by Clyde Barker
‘Well,’ said Brent Clancy, ‘I reckon as I’ll be the best judge o’ that. Just you set it down there.’
But the fellow was obdurate and stubborn as a mule and held onto the little case as though his very life depended upon it. He shook his head, saying, ‘You’ll not be having this.’
Now the one thing needful if you’re wanting to be robbing a bunch of folk is to show that you mean business and will stick at nothing. If once there is any suggestion of weakness or lack of resolve, then before you know it, your erstwhile victims will be banding together to turn the tables and overpower you. Clancy knew of instances where this had happened and the failed robber had been beaten to death by enraged citizens or, in one awful case, subdued and then strung up from a nearby tree. He did not propose to fall prey to any mishap of this nature and so strode forward and grabbed at the leather-bound article in question. The man holding it gripped all the tighter and as he tugged at it, Clancy was aware out of the corner of his eye of the other two male passengers making as though to move forward.
Unless he acted swiftly, Clancy knew that things would soon spiral out of his control and so he released hold of the contested article, stepped back a pace and then reversed the scattergun and slammed the stock as hard as he could against the skull of the man with whom he had been disputing. The results far exceeded his expectations, for the simple reason that he had momentarily forgotten that he had cocked both barrels of the thing before commencing operations. The consequence was that one of the hammers came down and one barrel of the scattergun fired up into the sky.
The roar of the shot echoed across the grassy plain like thunder, causing the passengers to leap back in alarm and wonder if their last moments had arrived. Clancy, who had felt a searing pain in his cheek as the weapon went off, twisted the scattergun so that he was once again holding it by the stock and covering the others. Holding the gun at his hip, he raised his left hand to his face and was less than enchanted to discover that he was all over blood. A fragment of the scrap metal must have gouged a furrow along his cheek. He said irritably, ‘You all satisfied now? I’m more’n half minded to shoot somebody down this minute. I damned near lost an eye there!’ He stooped down and picked up the little morocco-bound case which had caused the trouble. Its owner lay on the ground stunned.
The unplanned shooting had certainly driven all thoughts of resistance from those that Clancy was robbing. He presented, had he but known it, a ghastly sight. His eyes were wild and blood was running freely down his cheek and dripping from his chin. Nobody felt minded to tackle him now. Even little Maggie looked scared and was gazing in terror at the man whom she had previously thought of as a charming and good-humoured sort. It struck Clancy that this poor thing was actually afraid of him.
Maggie was wearing a pair of gold earbobs; embellished with seed-pearls. She had told him that these had been left her by her grandmama. He wasn’t such a dog as to deprive her of a treasured heirloom, but thought it incumbent upon him to offer some explanation to his other victims as to why he was excluding the girl from his depredations. If he appeared to favour her in any way, some fool would next be accusing her of being his accomplice and it could go ill with her. He said, ‘I’ll warrant all your gee-gaws are naught but pinchbeck, miss. They’re no use to me. You have any cash-money about your person?’
‘Not a cent,’ said the girl frankly, ‘I’m being met at the other end by somebody.’
Brent Clancy looked over the passengers and driver and said, ‘You folk take yourself off aways, just walk a hundred yards over yonder. Then I’ll leave you all be.’
Sullenly, with a few murmurs of discontent, the men walked off in the direction that Clancy had indicated with a wave of his hand. Before she left, he caught Maggie’s eye and gave her an almost imperceptible wink, which she acknowledged with the merest nod of her head. The only one who marked this brief exchange was the man whose case had been wrested from him by main force. He gave no outward indication of having noticed anything amiss, but was satisfied in his own mind that the young girl with whom he had been travelling could, at the very least, set him on the trail of the man who had stolen his property.
Once everybody was clear out of the way, Brent Clancy scooped up the loot and stowed it in his saddle-bag. Then he shook the dust of that place from his feet, mounted his horse and, urging on the mare, set off at a canter, aiming to put as much distance as he could between himself and the site of his latest crime.
On a Friday night, eight months before Clancy had knocked over the stage running between Missouri and Kansas, nine men met in a room on the first floor of a saloon in Pulaski, Tennessee. It lacked just three days to Christmas. Legend would later have it that only six men were present at the meeting and that it took place on the very night before Christmas, but this was not so. The names of six of the men are well known. They were John C. Lester, John B. Kennedy, James R. Crowe, Frank Mason, Richard R. Reed, and J. Calvin Jones, and their purpose in gathering that night was to found the organisation that was to become known as the Ku Klux Klan. What is not generally known is that former Confederate generals Nathan Bedford Forrest, George Gordon and Patrick Abernathy Mason were also there that night. While the crowd downstairs in the saloon were getting liquored up, the three generals outlined an audacious plan; a scheme that, it was hoped, would change the course of history.
Following the Confederate surrender in April, which had brought the civil war to an end, there had been an uneasy peace throughout the south. Now, seven months later, after realizing that their states would be under military rule for years to come, many of the thousands of demobilised soldiers had licked their wounds and were ready again to fight against the Federal Government in defence of states’ rights. The Southern Cause had suffered a serious setback, but it was far from finished. The purpose of the meeting that night was to harness the simmering discontent felt by so many in the South and use it to help the Confederacy rise from the ashes of its ruin.
