Bloody Trail

by Ford Fargo

  The youth hesitated. Danby stared at him, the sneer fading.

  “I give you an order, boy,” Danby said.

  The lanky redhead who had killed Sango snickered. “The kid ain’t got the guts for man’s work,” he said.

  “Shut up, Davis,” Danby said. “McCain’ll do what I tell him, won’t you, boy?”

  “It’s one thing to shoot ‘em down,” Derrick said. “Hell, they shoot ours when they catch ‘em. But I don’t want any part of torturing people like we was wild Injuns.”

  Danby leaned over in the saddle and back-handed the youth. “You little shit!” he said. “You’ll do what I say! You’ll skin them monkeys your own damn self, or by God, I’ll skin you!”

  “Like hell!” the young man said, and reached for his pistol.

  There could be no better opportunity for Charley and his comrades. He charged directly into the distracted Rebs and burst through their line, the other three black soldiers behind him.

  The Rebs gathered their wits quickly. A fusillade rained on the fleeing soldiers. Charley felt the bullets plow into him. One in his right shoulder, another breaking a rib in his back, a third in his left hip. He leaned close to the horse’s neck and held on, as if he could outrace the bullets. He never looked back.

  But he survived. He escaped. The other three did not. Charley spent the last months of the war healing. His dreams were haunted for some time by Danby and the young man with the Cherokee face.

  And now fate had brought them back together. Some people would regard that as an incredible coincidence. Others would realize that it was not so incredible—that Kansas and Missouri comprised a world much smaller than one might expect, and that the war in those border states was a web whose strands connected everyone in one way or another. Truth to tell, there were probably several former Union Jayhawkers and Confederate border ruffians living in Wolf Creek, interacting every day, and that was only to be expected. This meeting, such people would say, was no different.

  But Charley Blackfeather knew better. He knew that there was a symmetry to the spirit world, that led inevitably to balance. When he saw Danby and McCain on the streets of Wolf Creek, Charley knew that it was the drawstrings of nature pulling them all together. He had privately concluded that Wolf Creek was a mystical place, imbued with powerful medicine—a thin place between worlds, that drew lost souls to it with the suction of a whirlpool acting on driftwood.

  Of course, he would never be able to explain his beliefs on the subject to white folks. He didn’t have the words, and they didn’t have the ears to hear.

  But here he sat, beside a ghost from his past, and he knew it was so.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Derrick McCain lifted his head and sighed deeply.

  “I used to worry every day that someone was gonna come into town and recognize me from those days. I guess, as the years went by, I just put it farther and farther back in my mind. And now, here you are.” Derrick’s eyes narrowed. “Why didn’t you say something earlier, in front of everybody?”

  Charley studied him a moment.

  “On account of you got me puzzled,” the scout finally said. “At first I thought maybe you was workin’ with the outlaws—you did before—but now I ain’t so sure. It was plain to me that Danby recognized you, same as I did, but seems like it come as a shock to him. And you wasn’t play-actin’ this evenin’ at that ambush.”

  Derrick nodded sadly. “But I reckon it’s just too much of a stretch. I don’t guess you expected to find somebody who rode with Quantrill bustin’ sod in Taylor County.”

  “Wasn’t expectin’ it, no,” Charley said. “But wasn’t surprised. Fact is, I think I’ve spotted one or two others. Not from the same band as you and Danby, but I know I’ve seen ‘em before. I’ve got an eye for faces. I would’ve placed you, if’n I’d seen your face good before today.”

  “How come you ain’t said nothing about them?”

  Charley shrugged. “I ain’t got no personal stake with them. I ain’t tryin’ to re-fight the whole war—around here, that would have no end.”

  Charley put the knife back in its sheath.

  “You ain’t gonna stab me?” Derrick said.

  “Not sure. Not right at this moment, I don’t reckon. Just didn’t want you to panic. I remember that you saved my life that day, whether you meant to or not.”

  “It was a bloody day,” Derrick said. “One of the bloodiest. And I was tired.”

  He looked away from the Seminole, into the darkness.

