His voice rose steadily as he recounted the devastation wrought upon innocent Missourians by Jim Lane’s brute jayhawkers. He retold the atrocities Lane’s Brigade had visited on Osceola. He asked his audience to think on the barbarities beyond number that Jennison and Hoyt and their bastard redlegs had committed in Missouri—the farmers hanged, the young boys killed, the women widowed and crops destroyed and homes put to the torch.
Bill felt the anger in the men around him like a rising heat, heard their low cursings of accord. Quantrill heard them too, and moved deeper into his theme.
The black heart of Kansas, he said, was Lawrence—the favored home of abolitionists since territorial days. It had served as the capital of the Free State movement, its streets were named after New England, the town itself was named after a damned abolitionist. The place had long been a headquarters for the murdering jayhawks. It was where the thieving redlegs sold most of the plunder they took out of Missouri. And it was home to Jim Lane—the Grim Chieftain, the King Jayhawk himself. The man had built a mansion in Lawrence and paid for it with the blood money he got in receipt of Missouri loot.
“Lawrence—it is in Lawrence,” Quantrill said, his delivery now evangelical, “that we can have our greatest revenge. And reap our greatest reward!”
“Let’s go kill the sonsofbitches!” John Jarrette hollered—and the exhortation provoked cheers.
“Easy to say, John,” Cole Younger said, “but there’s a thousand soldiers between here and there.”
“That’s right—they got new posts all along the damn border to watch out for us,” Andy Blunt said.
“Those posts are thirteen miles apart,” George Todd said. “How much bigger hole you need?”
“And look there at Dick Yeager,” Quantrill said. “He went a hundred miles into Kansas to settle a score and he lost not a man in the doing. Lawrence is not half so far over the border.”
“That’s true, Bill,” Yeager said, “but I went with a dozen men. How many would we be to Lawrence? Three hundred? That’s a lot of riders to sneak forty miles into Kansas.”
“Even if we got there,” Gregg said, “we’d pay hell getting back.”
There was agreement with this point—and disdain of it as unduly fearful. “We can slide past anydamnbody,” Dave Pool said. “We’re ghost riders—hooooooo!”
Quantrill said they could get past the outposts on a moonless night, and once they were into the unguarded open country they could move fast enough to reach Lawrence before sunrise. The town was so sure of its safety it still had not installed a telegraph, and its local garrison had been reduced to fewer than a hundred soldiers.
“I have considered every objection to the raid, every obstacle,” Quantrill said, “and I admit that there are many. But he who never risks can never hope to gain. I, for one, am ready to assume the risk required to gain my greatest ambition—to bring Jim Lane back to Missouri and burn him at the stake within sight of Kansas City.”
This avowal raised cheers and renewed cries for vengeance, but again there were remonstrations. Of the captains, Todd and Pool and Jarrette were strong for the raid, while Younger and Gregg and Blunt were reluctant. Bill looked at Yeager and saw him grinning. He figured Dick would choose to go.
Quantrill raised his hands and the bickering fell off. “Think on it,” he said. “Consider what you have heard tonight. Examine it every way you will. And I’ll have your answer, every man, at sundown tomorrow.”
“You ain’t got to wait for my answer, Bill,” Todd said. “I say we sack the damn town and burn it to black dirt.”
“No!” Quantrill said, cutting off the renewing arguments. “I want no answers now. You have until end of day tomorrow to decide. Tomorrow give your answer, each and all, before your comrades.”
They debated into the night, Quantrill remaining apart from all discussion, then every man got some sleep and rose again before daybreak to resume the argument over breakfast. Opinions remained strong on both sides. They broke for dinner, and afterward sat apart to reflect.
Jim sat beside Bill in the shade of a maple and uncorked a bottle. They passed the whiskey back and forth in silence for a time, then Jim said most of the captains looked to be leaning toward the raid. “Yeager’s decided for it. Appears Blunt might too. W. J. still thinks it’s a fool notion. What say, Billy—which way you inclining?”
