“Stand fast!” the sergeant shouted. “You shoot and they die!”
“Let them loose!” Bill Anderson said. “Do it now!” The flanking fences prevented them from getting around the Yankees.
The big corporal held Josephine, and a soldier sat hunched behind Mary with his arm hard around her, and both men held pistols to the girls’ sides. Josephine was trying to claw the corporal over her shoulder and it was all he could do to keep his eyes from her fingers. “Quit, dammit!” he said, grappling with her. “Quit, I said!”
“Shoot him, Billy!” Josephine yelled. She tried to hit the corporal’s face with the back of her head. “Shoot him!” The corporal got his forearm around her throat and her eyes widened and she tried to dislodge his arm with both hands.
“You’re throttling her, goddam you!” Bill shouted, frantic in his helpless rage.
The corporal eased his hold and Josie drew audible breath as he shifted his grip to pin her arms at her sides and press the muzzle of his pistol under her chin.
“You…bastard,” Josephine gasped.
The other Feds in the party had been slowly backing their horses and were a good twenty yards down the lane, and now one of them yelled, “Here’s the company!” He waved his hat at comrades still out of sight around the bend but they all heard the rumble of the coming horses.
“Shit!” Buster Parr said. “We got to slide, Bill!”
“Go, Billy!” Josephine said, disheveled, breathless.
“They won’t be harmed, I swear it!” the sergeant said.
The lead riders in the Federal column came around into view.
“They’re on us, Bill,” Lionel Ward said.
“DAMMIT!” He yanked Edgar Allan around and they all lit out.
They were chased until they were into the deeper wildwood and then the Feds turned back. But the Yanks found the broncos in the rude corrals and took them too.
CAPTAIN BILL
When they returned to the Parchman farm they found it untorched, so eager had the Yankees been to make away with the girls. While the others swiftly gathered the remaining stores of food and packed them into their saddle wallets, Bill went to his sisters’ loft and looked on their beds and trinkets and clothes and he nearly howled in his outrage. He spied Josie’s black silk ribbon on the rude plank dressing table. He put it in his pocket and left everything else where it lay.
The others were remounted and waiting.
He stood on the porch and looked all around and marveled that he had once applied his labor to improving this place and making it what it was meant to be. Then said: “Boys, they took my sisters and I couldn’t stop them. The shame is my own and no one else’s. Maybe they’ll do like they said and exile them. I pray they do. Then I’ll collect them and they’ll not be removed from me again, take it for a vow.” He spat. “But only a fool puts trust in a Union promise. My intention is to offer Yankee prisoners in exchange for my sisters. Could be they’ll agree to it.”
“Could be they might, Bill,” Frank James said, “if you make a fair offer of three Yanks for each girl.”
There were grins all around.
“Any man of you who cares to join me in catching Yanks is welcome,” Bill said.
“Before I answer you on that, Bill,” said Lionel Ward, “I got two questions.”
“Ask them.”
“Well sir, I’ve rode with Jarrette and Todd and Yeager, all three, but I always knew the band was still part of one company and Bill Quantrill was the captain of it. What I want to know is, would you still be part of Captain Quantrill’s company?”
“I would, Lionel,” Bill said. “What is your other question?”
Lionel Ward shifted the chaw in his jaw and spat and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “Hell,” he said, “I disremember.”
“What say the rest of you boys?” Bill said.
“Count me in,” Hi Guess said, and Buster Parr said, “I ride with you, Captain Bill.”
It sounded so natural that it took a moment for him to realize he’d heard it. He saw by Jim’s smile that he had caught it too. And Lionel. All of them now grinning at Captain Bill.
“Well, I’d say nobody’s gonna ride with you, Captain,” Frank James said, “if we don’t quit all this yammering and get to riding.”
Bill laughed with them and went lightfooted down the steps and swung up onto Edgar Allan and they made away into the wildwood.
