The following day came the news of Price’s defeat at Westport. Pap was in retreat with the remnants of his army, heading back to Arkansas. Dave Pool and his guerrillas had gone with him. The word was that Quantrill had departed to Kentucky with his meager band.
Dearest—
Price is finished. Many of the best of us are killed. Quantrill is gone. My war is done. I shall take leave of my forty good men in the morning and follow this notice to you by a day. Then we shall evermore be Texans and sail love’s sea in our sturdy tub.
OCTOBER 26, 1864
It has rained in the night and on this chill dawn he wakes rolled in an oilskin under a dripping hilltop maple and in each hand holds a Colt. He has slept more soundly this night than he has in months, and he stretches with great satisfaction. A few feet away Jim sleeps on, nothing of him showing from under the enveloping slicker but the thick tangle of his hair.
He rises and tucks the pistols into his belt, fits himself with the rest of his armament, then picks up his slicker and rolls it up and regards the Ray County countryside. Pools of pale mist linger in the swales and hollows. The trees to the east are afire with the rising sun. A ragged white arrowhead of geese wings to southward in the reddening sky. At his back the distant woods are still steeped in lingering night shadows. He hears the call of a solitary crow. Below the hill the camp is already roused, the men gathering at the cookfires. The air is scented with raw earth and woodsmoke, the rising aromas of coffee and bacon, the smell of moldering leaves. He recognizes Butch Berry as one of the riders heading out to relieve the night pickets.
Jim comes awake and stretches with a groan, then throws off his slicker and gets up. He buckles on his gunbelt and stands by his brother to look down at the camp.
“Let’s get down there,” Bill says. “I got something to tell the bunch of you.”
Jim arches his brow in curiosity, then grabs up his oilskin and hurries after him.
Arch Clement sees them descending the hill and readies a cup of coffee for Bill. At their ropeline tethers, the horses are saddled and stamping, eager to be about the day’s business.
At the central cookfire Bill says, “Listen up, boys,” and the men converge around him.
But now they hear distant rebel yells of warning and see Butch Berry and Tom Tuckett, one of the night pickets, riding hard out of the northern treeline, about a furlong distant.
“Yanks!” Jim says. “A bunch of them, judging by those boys’ hollering!”
A half-dozen Missouri militiamen, the advance riders, come galloping out of the woods, all of them with revolvers in hand, trailing Butch and Tuckett by a hundred yards.
“Make for the south wood, boys!” Bill shouts. “Go!”
In seconds the company is ahorse and riding hard up the hill, Bill and Jim and Arch bringing up the rear. Butch and young Tuckett are fifty yards behind them and pulling away from the militia pointmen.
Then Tuckett’s horse is hit and goes down. The boy tumbles like a flung doll—but he scrambles to his feet and starts firing at the pointmen and drops a horse and rider.
Butch Berry reins about and starts back for him.
Bill pulls Edgar Allan around at the foot of the hill as the rest of the militia force comes bursting out of the trees three hundred yards away. They look to be thrice the guerrillas’ number.
The rest of the company vanishes over the hilltop, but Jim and Arch rein up on the crest and look back and Jim hollers, “Bill!”
The militia pointmen are shooting as they close on Tuckett and are forty yards from him when the boy staggers and falls. Butch reins up hard beside him and alights from the saddle and pulls him to his feet and tries to get him onto the horse but the animal shies, then bolts away. Supporting Tuckett with one arm, Butch shoots with the other and two militia horses go down shrieking, their riders flailing over the ground. The other three Yanks go galloping past him, all of them shooting, and Butch brings down another horse just as he is hit and he drops to his knees, still clutching Tuckett to him.
Twenty yards beyond Butch, the pair of remaining militia pointmen rein around and draw spare pistols.
Bill hears Jim shout, “Come on—they’re lost!” He sees Butch struggling to his feet and refusing to unhand his comrade. The militia force is coming hard on a rising howl and hardly a hundred yards from him.
