“Who in purple hell are they?” Cole Younger said.
“Listen!” Fletch Taylor said, just now catching the sound of the music. He grinned and swung his arms in the manner of a conductor.
The other wagons looked to Bill Anderson to be bearing supplies. There were several civilians in the entourage. An officer came loping up to the fore of the column and gestured toward them as he spoke with the point riders. He rode a fine gray stallion, and even at this distance his uniform was dazzling in its riot of gold braiding and polished brass, its rakish white hat plume. It was the most splendid Yankee uniform Bill Anderson had ever seen.
“There’s the son of a bitch in charge,” he said.
Quantrill took a look through his own glasses and said, “Oh my, he is a regal vision, isn’t he?”
The Fed pointmen started toward the guerrillas at a canter.
“Coming to say howdy to their fellow bluebellies,” Bill said, affecting to straighten the lapels of his Federal jacket in the manner of a fastidious officer. Quantrill laughed. The band was into a rendition of “John Brown’s Body,” the notes carrying more clearly as the train slowly came on.
The pointmen slowed as they drew closer. Bill could see their faces now and saw their sudden suspicion as they caught sight of the irregularities in their Union outfits, their long hair and the clutch of revolvers every man carried. The two Yanks reined up fifteen yards away.
“Howdy, boys,” Quantrill called. He beckoned them forward. “Come on up.”
“Oh shit,” one Yank said. He turned a mournful look on his fellow, a gray-mustached sergeant who leaned out and spat a streak of tobacco, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and said, “Yep. And we have stepped square in it.” He hupped his mount ahead another few yards and the other Yank came up beside him.
“Hello, bushwhackers,” the sergeant said. He smiled sadly at his dark turn of luck.
“Partisan rangers of the Confederate nation,” Quantrill said in the tone of a correcting schoolteacher. “Who’s your commander?”
“General Jim Blunt,” the sergeant said. “On his way to Fort Gibson. He’s going to be sore disappointed about this. He thought you boys were a welcome party sent out to escort us the rest of the way.”
“Blunt?” Quantrill said. “James G. Blunt?”
“Listen, boys,” the sergeant said, “I hope you’re of a mind to take prisoners because I surrender.”
Bill Anderson grinned at him. “The selfsame Blunt who put in a newspaper that the only choice he’d ever give a guerrilla was the kind of rope to be hanged with?”
The sergeant made a rueful face and nodded. The younger Yank looked near to tears.
“Well now,” Quantrill said. His elation was manifest. He signaled for the rest of the men to come out of the trees and form a double battle line to either side of him.
In the distance, the fancy Federal officer threw up his hand to halt the train. The band had just struck up “Tenting on the Old Campground” but then abruptly fell mute. The fancy officer peered through his binoculars and then hurriedly ordered the cavalry column into a battle line of their own. A civilian couple in a buggy drove up to speak to the officer and a moment later turned the buggy around and hastened back to the rear of the wagons.
“I’d say they’re on to us, Bill,” Bill Anderson said.
“Bill?” the young Yankee said, gaping at Quantrill. “Lord Jesus—you ain’t Bloody Bill?” It was more plea than question.
Quantrill scowled. “Hell no, I’m too handsome to be him.” He nodded at Bill and said, “That’s your man right there.”
Bill’s Navy was already in his hand. The young Federal threw up his hands and babbled something no one understood or cared to. The sergeant went for his own sidearm in a futile but necessary try. Bill Anderson’s revolver cracked twice and the Fed horses spooked and bolted as their riders tumbled.
Quantrill raised his Colt high and bellowed, “No prisoners!”
In fifteen minutes it was done with. Ninety-one Yankees lay scattered over the prairie in a dust-and-gunsmoke haze. Bill Anderson tied eight new knots in Josephine’s ribbon. The company lost one man. Lionel Ward, liked by everyone, had been shot dead by a trooper who then tried to get away with the bandsmen on their wagon. John Jarrette led a dozen men in pursuit for half-a-mile before the wagon lost a wheel and overturned, scattering men and musical instruments and yanking the entire shrieking team of mules down too. The guerrillas killed every broken man of them and so many times shot the trooper who’d killed Ward that the man was rendered faceless. They set the wrecked wagon afire and flung the Yankee bodies into the flames and the air was soon steeped with the smell of their roasting.