  “I had never really planned on taking such a course,” Derrick said. “I really did ride east to Tennessee, after my brothers, to join up. We were all there in the Army of the Mississippi, under General Albert Sidney Johnston. General Johnston died at Shiloh—and so did my brothers. A whole hell of a lot of people died at Shiloh, it was a mess.”

  Derrick closed his eyes for a moment, lost in a bad memory. “And it wasn’t long after that when I got the news from Wolf Creek. Some Jayhawkers had rode out to my folks’ farm one night and hung my pa from a barn rafter. Like I said, Pa was strong on popular sovereignty back in the ’fifties, and on the South. And on slavery—he always said slavery was an excuse Yankees tried to use to cripple the South in Congress. Anyways, he didn’t make many friends in these parts. I always sort of guessed that he was doing more than talking back then—they called this Bleeding Kansas for a reason, after all. Pa had friends that was hacked up by John Brown and his sons.”

  Derrick spat. Charley noticed that his fists were now clenched at his sides.

  “I was supposed to be here,” Derrick said. “Helping him and Ma. Instead I was hundreds of miles away. Pretty soon, it got to the point that I didn’t see any sense in lining up with thousands of other Southerners, face thousands of Yankees in a field, and then blowing the hell out of each other day after day. Not when the sons of bitches that murdered my pa was running scot free along the Kansas-Missouri border.

  “So I quit my post and drifted back West. I found some old boys who felt the same way about Jayhawkers as I did, and didn’t see the need to follow a lot of rules when dealing with them.”

  “Quantrill,” Charley said.

  “Yes, Quantrill. And all the hardcases that rode with him. There were several bands, and when they all come together we numbered in the thousands. There was Bloody Bill Anderson—his pa was murdered by Jayhawkers too, or so he said. And Frank James and his little brother Jesse—the Union bastards hung their old step-father from a tree and tortured him. And there was Cole Younger, Little Arch Clement, Clel Miller, and George Todd—and there was Jim Danby and his lieutenant, Wes Hammond.

  “We believed in hitting the Yankees hard. At first, I hated it and I loved it at the same time. I was doing things that the Good Book told me it was a terrible sin to do—but I was doing them to defend my homeland, and to avenge my pa. Every time I killed a Jayhawker up close, I imagined it was one of the men that hanged my father—and maybe some of them were.

  “But it got out of hand…way out of hand. You know what happened in Lawrence. We pretty near burned that town to the ground. Four hundred of us rode in at dawn and unleashed holy hell on them—everybody knew that town was the base for all the Jayhawkers and Redlegs in the area. I hear we killed a hundred and fifty men out of the two hundred that lived there. I don’t know. I wasn’t counting. I just know that the screaming mothers and wives and children still wake me up nights.”

  Charley nodded, almost imperceptibly. He heard the screams sometimes, though for him, it was not so much a haunting as an echo.

  “Things got pretty bad for us around Kansas after that,” Derrick continued. “We had to light out for Texas for a spell. While we were gone, the Union Army declared martial law in Missouri. And they arrested a bunch of women for being guerrilla sympathizers—including Bloody Bill’s sister. They put them in a stone jail, and it mysteriously collapsed in on itself and crushed those poor ladies to death.

  “Bloody Bill wasn’t just mad after that, he
was plumb crazy. He started scalping people—and a bunch of the others did, too. They would tie Yankee scalps to their saddles, and they’d flap in the wind when they rode into battle. It was downright savage. It was like the last veil of righteousness had been lifted away and we had become no better than heathens, you can’t imagine how terrible it was.”

  Derrick realized that Charley was staring at him curiously, with a bemused smile.

  “Oh,” Derrick said. “I meant no disrespect. It’s just that—well, I saw the bodies of some Confederate Cherokees that had been captured by some Union ones. The bluebelly Cherokees cut those poor bastards into pieces and then burned what was left, the smell was awful.”

  Charley politely nodded his understanding, and Derrick continued his tale.

