Wildwood Boys

by James Carlos Blake

  The following day they were twenty miles to the north, taking a dinner of roast corn and potatoes in the barn of a secessionist farmer. Their talk was mostly of Larkin Skaggs, whose fate at Lawrence they had learned of only a few days ago, and they were still in a fury about it.

  “Those sorry Kansans didn’t have the sand to fight when we were there in a bunch,” Sock Johnson said. “Couldn’t do a thing but hide behind their women’s skirts. But when it was only one drunk man left in town—oh, they were some brave souls then! Especially after he was dead.”

  “Then the damn Feds go and scalp him,” Ike Berry said. “We never did nothing like that to them.”

  “This war can’t get mean enough for them bastards,” Hi Guess said. “It’s always something to learn from the Feds about meanness. Scalping. Sweet baby Jesus.”

  “Well hell,” Arch Clement said. “We ought to do them in kind, don’t you all think?”

  “Not that easy,” Bill Anderson said. He nodded at Riley Crawford. “That sprout tried to take a scalp a few days ago. Show him, boy.”

  Riley Crawford blushed and took from his pocket something dark and withered and about half the size of his palm, with a few strands of brown hair attached to it.

  “Took him a quarter-hour to get that much,” Bill said. “By then that sorry head looked like somebody’s been working it with a hoe.”

  “We need us a damn Indian in this bunch, what we need,” Frank James said. “The Feds got Indians.”

  “Well, so happens I had an uncle rode with Jim Kirker down in Mexico,” Arch Clement said, “and he showed me just exactly how they lifted the hair off those red niggers.” The remark drew their full attention. They had all heard tales of the famous Irish scalphunter who for a time lived in Missouri.

  “Well then,” Bill Anderson said, grinning back at him. “I guess you can show us.”

  “My pleasure, Captain,” Arch Clement said.

  Most among them would take no scalps ever. Some thought the act unchristian—the Good Lord didn’t have objection to shooting a man who had it coming, but He drew the line at going at him like some heathen after he was dead. Others didn’t care for the mess of it, which so stank up a man’s clothes he could hardly stand the smell of himself. Some, like Riley Crawford, never got the proper knack of it and settled for taking easier trophies if they took any at all. Ears were quick and neat, noses, triggerfingers. But even among those who would take a scalp now and again, sometimes there simply wasn’t time for it….

  As they watched the militiamen bullying the small train of border country refugees out on the prairie this red-sun early morning, there dangled from Arch Clement’s saddle ties a quartet of scalps, one of them not two days old. The crows on the elm branches were eyeing this fresher morsel, and one still drying on Butch Berry’s saddlehorn. Here and there were other, older scalps—hanging from Dock Rupe’s belt, flapping from each of Buster Parr’s boottops, dangling from Edgar Allan’s bridle. Now Bill Anderson hupped Edgar Allan out of the trees and the men fell in behind him in a proper cavalry column and they set off at a lope for the refugee train.

  The militia lieutenant sat his horse and watched them come, taking them for the Federals whose uniforms they wore. As the cavalrymen drew closer he saw that the lead rider was a field officer and he effected a smart salute. His fingers were at his hatbrim when Bill Anderson’s bullet passed through his eye and the back of his head spattered the horse behind him. Both horses reared in fright and the lieutenant’s foot was snagged in the stirrup as he fell and his panicked horse bolted away with him bouncing and twirling alongside, his arms flapping overhead as if he were in some religious ecstasy.

  Pistols popping and issuing pale billows, the guerrillas rode through them and most of the militiamen fell where they stood, some still clutching whatever refugee possession they’d had in mind to thieve. The bushwhackers then dismounted and shot them all in head or heart to dispatch alike the wounded and the feigning. Then set to taking trophies. Arch Clement rode out to where the lieutenant had come free of his horse and lay with arms and legs splayed at odd angles, and when he rode back a fresh scalp hung on his saddle.

