Wildwood Boys

by James Carlos Blake

  The way Jim and Butch had heard the story, Payne Jones had played in a high-stakes poker game in the hotel one night and the major came out the big winner. Two days after that the officer was found dead on the south bank of the Red River, shot a bunch of times and robbed of his money, his eyes eaten by the crows. Everyone figured river bandits had done him in, but a few days later Quantrill found a letter under his door from a bushwhacker named Phillips who confessed to helping Payne Jones do the killing. Phillips claimed that when the major left the hotel to go back to his camp, he and Jones had caught up to him at the river and shot him and took his purse. But Jones reneged on his promise to split the money and kept the larger share for himself because the robbery had been his idea. So Phillips wrote the confession and left it for Quantrill and sneaked away in the night. The letter said that the major’s purse had a white star stitched on it and one of its points was missing, and if Quantrill searched Payne Jones’ possibles he’d likely find it.

  Quantrill went to Jones’ barrack and told him to lay his possibles out on his bunk. And there the purse was. Jones said he’d never seen it before, that somebody else must have put it there. But John Koger—one of Quantrill’s cadre of “old men” who’d been riding with him from the first, and whom nobody had ever known for a liar—told Jones he was sorry, but he had to say he’d seen him with the purse the night before. Oh yeah, Jones said, now he remembered—his sister had given him the purse for a present. Quantrill called him a lying and thieving murderer and placed him under arrest. He sent word to McCulloch that he was transferring the major’s killer to him for justice. He assigned three men to take Payne to the general’s camp in Fannin County and hand him over.

  “You say the major was kin to Ben Christian?” Bill Anderson said.

  “His father-in-law,” Jim said.

  “That’s the second damn time Quantrill’s put Christian ahead of his own men,” Bill said.

  “True enough,” Butch Berry said. “But listen to this. Before the three guards set out with Payne, some of the boys saw Todd talking with them. And guess what? Not Payne nor the guards ever did show up at McCulloch’s camp.”

  “Flat disappeared, the four,” Jim said.

  Bill smiled. “I’ll bet they disappeared to Missouri. And I’ll bet the general had a few things to say to Quantrill.”

  “He thought Quantrill had let them go and was lying to him,” Jim said. “Said he was this close, by God, to bringing him up on every damn charge he could think of.”

  “Quantrill must’ve been a little blackassed himself,” Bill said. His smile widened. “Did he have the balls, I wonder, to ask Todd if he knew anything about those long-gone rascals?”

  “Truth to tell, he did,” Butch said. “And George said he had no idea what became of those men. Told Quantrill he’d be willing to take a party out in search of them if he wanted, but Quantrill said never mind. They say he was giving George a ‘you’re a damn liar’ look, and George was giving him one back like ‘I dare you to say so.’ I tell you, it’s got real raspy between those two.”

  “What Quantrill did then,” Jim said, “was call the whole company together and give a speech about how any man among us who robbed or killed southern folk or rebel soldiers was no guerrilla but only a damned bandit, and he’d have no bandits in his command. Said he’d no longer stand by any man in the company who committed crimes against the townsfolk or on Confederate soldiers. He said any man who didn’t like it could mount up and leave. He was looking right at George Todd when he said it, but Todd just smiled like he was listening to a funny story.”

  “He said that?” Bill said. “He’ll side with townfolk and the regular army over his own men?”

  “Nobody left camp, either,” Jim said. “Not even Todd.”

  “Well, somebody’s leaving it now,” Bill said. He asked Jim to stay with Bush and told Butch to come with him.

  The smoke of campfires and barrack stovestacks rose thin and pale blue over the camp. It was the first time he’d been there since the day before his wedding. When his men spied him come loping toward their barrack they raised a terrific cheer that drew the attention of the other guerrillas. Archie Clement stood at the fore of Bill’s bunch to greet him, smiling wide. “It’s fine to see you, Captain,” he said.

  “Get the outfit set to ride,” Bill said. “We’re moving to our own camp.”

  The Anderson men whooped at the news and hastened to make ready, strapping on gunbelts, gathering bedrolls and saddles, heading loudly for the corrals.

