Wildwood Boys (35 page)

hooooooo!
”

 

Quantrill said they could get past the outposts on a moonless
night, and once they were into the unguarded open country they
could move fast enough to reach Lawrence before sunrise. The town
was so sure of its safety it still had not installed a telegraph, and its
local garrison had been reduced to fewer than a hundred soldiers.

 

“I have considered every objection to the raid, every obstacle,”
Quantrill said, “and I admit that there are many. But he who never
risks can never hope to gain. I, for one, am ready to assume the risk
required to gain my greatest ambition—to bring Jim Lane back to
Missouri and burn him at the stake within sight of Kansas City.”

 

This avowal raised cheers and renewed cries for vengeance, but
again there were remonstrations. Of the captains, Todd and Pool and
Jarrette were strong for the raid, while Younger and Gregg and Blunt
were reluctant. Bill looked at Yeager and saw him grinning. He figured Dick would choose to go.

 

Quantrill raised his hands and the bickering fell off. “Think on
it,” he said. “Consider what you have heard tonight. Examine it
every way you will. And I’ll have your answer, every man, at sundown tomorrow.”

 

“You ain’t got to wait for my answer, Bill,” Todd said. “I say we
sack the damn town and burn it to black dirt.”

 

“No!” Quantrill said, cutting off the renewing arguments. “I
want no answers now. You have until end of day tomorrow to decide.
Tomorrow give your answer, each and all, before your comrades.”
***

 

They debated into the night, Quantrill remaining apart from all discussion, then every man got some sleep and rose again before daybreak to resume the argument over breakfast. Opinions remained
strong on both sides. They broke for dinner, and afterward sat apart
to reflect.

 

Jim sat beside Bill in the shade of a maple and uncorked a bottle.
They passed the whiskey back and forth in silence for a time, then
Jim said most of the captains looked to be leaning toward the raid.
“Yeager’s decided for it. Appears Blunt might too. W. J. still thinks
it’s a fool notion. What say, Billy—which way you inclining?”

 

“I won’t be going,” Bill said. “I’ve been thinking hard, but no
matter how I look at it, I see I can’t go. Not with our sisters in a Yank
prison. Not while I’m waiting on an answer about getting them out
of there. What if the Feds want to make the trade while you and me
are away in Kansas? Hell, what if neither of us gets back from
Kansas? How long would the girls stay locked up then?”

 

Crows were chittering in the lower branches of a neighboring
tree. He felt that their bright eyes were on him, their aspect amused
and curious.

 

“But any of the boys in the bunch who want to go can go,” he
said, turning back to Jim. “So can you. I have to stay.”

 

“Well hell, Bill,” Jim said, “then I have to stay too.”

 

There came a cry of “Rider coming in!”

 

A horseman with an eyepatch loped into the clearing and reined
up, his mount lathered with hard use. He was arrived from Kansas
City, and the tidings he carried were grim.

One of the guards was a blond boy from Indiana who fancied himself a charmer of women, and from the day the girls had arrived
nearly a month ago, he had been making overtures to Mary Anderson. But the girls all agreed that there was something of the toad
about him, and they didn’t fault her lack of interest. At first, she had
been polite in her rebuffs, and then she had tried to ignore him, but
the Hoosier persisted in his attentions. Yesterday, when he and
another guard had come in to collect the breakfast pails, he’d made
bold to run a finger through her hair and remark on its prettiness.
She had simply walked away, shaking out her hair with her hands as
if to cleanse it of his touch, and left him smiling awkwardly and redfaced. But when he did it again this morning—this time stroking a
full handful of her yellow locks—she whirled and slapped his face
sharply and told him to keep his hands to himself.

In the face of the other girls’ laughter, the Hoosier was embarrassed to a rage. “You puke Missouri whore!” he said. He snatched
her to him and roughly groped her rump with one hand and
squeezed her breast with the other. She yelped and flailed at him and
there was a flurry of female shrieking and cursing as the girls leaped
to her defense. The other guard grabbed the furious Hoosier boy
from behind and pulled him away from them—and as he did,
Josephine hiked her skirtfront and executed a hard and perfect kick
to the Hoosier’s crotch. His eyes bugged and his mouth fell open and
his comrade let him drop to his knees. The Hoosier cupped himself
with his hands, bent forward and retched hugely.