  “It weighed on me more every day,” Derrick said. “I started thinking about Hell. It was hard to imagine a worse place than where I was already at, but if there was one I was surely headed straight into its mouth, and I could get sent on my way there any day. I was just sick of it all. The hunger for vengeance just sort of petered out after awhile, I guess. Instead of thinking about my dead pa, I started thinking about my living ma and how ashamed of me she would be.”

  A look of disgust passed over Derrick’s face.

  “And then came Centralia,” he said. “We hit the town that morning, just like Danby hit Wolf Creek today. And we tore up the railroad tracks—when the train rolled in we ordered everybody off of it and robbed them. There were about two dozen Union soldiers on that train, coming back from leave. Bloody Bill made them strip naked and stand in formation—and then the killing started.”

  Derrick shifted uncomfortably on the rock and then continued.

  “I didn’t join in. Danby did, he took some scalps and God knows what else—he gave me a real funny look when he saw me just standing off to the side.

  “I thought I was going to puke. I feel like puking now. I used to admire Bloody Bill, see. I used to look up to him. We had a lot in common, and I wanted to be like him—a cold, hard avenger. But now, he was an animal, a demon from Satan’s pit—and I didn’t want to be like him anymore. But with all the things I done, I was scared that deep down, I already was like him. I’m still scared that I am.”

  Derrick’s voice had gone thinner. He took a few moments to regain his composure.

  “You know the rest,” he said after awhile. “We knew you boys would come charging in to the rescue, so we laid a fine trap. I could deal with that, better than I could robbing old ladies on trains or murdering naked prisoners who was just on leave visiting their families. The ambush was war. And our side may have stopped taking prisoners—but so had the Yankees, and I’d had some good friends shot down in their tracks with their hands in the air. I didn’t like it, but I had done it—on the field, in the heat of battle, but not in the cold blooded way Bloody Bill ordered it done on that train.

  “But when Danby ordered me to—to help skin prisoners alive, I couldn’t take any more. I snapped. Funny thing is, if he’d just ordered me to shoot you, out there on the battlefield, you’d be dead now.”

  “Danby didn’t seem too happy with you that day, when you didn’t obey him.” Charley said. Despite the emotion emanating from Derrick like shimmering heat, Charley’s voice was impassive.

  “I reckon that would describe it,” Derrick said. “After you got away, he ordered one of his men to shoot me. I took a bullet in the chest and they left me laying with the dead Yankees. My dear old friends took my boots and my duster, and most everything else, same as they did to most of the corpses. They took all their own dead and wounded with them, except for me. Some kind folks that lived close by found me and took me in till I could ride. It was a miracle I was alive.

  “I borrowed a horse from them—I sent them money for it later—and made my way to the Cherokee Nation. My pa used to run a school there, before we moved to Kansas—I still knew people who would take me in and keep me hid while I finished healing.”

  “So I was right,” Charley said. “You did live in the Cherokee Nation.”

  “Just for awhile, when I was a little kid,” Derrick said. “I’m not Cherokee. Pa just moved there for the job. My people are from Tennessee, like I said.”

  Charley smiled. “So are the Cherokee. I bet you got some Cherokee blood in you, way back yonder somewhere. You got a Cherokee face.”

  Derrick was beginning to tire of Charley’s talk about his face. Others had made similar comments throughout his life—especially in Indian Territory—but somehow he found that the Black Seminole hammering at the subject was making him especially annoyed.

  “Anyway,” Derrick said, “now you know my story. I made my way home and tried to put all that behind me. Then the outlaws hit town, and I saw Danby. And I heard the screaming women—and that pitiful little Chinese child. And all the anger and shame came back to me. I felt like—I felt like maybe, if I could help bring them in, be on the side of the angels just this one time, then maybe somehow I could make up for all the bad I’ve done. Maybe the scales would be balanced for me.”

  Charley’s head jerked around as if he’d been struck.

  Balance.

  Charley Blackfeather understood the need to restore balance. It was the primary spiritual goal of his people, before some of them started taking on white man’s ways.