  And here came Quantrill out of his hut and strolling toward him. Behind him came George Todd, Dave Pool, and Dick Yeager. Bill and Butch sat their horses and watched them come.

  “Well now, William T.,” Quantrill said, “I was thinking to ask you into my house for a drink in celebration of this rare honor, but it would appear you’re not staying long enough to step down off your horse. Quo vadis?”

  “So you won’t stand by a man of the company against a damn regular or even a townsman?” Bill said.

  “Ah, my address to the men,” Quantrill said, giving Butch Berry a quick glance. “More precisely, what I said was I won’t have bandits in my command.”

  Bill swept his hand at the gathered guerrillas and said, “Are these men of your command?”

  Quantrill looked around as if to be sure which men Bill meant. “Aye.”

  “And not a man of them an outlaw?”

  Quantrill smiled. “You’re a clever disputant, William T., and there’s no denying it. However, there is a distinction between outlaw and bandit. A guerrilla who robs and kills Unionists may be declared an outlaw by Unionists, but he is no bandit unless he also robs and kills men of the South. It’s a matter of circumstance, you see. No man is a bandit until circumstance proves him so.”

  “Circumstance be damned,” Bill said. “A captain stands by his men.”

  “You’re being willful,” Quantrill said. “A wise leader always regards circumstance. A man shouldn’t grip so tightly to a principle that he can’t unhand it when circumstance voids it of worth. It’s like trying to save a sinking ship by holding tighter to the tiller.”

  “You’re full of shit,” Bill Anderson said.

  Todd looked close to open laughter. Most of the others stood smiling as well.

  Arch Clement rode up and said, “The boys are ready, Captain Bill.”

  “You disappoint me, William T.,” Quantrill said.

  “Oh damn,” Bill said. “I pray Lord Jesus will forgive me.” And he led his men away.

  He encamped them a quarter-mile into the wildwood flanking the cabin, and he named the company the Kansas First Guerrillas. Kansas had not only been his own home for more than ten years, but also the home of a number of his men, and he regarded the name as a fitting defiance of the notion that the state belonged entirely to Yankees. A courier brought congratulations from General McCulloch for his break with Quantrill.

  He stood on the porch that night, Bush’s arms around him and her head resting on his shoulder, and could see the light of the company fires far back among the trees. Holding to her in the chilly darkness, breathing the scent of her hair, feeling the warmth of her flank against him, the soft press of her breast on his arm, he knew he would have to leave her.

  A captain stands by his men, circumstance be damned.

  The instant he’d said it to Quantrill he’d known he believed it above all things on earth. As he stared at the fires burning in the wildwood camp, he reflected that not a man of them had ever questioned if he would be leading them back to Missouri. They’d never had a doubt of who he was.

  Even as he held Bush close, he already missed her terribly and felt his loneliness twisting hard in his chest.

  She raised her head from his shoulder and kissed his cheek and hugged him more tightly. As if she’d heard his thoughts, she said softly, “Don’t feel so low about it, boy. It’s what you have to do.”

  He gawked at her.

  “I always figured you’d g
o back because of Joey,” she said. “It grieved me because I didn’t see how you can measure revenge for her. How many do you have to kill? For how long? For as long as there’s the war? For as long as you live? How can it ever be made even? But what—”

  “I don’t know,” Bill said. “I don’t know how long or how many or even if—”

  “I wasn’t finished,” she said. “What I know now is, even if they hadn’t ever done a thing to her, you’d still go back.” She stroked his beard. “One day I just knew it. I suddenly felt it and knew it was true and it damn near made me cry. I thought of every argument I could raise to keep you from going before I finally realized I not only couldn’t, I shouldn’t even try. I love you, Bill. I love who you are and I’d be the rankest fool to try to argue you into being somebody other.”

  She smiled and petted his face.

  “If I’m anything in this world more than a horse thief, I’m their captain.”

  “I know.”

  “If I quit them—” He gestured vaguely.

  “Then I might not recognize you anymore,” she said. “And that, Captain Anderson, would be just terrible.”