“I won’t be going,” Bill said. “I’ve been thinking hard, but no matter how I look at it, I see I can’t go. Not with our sisters in a Yank prison. Not while I’m waiting on an answer about getting them out of there. What if the Feds want to make the trade while you and me are away in Kansas? Hell, what if neither of us gets back from Kansas? How long would the girls stay locked up then?”
Crows were chittering in the lower branches of a neighboring tree. He felt that their bright eyes were on him, their aspect amused and curious.
“But any of the boys in the bunch who want to go can go,” he said, turning back to Jim. “So can you. I have to stay.”
“Well hell, Bill,” Jim said, “then I have to stay too.”
There came a cry of “Rider coming in!”
A horseman with an eyepatch loped into the clearing and reined up, his mount lathered with hard use. He was arrived from Kansas City, and the tidings he carried were grim.
KANSAS CITY FATES
One of the guards was a blond boy from Indiana who fancied himself a charmer of women, and from the day the girls had arrived nearly a month ago, he had been making overtures to Mary Anderson. But the girls all agreed that there was something of the toad about him, and they didn’t fault her lack of interest. At first, she had been polite in her rebuffs, and then she had tried to ignore him, but the Hoosier persisted in his attentions. Yesterday, when he and another guard had come in to collect the breakfast pails, he’d made bold to run a finger through her hair and remark on its prettiness. She had simply walked away, shaking out her hair with her hands as if to cleanse it of his touch, and left him smiling awkwardly and redfaced. But when he did it again this morning—this time stroking a full handful of her yellow locks—she whirled and slapped his face sharply and told him to keep his hands to himself.
In the face of the other girls’ laughter, the Hoosier was embarrassed to a rage. “You puke Missouri whore!” he said. He snatched her to him and roughly groped her rump with one hand and squeezed her breast with the other. She yelped and flailed at him and there was a flurry of female shrieking and cursing as the girls leaped to her defense. The other guard grabbed the furious Hoosier boy from behind and pulled him away from them—and as he did, Josephine hiked her skirtfront and executed a hard and perfect kick to the Hoosier’s crotch. His eyes bugged and his mouth fell open and his comrade let him drop to his knees. The Hoosier cupped himself with his hands, bent forward and retched hugely.
“Now who’s the puke, you ignorant bully!” Josie said. She was set to kick him again but the other guard pushed her away as more guards came stomping up the stairs.
The sergeant in charge demanded to know what in purple hell all the hullabaloo was about and everybody but the Hoosier started talking at once. When the sergeant at last came to understand what happened, he gave quick orders to shackle a twelve-pound ball to Josephine Anderson’s right ankle.
As communal punishment they are to be denied dinner but they don’t care. They tell Josephine again and again how proud they are of her, and they laugh at each other’s repeated descriptions of the Hoosier as he went down on hands and knees and puked like he’d been poisoned. They’ve cleaned up the mess and dropped the dirtied rags out a rear window and heard a hog below snortling loudly over the treat fallen to it from above.
Josie sits on her bunk, Mary beside her and petting her and every few minutes asking if there is anything she can do for her. Jenny stands out in the middle of the floor and demonstrates again and again the kick her sister used to bring the soldier down. “Lordy! It was just so grand, Jo!” she says. “Billy and Jim are gonna be proud
of you!”
Josephine grins.
“I can’t believe they locked this awful thing on you,” says Charity McCorkle Kerr. She fingers the chain attaching the heavy ball to the iron clasp on Josie’s ankle.
“Truth to tell, it makes me feel like a desperado,” Josie says. She affects a wicked leer and pretends to twirl the ends of a long mustache in the manner of a stage villain.
“All they’ve really done is give me a weapon,” she says. “Look.” She cradles the cannonball in both hands and stands up, its chain swinging. “Next time a keeper gets improper with one of us, I’ll just go up to him and take a bead on his foot like this”—she holds the cannonball out—“then…” She lets the ball drop. It bangs on the floor resoundingly and makes an indentation.
