Raiding With Morgan (20 page)

A skeptical frown muddled Lieutenant Foote's rugged features. He butted his rifle, freeing a hand to drag fingers across his nostrils and sling snot against the wall. “That may be your name, but, by damned, you don't look like no gun-waving, fire-eating Morgan Raider to me. You look like you should be plowing somewheres today.”

When Ty didn't respond to that degrading epitaph, the Yankee footslogger slung snot again, hawked, spat on the floor, and said, “Here's how it's gonna be, pup. I'm escorting you to Cincinnati on the morning packet. I'm going to manacle your hands. We'll do it with them in front of you for starters. You give me the slightest cause and you'll travel with your hands locked behind you, a damn unpleasant way to ride on boats and trains. You try to run on me, and I'll stick you or shoot you. Don't matter to me which.”

Removing a set of handcuffs from a leather pouch attached to his belt, Lieutenant Foote, hard gaze never leaving Ty, tossed them to his prisoner. “Get dressed and put those on your wrists and snap them shut.”

The lieutenant waited patiently while Ty pulled on trousers and shoes and locked the heavy metal bracelets on both his wrists, doing his best to hide the pain in his leg. He was determined to keep Lieutenant Sheldon Foote from spotting any weakness in his prisoner that he could exploit.

Ty's caution was quickly rewarded. Lieutenant Foote slanted his rifle across his burly chest and said, “Like I told the good doctor downstairs, I'm not concerned about the healing of your wounds. My orders are to deliver you to headquarters in Cincinnati double-quick, since you're to be on a northbound train tomorrow morning. You've been assigned a new home, Mattson, what we call the ‘Hotel De Gankee,' just outside the fair city of Chicago. Bein' a Southern secesh boy, I'm certain you'll enjoy its lakeside winters.”

Lieutenant Foote stared straight into Ty's eyes. “Keep this in mind every minute. I'm a field-commissioned officer. Fail my duty once and I'll be broken back to the ranks. So heed my every order, or I'll leave you dead on the riverbank for the locals to bury.”

With that final, explicit warning, Foote stepped aside and pointed at the bedroom doorway. “After you, Mattson.”

Ty didn't let Lieutenant Foote's deliberate refusal to address him by his military rank faze him. He was beginning to realize how few personal rights were accorded prisoners of war. Professor Ackerman had noted in his studies that in many historical wars, it had proven cheaper for both armies to bury their captured enemies rather than house and feed them.

Hands braced on the walls of the stairwell, Ty negotiated the steep steps to the first floor. Dr. Gates and Jarvis nodded to him from the front parlor, but they didn't speak. Given Lieutenant Foote's zealous devotion to duty and lack of social amenities, this was probably best for everyone.

With that threatening bayonet behind him, Ty kept moving. He stepped out into a dreary morning. Fog clung to the river in silvery gray patches. Dark clouds whisked eastward, propelled by high-level winds. Damp air tweaked Ty's nose.

The scene fit his mood. He stepped off Dr. Gates's porch and turned toward the Pomeroy levee. He felt like a condemned pirate walking the plank of a British warship at sword point, a sensation that reminded him with stark clarity how precious, tenuous, and short life could be.

We are in Union shackles facing an unknown fate. We will shortly pay dearly for acts of war that our captors have declared illegal and unwarranted. We will not encounter a single forgiving heart. For us, human kindness and mercy perished on the battlefield behind a swirling veil of cannon smoke. The Union prison camps are shrouded in mystery. Will we be treated honorably or housed like starving dogs and whipped if we bark in protest? Will we be exchanged? If not, can we outlast the war? The uncertainty tears at our nerves. Oh, how some wish they'd died with gun in hand. We pray for the best. May the Lord watch over us.

—Journal of Lieutenant Clinton J. Hardesty, Morgan's Confederate Cavalry, 30 August 1863

T
y shivered, pulled the threadbare blanket tighter about his body, and snuggled against the backside of Shawn Shannon. The 1864 New Year's Eve blizzard raging against the single pine-board wall behind him threatened to tear the tar paper roof from the prison barrack.

His bunk was the farthest from the wood-fired boiler burning in the center of the narrow room. He was thankful he was in the middle tier of bunks, sandwiched between the solid bodies of Lieutenant Shannon and Private Ebb White. He was protected there from the arctic blasts of freezing air that swept through holes in the roof and the penetrating chill of the bare earth floor that seeped from beneath the lower ones.

