wailing like a lost child.

  “Sorry about the hand, mam,” Yeager said. “It was an accident. I appreciate you were doing your best to protect him.”

  If the woman heard she gave no indication. Yeager looked at Bill and Jim and said, “Fire it.”

  As the Andersons flung lamp oil over the floor and walls, Yeager recharged his revolver, then said to the woman, “I suggest you leave him lay and get on outside.” Then he went out.

  Bill Anderson put his hand on her shoulder and said, “Come along, mam.”

  She remained as she was, crying, holding to her husband. Jim Anderson struck a match and dropped it and flames jumped up the walls. He hurried to the door and called back, “Hey, Billy!”

  Bill grabbed the woman under the arms and tried to drag her away, but she struggled fiercely to get loose and back to her husband. Jim ran over and grabbed Bill’s arm and yelled, “Come on, dammit!”

  “She’s not staying in here!” Bill said. The woman was screeching and twisting hard in his embrace, kicking and flailing wildly, trying to gouge his eyes over her shoulder. His face was spattered with blood off her mutilated hand. “Damn you, woman, let’s go!”

  Jim cursed and crouched to pin the woman’s legs and they lifted her bodily and carried her out as the fire coursed across the room.

  When the bushwhackers rode away, she was standing in the firelight and staring at her ended world, her ruined hand dripping blood into the Kansas soil.

  Several Federal outposts received vague reports of the raiders’ visit to Council Grove, but the only one that mentioned the direction they’d taken said they’d gone east, presumably back to Missouri, and so the cavalry patrols concentrated themselves all along the Santa Fe between Council Grove and the border. After several hours of roaming that stretch without a sign of the miscreants, the patrols returned to their posts, certain that Missouri guerrillas could never have gotten this deep into Kansas anyway and that the raiders in Council Grove had likely been a gang of local outlaws.

  The rain ceased. The clouds broke apart and fell away. The sky was brilliant with stars. A narrow cut of yellow moon showed low in the western sky. They rode westward on the Santa Fe so that the Howells woman would give that direction to any who came seeking after them—then they swung south at the Cottonwood Creek and a mile farther on made their camp for the night. At dawn, they set off to eastward, the Andersons directing the way to John Segur’s ranch.

  They rode onto Segur rangeland just after midday under a bright and sparsely clouded sky. A pair of herd guards were sitting their horses beside each other and talking about the girls they hoped to see at the next Saturday night dance in Americus. They never caught sight of the band of riders reining up on a low rise a hundred yards away, nor heard the cracking of the half-dozen Sharps that took them off their mounts in the same instant, one man’s slung brains preceding him to the ground, the other’s heart seized around the two bullets so abruptly entered in it. Yeager left two men with the herd to cut out the best horses, and then the band rode over the next rise and toward the ranch buildings.

  A man at the bunkhouse door saw them coming and turned to say something to someone inside. A dozen or so men came outside to look, some shirtless, a few with pistols tucked in their pants. The guerrillas heeled their mounts into a gallop and unloosed their unearthly rebel yells. The ranchmen stood fast, mouths ajar, gaping at the dreadful vision of their deaths thundering toward them. Before any of them thought to draw his gun, the guerrillas were shooting them down—the ranchmen crying out, spinning, staggering, leaving their feet as the bullets found them, dying instantly and not so quickly, clutching at their heads, their bellies. Not a man of them was standing and few were still alive as the bushwhackers rode over them.

  The guerrillas reined around and came back at a trot and here and there one or another leaned down to shoot in the head any ranchman who looked to be still breathing. Bill recognized one of the open-eyed dead as the man who’d thrown a rock at their wagon on the day they were exiled from their home with their father’s body.

  They loped up to the main house where an old man with a shotgun stood on the porch, shielding a woman in the door who clutched an infant to her bosom. A quartet of large dogs came snarling toward the riders, their napes roached, and Yeager drew his pistol, but Bill Anderson said, “Don’t.” He gave a sharp whistle that stopped the dogs short. “Get gone,” he said, and they whirled and fled around the side of the house. Yeager grinned at him like he’d pulled a card trick.

