Wildwood Boys (26 page)

The Anderson brothers too were now garbed in guerrilla shirts.
Josephine had presented Bill with a dark blue shirt bedecked with
flowerwork in red and silver, the ammunition pockets lined with soft
leather. Jenny surprised Jim with a guerrilla shirt too—gray, with
black-and-brown embroidery—and it would have been hard to say
which brother received the handsomer garment. Annette and Hazel
promised to have shirts ready for the Berry boys on their return.

Jarrette was now showing off his latest prize, a weapon he’d
found in an Englishman’s hotel room in Independence—a Maynard
smoothbore doublebarrel which, in addition to the Colts he carried
on hips and belly, he wore in a sling holster across his chest. The
barrels were aligned one under the other and each was five inches
long and both of cavernous .64-caliber. He charged one barrel with
a solid ball and the other with scrap metal and small coins, and
either load could remove most of a man’s head. He called this gun
his Widowmaker.

Others too gave names to certain of their firearms. Andy Blunt’s
cutdown shotgun was Alice Malice. Cole Younger’s Army Colt was
Chopper. Dave Pool’s monstrous LeMat pistol, chambered for nine
.44 rounds from its top barrel and a .60-caliber ball or shotcharge
from the underslung, carried the name Hellgate. Dick Yeager
addressed his Sharps carbine as Mr. Graves. Some in the company
would give no appellation to a gun, but every man’s knife had a
name. Most of them carried bowies—some the size of small
swords—but popular too was the tapered poniard known as the
Arkansas toothpick. There were Green River knives and clasp knives
and skinners, fighting knives of all sorts. And because killing with a
knife entailed closing with your foe so that you smelled him and saw
his wild eyes and heard his breath and felt his blood spatter you even
as you sometimes stained him with your own, because a knife, in
brief, was a far more intimate weapon than a gun, it was generally
regarded as female. They called their cutters by the names of wives
and sweethearts—Sally, Molly Jean, Annie, Rachel, Maggie May—
and of women they knew as deadly legend: Jezebel and Delilah and
Bloody Mary, Salome and Lady Macbeth.

At the fire where Bill Anderson now sat, a bushwhacker named
Lionel Ward was telling of the marriage he’d been forced into at the
points of various long guns after the woman’s father caught them in
the act in the barn. “She wasn’t no spring chicken, you see,” Lionel
Ward said, “twenty-five if she was a day, and like as not was getting
fearful of the fates. I suspicion she had a hand in planning with her
da and brothers for that little surprise in the barn. Truth to tell, I
didn’t mind, for she’d mostly been such a sweet thing to me. But
once we’d been stood in front of that preacher, oh Lord, didn’t that
woman reveal herself for the queen of fishwives! Had a temper she’d
kept from me, you see, but now it was off the leash.” He stood it for
three months, he said, and one night couldn’t stand it anymore. He
sneaked out and saddled his horse and rode off without a look back.
“Took naught but me good Dan and me rifle and the scars on me
poor heart.”

“Could say you seceded from

Rebel yells
that
union too, hey Lionel?” somebody called out, and everybody laughed.

 

Now came a sudden outbreak of yelling and hollers of “Fight!
Fight!” from a group at another fire, and they all ran to witness the
scrap.

 

George Todd and Will Haller were locked together on the
ground, grappling in a firebright haze of dust, snarling and punching
and each trying to get a chokehold on the other. The bushwhackers
formed a wide circle about them, clamoring like harrying hounds,
shouting bets one to the other, exhorting the fighters to do their
worst.

 

Todd was the stronger man and now had Haller in a headlock
with one arm and was punching him repeatedly with his free fist.
Haller’s face distorting under the blows, smearing with blood, then
he managed to lock his teeth into Todd’s forearm and Todd cursed
and punched him faster but the bite loosened his hold and Haller
slipped free.