  He touched her smile. She kissed his fingers. “Do you truly understand?” he said.

  “Oh, hell no. Do you?”

  “Not in any way I can say that makes sense.”

  “That I understand,” she said.

  “I still don’t want to leave you.”

  “I know,” she said. “And you know I’ll be here waiting for you. Now that’s an end on it. Let’s not say another word on it. Let’s just go on inside and do that thing we do so well.”

  Two weeks later Butch and Jim reported that McCulloch had summoned Quantrill to his headquarters at Bonham and then tried to arrest him for insubordination. But Quantrill had suspected a trap, and he managed a neat escape, together with the forty men he’d taken to Bonham with him. He made straight for the Red but sent a rider to Mineral Creek to warn Todd and the others and they’d cleared out quickly too. The regulars gave chase but by the time they arrived at the river the bushwhackers were all on the other side, beyond reach of McCulloch’s authority. Quantrill stood up in the stirrups and patted his ass at the soldiers in an old gesture of contempt—and then they rode off laughing.

  “Funny thing is,” Jim said, “McCulloch put out word that the Anderson guerrillas helped in the chase after Quantrill and Todd. Why you reckon he did that, Bill?”

  Bill shrugged. “Probably wants to put us in better stead with the locals than Quantrill was. Get them to quit complaining so much to him. That’s good. If we don’t give the good folk reason to be upset with us, the general will be happy and not press us to work for him like he was pressing Quantrill.” He grinned. “Tell the boys watch their manners in town from now on.”

  Quantrill and Todd had set up a new camp in the Choctaw Nation, but after two weeks there, Fletch Taylor came back across the river to join Bill’s company. He said he couldn’t stand the sniping between Todd and Quantrill anymore.

  “I swear, I’ve seen them come yay close to pulling guns. The thing is, they’re scared of each other. Whoever stops being scared first is the one’ll come out top dog.”

  A WOEFUL ACCOUNT

  The new grass leaned in the spring wind, the trees swayed, the first sporadic rains arrived. The company set about smoking and jerking beef and venison to be in good supply all the way back to Missouri.

  On a drizzly afternoon, Jim Anderson showed up at the cabin, accompanied by a young bushwhacker he introduced as Jack Henry. The man was wan and gaunt and his right sleeve was folded on the stump of his arm and pinned to his shoulder. As the men clumped into the house, crows looked on from the dooryard fence.

  Jack Henry was one of Andy Blunt’s boys who’d stayed with him in Missouri over the winter. He was only seventeen but had long been shed of boyhood, and his face showed that he carried hard news. When Bush heard that he’d been with Blunt, she put aside the pan of cornbread she was preparing and came to sit at the table with them.

  The cripple had been avoiding her eyes. “My brother’s dead, isn’t he?” she said.

  Now he fixed his gaze on her. “Yes, mam, I’m sorry to say.”

  She sighed as if she’d been expecting just this news for some time, but she didn’t weep nor make any show of grief. She simply looked worn.

  “Ike Berry too,” Jack Henry said. “And Val Baker.”

  “Shit,” Bill said. He glanced at Jim, who said, “Butch knows. He went off in the woods.”

  “Tell it,” Bill said to Jack Henry….

  Blunt’s camp was in the snowy hills a few miles from Warrensburg and consisted of a half-dozen scattered and well-hidden dugouts, each one housing three or four men. In January Ike Berry and Val Baker showed up. They’d been visiting with Baker’s wife at her parents’ place a few miles downriver and were rested and well-fed. After all the backslapping how-do’s were done with and a jug was started around, Ike told of his errand to fetch Ned Smith. Blunt said the boy had proved himself as brave and tough as any man in the company and he’d hate to lose him, but if he wanted to go he could go.

  Ned was glad to hear his sister was safely in Texas, but he didn’t want to leave the company—not until Ike told him that Bush was married to none other than Bill Anderson. The boy was jubilant to learn he was brother-in-law to Bloody Bill, and now was eager to get to Texas and be introduced. Jack Henry asked if he could ride back to Texas with them and they said sure. His parents had been run off their farm by Order 11 and gone to Nacogdoches to live with his uncle, and he wanted to go make sure they were all right.