Two days later they added another pair to their band—Dock and Johnny Rupe—brothers met over a dinner table where they’d been invited to sit down by a family of secessionists known to Buster Parr. Buster had not seen the Rupes in eight months, and in that time the brothers, sixteen and seventeen, had gained their growth. Their mother knew she could keep them from the war no longer. But the boys would have to ride double on the family’s old mare until they could get proper mounts.
The following afternoon they ambushed a militia patrol of seven men on the Blue River road west of Raytown. But the Unionists fought desperately, and the guerrillas were obliged to kill them all.
“That’s gonna be the problem with getting prisoners,” Frank James said. “They figure we’ll kill them anyway, so why surrender?”
They stripped the militiamen of their uniforms and put them on, and the Rupe brothers selected the two best of the soldiers’ horses. Then they rode on.
They spied various Federal patrols over the following two weeks but all of them too large to engage, and then came a span of five days in which their luck was excellent. They came on three Federal patrols on the open range along the borderline and not more than ten men in any of them. In each instance they rode right up to the Yanks, raising their hand in greeting, and then shooting them at point-blank range before the Feds kenned to them as bushwhackers. In the three attacks they took a total of six prisoners—though two of them fell dead off their horses over the next two days.
They were crossing the Blue River near Little Santa Fe, all of them wearing Federal blue, when they were almost ambushed by Dick Yeager’s bunch. Dick recognized the Andersons just in time to check his boys, then came out of the trees and hallooed them. It took Bill and Jim a moment to recognize him too—most of the right side of his mustache was gone and the bared portion of lip showed a raw scar. He told them it had been shot off a few weeks earlier in a fight with redlegs in Cass County. “Closest shave I ever had,” he said, showing big yellow teeth.
When Bill explained his plan to trade prisoners for his sisters, Yeager offered to help him, and the two bands, thirty men strong, set out to hunt for Yankees.
They fell on a camp of militia scouts just west of the Little Blue, killing two and capturing three. The following day they sat their horses in the silent shadows of a willow thicket hard by a rippling creek and watched a militia patrol coming down the road. When the soldiers drew abreast of them, they charged out of the trees, rebel-yelling and shooting, and they had to laugh at the looks on the militiamen’s faces. Most of the soldiers fled for their lives, and the others went down—except for a handful who threw up their hands and surrendered, but in their excitement the bushwhackers killed some of them too. They dispatched the militia wounded, took the uniforms off the dead, tied the six new prisoners to their saddles and hastened away with them, leaving behind a few wounded horses and a dozen naked dead men staring blindly at the descending crows under a pale and unpitying sun.
They camped that night in the heavy shelter of the White Oak breaks, near the Little Blue. Of Bill’s thirteen prisoners, two had tried to escape and been killed for their folly, their bodies left to the crows. He would offer the remaining eleven for his sisters.
He and Yeager were sitting at one of the fires, a jug passing around, Yeager talking about the joys of steamboat robbery, when a courier rode in. Quantrill was at the Blue Springs camp and calling his officers together for a council there tomorrow night. Riders were spreading the word to the other wildwood camps.
“He said to tell you he wants you there too, Capta
in Anderson,” the courier said. “He said for each captain not to bring more than one or two men. He wants to keep the meeting small and anyhow only wants to talk with the captains.” He went to fetch himself supper.
There again—Captain Anderson. And from one of Quantrill’s own messengers. Well, why not? Quantrill himself had called them “your boys” since before they hit Olathe. It was all Bill could do to keep from laughing outright with the pleasure of it, with the grand feeling of its rightness, with the ticklish certainty of having come upon his true calling.
Yeager was grinning too. “Some of my boys said today they’d like to ride with you if you’ll have them, did you know that? Some cousins of Lionel Ward and a couple of Clay County neighbors of the James fella. I’d take it kindly, Captain Anderson, if you don’t poach all my damn men.”
They laughed and went to retrieve plates of beans and cornbread. When they resettled themselves by the fire, Yeager said, “I bet I know what the meeting’s about.”