  At the first gunshot the refugees had flung themselves under the wagons. Now they were slowly showing themselves again, fearful and uncertain. The women clutched to each other and some held close the youngest children. One of them had fetched the crippled man his crutch and Ike Berry helped him get upright. The oldest boy stood apart and studied the men in Federal blue as some stripped the dead men of their ammunition and searched their pockets and some examined the militia horses and singled out a few to take with them. Then he cried out, “You ain’t Feds!”

  As he went through a militiaman’s effects, Frank James gave the boy a crooked smile. “You complaining, son? You ruther we were?”

  “You’re bushwhackers!” The boy beamed. “Lookit you-all’s hair! Lookit your Colts!”

  “Captain Billy’s wildwood boys,” Ike Berry said as he replaced the emptied cylinders of his revolvers with loaded ones. He looked at the women and the crippled man, all of them agawk. “You all be sure and tell it right. It was Bill Anderson’s company saved your Christian souls today.”

  Lionel Ward stepped up to a wounded militia horse and shot it pointblank in the head and jumped aside as the animal dropped like its legs had been yanked away. A pair of guerrillas set to skinning the hide off its flanks and haunches and then cut out thick steaks and wrapped them in shirts taken off the dead militiamen. Fresh meat had lately been hard to come by. Bill told the refugees to help themselves to all the meat they could cut off the carcass but be quick about it and get back on their way south.

  RED SEPTEMBER

  By the calendar it is still a few days before the start of autumn, but in this latter part of September the wildwood greenery is paling fast, some of the trees already gone purple, amber, bright blood red. Duck flocks daily arrowhead to southward. The nights carry a chill. The old folk say it’s the fires. All those Yankee burnings have put too much smoke in the air for too long, they say, over too big a region. The weather’s turned strange with it. The skies have the look of unseasonable frost coming on, the air has the feel of it. But then the earth could use an early winter. The world needs to slow for a time, rest itself, heal up some. Next spring will be here soon enough—and the bush war back with it.

  They’d come racing back to Missouri with every Federal in Kansas on their heels. Quantrill ordered them to split up into their smaller bands and hide deep in the wildwood. Bill and his bunch had gone with Yeager’s to a hideaway hard by Miami Creek in Bates County, but a few days later Yeager took his men farther east, away from the border country and its hordes of Yank hunting parties. Bill’s bunch stayed in Bates, and a dozen of Yeager’s boys chose to stay with them.

  Although Order 11 cleared thousands of southern families from the borderland counties, there were still plenty of supporters in neighboring counties to provide food and respite for the guerrillas. Even in the borderland itself, a few seceshers had fooled the Feds into believing they were Yankee loyalists, but they were still helping the bushwhackers all they could. Union patrols continued to scour the countryside, however, and most of the guerrilla bands were staying well hid. Quantrill was keeping to Kate King’s company in the Blue Springs cabin hideout and making plans for the winter move south. And once again living with them, rumor held, were the reconciled George Todd and Frances Fry.

  In these last weeks of the summer of ’63, only Bill Anderson’s band went hunting after those who were hunting them. They followed no clear plan from one day to another but were guided by hunches, by rumors heard from pilgrims met on the trails, by information gained from the few farmers still about. Sometimes Bill let Edgar Allan go whichever way he inclined, and as the horse chose was the heading they followed. Such waywardness was not without advantage: if they themselves didn’t know where they would be tomorrow, neither did the Yankees. It was a war of chance encounters and they became the master
s of it. When they wanted to travel fast and far they rode at night, for no Union outfit would venture into the bush after sundown. The darkness belonged to the wildwood boys.

  They roamed from Jackson County down to Vernon, ranging all of the territory evacuated by Order 11, and some days they found quarry and some days not. And some days found themselves confronted by superior numbers and having to retreat into the deeper forest. They perfected the trick of sending a handful of men into the open to be seen by a passing Union party and gulling it into giving chase to where the rest of the company lay in ambush. They now wore Federal blue more often than not, and time and again rode right up to a force of unsuspecting Yanks who would not know the truth until it was killing them.

