As they watched the militiamen bullying the small train of border
country refugees out on the prairie this red-sun early morning, there
dangled from Arch Clement’s saddle ties a quartet of scalps, one of
them not two days old. The crows on the elm branches were eyeing
this fresher morsel, and one still drying on Butch Berry’s saddlehorn.
Here and there were other, older scalps—hanging from Dock Rupe’s
belt, flapping from each of Buster Parr’s boottops, dangling from
Edgar Allan’s bridle. Now Bill Anderson hupped Edgar Allan out of
the trees and the men fell in behind him in a proper cavalry column
and they set off at a lope for the refugee train.
The militia lieutenant sat his horse and watched them come, taking them for the Federals whose uniforms they wore. As the cavalrymen drew closer he saw that the lead rider was a field officer and he
effected a smart salute. His fingers were at his hatbrim when Bill
Anderson’s bullet passed through his eye and the back of his head
spattered the horse behind him. Both horses reared in fright and the
lieutenant’s foot was snagged in the stirrup as he fell and his panicked horse bolted away with him bouncing and twirling alongside,
his arms flapping overhead as if he were in some religious ecstasy.
Pistols popping and issuing pale billows, the guerrillas rode
through them and most of the militiamen fell where they stood, some
still clutching whatever refugee possession they’d had in mind to
thieve. The bushwhackers then dismounted and shot them all in
head or heart to dispatch alike the wounded and the feigning. Then
set to taking trophies. Arch Clement rode out to where the lieutenant
had come free of his horse and lay with arms and legs splayed at odd
angles, and when he rode back a fresh scalp hung on his saddle.
At the first gunshot the refugees had flung themselves under the
wagons. Now they were slowly showing themselves again, fearful
and uncertain. The women clutched to each other and some held
close the youngest children. One of them had fetched the crippled
man his crutch and Ike Berry helped him get upright. The oldest boy
stood apart and studied the men in Federal blue as some stripped the
dead men of their ammunition and searched their pockets and some
examined the militia horses and singled out a few to take with them.
Then he cried out, “You ain’t Feds!”
As he went through a militiaman’s effects, Frank James gave the
boy a crooked smile. “You complaining, son? You ruther we were?”
By the calendar it is still a few days before the start of autumn, but in
this latter part of September the wildwood greenery is paling fast,
some of the trees already gone purple, amber, bright blood red. Duck
flocks daily arrowhead to southward. The nights carry a chill. The
old folk say it’s the fires. All those Yankee burnings have put too
much smoke in the air for too long, they say, over too big a region.
The weather’s turned strange with it. The skies have the look of
unseasonable frost coming on, the air has the feel of it. But then the
earth could use an early winter. The world needs to slow for a time,
rest itself, heal up some. Next spring will be here soon enough—and
the bush war back with it.
They’d come racing back to Missouri with every Federal in Kansas
on their heels. Quantrill ordered them to split up into their smaller
bands and hide deep in the wildwood. Bill and his bunch had gone
with Yeager’s to a hideaway hard by Miami Creek in Bates County,
but a few days later Yeager took his men farther east, away from the
border country and its hordes of Yank hunting parties. Bill’s bunch
stayed in Bates, and a dozen of Yeager’s boys chose to stay with
them.
Although Order 11 cleared thousands of southern families from
the borderland counties, there were still plenty of supporters in
neighboring counties to provide food and respite for the guerrillas.
Even in the borderland itself, a few seceshers had fooled the Feds
into believing they were Yankee loyalists, but they were still helping
the bushwhackers all they could. Union patrols continued to scour
the countryside, however, and most of the guerrilla bands were staying well hid. Quantrill was keeping to Kate King’s company in the
Blue Springs cabin hideout and making plans for the winter move
south. And once again living with them, rumor held, were the reconciled George Todd and Frances Fry.
In these last weeks of the summer of ’63, only Bill Anderson’s band
went hunting after those who were hunting them. They followed no
clear plan from one day to another but were guided by hunches, by
rumors heard from pilgrims met on the trails, by information gained
from the few farmers still about. Sometimes Bill let Edgar Allan go
whichever way he inclined, and as the horse chose was the heading
they followed. Such waywardness was not without advantage: if
they themselves didn’t know where they would be tomorrow, neither
did the Yankees. It was a war of chance encounters and they became
the masters of it. When they wanted to travel fast and far they rode
at night, for no Union outfit would venture into the bush after sundown. The darkness belonged to the wildwood boys.