He heels Edgar Allan into a sprint and closes up fast behind the pointmen as they fire on Butch, and Butch sits down hard and Tuckett slips from him. Bill shoots one of the Yanks off his horse and the other looks back big-eyed and then ducks low in the saddle and veers away at a hard gallop.
He pulls Edgar Allan up short beside Butch, who is risen to one knee. He yells his name and leans from the saddle and puts his hand down to him as the Union troop thunders toward them in a storm of hooves and gunfire. Edgar Allan flinches and yelps and then is hit again. A rifleball hums a hole in Bill’s hatbrim, his right leg jerks and goes numb, a bullet cuts through his jacket and burns his ribs.
Butch looks up, his face streaked with blood, his shirt drenched red. He sees it is Bill and grins wide and white—and reaches up and clasps his hand.
And in that instant—his own grin feeling hugely grand—Bill sees a glorious incandescence and nothing more….
As the larger portion of the militia outfit chased the Kansas First Guerrillas into the wildwood, the jubilant commanding officer and a few others stood gathered around Bill Anderson and looked on the handsome unmarred face, the blue-rimmed hazel eyes. They couldn’t believe it was him, but the orders from General Price that they found in his pocket confirmed it. Some of the militiamen unsheathed their knives but the CO said no, not yet, he wanted the body fully recognizable.
They confiscated a wagon from a nearby farm and loaded him onto it, the back of his head soggy with blood where the pistolball smashed his skull. Then they bore him away, singing “Battle Hymn of the Republic” as they went. Butch Berry and Tom Tuckett they had scalped and stripped of their blue uniforms and slashed with sabers and mutilated in their private parts and beaten with rifle butts until none who ever knew them would have recognized their remains, which were left to the ants and crows.
They took him to Richmond, the Ray County seat, and laid him out in the courthouse for everyone to see. Some of the authorities both military and civilian cut locks of his hair for mementos before he was put on public display, stripped of the Union bluecoat, clad in his artful shirt. Also on public view were his six Navy Colts, a scalp taken from his horse’s bridle, some letters from his wife, a likeness of her and one of him and her together, a lock of hair presumed to be hers, a poke containing six hundred dollars in greenbacks and specie, a pair of gold pocketwatches. But the article that drew the most prolonged and intense regard was his black silk ribbon with its knots. Many who looked on it made effort at a careful count, and yet no two sums agreed, varying from forty-eight to sixty-one. Some swore for a fact it held more than a hundred.
His horse and one of his Navies were awarded to the officer in command of the hunting party that brought him down. His watches and the rest of the guns went to the other officers. The money was divided among the enlisted men of the force, and some of them would never spend their share but keep it as a souvenir. All other of his articles, including the black ribbon, would disappear before evening and no one would know where they went.
The local photographist was summoned and Bill Anderson was propped up in a chair and pistols placed in his hands and pictures made. A journalist on the scene jokingly asked if the guns were empty—and could not keep from laughing aloud when an officer snatched them from the corpse and removed the cartridges before putting the pistols back in the dead man’s hands.
They kept him on exhibit all through the day, then lighted the courthouse with torches and extra lamps and let people look on him into the night as well. As the news of his death had spread, gawkers from every county roundabouts came to join the long line and have their own look. Not until well after midnight had th
e last of them come and gone, and taken with them a tale to tell again and again.
But the best of the tales would belong to the few locals who went out on the street quite early next morning and spied something odd atop the telegraph pole at the end of the courthouse street. On drawing nearer and looking harder, they saw it was the head of Bloody Bill Anderson. The Yankee commander was notified and he ordered it removed, but he made no effort to know who committed the act, and no one cared that he did not, and all that day militiamen were smiling.
They buried his remains in an unmarked grave but everyone knew which plot it was, because for weeks after, every time a soldier in the vicinity had the need to piss, that was where he’d do it. Even after the army departed Richmond, no grass did grow on that grave thereafter, and some said it was not army piss that had burned the plot barren, but the hellfire from below.