  So it went, through the end of summer and into the first fall days of that red September. And in that time Bill Anderson’s company grew to forty men hard and true. His silk ribbon now held twenty knots, and stories of his exploits were told throughout the borderland.

  And the stories all called him Bloody Bill.

  Among them was a man named Oz Swisby, a skilled banjo-picker and singer and composer of songs which could never be sung in polite society. He’d reworked an oldtime ditty into a song about their company, and it caught the men’s fancy and became a favorite.

  We’re Bloody Billy’s wildwood boys,

  we’re riders of the night.

  We’re mean-ass sons of bitches,

  and we love to fuck and fight.

  Only in the deep reaches of the night did he sometimes permit himself to dwell on her. He slept but fitfully anymore, yet he never felt physically tired. He’d waken under the midnight stars and regard the immense dark mystery above him and wish that he could know if it was there by accident or design. This was the hour when he’d think of Josephine and the fierce spirit in her eyes. He would each time wonder if such a spirit, freed of the flesh, flew up like a spark off a campfire to die as ash in the blackness—or if somehow the spark burned forever in the void. He wondered if the stars themselves might not be the spirits of the dead and if comets might not be the most restless of them, the least reconciled to their fate. Was the essence of Josephine even then streaking through the endless dark of the universe? The notion was the loneliest he had ever had. There after, every shooting star he saw filled him with a hollow sensation for which he owned no name.

  Came a courier from Quantrill with word that he intended to start south for the winter within the week. Their brush cover was already too much reduced by the Yankee fires and the early leaf fall, and Union patrols in the region were more numerous than ever. Quantrill wanted all the bands to make the move together for the greater safety to be had in numbers. He called for a rendezvous at Perdee’s farm on the Blackwater River on the last night of September. They would leave for Texas on the following dawn.

  SOUTHWARD BOUND

  The conjoined bands numbered three hundred men as they made their way south in a double column through the largely deserted borderland. Most of them wore Federal blue. Dave Pool was in charge of the forward scouts, and Gregg and Yeager commanded the two outrider parties that kept watch for Union patrols far out to either flank.

  Bill’s bunch was now well familiar with the hardships of the country they were passing through, but most of the larger company was seeing for the first time the destruction visited by Order 11. Hardly a mile of road lay unlittered with broken-wheeled wagons, smashed furniture, staved barrels and sundered trunks, scattered and tattered clothing of all description. Here and there the rotting carcasses of horses and mules, cows and pigs and dogs. Here and there a hasty human grave, most of them made too shallow and since excavated by coyotes or feral dogs, the remains devoured to ragged and disjointed skeletons. A carrion stench weighted the air, and mingled with it was the odor of ashes. Crows everywhere tittering contentedly at the glut of good pickings.

  The men cursed bitterly on seeing the charred ruins of homesteads where they’d taken supper and a night’s rest, where they’d entertained themselves and their hosts with music and song and stories of vengeance against redlegs and Feds. Now nothing stood of these places but blackened stone chimneys at either end of ashpits. Except for the squalling of the crows, the only daylight sound was of their own low cursings, the horses’ hooffalls, the chinking of bridle rings. There were no other birds but the crows. It was strange to traverse so much sunlit country without hearing birdsong, without the sound of roosters, livestock, dogs.

  “When a region goes dogless,” Cole Younger said, “you know it’s done for.” He had decided to go south with the company this year. Of Quantrill’s captains, only Andy Blunt had chosen to stay back for the winter.

  There were still some dogs around, Bill Anderson said, but they kept themselves hidden in the daytime and only came out at night. He said he’d come on a pack of them at twilight just a few days ago. But he did not tell of his dismay to find he could understand nothing of what was in any dog’s head, nor convey to the dogs what was in his own. He’d concluded that they must have been mad. He could think of no other explanation.

  “So many of them been shot trying to protect their home,” he said, “the ones left don’t like to show themselves in daylight anymore.”