  They reined up in a line before the porch. The woman was young and pretty, auburnhaired, and though she was clearly frightened, Bill thought her aspect also bespoke familiarity with the world’s meanness. The old man took a step forward and raised the shotgun to his chest and moved the muzzle from side to side like he was deciding which of them to shoot first. He looked Mexican and seemed unafraid, and Bill would have bet that the old man had known some of life’s meaner side himself.

  “Tell him put the gun down,” Yeager said to the woman. She spoke in soft Spanish and the old man took a step back and lowered the shotgun to his hip but kept it pointed their way.

  She identified herself as the widow Mrs. Clara Segur Baker, daughter to John Segur, who owned this property. The Anderson brothers exchanged a look, only now realizing she was the woman Arthur Baker had chosen to wed instead of their sister. She scanned the distant litter of her father’s hired men where they lay slain in the sun, but whatever thoughts she had about the slaughter, she did not voice them.

  Yeager told her they were seeking after her father. If he was hiding in the house, it would be best if he came out now. Clara Baker said her father was in Emporia on business. “Why do you wish to harm him?” she said.

  Yeager sighed and looked at Bill. “We ain’t got time for jabber. If the sonofabitch is in there, I know how to make him come out quick. Buster, Lyle, Deacon—get in there and fire the place.”

  The three guerrillas dismounted and started up the steps. Bill said, “Oh hell, Dick, the woman’s already a widow and her child an orphan. Let’s not burn her house too.”

  “Damn, Anderson, it ain’t like we got all day to look for him.”

  At the name of Anderson, Clara Baker fixed a sharp look on Bill. But now the three bushwhackers were on the porch and the old Mexican raised the shotgun to warn them back and the one called Deacon slapped the barrel aside and said, “Get that thing out of my face, Pancho.” The Mexican swung the muzzle back again and yanked the trigger and the charge carried Deacon off the porch and into the horse behind him and the animal was stung by some of the buckshot too and reared with a shriek and the spooked horses to either side nearly unseated their riders.

  The woman whirled into the house and Buster Parr grabbed the shotgun
and tried to wrest it away but the old man’s hold was iron. Buster rammed him against a porch post and the Mexican lost his grip and fell to his knees and Buster leaped out of the way as a half-dozen men opened fire. They shot the old man more than thirty times in the next five seconds and reduced him to bloody wreckage.

  In the lingering blackpowder haze, Yeager calmed his horse and leaned from the saddle to peer down at Deacon’s rude remains. “Well shit,” he muttered. Then glared up at Buster and said, “Get that bitch out here if you got to drag her by the hair and set that fucken house afire now!”

  He ordered Deacon’s body to be laid out in the house. They had no time to give it proper burial and cremation would have to suffice.

  The searchers followed the sound of the baby’s crying down the hallway to a bedroom and found Clara Baker hunkered in a wardrobe closet. She was escorted to a safe distance from the house and there sat on the ground with the child in her arms. The house now crackling with flames. Some of the bushwhackers were turning the cows out of the barn and setting it on fire too. Over by the bunkhouse the crows were already at their feed. Clara rocked the baby and regarded her home’s destruction and wept without sound in the shadow of the rising smoke.

  They sat their horses and waited to see if John Segur would come out of the burning building. When the roof timbers began collapsing in great sparking crashes, Yeager turned to Bill and said, “Guess the bastard’s in Emporia like she said. Let’s ride.”

  They rode back toward the border at a steady canter, taking with them twenty head of Segur’s best stock and switching to fresh mounts whenever the horses under them foundered. They rode through the night, resting briefly at various creeks. In the morning they came to the Rock Springs depot where they stopped to water and found a single passenger waiting for the stage—a Federal sergeant. The soldier knew instantly who they were and jumped to his feet with his hands up. Yeager laughed and shot him. The stationmaster nearly smothered his wife under his hand in muting her terrified cries lest she annoy the bushwhackers sufficiently to murder them as well.