“Now who’s the

puke,
you ignorant bully!” Josie said. She was
set to kick him again but the other guard pushed her away as more
guards came stomping up the stairs.

The sergeant in charge demanded to know what in purple hell all
the hullabaloo was about and everybody but the Hoosier started
talking at once. When the sergeant at last came to understand what
happened, he gave quick orders to shackle a twelve-pound ball to
Josephine Anderson’s right ankle.

As communal punishment they are to be denied dinner but they
don’t care. They tell Josephine again and again how proud they are
of her, and they laugh at each other’s repeated descriptions of the
Hoosier as he went down on hands and knees and puked like he’d
been poisoned. They’ve cleaned up the mess and dropped the dirtied
rags out a rear window and heard a hog below snortling loudly over
the treat fallen to it from above.

Josie sits on her bunk, Mary beside her and petting her and every
few minutes asking if there is anything she can do for her. Jenny
stands out in the middle of the floor and demonstrates again and
again the kick her sister used to bring the soldier down. “Lordy! It
was just so

grand,
Jo!” she says. “Billy and Jim are gonna be proud
of you!”

Josephine grins.

 

“I can’t believe they locked this awful thing on you,” says Charity McCorkle Kerr. She fingers the chain attaching the heavy ball to
the iron clasp on Josie’s ankle.

 

“Truth to tell, it makes me feel like a desperado,” Josie says. She
affects a wicked leer and pretends to twirl the ends of a long mustache in the manner of a stage villain.

 

“All they’ve really done is give me a weapon,” she says. “Look.”
She cradles the cannonball in both hands and stands up, its chain
swinging. “Next time a keeper gets improper with one of us, I’ll just
go up to him and take a bead on his foot like this”—she holds the
cannonball out—“then . . .” She lets the ball drop. It bangs on the
floor resoundingly and makes an indentation.

 

“Wouldn’t
that
set the bastard to howling and hopping on one
foot?” Josie says with a wide grin.

 

The floor quivers under their feet for a moment and ceases.

 

The girls look at each other. “What in the
world
. . .” Sue Vandiver starts to say—and the floor groans and renews its reverberations. The bunks rattle. The walls shudder and give off dust.

 

“Oh my God,” Amanda Selvey whispers.

 

The doorlock clatters and the door flies open and a guard yells,
“Come on!”
and they hear his boots thumping down the stairs.

 

The building jars sharply and every girl falls down shrieking.
Timbers and joists pop like gunshots and the walls break open with
tremendous cracklings and plaster falls and the air enfogs with powder and dust. The floor moans and tilts on its moorings and bunks go
sliding across the room.

 

Mary and Jenny help Josie to stand up with the iron ball hugged
to her chest as the other girls scramble for the door, some of them on
hands and knees. Holding to each other, the Andersons stagger after
them, coughing and choking in the haze. Just as the first girls lurch
out on the landing, it tears free of the wall and plunges in a monstrous crashing and terrified chorus of screams.

 

“
Windows
—we’ll jump!” Josie shouts.

 

They veer toward the front windows, leaning against the slope of
the floor, but it suddenly dips to their right and Jenny loses her grip
and tumbles away, shrieking
“Josieeee!”

 

Josie and Mary turn to go after her but then the ceiling rips apart
and furniture comes smashing down and the floor buckles and the
whole world gives way.

The pall of dust over the collapsed building was so dense that rescuers could barely see each other at a distance of two yards. They
were guided by the pitiful cries of the survivors. It was an hour
before the first victim was extricated, and it took the rest of the
morning and half of the afternoon to find and remove the others.
The street was jammed with onlookers shouting questions and conjectures about what had happened, avid to know if anyone had been
killed.

The first ones brought out were Jenny Anderson and Juliette Wilson. Jenny’s legs were mangled and her face badly torn. She would
carry the scars and require a cane the rest of her life. Juliette was
alive when found, but her ribs had been stove and had punctured
both lungs, and a few minutes after she was borne from the ruins she
was dead, drowned in her own blood. They found four girls together,
two of them maimed of limb but destined to live, and two with only
cuts and bruises who would forever regard themselves as favorites of
God. Sue Vandiver, Amanda Selvey, and Charity McCorkle Kerr
were each one found crushed dead.