 

Both men on their feet now and gasping, hair askew, eyes in red
rage—and then abruptly locking together again and pulling each
other down. They rolled to the edge of the fire and the back of
Todd’s shirt began smoking and he yelped and rolled them hard
away from the flames. Haller kept trying to ram his knee into Todd’s
crotch and now Todd was biting hard on his ear and the top part of
it came away in his teeth. Haller howled and bucked wildly and
shook loose and they both scrambled to their feet again. Todd still
had the portion of Haller’s ear in his mouth and he turned and spat
it into the fire. Haller steadily and lowly cursing. Then they were
clenched again and Todd wrestled Haller to the ground and finally
managed to straddle his chest and pin Haller’s arms down with his
knees. The back of Todd’s shirt was scorched from the fire and the
taut fabric was embossed with the outline of the sheathed bowie he
wore back there on a sling around his neck. He reached back under
his collar and drew the weapon forth.

 

Both men were variously armed but neither had reached for a
weapon till now. Some might have thought it understood between
them that the fight was one of brute strength and not weapons, but
of all men anywhere, none knew better than this bunch the fallacy of
fighting by rules. Not even Quantrill, looking on with his arms
crossed, said anything in protest of Todd’s introduction of the knife.

 

The bowie’s blade was a foot long and three inches wide in its
upper portion and its curving saber point was honed top and bottom
so it could cut both upward and down. Todd put the tip to Haller’s
throat and a bulb of blood formed at the indention and then rolled in
a thin line around his neck.

 

“I’m gonna . . . get off you, punkinhead,” Todd said in a gasping
breath. “You can pull your knife or your gun . . . either one. Or you
can . . . get yourself gone.”

 

Todd rose quickly and stepped away from Haller, one hand brandishing the bowie, the other gripped on a holstered pistol. Haller got
up slowly and warily. He spat blood. He stood facing Todd, his battered face working with tics, then looked around at the others, some
of them solemn-faced, some agrin, all of them quieted now and waiting to see what he would do. He muttered, then spat again, then
limped off to where the horses were picketed.

 

The following morning Todd was elected the company’s new first
lieutenant. The rest of the day the men were at cleaning their
weapons and seeing to their horses, at telling tales and jokes, passing
the time until the sun was fled below the horizon and dusk rolled up
out of the east like a purple tide. As the last pink streaks faded from
the western sky Quantrill called them to mount up and then led the
way over the border and into enemy country.

They rode ahead of their raised dust like specters at roam on the
dark land. The pale half-moon was in the west when the town’s
lights came in view. A mile from town, scouts were waiting to report
the presence of a hundred Kansas militiamen, though the unit was
composed almost entirely of green recruits. “The spies say not a man
of them’s heard a shot in battle,” a scout said. “Say the name of
Quantrill puts a goodly white in their eye.”

Quantrill conferred with his officers, then sent Gregg with
twenty men to deploy around the town and cut off any messenger
the Yanks might try to send out.

The town blazing with lamplight this Saturday night as they trotted down the street in a double column, looking ghostly in the haze
of dust, raising no sound but the clumping of hooves and the jingling
of ringbits and armaments. They had of course been spotted as they
closed on the town, and the militiamen were formed up in two ranks
on the far side of the central square, the front line down on one knee
and both ranks with muzzleloaders ready. The street clear of civilians
but there were spectators at every window.

“Stay easy, boys,” Quantrill said softly to the men nearest him.
“If they wanted a fight, they’d have started it by now.”

 

At the square, the column split off to right and left to form a line
facing the soldiers some thirty yards across the way. The officer in
command was a goateed major standing slightly to the fore of the
ranks with a saber in his hand. A beardless lieutenant was close
beside him. They stood like farmers gauging a dark storm in the distance.

 

Bill Anderson heard Quantrill whisper to Todd, “Look at them.
They’d rather be anywhere but here. Would they were all this easy.”
He raised his hand and every guerrilla brought up a pistol in each fist
and the cocking of more than a hundred revolvers at once was a
sound to prickle Bill’s neck hairs.

 

“Halloo the commander!” Quantrill called out.

 

The militia officers were agape—and then the major stepped forward and said, “I am Major Wilbur Halltree, commanding the—”

 

“Your choice, sir,” Quantrill cut in, “is to live or die. Lay down
your weapons and I promise parole to every last man.”