“Wouldn’t that set the bastard to howling and hopping on one foot?” Josie says with a wide grin.
The floor quivers under their feet for a moment and ceases.
The girls look at each other. “What in the world…” Sue Vandiver starts to say—and the floor groans and renews its reverberations. The bunks rattle. The walls shudder and give off dust.
“Oh my God,” Amanda Selvey whispers.
The doorlock clatters and the door flies open and a guard yells, “Come on!” and they hear his boots thumping down the stairs.
The building jars sharply and every girl falls down shrieking. Timbers and joists pop like gunshots and the walls break open with tremendous cracklings and plaster falls and the air enfogs with powder and dust. The floor moans and tilts on its moorings and bunks go sliding across the room.
Mary and Jenny help Josie to stand up with the iron ball hugged to her chest as the other girls scramble for the door, some of them on hands and knees. Holding to each other, the Andersons stagger after them, coughing and choking in the haze. Just as the first girls lurch out on the landing, it tears free of the wall and plunges in a monstrous crashing and terrified chorus of screams.
“Windows—we’ll jump!” Josie shouts.
They veer toward the front windows, leaning against the slope of the floor, but it suddenly dips to their right and Jenny loses her grip and tumbles away, shrieking “Josieeee!”
Josie and Mary turn to go after her but then the ceiling rips apart and furniture comes smashing down and the floor buckles and the whole world gives way.
The pall of dust over the collapsed building was so dense that rescuers could barely see each other at a distance of two yards. They were guided by the pitiful cries of the survivors. It was an hour before the first victim was extricated, and it took the rest of the morning and half of the afternoon to find and remove the others. The street was jammed with onlookers shouting questions and conjectures about what had happened, avid to know if anyone had been killed.
The first ones brought out were Jenny Anderson and Juliette Wilson. Jenny’s legs were mangled and her face badly torn. She would carry the scars and require a cane the rest of her life. Juliette was alive when found, but her ribs had been stove and had punctured both lungs, and a few minutes after she was borne from the ruins she was dead, drowned in her own blood. They found four girls together, two of them maimed of limb but destined to live, and two with only cuts and bruises who would forever regard themselves as favorites of God. Sue Vandiver, Amanda Selvey, and Charity McCorkle Kerr were each one found crushed dead.
As the girls, dead and alive, were carried from the wreckage, many of the women looking on were moved to tears and some even to anger, and several were heard to shout “Murderers!” at their own soldiers.
Mary and Josephine Anderson were the last to be uncovered, the elder girl lying atop her sister. When the rescuers lifted Mary out of the rubble, she screamed with the pain of various broken bones. Her spine was fractured, her legs partially paralyzed forevermore.
Josephine was pinned down by a heavy beam across her chest. Except for a bloody nose, her face and head appeared uninjured, and though her eyes were bloodshot, she was not crying. As the rescuers worked to loosen the beam, a man with an eyepatch smiled down at her and said, “Don’t you worry, honeygirl, we’ll have you out right quick.” Her bare legs were exposed on the other side of the beam, and he reached down and tugged her skirt hem to her knees. Her feet were shoeless, and there was a dark swelling of bonebreak above the manacle on her ankle. Then the beam was free and several of the men took hold of one end of it and heaved together to raise it and lay it aside.
And now they saw the iron ball embedded in her chest, a portion of its chain impressed with it. Saw the bloodsoaked dressfront and the blood pulsing from all around the edge of the ball. It was a wonder she could still be living, that her eyes yet held such ferocity as they did. She coughed softly and blood showed on her lips and the light in her eyes seemed to waver. In a voice she could not have raised above its rasping whisper but which every man of them heard as clearly as if she’d spoken it at his ear, she said: “You’ll be sorry….”