“Me too,” Bill said.
They had spoken about Quantrill’s determination to raid Lawrence, but neither man was decided if he was for or against it. They yearned to turn Lawrence to ashes, of course, but they knew too that such a raid could prove folly of the worst sort.
Bill chose his brother and Buster Parr to go with him to the council. He would leave his prisoners with the rest of the bunch. He wrote a note to the Federal commander in Kansas City, presenting his offer of eleven Union captives in exchange for his sisters. He promised to move the girls out of the state if they were released. The general could send his answer through the same courier who delivered Bill’s note.
THE PRISON ON GRAND AVENUE
There were eleven of them—all bloodkin to known guerrillas and two of them wives of wildwood boys as well—the eldest of them twenty years old. They were held in Kansas City, quartered on the second floor of a dilapidated three-story commercial building in the middle of Grand Avenue. The top floor was rented to a business that used the space for storing furniture. The ground floor was taken up by a liquor store.
Their floor was without partitioning except for a corner that had been fitted with flimsy walls of thin board to enclose it into a sort of privy containing several slop jars. Bunks were set along the walls in dormitory fashion. The windows of the rear wall were small and offered nothing to see but weedy vacant lots, but the front windows were tall and admitted plenty of sunlight and afforded good view of the street. A trio of guards was always on duty at the entrance to the building, another guard placed at the foot of the stairway, and yet two more posted on the second-floor landing.
The landing guards brought the girls their meals every morning, noon and evening, but refused to carry out their slops. They told them to fling them through a rear window into the lot below. The neighborhood hogs liked to root in the shaded earth behind the building and would make short work of the waste.
They got along well enough with a few of the guards, but most of their keepers were Kansans to the core and made no secret of their enmity toward all things Missourian. Josephine more than once got into a strident exchange of insults with them and each time had to be restrained by the other girls before she provoked the Feds further.
They passed their days observing the doings along Grand Avenue, pointing out to each other the handsomest and best-dressed and silliest-looking people to go by on the streets and sidewalks and making up stories about them. There had been an outbreak of rabies that summer and citizens had permission to shoot any dog seen loose on the streets, so the girls occasionally heard gunshots, sometimes followed by yelping until another report put an end to it. The dead-dog wagon came clattering down the street every afternoon, heaped with carcasses and swarming with flies, and Josephine could not help thinking how much the sight would pain Bill.
They gave their evenings over to harmonizing on favorite songs, to practicing their oral imitations of musical instruments. Jenny Anderson could mimic a fiddle, and she laughed with the others when they teased her that she was in need of a tuning. Charity McCorkle Kerr, sister to one bushwhacker and wife to another, could fairly well sound like a piano, which instrument she had been playing since age six. Among these prisoners were a pair of Cole Younger’s cousins, and one of them, Amanda Selvey, could put her hands over her mouth and twang like a Jew’s harp or trill like a harmonica. The other cousin, Sue Vandiver, was a small brass band all her own, expertly oom-pah-pahing like a tuba or tootling like a coronet or French horn. An otherwise reticent girl named Juliette Wilson, whose brother rode with Dick Yeager, could raise guitar strumming with her tongue and palate, and Josephine could plunk so like a banjo that the others said she sounded better than the real thing.
Before long the girls were dancing nightly to their own music, waltzing to piano and horns and violins, reeling or stepdancing to stringband tunes. People passing on the sidewalks heard them and believed they were playing real instruments up on the second floor. And many were the outraged complaints to the officer of the guard every evening when the girls concluded their musical entertainments with a rousing and harmonious rendition of “The Call of Quantrill” that carried out their windows and down the block:
Arise, my brave boys, the moon’s in the west,
the Federal hounds are seeking our nest.
We’ll be in the saddle at breaking of day,
and the Quantrill they hunt will be far on his way.
They chase and they hunt us ever in vain,
no matter they search all the brush and the plain.