  They set out on a day so cold their spit froze before it hit the ground. It wasn’t till Ike Berry led them east off the Blackwater trace and onto the Holden road that Jack and Ned learned of the picture he carried of the blonde girl, and of his hope of finding out who she was from the Harrisonville photographist who’d made the likeness. They all but Ike thought it was a fool’s errand. Even if he should learn her name and where she lived, she wasn’t likely to be swept off her feet by one of the bushwhackers who killed her beau and scalped him. Maybe not, Ike said, but he had to try.

  In Harrisonville they discovered that the studio and several adjoining buildings had been burned down by redlegs more than a year ago. Nobody knew what had become of the old picturetaker who’d owned the place. Ike’s disconsolation lingered for days as they made their way south through the ruins of the borderland counties, the region now long deserted and seeming lifeless in the pale dead of winter, its eerie silence broken only by the callings of crows. Valentine Baker had wanted to go around this badland and avoid the risk of running into any Yankee patrols, but Ike argued that there was no need to add all those miles to their journey. He said the Federals weren’t likely to do much patrolling in this wasteland anymore, especially not in the winter. And so they pressed due south and made it through the region of Order 11 without incident, and Ike said he told them so. They had just crossed the Marmaton in Vernon County one early afternoon when a militia patrol of some thirty men came riding over a hill and spied them.

  They tried to run for it, but as they raced around a bend in the trail, Jack Henry’s horse was shot from under him and flung him tumbling down a steep snowy slope. Two of the militiamen rode up to the edge of the rise as he was struggling to get to his feet and one of them shot him in the arm and other in the chest. He would have no memory of being shot yet again, this time in the back, as he lay facedown in the snow.

  He woke up in a raging fever, the taste of his own blood in his mouth, swathed in bandages and his own high stink. He was in a narrow bunk in a dimly lighted back room of a house, being watched over by an old man and his crone of a wife. Their name was Pinker, and their farm stood less than a mile from the trail where he’d been shot. They’d heard the gunfire and trudged out through the snow to see what they might find, and what they’d found was him, sopping bright red against the white snow and near to dead. “It was the cold what sa
ved ye,” the old man told him. “Slowed the blood from all running out.” This couple, whose four sons had all been killed on different occasions by Unionists of one sort or another, had fashioned a rough travois of tree limbs and branches and on it dragged him back to their place. They tended to his wounds and waited to see if he would ever wake again. Six days later he did.

  They’d dug the balls out of his back and chest and treated the wounds with oil of turpentine, and they said he was in little danger of dying from either of those wounds. But the bullet that hit his arm had fragmented even as it shattered the elbow, and now the arm was poisoned beyond salvation. Pinker said it would have to come off. “We can do her,” his old woman said, “we’ve had lots of practice.” Then he passed out again. The next time he woke the arm was gone.

  They gave him the additional hard news that his three comrades had been killed within two miles of where he himself had been shot. The way the Pinkers had heard the story told in town, the guerrillas tried to make a stand in an abandoned barn, but the militia set it afire and drove out two of them—the one left inside was already dead. The pair to come out were shot up so bad they couldn’t ride, so they were hung right there next to the burning barn. The militia put a notice on the tree that they would kill anybody who cut them down, and as far as the Pinkers knew, nobody yet had or was likely to.

  He was nearly two months in recovering and learning how to do for himself with one arm, and was still skeletally thin when he told them he had to go. He’d had two ten-dollar gold pieces in his pocket on the day he’d been shot, and they were still there. He gave one to the Pinkers in exchange for their old mule, a scrawny beast the Feds hadn’t thought worth stealing, and he would not let them refuse the payment for it.

  Just before he left, they brought him more bad news. Andy Blunt’s boys had been caught in the open by two companies of militia and eleven bushwhackers were killed, including Captain Blunt. The militia was bragging of how they took him back to their camp and hung him from a tree for two days so everybody could have a good look at him, then they stripped his body and threw it in a gully where the crows and wild dogs could feed on it.