History has judged the Ku Klux Klan harshly, dismissing it as little better than a gang of hooligans whose aim was to terrorise the newly freed black slaves. This was, as far as it goes, perfectly true. Every member of the organisation in the years that followed that first meeting in Pulaski swore a solemn oath devised by former Brigadier-General Gordon, that they believed in ‘a white man’s government and the emancipation of the white men of the South and the restitution of the Southern people of all their rights’. In short, the aim was the restoration of the Confederacy and the renewed subjugation of the former slaves.
The nine men meeting in that room talked long into the night about the means by which Southern Rights were to be regained. The generals outlined their strategy, which was a subtle and cunning one. On the one hand, the new organisation would work on a local level to keep down blacks who were inclined to get a little uppity, what with all the ‘freedom’ they were being promised. This end was to be achieved by the judicious use of beatings, lynching and the burning of homes. At the same time, the Ku Klux Klan would be forged into what amounted to a secret army; a force hundreds of thousands strong who would be ready to wrest control of the South from the Yankee invaders, just as soon as the time was ripe. This would entail biding their time for at least another nine months or so.
It was then, after they had been talking for three hours or more, that General Forrest revealed the final piece of the plan; the culmination of all their plotting. He dressed the matter up in various fancy metaphors, talking of ‘cutting off the snake’s head’ and suchlike, but the gist of the thing was clear. In the high summer of the following year, 1866, the key figures of the Federal Government would be removed. The president, secretary of state and a number of generals would all be cut down as though by a bolt of lightning. The nation would be left rudderless and this was to be the signal for a general rising in the South, which would be accompanied by the simultaneous assassination of Republican politicians, carpetbaggers, scalawags and all the other figures who looked set to make li
fe a misery in the South for the foreseeable future.
General Forrest would not be drawn on the method by which the wholesale removal of the leading figures of the Federal Government might be achieved. Nor would he explain how the Yankee army would be prevented from wreaking revenge upon the South. He limited himself to observing that ‘Those Yankees heard our “rebel yell” often enough in the war, gentlemen. I tell you now, the rebel yell they will hear next, will be the loudest ever. I venture to suggest that this enterprise, which we are calling “Operation Rebel Yell”, will not only restore the South to its rightful position, but will sound the death knell for the Union itself.’
Chapter 2
There was some exceedingly lively and animated conversation in the stagecoach that Clancy had held up as it proceeded on its way to the Missouri town of Indian Falls. The general thrust of the conversation was between the two younger men, who would, it seems, have made short work of the road agent who had interrupted their journey were it not for their fears about a young lady being exposed to violence or some other species of unpleasantness. If not for this consideration, the theme of their angry declarations was that there were no lengths to which they would not have gone in tackling that desperado.
The two other passengers in the stage were singularly unimpressed by the braggadocio of the youngsters. Maggie stared moodily out of the window, thinking wistfully of the time that she had spent with Clancy, while the older man eyed the youngsters with undisguised contempt. He was the only one who had resisted and had had his head cut open in the process.
Frank Mason had been one of those present when the Klan was founded and what those involved referred to as the ‘Great Enterprise’ was launched. He had been carrying various documents and notes relating to both matters in a vanity case and that they had now fallen into the hands of some wild young bushwhacker was little short of a disaster. It was not so much that the information contained in the little case was irreplaceable; more that in the wrong hands there was enough there to alert Washington to what was afoot, which could in turn spike the guns of the conspirators in no small measure. It was of the utmost importance to recover the papers before any mischief resulted from their loss and also to silence the boy who had made off with them. True, the information was for the most part in cypher, but so weighty was the matter that no chances could be taken. Any cypher can be broken in time.
That the young rascal who had robbed him was evidently known to the girl sitting at his side had not escaped Frank Mason’s notice. He had both heard her startled exclamation when first she laid eyes on the robber and also observed the slight wink which he had given her as they parted. Mason would take oath that the two of them were somehow connected, which meant in turn that he must stick closer than a cocklebur to the young woman and try to get her alone when they arrived at their destination.
Maggie Hardcastle had not a cent to her name and was relying upon a mutual acquaintance meeting her when she reached town and taking care of her until she was settled in her new position, which was another hurdy-gurdy house in Indian Falls. Hurdy houses were a little different from ordinary saloons. They provided men with not only food and liquor, but also the opportunity to get to know young women who were apt to be a little more free and easy with their favours than was generally the case with respectable girls. Music was provided by a man with a hurdy-gurdy and those who wished could dance and get to hold some girl a little closer than was conventional. The girls themselves wore skirts short enough to reveal their knees, which was a scandalous thing to many upright citizens and accounted for the stiff opposition in some towns to the opening of a hurdy house. The rumour was that many of the young women employed in such places were willing, for sufficient monetary compensation, to go a deal further than merely dancing with customers. In fact, it was sometimes suggested, such places were little better than cat-houses.