We ride like the wind, like ghosts in the night,
we are bold wolves in battle and swift hawks in flight.
Few shall escape us, fewer be spared,
our deadly pistols in vengeance are bared.
For none are so brave, so sure in their might,
as men of Missouri defending her right.
In this sultry summer the city smelled of horseshit and of human waste baking in the alleyway jakes, of woodsmoke and cooking, of dust blown in off the prairie, of thousands of people in close urban quarter. The girls grew familiar with the sounds of the city—the clattering and clopping of passing street traffic, the iron-crashings and whistle shrieks from the railyard, the cries of streetcorner news hawks and calls of wagon vendors, the sharp-bark commands of army units on the drill field down the street.
They heard other things too. The building was old and dry in its joints, and sometimes, in the late hours of the night, they’d hear a slight creaking in the walls or a low groan from the floor, and in the morning they’d make jokes about the place being haunted. There was another late-night sound as well—the faint laughter of men and women which seemed to come up through the walls, though the liquor store had closed hours earlier. They thought it was a trick of acoustics, that the building was somehow redirecting the sounds from some neighboring tavern.
In fact, the laughter was coming from the cellar, which they did not know was being used as a temporary jail for prostitutes known to be diseased. The building next door was serving as an army guardhouse, and some of the soldiers, in violation of orders not to fraternize with the cyprians, had hacked holes through the common cellar wall so they could visit the whores and trade whiskey and food for their favors, the medical dangers be damned. They snugged supporting beams into the rude passageway, but the structure was makeshift,and in the liquor store above, sober men would feel a slight list as they traversed the floor. One day a bottle fell and broke, and the proprietor and a patron watched in uncertain amusement as the whiskey rivulets flowed like snakes to form a trough at the base of the wall. The patron said it might be a right idea to shore the wall beam. The whiskeyseller said it wasn’t his building, so to hell with it.
The girls would never know either the source of the laughter or that the reason it ceased in their third week of imprisonment was that the guardhouse commander learned of the shenanigans and ordered the whores removed to more secure confinement.
The only vestiges in
the cellar of the last good time to take place there were the litter of abandoned underclothes and the empty whiskey bottles and the various scattered carcasses of half-eaten roast chickens. Over the following days the smell of the chicken remains carried out through the cellar window to the snorting hogs that prowled for slops along the rear of the building. But the window was too small to admit them, so the swine burrowed beneath it and then through the rotted rear wall of the cellar. And who can say whether, as they made their way inside, they paid any hog mind at all to the groans of wrenching girders and joists torsioning to the breaking point.
COUNCIL OF CHIEFTAINS
They were recognized by the pickets and allowed to pass along the trail and into a clearing in this dense portion of wildwood. Quantrill’s camp was a quarter-mile away and close by Blue Springs, but here was where the council would meet. They gave their horses to a young bushwhacker who tethered them with the others at safe remove from Quantrill’s horse. Charley had already bitten two of the other animals, the horsehandler said, and ruined a thumb on one of Andy Blunt’s men, some brash youngster who claimed he knew a horse’s mind and reached a hand out to stroke Charley’s muzzle, saying, “Ho now, boy, you ain’t gonna bite nobody, are you?”
A fire burned low in the center of the clearing, and torches stood at intervals around the perimeter, casting an eerie wavering light on the underbranches of the trees. Each of the captains had brought a couple of men with him and there were nearly twenty men assembled near the fire, some few others tending to the horses or posted as videttes. Bill had not seen some of these men, including Quantrill himself, since the previous autumn. There was much shoulder-slapping and sharing of jugs. Then Quantrill called them to gather around him.
He paced slowly inside the circle as he spoke, passing before every man so he could directly address each in turn. He said the Union newspapers were crowing about Gettysburg and claiming the war was all but won. He didn’t know what the Richmond high-hats thought about that, but he believed it was time to show the Federals just how far from finished the war was. And the best place to show them was in Kansas—the home to killers who had been murdering Missourians since before it even became a state.
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