  He also understood violence. He thought back on the Florida plantations he had raided with John Horse, the soldiers he killed and fed to the alligators, the things he had done to white and Indian enemies alike in the Civil War. He doubted McCain’s “sins” could compare to his own actions. He did not consider them sins, though, and was not ashamed of them. It was the way of the world.

  Charley understood a man fighting to protect his way of life, and he understood fighting for revenge. Most of all, he was struck by the parallels in their stories—there was some strong medicine there which should not be ignored.

  “Well?” Derrick said. “Are you going to tell them about me?”

  Charley stared impassively at the younger man for awhile.

  “I won’t say nothing,” he finally replied. “I’ll give you a chance to restore balance. Balance is the most important thing there is, to an Indian. To white folks, too, only most of ‘em don’t realize it.”

  Derrick nodded his appreciation, but then the Black Seminole continued.

  “But I will have my eyes on you.”

  “That’s fair enough,” Derrick said.

  “Sleep now,” Charley said. “It’s my watch.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  G.W. Satterlee stretched, yawned, and then wearily scrubbed a hand over his face. He was getting too old for this. He had a comfortable bed in his house back in Wolf Creek, and yet he'd spent the night sleeping on the hard ground, just like in the days when he'd been hunting buffalo or scouting for the army.

  But, at least he'd woken up this morning, he reminded himself. That was something four of the men who'd ridden out with him would never do again, and the same was true for a number of people back in the settlement. Not to mention Mack Haskins, the grief-stricken farmer.

  The hour was well before dawn. A faint band of gray tinged the eastern horizon. A few yards away from the spot where Satterlee had spread his bedroll, Charley Blackfeather was poking the embers of the fire to life.

  "I'll have some coffee boiling soon, Sheriff," the Seminole said.

  "And I'll be more'n happy to drink some of it," Satterlee replied. "Obliged to you, Charley. Quiet night, wasn't it?"

  "Real quiet," Blackfeather said. "Except for the wounded men moanin' now and again. But in war, that qualifies as quiet, I reckon."

  "I didn't know we were at war," Satterlee said as he hunkered on his heels and held out his hands to warm them in the glow of the flames that had sprung up. It got chilly at night, out here on the plains. "I thought we were just chasin' down a band of murderin' outlaws."

  "Same thing. It's all killin'."

  Satterlee shrugged and said, "You ma
y be right about that."

  He straightened. A few more of the sleeping men were starting to stir. Satterlee walked over to where Dr. Logan Munro had propped himself up on an elbow.

  "Mornin', Doc."

  Munro pushed his blankets aside. He sat up and said, "I need to check on my patients."

  Munro climbed to his feet. Like Satterlee, he moved with the creaky stiffness of a man who might not be old, but was certainly no longer young.

  While Munro was making sure that Tolliver and Zachary had lived through the night, Satterlee walked around the camp, rousing the other men.

  "Reckon there's a good chance Danby and the rest of his bunch made camp last night, so they shouldn't have gotten too much farther ahead of us," Satterlee said. "But they'll be pullin' out early this morning, so we'd better do that, too."

  "What about the men we lost, Sheriff?" Rob Gallagher asked. "Are we going to bury them?"

  "Not unless you've got a shovel tucked away in your back pocket, son. None of the rest of us brought one."

  Derrick McCain said, "There's a little draw over yonder. Maybe we could put them in it and cave the bank down over them. It's better than nothing. Somebody could come out from town later and retrieve the bodies."

  "That's not a job I'd want," Billy Below said.

  "I could help with that," Sweeney put in. "Assuming I make it back alive."

  "So could I," Blackfeather added without looking up. He set the coffeepot at the edge of the flames. “We got another body, though, tucked behind that rise back yonder.”

  “Another outlaw?” Satterlee asked, and Charley shook his head.

  “The farmer’s wife,” the Seminole answered. “I found her out a ways, when I was scoutin’ up makin’s for the travois. I reckon they was done with her, and didn’t want her makin’ noise or slowin’ ‘em down. So they throwed her away.”