Massacre!

by John J. McLaglen

  But he still thought that Quantrill was a liar. He was convinced that the Lawrence attack was simply to pay off the scores of two years back when Quantrill had so nearly suffered the fate of Dutchman. Jim Lane was his most bitter and sworn enemy. Maybe there was gold and silver in the Kansas town. But Jed Herne was certain that it wasn’t the true reason for more than four hundred men riding to raid the place.

  Even at nineteen Jedediah was old enough to know that there was a time to talk and a time to keep your own counsel. Surrounded by Quantrill’s fanatical believers he wasn’t about to suggest that their Messiah had feet of clay.

  And a mind blinded by thoughts of blood.

  As they cleaned their horses together, the Quantrill Raiders bellowed out a song that one of their number had made up. Called ‘To Hell With Forty-Seven!’ it was about their contempt for the notorious Special Order of General Totton that had effectively rendered them all outlaws, forced to wage their War from beyond the pale, with the threat of the gallows for ever shadowing them.

  But it didn’t worry them. Designed to try and cut down on the brutality and violence of the fighting on the borders of Kansas and Missouri, the Order had the reverse effect. It hardened their resolve not to be taken. And that meant wiping out everyone who could conceivably prove a threat to them.

  And that meant just about everyone with eyes to see and a voice to speak.

  I’m goin’ to suck on that melon,

  Just as sweet as it can be,

  My dear dove goin’ to suck on that melon,

  Then she’s goin’ to suck on me.

  Cole Younger had a pleasant voice, and the group of men that were his special responsibility for the coming raid sang along with him on the old cavalry song. Everything was near as damn it ready. It was a quirk of William Quantrill that he took such great care over his own appearance, and yet allowed his men to ride out to War looking the most villainous raggle-taggle array Jed had ever seen.

  He had gone along with the trend, letting his stubble grow so thick that the suspicion of a moustache that he had been trying for months to cultivate was lost in the general hairiness.

  Whitey had chosen to dress himself in an approximation of a regular Confederate uniform, which looked even more bizarre when contrasted with the white hair billowing over his grey-clad shoulders and the parchment face with die coals for eyes. He carried a long saber and a pair of Navy Colts stuck in his broad belt. Quantrill encouraged the use of the lighter thirty-six caliber pistol for what was essentially hit-and-run raiding, where a man needed to be able to shoot well from the back of a fast moving mount over rough ground.

  Jed had also picked out some rags of uniform to satisfy his own sense of style. A grey hat with the remains of a white plume and a light-grey jacket over a shirt of the same color. He was taken by a wide strap that went across his chest and he used it to stick a spare pistol in. A Navy Colt, though he stuck loyally to the Tranter in his ordinary holster.

  He looked around at the rest of the unit as they prepared to move out, waiting only for their commanding officer to make his carefully judged appearance.

  Nearly four hundred and fifty of the hardest men in the Confederacy. Mostly in their late teens or early twenties, with even officers like Cole Younger still the age of Jed and Whitey. Alongside Cole, Frank James ran his fingers through his ginger hair and waved a swarm of flies away from his horse’s eyes.

  And beyond them the rest of the Raiders.

  Most wore red flannel shirts, though a number of them had chosen to add to that standard attire with bits and bobs of uniform. Some even wearing Union vests or pants. Most wore the broad-rimmed hat of the region, with its distinctive low crown.

  Nearly all of them sported heavy moustaches, some with full beards. As Jed looked along the column, he saw the stir of movement as Quantrill appeared from his tent, and joined in the huzzah of appreciation.

  The colonel was as elegant as if he was considering a stroll along a fashionable Boston street to have tea with one of the best families.

  Sitting his horse with easy grace, waving a hand to the cheers of his men. He was wearing the same shirt as when Jed and Whitey had first met him, with the delicate embroidery that spoke of the hand of a woman. His boots glistened in the bright sun and his soft black hat was pushed back on his head, the golden cord gleaming on it. Quantrill carried a saber with a polished hilt and a brace of matched Colts with walnut butts.

  ‘Men!’