  Quantrill chuckled. “About halfway sounds like us.”

  George Todd was riding directly behind Quantrill and said, “Speak for yourself, Bill. I ain’t scared of showing myself to any Fed party anytime, anywhere.”

  Todd had been highly mutable in his moods since the company began the ride south. The rumor was of another fight with Frances Fry at the cabin, worse than the one before, and this time Quantrill was pulled into it. A pair of Todd’s boys posted near the cabin as lookouts claimed to have witnessed the whole thing. They said they heard a shriek and then the Fry woman (a right fine looker, they said) ran out into the open dogtrot with Todd directly behind her and cursing her for a goddam whore, his hair steaming and wetly plastered to his head with what looked to be coffee. She tried to kick him and he slapped her off her feet just as Kate and Quantrill came out. Kate was in a fury and demanded that Quantrill kill him, but Quantrill said killing seemed a little excessive. Kate said if he didn’t do it, she would. Todd took umbrage and asked Quantrill if he was going to let the crazy bitch threaten him like that. Quantrill took offense at Todd’s calling Kate a bitch and told him he’d better just mount up and go. The lookouts said the hollering scared the birds off the trees, said it must’ve carried for fifty yards around. Todd finally stomped off and got his horse and rode back with his men to the Sni-a-bar camp.

  George had been in short temper for days afterward, but he seemed pretty much over it by the time Quantrill showed up and called all the bunches together at Perdee’s. They greeted each other cordially and seemed easy enough as they sat together at the supper-fire. When they discussed the winter plan with the other captains, nobody detected any show of hard feelings between them.

  But once the company set out for Texas, Todd’s attitude had begun to turn contentious. He argued with Quantrill’s every choice of campsite. He sniggered at his remarks on the beauty of the daybreak sky or the lonely look of the ravaged countryside. Quantrill had ignored his attempts to nettle him, but it was obvious to the others that George was not entirely shed of his soreness over the cabin incident. Some believed his resentment went back to Will Haller’s election over him as the company’s first lieutenant and Quantrill’s refusal to hold another vote.

  In any case, Quantrill had clearly had enough, because this time he didn’t let Todd’s taunt go unremarked. He looked back at him and said, “I didn’t say I was scared, George. Do you think I’m scared?”

  Their eyes held for a moment—then Todd grinned wryly and said, “Oh hell no, Bill. I wouldn’t be riding with you if I did.”

  “That’s fine then, George. You ever think I’m scared of anything or anybody—of any man at all—you be sure and speak up.”

  “I’ll do that, Bill.”

  Quantrill turned to Bill And
erson and winked, and Bill had to grin at the man’s coolness. Still, he liked and admired both men and hoped the bristlings between them would quit.

  A BANEFUL NOON

  They forded the Spring River and crossed into Kansas about fifteen miles from the Indian Territory on a late spring morning under a pale yellow sun and thinly clouded sky. Dave Pool and his scouts were waiting in the shade of a stand of dusty cottonwoods on the far bank. They reported a Federal wagon train a few miles north and bearing this way along the main road. A troop of one hundred cavalrymen escorting eight supply wagons, a civilian carriage, and one wagon carrying a damn musical band.

  “Must be somebody important,” Dave Pool said, “having his own musicians with him and all.” If they cut through the woods, Pool said, they could intercept the Yank train just west of Baxter Springs.

  They debouched from the forest into a wide stretch of brown prairie cut through by a main wagon road. Quantrill directed the larger portion of the company to keep to the trees and out of sight. The sun was straight up and there was no lean at all to the shadows.

  Trailing a low cloud of fine dust, the Yankee train was a quarter-mile up the road and coming at a walk, each of the wagons behind a six-mule team, the cavalry escort flanking it to either side. Bill Anderson fixed his field glass on them and saw that one of the wagons had been modified to accommodate a colorfully uniformed band of musicians. The bandsmen were laboring with their instruments and the notes of “Hail Columbia” began faintly to clarify themselves.