“AND I DON’T WANT NO PARDON…”
He rode with the company down to Arkansas where they would make their winter camp and there said goodbye to them and shook hands with Arch Clement, their newly elected captain. Then he rode on to the Red and ferried across it and made his way to her place and found it abandoned.
The yard had gone to high weed and the cabin was missing its oversized door and had been ransacked of all furniture, including the big tub. He went into town and learned that the Purple Moon had changed ownership and was now called the High Hat. Most of the girls who had worked there last winter had moved on, but one who had not was a girl named Amanda. She told him that when the news of Bill’s death came to Sherman, several girls who knew her went out to the house to offer condolences, but Bush would not receive them, refused even to answer their halloos. The Hundley boy finally came from around back of the house and told them to go away. He obviously took the news badly too, for that night he came to town and got terribly and belligerently drunk and picked a fight with a pair of teamsters, and when it was over, one teamster lay dead and so did Lamar Hundley. A few days after that she was gone and no one knew where.
He navigated westward, hired on as line rider on a New Mexican ranch through the remainder of the winter, then moved on in the first warm days of spring. He shivered in the high passes and sweltered in the deserts, went weeks without encountering another soul during which he spoke to no one but himself and his horse. What he most often spoke of were the days when he and his brother were at the rustling trade with their father. He recounted to his mount the thrill of those nights when they drove the horses at a gallop under the moon and stars. Sometimes he spoke of his sisters, whom he had not seen since before their crippling in Kansas City. He’d heard that all the women prisoners had now been exiled from the state, but he had no notion at all where the girls might be. He heard the news of Appomattox nearly two months after the fact. And a report that Quantrill had been killed, though none knew where or even if it was true.
He rode after his shortening shadow every morning and played it out behind him in the dying day’s last red light. He held to this course until it delivered him to the end of the continent. The sight of the Pacific—brightly blue, undulant and endless—made him lightheaded. He took off his boots and walked barefoot in the wet sand and each time jumped back from the rushing surf as if it might snatch him away.
He took employment as a keeper of the peace in a nameless San Diego bordello and never had to use his pistol except once when a bad actor cut him across the ribs and he shot the fellow’s knee to fragments. He lived in a room over a cafe and kept to himself and no one called him friend. Now and then he visited with one of the house girls.
One day he heard someone say Christmas was two weeks hence, and he was astonished to realize how long he had been in this land of perpetual sunshine and greenery and soft seawind, where there were no seasons to mark time’s passage.
The next day he started back.
He arrived in Kansas City on a night of wind and bitter cold. He recalled the last time he had been here and the hard rain falling and the three who were with him and now all of them dead. He supposed that many of the men who had been here that night were now dead. He went into a crowded saloon and stood at the bar and drank whiskey in the clamor of men and women in desperate chase of pleasure. At every opening of the door, the sudden draft fluttered the lantern flames and the yellow light quavered on the walls. The place was hazed with smoke. In the heavy heat of the various potbellied stoves glowing red, the chief smells were of men unbathed and the cloying perfume of the whores.
The saloon grew louder and smokier and more crowded, the bar now packed four deep. He had just received a fresh drink when someone jostled his arm and most of the whiskey sloshed onto the bar. The man who did it had his back to him and wasn’t even aware of the accident. A Federal sergeant in the company of two comrades.
“Hey, you!” He thumped the sergeant on the back with the heel of his hand. The man whirled with a glare.
“You owe me a drink.” He gestured at the spilled whiskey.
The Fed regarded him closely. “I’ll be go to hell,” he said, his words barely audible over the din of music and song and loud talk and laughter. “I thought we’d killed all you bushrats or run you out of Missouri.”
“He’s one for sure, Silas,” one of the other soldiers said, showing a yellow grin. “Look at the hair on him. Longer than my big sister’s.”