 

“Ah now, Captain Quantrill, they don’t want no parole!” Cole
Younger called loudly. “They want to die for Old Abe Lincoln, so
let’s oblige them to the last man!”

 

Quantrill smiled and Younger grinned at the men nearest him.
Bill Anderson recognized Cole’s outcry for a ploy to let the Feds
know who they were dealing with. The militiamen stirred uneasily
and exchanged nervous looks and whispers. The lieutenant ordered
them to be silent and stand fast.

 

“
You
are Quantrill?” the major said.

 

“
Captain
Quantrill, sir, and his partisan rangers of the Confederacy,” Quantrill said. “I’ll have your answer quick or choose it for
you.”

 

The major looked around as if searching for someone he could
charge with making the choice. He stared back at Quantrill and said,
“But what assurance . . .” and gestured vaguely.

 

“If I were bent on killing you, sir,” Quantrill said, “you would
already be over the river and all of your men with you. Now
choose.”

 

The major looked at the lieutenant, then at his men, many of
whom were nodding like men with palsy. He turned back to
Quantrill and said, “Oh hell, man . . . we surrender.”

They herded the soldiers into a corral and ordered them to strip off
their uniforms and toss them in a wagon, and they relieved some of
their boots as well. They then set about seizing all the teams and
wagons in town, all the horses and mules, their rebel yells keening
through the streets. They ransacked the saloons and liveries and
shops. They loaded the wagons with barrels of whiskey, with weapons
and powder and balls, with foodstuffs and tools, tack, dry goods,
pausing in their labors now and again to take a drink or two, to
shoot to shards everything of glass along the streetfronts. Their
howling and gunfire sent most of the town’s dogs into hiding, but a
few rough curs set themselves with napes roached and teeth bared
and were shot dead where they stood. It pained Bill Anderson to see
dogs killed for their bravery, but he would not warn them away from
holding to their natures.

The Berry boys asked after the sheriff and were pointed to a man
with bloodied head who sat crosslegged in the square, disarmed and
looking addled. He was not the lawman who’d accosted them on
their previous visit to Olathe. They asked who’d been sheriff back in
June and were told his name was Worrell, but he’d been badly
wounded in a scrap with some passing strangers and would nevermore walk without crutches and had gone to live with his married
daughter in Lawrence. They asked about Harrison Porter and
received directions to his ranch a few miles from town. They told
Quantrill what they wanted to do and he said to take five men with
them, settle their brief, and bring back all the good horses they
found.

No house or hotel room escaped searching. They kicked open
locked doors, broke into trunks and chests and closets, rooted out
cash and gold and jewelry. Where they found nothing of sufficient
value they smashed furniture in their pique. The men were rounded
up in the courthouse square and robbed of their weapons, money,
watches, whatever ornaments of gold they wore. Some tried to
abscond into the outer darkness, into the nearest brush or ravine, but
were intercepted by Gregg’s perimeter guards. Some sought to hide
in outhouses, in haylofts, in wagonbeds, under tomato vines in their
garden, and some of them were discovered and some not.

Wives took to the square to plead for their men’s safety, but they
would have done better to stay at home. Where the raiders found
only women in a house their rapacity was checked. Andy Blunt was
set to take a small gilt handmirror he fancied for his sweetheart, but
the missus of the house beseeched him for it, saying it had belonged
to her daughter who’d drowned a year ago. Blunt gave it back and
tendered a condolence.

Not so fortunate was the man who tried to hide a bay pony in a
small corn patch behind his house. Cole Younger heard the animal
nicker and went outside and found it. The owner rushed out and
snatched the reins away and said, “I’ll die before I’ll give up this
horse.” Cole Younger was full of whiskey and in no temper to be
opposed. “Then die it is,” he said, and discharged a bullet into the
fool’s brain. But the flaring pistolblast spooked the pony and it
bolted away. Cole chased after it, cursing and threatening to shoot it,
but the horse vanished in the darkness and he did not see it again.

So it went through the rest of the night. The town’s two newspaper offices were demolished, their printing presses dismantled with
sledgehammers, their stores of ink poured over the supplies of
newsprint, over the furniture, over the heads of the editors. When
the owner of the