Ty dreaded the coming morning. The guards had refused to buck temperatures twenty degrees below zero and the three feet of snow blanketing the yard to help the prisoners fetch more wood for the stove. When the wood box was empty, Ty would fetch wood with his fellow inmates in shifts or they would freeze to death. Lord, how he wished for the stifling round-the-clock heat of his ride with General Morgan.

Prisoners were not allowed to talk after the evening bugle. That didn't stop Ty from hearing those suffering closest to him in the near darkness. Below him, Private Billy Burke whimpered occasionally, the result of his spending hours riding the “Mule,” a wood frame near the yard gate with a narrow scantling across the top of it, his punishment for stealing a fellow prisoner's meager ration. The guards had gladly provided Billy with a set of stirrups by tying sand-filled buckets to each of his ankles. A day and night on the “Mule” left Billy sore, stove-up, and hurting a week after he returned to the barrack.

The groans reaching Ty across the narrow aisle separating the tiered bunks frequently drowned out Billy Burke's whimpers. After being caught throwing a stone at a Union sentinel, Private Ben Henry had been sentenced to thirty days with a sixty-four-pound iron ball, on a three-foot chain, strapped to his ankle. It made no difference that Private Henry was taken to the Camp Douglas smallpox hospital the next day. He was made to wear the ball and chain throughout his hospital stay. Upon his release, the iron ball slipped off the bed of the wagon returning him to Ty's barrack, severely injuring his ankle and his hip. The Reb doctor serving the camp hospital doubted Ben Henry would ever recover completely. He was left to suffer in his barrack bunk, because sick prisoners enduring infectious maladies other than smallpox filled the beds at White Oak Square Hospital.

Bad as the situation was for some in his barrack, Ty knew that the circumstance of Private Given Campbell was worse yet. Given had joined a group of conspirators that bribed night guards to look the other way while they scaled the east wall of the stockade. Their escape was short-lived, for the five of them were found hiding in the tenement slums of Chicago, three miles from Camp Douglas, within twenty-four hours. The punishment meted out after they were returned to the prison was thirty days in the White Oak Square Dungeon.

Just thinking of that pesthole made Ty's skin crawl. Accessible via a hatchway in the floor of the guardhouse, the underground room of the dungeon measured only eighteen square feet. Prisoners who survived a sentence there told of the one small barred window near the ceiling, and the solitary sink in a corner, which gave off an intolerable stench that assailed their nostrils and watered their eyes without relief. Rations were scant meals of bread and water, morning and evening. No blankets and bedding were provided. Regardless of the outside temperature, Rebels served their time in whatever clothing adorned their bodies when the hatchway door shut above their heads. Populate the tiny dungeon with up to twenty-four men at the same time and brutal brawls and fisticuffs were inevitable. The ordeal severely weakened prisoners, so after their release, death from other causes was commonplace.

“Our commandant,” Shawn Shannon had warned, “isn't concerned a whit about how many of us die from a stretch in the dungeon. Why should he be? It helps do away with the biggest of his problems.”

Ty wanted no part of the “Mule,” the ball and chain, or that foul dungeon. On the advice and counsel of Shawn Shannon, he had been very deliberate with his every move since arriving at Camp Douglas, Lieutenant Sheldon Foote's “Hotel De Gankee.” He was never late for morning roll call; and when the guards chose to make fun of his troublesome limp, knowing Ty didn't dare retaliate, he kept his lips buttoned and a bland expression on his face, though his innards burned hotter than Hades.

A Yankee sergeant, who laughed nasally, snarled, “Too bad those big shoulders will never have a chance to lift you over the stockade, secesh. You'd be running for a week to get there with that gimp leg.” That sergeant came the closest of any of the blue-belly guards to riling his feelings.

That was, until earlier this New Year's Eve, when Ty had been visiting the sinks before the blizzard struck in full force and ran smack into his father's murderer. All of Morgan's men, other than his highest-ranking officers, had been imprisoned at Camp Douglas. Ty had watched for Jack Stedman's son from the second he walked through the stockade gates—no small feat, what with White Oak Square containing sixteen barracks that held nineteen hundred men.

The sinks for each set of four barracks were constructed over sewers, with forty funnels from each sink connected to a soil box. Each funnel fit one man. To discourage escape attempts, Camp Douglas regulations mandated that a prisoner visiting the sinks during nighttime hours, no matter the weather, had to strip to bare feet and underwear before stepping from his barrack. If his sink was crowded with long lines, a prisoner sought relief at another, as public urination was forbidden and the guards were diligent about watching for such acts and quick to administer a whipping or paddling.