“Oh, he’s one, all right,” the third soldier said. He affected to sniff the air. “Nothing stinks like that but bushwhacker.”
The soldiers were close about him and his back was against the bar.
“You still owe me a drink,” he said.
The sergeant grinned. “Oh, I owe you something all right, bushwhacker, but it’s not a drink.”
“I’ll wager it is,” said a man who pressed up behind the sergeant and spoke over his shoulder. It was Coleman Younger. He grinned and said, “Hello, Jim. Good to see you.”
The sergeant had lost his smile and stood fast, and Jim knew that Cole was surreptitiously holding a pistol to the man. The other two soldiers also stood wide-eyed, one of them with Frank James’ Colt in his ribs, the other with Jesse’s Smith & Wesson hard against his spine. Frank showed a small smile and nodded. Jesse was grinning like a lunatic.
“Get the man his drink,” Cole said.
The sergeant shouted and waved hard for the barkeep’s attention and signaled for a whiskey. When it came, Jim picked it up and looked at it and then poured the drink in the sergeant’s shirt pocket. He looked at Cole and the James boys and said, “Let’s get away from the smell of these Union shitbags.”
Cole stripped the sergeant of his pistol. “You want this, come on out and get it,” he said.
They swiftly snaked their way through the crowd and outside. They went to their horses and swung up on the saddles and came together in the middle of the street, reining their mounts in tight circles and all of them laughing. The wind had quit and their breath plumed blue in the bright light of a high full moon.
“I swear you got some luck, Jimbo,” Cole said. “If we hadn’t stopped in for a drink, those Yankee assholes might be dancing on your head right now.”
“The door!” Frank said. The sergeant had come banging out onto the gallery, and the shotgun in his hands had likely come from behind the bar. It took him a moment to spot them and start to raise the weapon—a moment too long. Jesse shot him in the mouth and he staggered back against the door jamb and the shotgun fell and he pitched forward on his face.
They heeled their horses hard and sprinted away into the darkness of the wildwood.
They went ten miles at full gallop before they were sure of no pursuers, then reined up on a bluff overlooking the Missouri. Their horses blew great smoky exhalations. The trees stood darkly skeletal in the stark moonlight and the river shone like a silver ribbon. Cole uncorked a bottle and they handed it around and all took a drink in turn but Jesse, who simply passed it along every time it came to him.
They sat their horses under the moon and drank and caugh
t each other up on things. Frank had been with Quantrill in Kentucky. He said Quantrill’s mean-ass horse Charley threw a shoe one day and Quantrill took him to a blacksmith who wisely put leg restraints on the animal to keep from getting his brains kicked out, but the horse kept trying to kick him anyway and broke a leg in the trying. Quantrill had to shoot the beast. He wept when he did it, and he said it meant the end was near for him too. He was right. A week later a gang of hired Union manhunters caught up to them, and in the fight that followed, Quantrill was shot in the spine and paralyzed from the chest down. The Feds carried him away to Louisville and it took him a month to die. The way Frank heard it, he’d left a goodly sum of money to Kate King, and the story held that she’d used it to buy herself a fancy whorehouse in Saint Louis.
Last spring Jesse decided to take up the Federal offer of parole to all bushwhackers who turned themselves in. Together with a bunch of other rebels worn out with the bush life, he’d ridden into Lexington under a white flag—and the Yankees had opened fire. He was shot in the chest for the second time in a year, and for the second time was thought to be a goner—and for the second time beat the odds. He was now engaged to wed the woman who nursed him back to health, his cousin Zerelda.
The word on Arch Clement was that he was raising hell in Texas. Dave Pool had been granted amnesty and was now a lawman in Lafayette County. W. J. Gregg was a carpenter in Independence, had a wife and two children and another babe on the way….
After he and Cole compared their California adventures, Jim said, “Well, what do you boys have in mind to do now?”
On an afternoon of driving snow, they robbed the Clay County Savings Bank in Liberty of $60,000 and made their howling, shooting getaway.
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