  He waited for the silence to creep back to die wooded glade where they had kept their camp for the last few days. A dangerously long period with Jayhawker spies everywhere.

  ‘Today we ride!’

  Hurrahs from every hand, and much waving of hats.

  ‘We ride for riches! For freedom!! And for our beloved country!’

  Jed noticed cynically that money came before any inconvenient idealism.

  ‘That devil from the Pit, Jim Lane, and his band of assorted robbers and murderers who call themselves loyal patriots—’ He waited for the howls of derision. ‘They say that they are honorable men! Well, I say they are ... Aye! All honorable men. But only as they mean honor. Not as we comprehend the word.’

  Herne glanced across at Whitey, seeing the look of boredom that the albino could never bother to conceal. Catching Jed’s eye, Coburn yawned, shaking his head at the speechifying that was holding them up from getting to the action. And the money.

  Beyond him Jed saw another man with ginger hair, just to the right of the sandy Frank James. It was a common color of hair on the Missouri-Kansas borders, and there were several men in the command with the nickname of ‘Red’. Herne vaguely wondered which of them had been the companion of the Dutchman in the murder of the old man. And whether that Red felt a pang of concern when he heard about the cruel death of his partner.

  But Quantrill had finished his speech with a rousing reference to burning out Lawrence and raising the good old black flag of glory!! Jed joined in the bursts of cheering that sent half of the horses rearing and kicking with fright at the noise.

  The only incident of that first day’s ride was when a young Missouri boy, standing less than five feet tall, decided to challenge Cole Younger’s right to lead their unit. Starting to pick at the big man until the rest of them were in fits of laughter at the uneven contest.

  ‘Just because you’re bigger than me, Cole Younger, that don’t make you better. Do it?’

  ‘Some ways, it does.’

  ‘But there’s ways a little person is as good as a big person.’

  ‘Come on, Andy,’ said Cole, an edge creeping into his words. ‘You little guys go on with your little voices going meep, meep, meep. Tell me one way little’s as important as big.’

  Andy rode on a few paces lost in thought, his face reddening, while the other teased him. Jed saw that he couldn’t think of anything and was unable to desist the opportunity for a joke himself.

  ‘I know, Cole.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Somethin’ that’s little that takes as much trouble as somethin’ big.’

  ‘What’s that Jedediah?’

  ‘Takes you just as long to wipe your ass after a little shit as after a big one.’

  It took ten minutes for the jest to run round the whole company.

  Though Quantrill had spent a deal of time around the eastern part of the Territory of Kansas, both under his own name and as the Jayhawkers, Charley Hart, there had been great changes in the land wrought by the ravages of the Civil War. Whole communities had vanished, and winding trails had become well-ridden roads. It wasn’t going to be easy to take that number of men clear across country without a Northern spy seeing them or hearing of their passing, but Quantrill aimed to have a damned good try.

  They sought out the least used trails, sending ahead up to a dozen scouts, dressed in ordinary civilian clothes, to test the route that lay before them. And there were more outriders along their flanks and a half dozen bringing up the rear, a mile behind, to ensure th
at they were not endangered from any direction.

  Towards evening their patrolling horsemen brought in a prisoner. A tall, gangling boy, not more than fifteen, with hair cropped low over his ears and a vacant idiot’s smile that looked like it had been pasted on his face as an afterthought. He had a dreadful squint, and enraged Quantrill when he appeared not to be looking at him.

  ‘I am, suh,’ he said. ‘Doin’ mah best to look at you. Truth is I can’t see well, suh. But I can make you out real good now. You must be a general of some kind, ain’t that so, suh?’

  Quantrill had him questioned about any other groups of soldiers moving in the area but the boy was clearly half-witted and they could get little sense out of him, though his sad, patient smile never wavered, even after he had been slapped across the mouth to try and elicit information from him.

  ‘He don’t understand what we want, colonel,’ protested Cole Younger. ‘He’s but eighty cents in the dollar.’

  ‘Got a tile loose, colonel,’ said someone else.