As the girls, dead and alive, were carried from the wreckage,
many of the women looking on were moved to tears and some even
to anger, and several were heard to shout

“Murderers!”
at their own
soldiers.

Mary and Josephine Anderson were the last to be uncovered, the
elder girl lying atop her sister. When the rescuers lifted Mary out of
the rubble, she screamed with the pain of various broken bones. Her
spine was fractured, her legs partially paralyzed forevermore.

Josephine was pinned down by a heavy beam across her chest.
Except for a bloody nose, her face and head appeared uninjured, and
though her eyes were bloodshot, she was not crying. As the rescuers
worked to loosen the beam, a man with an eyepatch smiled down at
her and said, “Don’t you worry, honeygirl, we’ll have you out right
quick.” Her bare legs were exposed on the other side of the beam,
and he reached down and tugged her skirt hem to her knees. Her feet
were shoeless, and there was a dark swelling of bonebreak above the
manacle on her ankle. Then the beam was free and several of the
men took hold of one end of it and heaved together to raise it and lay
it aside.

And now they saw the iron ball embedded in her chest, a portion of its chain impressed with it. Saw the bloodsoaked dressfront
and the blood pulsing from all around the edge of the ball. It was a
wonder she could still be living, that her eyes yet held such ferocity
as they did. She coughed softly and blood showed on her lips and
the light in her eyes seemed to waver. In a voice she could not have
raised above its rasping whisper but which every man of them heard
as clearly as if she’d spoken it at his ear, she said: “You’ll be
sorry....”

Verdicts

The early rumor was that if their guerrilla kin did not themselves
come to claim their bodies, the girls would be buried in Leavenworth
cemetery. Once the war was over, any family that wanted to claim
the remains and remove them for burial somewhere else would be
permitted to do so. The maimed and injured girls were being cared
for in a special ward of the army hospital at Fort Leavenworth until
they were fit to travel. Then they would be exiled from Missouri as
decreed.

There was talk all over town that the Federals had deliberately
undermined the building to make it fall, that they had hoped to kill

all
the women in it. The Yanks were of course denying the accusation
as a base and outrageous lie, insisting they did not make war on
women beyond arresting and exiling those of them related to bushwhackers. But the talk was that they’d done it to show the guerrillas
the high price of bushwhacking from now on.

This information came to them by way of the man with the eyepatch who but a few hours earlier had smiled on Josephine and
called her honeygirl. He was known in Kansas City as Jack Andrews,
a supplier to wagon train companies, but his true name was Leonard
Richardson and he was a spy for Quantrill, one of the many who
worked for him in Kansas City and Leavenworth.

When Richardson told them which of the girls had been killed,
Quantrill sent a rider to retrieve John McCorkle and Nathan Kerr.
Both of them rode in his bunch, so he would have no one but himself
tell them of the death of Charity, sister to one and wife to the other.
Dick Yeager sent a man back to the White Oak camp to give John
Wilson the news of his sister Juliette.

Cole Younger was pacing hard, cursing, spitting repeatedly. The
two cousins killed had also been favorites, and his family’s experiences in this war made it easy to believe the Federals had arranged to
bring the building down.

“It’s how they do, the bastards,” he said. “They kill old men
from ambush, they make women to fire their own homes, and
now...

now
they kill girls by bringing a building down on them.
God
damn it,
I can stand no more!”

Quantrill held silent, leaning on a tree and smoking a thin cigar
and watching Cole with narrow eyes as he paced in the dying light of
the late afternoon. He observed too the shadowy faces of the other
captains as they listened to Cole’s fulminations. All these men had
lost kin to the Unionists, lost friends and neighbors who had committed no crime but to feed them and bind their wounds and give
them a place to sleep for a night. News of Federal meanness was
hardly news at all anymore, but neither was it something a man got
used to. Every new instance of Federal brutality only added to the
pain of every previous one. But the news had never before been so
awful as this, the killing of young women, of