Among the few who escaped were the couple in civilian dress. The man and woman had scrambled from the buggy and mounted on horses and galloped off side by side. The guerrillas didn’t want to risk shooting the woman in trying to bring down the man and so both of them had got away.
Butch Berry shot down the horse of the fancily uniformed officer, who staggered to his feet and offered up his pistol in surrender. Butch laughed and pointed his pistol in his face and said, “Tell the devil Butch Berry says hello, General.” The man’s look in that instant struck him as so comical he laughed harder. “Wait! Not me! I’m—” and Butch shot him dead. Then took his scalp. Then rode over the battleground, waving the dripping trophy above his head and shouting that he’d killed General Blunt and receiving his fellows’ cheers for it.
They turned out every Yankee pocket and made quick inspection of their horses and rejected them all. They found a wagonload of tinned rations and sat to a gluttonous feast of beef hash and lima beans, sardines and stewed tomatoes, peaches and spiced apples. Someone made the gladsome discovery that the Fed canteen he’d confiscated contained whiskey. Within minutes every canteen on the field had been tested and more than half were found to be holding spirits too.
“These goddam Yanks!” Buster Parr said with a wild whiskey grin. “I love them so!”
A full gallon demijohn of brandy was found in the abandoned buggy and the men presented it to Quantrill as a gift. He thanked them and poured drinks for his gathered officers. They drank toast after toast as they fed on the fine Yankee rations, and in short order not a man of them was sober.
“We did it, boys,” Quantrill said. “We whipped Blunt. The regulars never whipped him, but we did, by God—we did!” It occurred to Bill Anderson that he had never seen Quantrill even mildly drunk before.
“I deserve some damn credit,” Quantrill said. “A promotion! I deserve to be a major.”
“Hell, why not a colonel?” Bill Anderson said.
John Jarrette thought a colonelcy was a damn right notion and raised his whiskey cup in toast of it. Cole Younger said he wouldn’t follow another order from Quantrill if he was anything less than a colonel.
Quantrill was beaming. “Well hell, Coleman—then colonel it is!”
Every man in the party cheered the self-awarded promotion and took another drink to celebrate it.
Drunken Riley Crawford, a canteen of whiskey in one hand and a Yankee saber in the other, was slashing and thrusting at the air all about him, bellowing that he was Captain Kidd. the meanest pirate on the Seven Seas. Several bushwhackers sat nearby, eating and drinking and taking mild entertainment from Riley’s besotted play. Now Crawford was backing up, swordfighting with several opponents at once and cursing them for Spanish dogs, and he stumbled on a Yankee corpse and nearly fell. He glowered at the dead man and said, “Sneak up on me from behind, will ye? Take this!” And thrust the saber into his chest.
His audience applauded, and one man called out, “You got him good, Riley!”
Crawford whirled about and narrowed his eyes at another Federal sprawled nearby and cautiously stalked toward him, saying, “And you! Trying to slip up on me flank, hey?” He slapped the Yankee across the shoulders with the flat of his blade. “Get up, you son of a bitch! Get up and take it like a man!”
And up the Yankee rose in a terrified scramble, thinking the boy had seen through his ruse of pretending to be dead. The blood of a head wound had run down and encircled his eyes so that he appeared to be wearing scarlet spectacles, and whether he or Riley was the more terrified would have been hard to say. The onlooking bushwhackers burst out laughing and one said, “Lookit! Young Crawford’s raised the dead!”
Riley flung aside the saber and drew his Navy Colt and shot the man in the chest and knocked him supine again. Then stepped up and shot him five times more.
His audience was gasping with laughter. “Say, Riley,” Hi Guess said, “are you sure he’s done for?”