VERDICTS
The early rumor was that if their guerrilla kin did not themselves come to claim their bodies, the girls would be buried in Leavenworth cemetery. Once the war was over, any family that wanted to claim the remains and remove them for burial somewhere else would be permitted to do so. The maimed and injured girls were being cared for in a special ward of the army hospital at Fort Leavenworth until they were fit to travel. Then they would be exiled from Missouri as decreed.
There was talk all over town that the Federals had deliberately undermined the building to make it fall, that they had hoped to kill all the women in it. The Yanks were of course denying the accusation as a base and outrageous lie, insisting they did not make war on women beyond arresting and exiling those of them related to bushwhackers. But the talk was that they’d done it to show the guerrillas the high price of bushwhacking from now on.
This information came to them by way of the man with the eyepatch who but a few hours earlier had smiled on Josephine and called her honeygirl. He was known in Kansas City as Jack Andrews, a supplier to wagon train companies, but his true name was Leonard Richardson and he was a spy for Quantrill, one of the many who worked for him in Kansas City and Leavenworth.
When Richardson told them which of the girls had been killed, Quantrill sent a rider to retrieve John McCorkle and Nathan Kerr. Both of them rode in his bunch, so he would have no one but himself tell them of the death of Charity, sister to one and wife to the other. Dick Yeager sent a man back to the White Oak camp to give John Wilson the news of his sister Juliette.
Cole Younger was pacing hard, cursing, spitting repeatedly. The two cousins killed had also been favorites, and his family’s experiences in this war made it easy to believe the Federals had arranged to bring the building down.
“It’s how they do, the bastards,” he said. “They kill old men from ambush, they make women to fire their own homes, and now…now they kill girls by bringing a building down on them. God damn it, I can stand no more!”
Quantrill held silent, leaning on a tree and smoking a thin cigar and watching Cole with narrow eyes as he paced in the dying light of the late afternoon. He observed too the shadowy faces of the other captains as they listened to Cole’s fulminations. All these men had lost kin to the Unionists, lost friends and neighbors who had committed no crime but to feed them and bind their wounds and give them a place to sleep for a night. News of Federal meanness was hardly news at all anymore, but neither was it something a man got used to. Every new instance of Federal brutality only added to the pain of every previous one. But the news had never before been so awful as this, the killing of young women, of girls. Quantrill sensed that the heart of every man he looked on was echoing Cole Younger’s cry that he could stand no more. Every face he looked on was set in murderous fury.
When Richardson had named Josephine Anderson among the perished and told of the ball shackled to her leg, Bill’s only surprise had been at his lack of surprise. Of course she would have been the one to be shackled. Of course she would have refused to show
them her tears. Of course she would have said the last words she did. While she’d been imprisoned, he had been near to howling with his frustration. Had been frantic in his wait for the Yankees’ answer to his offer of a trade for her and her sisters. Now he was done with dread and consternation.
He had not protected her as he should have, and so she’d been arrested. And so she’d been killed. But even the crushing weight of his guilt was as nothing beside his rage. It was beyond utterance. It defied every form of language from poetry to madhouse scream. He could but feel it, coiled and ready in the cold and deepened darkness of his soul.
He regarded his brother’s grief-hung face and the fury in his eyes. He saw the other chiefs nodding at Cole’s rantings, heard their muttered blood oaths. And then met Quantrill’s thin glinting gaze. They held each other’s eyes and it seemed to him Quantrill was telling him something and that he understood it, though he could not have said what it was.
Cole Younger was shouting now that he didn’t care about the fucken odds, he was for going to Lawrence.
Quantrill tossed aside the cigar and stepped in front of the assembly and for a moment studied the sun, still a small distance above the trees. Then looked at them and said, “It is not yet sundown, but if all of you are ready…” There was a clamor of ayes. “Then I’ll hear each man in turn. What say you…Todd?”
“You know my choice—we make an ashpit of the place!”
“Younger?”
“We loot the town to its last dollar and take it off the map.”
“Yeager?”
“Lawrence and the torch!”
“Pool?”
“Lawrence! If not a man of us gets back, so be it, but Lawrence pays for the girls, for everything!”
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