The hurdy-gurdy house at which Maggie had been working in Sheridan was indeed as much a brothel as it was somewhere to drink and dance, and this had led to her leaving, or rather being asked to leave, the place. Maggie Hardcastle did not mind exposing her legs a little, nor to flirting and canoodling with some of the men who frequented the Sheridan house. She drew the line, however, at anything more than that and refused flatly to go upstairs with any of the customers, in order, as she put it, to go the whole hog. The manager had intimated to her that if she continued in this way, then their paths would have to part. As he had reasoned the matter out to her forty-eight hours earlier, ‘Strikes me girl, you’re a mite too delicate for this line o’ work! Happen you’d do better teaching in Sunday school or something of that kind. The boys we get here want something more than a kiss and a cuddle in the corner of the bar-room, if you take my meaning.’
Having already come to much the same conclusion as the manager of the hurdy house, Maggie had promptly arranged to leave. She had sent word the previous week to a friend of hers in Indian Falls, asking if she would meet her from the stage in a se’n night. Thus it was that when the stagecoach drew in to Indian Falls and she disembarked, Maggie looked round eagerly for Josephine, her friend. Josephine, however, was nowhere to be seen and Maggie found herself in the disagreeable position of being in an unknown town that she had never before visited. With growing despair, she realized that she could not recollect her friend’s address either. She had been depending upon being met when she got here.
As Maggie stood, looking helplessly and forlornly around her, somebody tapped her gently on the shoulder. Turning, she saw that it was the older man who had been sitting next to her during the journey. He said diffidently, as though shy of his intentions being mistaken, ‘I hope I ain’t troubling you miss, but you look a little lost. Is there aught that I can do, to be of service?’
Although he looked closer to fifty than forty, the man was good-looking and had a courtly manner. Maggie said, ‘I was supposed to be meeting somebody here, but the party hasn’t shown up.’
‘Well, if I’m not being too forward, might I offer to buy you some refreshments, while we think what is to be done? I hate to see a lady in difficulties.’
Had the man been a few years younger, Maggie Hardcastle would have politely, but firmly, declined the offer of help. However, this fellow looked old enough to be her father and had a pleasant way with him; like an uncle or something. He spoke too with an educated voice, which further served to make him appear trustworthy. She said, ‘Well, that’s right kind of you, sir. My name’s Maggie. Maggie Hardcastle.’
Bowing courteously, the man said, ‘And I am Nathaniel Delaney, Miss Hardcastle, and I am delighted to make your acquaintance. I am entirely at your disposal.’
Brent Clancy was not in the best of humours as he rode east, heading into Missouri. The wound to his cheek was a shallow one, but had nevertheless bled profusely. Apart from the attention that such a mark on his face might bring, just at the very time that he hoped to travel along without being the object of anybody’s remark, there was too the matter of his vanity. He prided himself on his good looks and the idea of having a scar down the side of his face irked him. Still, there it was, thought Clancy. A way of life such as this was bound to end in the occasional shot being fired.
After holding up the stage, Clancy had been left with a choice. He could hardly head back to Sheridan or on to Indian Falls. News of the robbery would spread soon enough and the sudden appearance of a wanderer with blood on his face would be likely to attract questions. He wished to get altogether away from the stagecoach route that ran from east to west and so he really had to decide if he would be going north or south. North would take him into more civilised parts; places like Kansas City or Topeka, both of which had well-organised and efficient police forces and good local law enforcement, which was not at all what Clancy was seeking! South, on the other hand, was Arkansas on one side and the Indian nations on the other. Both were a little wilder and less civilised than some parts of the country and so it was a natural choice that he should head in that general dire
ction. He recalled talking over his possible destinations with Maggie, for she had been on the point of moving on herself and did not appear to know this part of the country too well.
It was while he was weighing up the advantages of one destination over another that Clancy became aware that he was being trailed by two men who were, like him, on horseback. He had a sixth sense for danger and had it not been for this, Clancy might have dismissed the pair as no more than travellers who chanced to be going in the same direction as he himself. They were a half mile behind, but from what he could see, the two of them were moving faster than he and would catch up with him by and by. He had no especial reason to suppose that these other travellers meant him any harm, but Brent Clancy had not survived through the whole of the war by taking things for granted and being careless of his security. It was by always treating strangers as potential enemies that he had made it safely past his twenty-first birthday.
The track along which he was riding led through a featureless sea of grassland, but ahead lay a little wooded valley, which suggested to Clancy some opportunity for concealment. At the very least, it might afford him a chance to surprise those coming up from behind and ascertain if they had any intentions towards him or if this was just a random encounter between strangers on the road. As soon as he entered the wood and was out of sight from those two men coming up behind him, Clancy spurred on the mare and left the track. Once he was among the trees, he reined in and, concealing himself a little behind a stout oak, waited to see what would chance next.
The two riders had evidently speeded up a little, because no sooner had Clancy moved off the track, than they rode into the afforested area. Once there, seeing that the man they had been pursuing was nowhere in sight, the two men reined in and looked about themselves, perplexed. Brent Clancy smiled to himself. It was just exactly as he had suspected; those boys were on his trail, although for why was a mystery to him. Then, to his surprise, one of the men called out amiably, ‘Clancy! Where are you hiding, you son of a bitch?’