“Poor fella come back from the grave just so Riley could put him right back in it,” Dave Pool said.
“Ain’t it the drizzling shits, though?” Archie Clement said. “I remember shooting that rascal myself. Thought sure I killed him.”
Riley Crawford, sobered to some degree by the harrowing experience, glared at Arch and said, “Well, you sureshit didn’t kill him enough, did you?”
As always, among the effects they found on the dead Yankees were letters from home, and as they sat on the ground, gorging on Federal rations and toping on Federal drink, they scanned the missives to see if any might be worth reading aloud. By now most letters sounded the same, especially those from mothers, which too often reminded them of their own mothers and made them homesick and so they no longer cared to read mother-letters, never mind hear them aloud. Most sweetheart letters were also largely forged of sentiments so conventional it was hard to distinguish one from another—yet they sometimes contained salacious detail and so were always worth a quick scan. A company favorite was the letter Cole Younger took off a dead Yank in early summer and had since read aloud many times and still carried in his shirt, stained and creased to tatters. It contained an Illinois girl’s wonderfully graphic reminiscence of the farewell fellatio she’d granted her doomed soldier boy under a walnut tree in the evening shadows while her unsuspecting parents kept to the house. It still put Cole’s listeners in a hormonal agitation whenever they heard it. And there was the one John Jarrette carried, a Boston lassie’s letter telling the cavalryman whose brains Jarrette splattered onto an elderberry bush that she couldn’t wait to be naked with him again and be attended by The Captain, the name she’d bestowed on his member. Every time Jarrette read the passage expressing her delight in her beau’s lapping attention to the “cherries” on her “milk puddings,” the men yowled and bayed like hounds.
Blunt’s troops, however, seemed to be sorely lacking for intrepid ladyloves. Their letters were quickly run through and discarded as yawning bores. Only Ike Berry made an interesting find, but he revealed it to no one other than his brother and the Andersons. He took them aside and showed them a small oval photograph he’d found in the jacket of a Federal corporal, a likeness of a young blonde beauty with brave dark eyes and full lips, wearing a black choker around her neck. Jim let a low whistle and Bill said she sure enough looked like something to fight a war for. There’d been no letter nor anything else in the corporal’s effects to say who she might be, but the back of the picture bore an ink drawing of an artist’s easel with the canvas showing an eyeball, and underneath the drawing the stamped information: NATHANIEL SOBELSKI, PHOTOGRAPHIST—HARRISONVILLE, MISSOURI.
“A Missour girl sweet on a Yank,” Butch Berry said. “It’s enough to make me spit.”
“Butch has a point,” Bill said. “She’s not without serious fault.”
“Nobody’s perfect,” Ike said. “I could get her to see the error of her misplaced loyalty.”
The Andersons grinned wide and Butch snorted and spat.
But even to them Ike did not reveal the whole of his discovery.
He did not show them the small gilded locket and neckchain he’d taken off the dead man. When he’d opened the locket and seen the small tangle of dusky yellow curls nestled within, he’d stared at it for a time before accepting that it was a lock of her private hair. He’d felt of its springiness between his fingers, put it to his nose and believed he detected a faint scent of female essence. He imagined her as she applied the scissors and his chest went tight.
He was enthralled by this blonde beauty who had made her soldier boy so bold a gift. He thought of her as Rachel, a name he had always admired. He would henceforth compose nightly letters to her in his head, would praise her beauty and her daring heart, would tell her everything of himself and his deepest yearnings, would inquire after her opinions on the whirling world. He would envision her as she read his letters on a porch swing in the soft gold light of late afternoon. In nights to come he would imagine a time when the war had ceased to be, imagine himself seeking her out, wooing her, gaining her favor, declaring himself, promising to provide for her and to protect her better than the corporal ever could (the corporal unable, after all, to protect even himself). He would imagine them married and with a home and children, living on a fine tract of bottom he knew of in Ray County, making their way in this life with no need of anyone but each other and their sons and daughters. It was a life so right his eyes would go hot every time he dwelt on it.