They roamed from Jackson County down to Vernon, ranging all
of the territory evacuated by Order 11, and some days they found
quarry and some days not. And some days found themselves confronted by superior numbers and having to retreat into the deeper
forest. They perfected the trick of sending a handful of men into the
open to be seen by a passing Union party and gulling it into giving
chase to where the rest of the company lay in ambush. They now
wore Federal blue more often than not, and time and again rode
right up to a force of unsuspecting Yanks who would not know the
truth until it was killing them.
So it went, through the end of summer and into the first fall
days of that red September. And in that time Bill Anderson’s company grew to forty men hard and true. His silk ribbon now held
twenty knots, and stories of his exploits were told throughout the
borderland.
Among them was a man named Oz Swisby, a skilled banjo-picker
and singer and composer of songs which could never be sung in
polite society. He’d reworked an oldtime ditty into a song about their
company, and it caught the men’s fancy and became a favorite.
We’re Bloody Billy’s wildwood boys,
we’re riders of the night.
Only in the deep reaches of the night did he sometimes permit himself to dwell on her. He slept but fitfully anymore, yet he never felt
physically tired. He’d waken under the midnight stars and regard the
immense dark mystery above him and wish that he could know if it
was there by accident or design. This was the hour when he’d think
of Josephine and the fierce spirit in her eyes. He would each time
wonder if such a spirit, freed of the flesh, flew up like a spark off a
campfire to die as ash in the blackness—or if somehow the spark
burned forever in the void. He wondered if the stars themselves
might not be the spirits of the dead and if comets might not be the
most restless of them, the least reconciled to their fate. Was the
essence of Josephine even then streaking through the endless dark of
the universe? The notion was the loneliest he had ever had. Thereafter, every shooting star he saw filled him with a hollow sensation
for which he owned no name.
Came a courier from Quantrill with word that he intended to start
south for the winter within the week. Their brush cover was already
too much reduced by the Yankee fires and the early leaf fall, and
Union patrols in the region were more numerous than ever. Quantrill
wanted all the bands to make the move together for the greater
safety to be had in numbers. He called for a rendezvous at Perdee’s
farm on the Blackwater River on the last night of September. They
would leave for Texas on the following dawn.
The conjoined bands numbered three hundred men as they made
their way south in a double column through the largely deserted borderland. Most of them wore Federal blue. Dave Pool was in charge
of the forward scouts, and Gregg and Yeager commanded the two
outrider parties that kept watch for Union patrols far out to either
flank.
Bill’s bunch was now well familiar with the hardships of the
country they were passing through, but most of the larger company
was seeing for the first time the destruction visited by Order 11.
Hardly a mile of road lay unlittered with broken-wheeled wagons,
smashed furniture, staved barrels and sundered trunks, scattered and
tattered clothing of all description. Here and there the rotting carcasses of horses and mules, cows and pigs and dogs. Here and there
a hasty human grave, most of them made too shallow and since
excavated by coyotes or feral dogs, the remains devoured to ragged
and disjointed skeletons. A carrion stench weighted the air, and mingled with it was the odor of ashes. Crows everywhere tittering contentedly at the glut of good pickings.
The men cursed bitterly on seeing the charred ruins of homesteads where they’d taken supper and a night’s rest, where they’d
entertained themselves and their hosts with music and song and stories of vengeance against redlegs and Feds. Now nothing stood of
these places but blackened stone chimneys at either end of ashpits.
Except for the squalling of the crows, the only daylight sound was of
their own low cursings, the horses’ hooffalls, the chinking of bridle
rings. There were no other birds but the crows. It was strange to traverse so much sunlit country without hearing birdsong, without the
sound of roosters, livestock, dogs.
“When a region goes dogless,” Cole Younger said, “you know
it’s done for.” He had decided to go south with the company this
year. Of Quantrill’s captains, only Andy Blunt had chosen to stay
back for the winter.
There were still some dogs around, Bill Anderson said, but they
kept themselves hidden in the daytime and only came out at night.
He said he’d come on a pack of them at twilight just a few days ago.
But he did not tell of his dismay to find he could understand nothing
of what was in any dog’s head, nor convey to the dogs what was in
his own. He’d concluded that they must have been mad. He could
think of no other explanation.
“So many of them been shot trying to protect their home,” he
said, “the ones left don’t like to show themselves in daylight anymore.”
Quantrill chuckled. “About halfway sounds like us.”
George Todd was riding directly behind Quantrill and said,
“Speak for yourself, Bill.