  Quantrill shook his head. ‘Perhaps. The best spies are those that nobody believes could be a spy. Perhaps this lad is just such a one.’

  Herne looked at the boy. Crying, with great gobbets of tears streaming over his cheeks. Blood trickling unwiped from nose and cut lip. But still with that vacant, almost saintly smile.

  ‘No,’ he said, his voice loud in the stillness.

  Quantrill turned his head slowly and looked at him. ‘Herne. You know that I value the opinion of all men. But I will not tolerate being interrupted or crossed. You say that I am wrong?’

  ‘I do, Colonel Quantrill. If ever I saw a fool then that’s one standing there.’

  ‘I say that he might be a spy, Jed. Indeed, I say that I am sure enough to order him shot down where he stands. What do you say to that?’

  ‘I say that you’re wrong, colonel,’ replied Jed, sitting his horse calmly. Trying not to show the turmoil that churned in his stomach at the confrontation. Knowing that Quantrill was capable of killing the boy and then shooting him down as an example to the rest.

  The sleepy eyes seemed to be searching his. Out of the comer of his eye Jed noticed that Whitey had very casually let his right hand drop to the butt of one of the Colts in his belt, and he wondered whether Quantrill had also seen the movement.

  ‘Cole Younger?’

  ‘Colonel?’

  ‘You have heard what I think. And you have heard the thoughts of this young man.’

  ‘I have, Colonel Quantrill.’

  ‘Then speak and tell me what your opinion of the matter is, if you please.’

  Younger pushed his low hat back from his forehead and squinted up at the sun. ‘Seems to me, colonel, that there’s two ways of thinkin’ here.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I figure that Jed is right. The boy’s the biggest damned idiot I ever saw since a boy back home with his feet on backwards who used to sit in the dirt and eat horse shit. But you’re the man up there and if you say that we’ll be safer if he’s dead then I don’t figure you’ll find many of us to argue with that.’

  Quantrill nodded, the plume in his hat dancing at the movement. ‘That is correct. Jedediah? You have heard what Cole says. Will you try to argue this more?’

  If there’d been an artillery piece at his head the threat couldn’t have been clearer to Jed. And in a way he supposed that Quantrill could be right. He didn’t doubt the boy was a poor, foolish innocent. But it happened in war that innocence had to suffer.

  ‘I will not, colonel,’ he said, pleased to hear that his voice didn’t tremble. He’d faced death many times already in his nineteen years, but rarely so close.

  ‘Very well.’

  He heeled his horse forwards until it stood alongside the grinning boy. The lad looked at the proud figure of the officer, and reached up to pat his mount on the nose. The animal snickered with pleasure and buried its head in the boy’s neck while he rubbed it between the ears and crooned softly to it.

  ‘Under the authority of the Confederate States of America,’ said Quantrill, drawing his pistol, ‘I sentence you to death as a spy.’

  Jed noticed that, like Jansen in Strafford Springs, killings had to be shrouded in a cloak of legality.

  The boom of the pistol made many of the horses start, the echo of the shot rolling over the dusty grassland. The body of the boy jerked sideways’ most of his face blown away by the bullet.

  ‘Took his damned smile off of him,’ commented Quantrill, holstering the smoking pistol.

  That was the first killing of the raid on Lawrence, Kansas, in the summer of eighteen sixty-three.

  Chapter Twelve

  The second one came early on the evening of the next day.

  Another day of sweltering heat and choking dust as the long column wound its way along the back-trails of the border lands, heading westwards. Through a land virtually deserted by man.

  August the twentieth. The raid was planned for the early hours of the next morning and Quantrill had called a halt a little after the middle of the day, ordering all of his section commanders to inspect the arms and equipment of their men.

  ‘How much further, Cole?’ said Whitey, stretched out under the shade of a tall sycamore, spinning the chamber of his pistol.

  ‘Don’t rightly know. Fact is, I don’t believe there’s anyone with the column knows how we’re gettin’ in to Lawrence tonight. Might need us a guide.’

  ‘Like the boy,’ said Herne, quietly’

  ‘Now, Jed. What’s in the past is over. Best look for what’s “comin’ towards you.’