On all of his remaining nights, just before he went to sleep, he would open the locket and touch the special hair. And if her true name was not Rachel, that was all right. He would love her, did already love her, whatever it was.
They buried Lionel Ward under a purpling maple, adding to the wide earth’s mass of interred bones and bonedust, to its store of dead beyond number. The ninety-one Yankee dead they left to rot under the passing sky—two dozen of them scalped and blood-crowned, many more of them docked an ear, absent a nose, minus an index finger. The crows were already at feed on them, and the wind would carry the swelling stink with its news of the waiting feast and draw more scavengers yet. Let the damn Feds find their fellows in such state and take warning from it.
IV
The Camps
1863–1864
MINERAL CREEK
They ferried across the Red River into Grayson County, Texas, on a cool October afternoon of cloudless sky and bright tangerine sun. A flock of blue herons as tall as schoolchildren rose off the upriver bank with a smooth working of wide slow wings. Bill Anderson regarded their flight and rued his lack of art to capture the beauty of it. He wondered what Poe might write about those gangly birds with their snake necks and dagger beaks and fierce mad eyes.
The ferryman spat a streak of tobacco at a watersnake wriggling near the pushpole. He told Quantrill he was smart not to try to ford the river, that there were quicksand bogs all along the Red of such size they’d been known to swallow entire wagons and their teams with them. “There’s more human bones rotting under the Red than in all the cemeteries twixt here and Fort Worth,” the ferryman said, showing a black grin through his stained beard.
Bill Anderson heard him and smiled. And thought the Red was a Poe river, all right.
Scouts had gone across three days ago to search out a campsite and they were waiting on the south bank to report to Quantrill. They’d found a good spot on Mineral Creek, and Quantrill said to lead the way. They rode along a trail winding through yellow grass to their stirrups, through shinnery and groves of cottonwoods squalling with crows. Just before sunset they reined up at a wide shortgrass meadow bordering the creek. Quantrill studied it carefully and then nodded. “This is it, boys. Our winter home.”
There was plenty of forage for the horses, and the creek was thick with turtles, with catfish and trout. The surrounding woodlands abounded with deer and wild pig. They formed into work parties and set to hewing trees and trimming timber and constructing a cookshed and rude quarters against the coming cold. They built large stone firepits and dug slit trenches in the woods. A family of hardfaced moonshiners emerged cautiously from the trees one day to sell them excellent spirits at better prices than they’d get in town, and the guerrillas made a deal with them for two wagonloads of whiskey every week. All else they would need by way of suppl
ies they could get at the town of Sherman, some fifteen miles to the southeast, and Quantrill and his officers established rosters for supply runs.
A courier came to them from General Henry McCulloch, C.S.A., commander of the District of North Texas, whose headquarters was in Bonham, some twenty-five miles east of Sherman. He conveyed his regards and congratulations to Quantrill and his men on their splendid victory over General Blunt at Baxter Springs. He’d heard the news from General Sterling Price himself, who was encamped in Arkansas and to whom Quantrill had sent a report about the engagement. He said he might call on Quantrill to assist in various military objectives in the Red River region. Quantrill responded with his own compliments and said he and his men stood ready to serve the general in any capacity.
At first they were content to spend most of their time in camp, making trips to town only as part of a supply detail or to visit the pleasure houses. Having lived in constant wariness for so long, they were slow to let down their guard, to believe fully that they were at safe remove from Yankee territory and its relentless hunting patrols. They passed their first weeks preparing for winter and tending to other requisite matters. They hunted and fished, smoked and jerked meat to lay by. They reshod their horses, made pistol cartridges, mended their clothes with needle and thread.
For recreation they drank and played music and sang. They had shooting contests and Quantrill usually came out the winner, although Bill Anderson won sometimes and so too did Todd. Nobody else ever won except Cole Younger and Butch Berry, who each won once. They held horse races, but Quantrill’s Charley couldn’t be beaten, and after a time nobody would bet against him anymore, so Quantrill proudly retired the horse from the competitions.
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