  CI guess you’re right, Cole. I’ve done some killin’, and likely to do some more. But I don’t take easy to folks murderin’ others that can’t hit a lick back. It’s not the way.’

  ‘That’s true enough, Jed,’ said Frank James, wiping sweat from his forehead with a blue bandana. ‘But there comes a time to everyone when it’s him or you. And if the him’s a blind man with a wife and fifteen kids then that’s his bad luck. Time’ll come to us all to face that moment.’

  ‘Yeah. Knowin’ it don’t make me like it none, Frank. Not at all.

  ‘Hell!’ laughed Cole Younger. ‘Frank there’s livin’ proof of makin’ the best. Know that Jesse don’t like his name that much? Well, ask Frank there what his real given name is.’

  ‘Lay off it, Cole.’

  ‘Come on, Frank. You’re just jealous on account of me bein’ a higher officer than you and bein’ damn near an exact year younger.’

  ‘I’m not!’

  Jed was interested. ‘Come on, Frank. You changed your name?’

  Breathing hard and looking angrily across at the grinning Younger, Frank shook his head. ‘Not changed it, Jedediah. I’m Christian-named Alexander Franklin, and I don’t cotton on to Alexander. Nor overmuch to Franklin. Ma was always strong on family names. So I chose Frank.’

  ‘Beats Thomas Coleman,’ said Younger.

  ‘I never thought overmuch of Isaiah,’ added Whitey.

  Herne sat up and tucked the greased Tranter back in the holster, taking care not to catch the cocking lever on the oiled leather.

  ‘Me, I like Jedediah Travis,’ he said.

  ‘How d’you get that mouthful?’ asked Frank James.

  ‘My Pa was a mapmaker with Fremont and they gotten trapped up in Carson Pass in the Sierras in forty-four. My Ma was there with them and I was born in a snowbound tent on February twenty-ninth. Ma died soon after. My Pa’s name was Albert Jedediah and he called me after him. He was a great admirer of the Texan’s fight for independence against the Mexicans and called me Travis after the defender of die Alamo. That’s all.’

  ‘Your Pa dead as well?’ asked Cole Younger.

  Herne shook his head. ‘Nobody rightly knows. He was never right in the head after Ma died and he took to goin’ off alone. Vanished into Indian country in the fall of that year I was born. Never been seen since. Every now and again there’s talk of a white man with the Sioux in the hills, b
ut there’s never more than talk.’

  There was a long silence after his words. Broken by Quantrill’s shout of command for them to mount up and get on their way again.

  It was a hard land.

  Seamed with deep gullies and steep-banked creeks, some impossible to cross with such a large body of men. Twice Quantrill was forced to order his column to turn about and go miles around one of the natural barriers. As they moved on, so their scouts were gradually being pulled in closer to the rest of them.

  Silence became the order as the sun slipped away to the west and the shadows grew harsher and longer, hiding the depth of the ruts in the trails.

  Herne jogged along with the rest of them, his left hand resting easily on the hilt of the saber. A long, curved cavalry sword that Quantrill’s men had taken from a Union lieutenant in an ambush only a week or so earlier.

  Every now and again they would come across a cluster of cabins, gathered together along the banks of a stream for protection. But in most cases that closeness had been little help to them. It was rare to find a single dwelling that hadn’t long been devastated by one or other of the bands of marauding guerrillas.

  They were over the border into Kansas by then.

  And night was coming on fast.

  The setting sun cast a glow over the land, brightening the reddish-pink colors of the fireweed that twined around the ruined and burned-out buildings. The rough-cut stones of the chimneys were blackened by the smoke, but the greedy vegetation was already beginning to hide the desolation and coyer the land in green once more.

  Quantrill held up a gloved right hand to halt the column, the order being passed down the files of men. As Cole Younger was one of the senior lieutenants of the Raiders, his group was near the front, and Jed could easily hear what was happening. One of the scouts had reported a fortified farm ahead of them. About a mile away. They’d gone closer to try and investigate but barking dogs had driven them off.