Long lines had forced Jack Stedman's offspring to seek accommodations at a sink other than his own, fostering the unexpected encounter that set in motion a chain of events that ensnared Ty like the jaws of a metal trap clamping on his ankle.

The Stedman son was in a powerful hurry to answer his need; he and Ty bumped into each other in the sink doorway. For two long seconds of lantern light, Ty looked squarely into a pair of cold gray eyes before he was shoved aside. In that short span, he caught the other vital features of the hurrying figure—pale blond hair, wide forehead, and bear trap jaw heavy on chinbone—that confirmed what he'd seen. He'd found his man. He was here in White Oak Square. He hadn't died on the battlefield, been sent home with the severely wounded, or been amongst the 103 Rebels that had escaped the first week of December.

Ty didn't hesitate or look back. He let the wind swing the sink door closed behind him and scurried across the ice-covered parade ground, arms spread wide to keep his balance. His feet growing numb, he hustled inside his barrack and made straight for the warmth of its boiler, stomping his feet and rubbing his hands together. Lord, but he was wracked with chills, through and through.

“Damn cold pee, huh, lad?” Private E.J. Pursley quipped, holding out Ty's shoes, shirt, and pants.

Never to be outdone, Private Cally Smith asked from his bunk, “Didn't freeze your vitals, did you? They're mighty important to us young fellers.”

“They would be, if we ever saw anything besides stockade walls every morning,” Corporal Sam Bryant said. “I didn't believe before they stuck us in this godforsaken pox pit that you could die of boredom, but I'm about to change my mind.”

“Oh, pshaw, Sam,” Ebb White countered, “you'd miss our chess games right off the mark, don't tell me no different. I'm the only man in creation you can checkmate.”

“Truth is, Ebb, I'd swap the rest of my days for a Yankee pardon and one more kiss with Kaitlin Fowler in her father's hay loft.”

The barbed teasing and romantic lamentations of his messmates seldom taxed Ty's patience. Upon his arrival at Camp Douglas back in September 1863, he'd been delightfully overwhelmed to learn that, except for Ad White and Harlan Stillion, his mess had survived the fight at Buffington Island intact and he would be sharing the same quarters with them. Tonight, though, he was only half listening to their jabber. He was desperate to talk with Lieutenant Shawn Shannon about the incident that happened a few minutes ago at the sink.

Ty dressed in a rush and headed for the far end of the building. Shawn Shannon, who'd lied about being an officer to travel to Camp Douglas with his messmates, liked to distance himself from the guards who lingered about the barrack's boiler, a strategy that also made a bunk available for a sick Rebel closer to the barrack's sole source of heat.

Lieutenant Shannon was reclined on their middle-tier bunk, reading a book by candlelight. His midnight eyes fixed on the rapidly approaching Ty. “Barracks aren't on fire, are they?”

Ty ignored his question, rose on his toes, leaned close so as not to be overheard, and, voice brimming with excitement, said, “I just saw Jack Stedman's son, father's killer, in the sink.”

“Are you certain it was him?”

“Yes, he's the same sapper sergeant Father and I identified while we were bridging the creek outside Chester, Ohio.”

The seven o'clock evening bugle blew, signaling that all candles and lanterns were to be extinguished and all conversation was to cease. The sharp tone of Ty's voice told Shawn Shannon he wouldn't be put off until morning, not about something of such importance to him that it was threatening to pop his cork.

Shannon laid his book aside, snubbed out the candle, and threw his legs over the side rail of the bunk to make room for Ty. “Climb up here beside me. If we talk in a whisper, the wind and the roar of the boiler should keep the guards from hearing us for a little while.”

When Ty was settled on the paper-thin, straw tick mattress, Shawn Shannon said, “Now, if you've found the right man, what do you intend to do?”

“I'll see him hanged or kill him myself,” Ty answered vehemently.

“Ty, let's set things straight. The Yankees won't hang him, unless he confesses, which is not likely to happen. We have no witnesses that saw him shoot Owen. You didn't see him do it, and when I got there, he'd already disappeared into that mad scramble of wagons and vehicles and horsemen fleeing the blue bellies. Even if we did have witnesses, think about it, why should the Yankees care if a secesh trooper killed one of his own in the heat of battle? On the other hand, you murder Jack Stedman's son or kill him in a fair fight, either way they'll gladly make an example of you and hang you in front of the entire garrison.”

In the ensuing silence, Shannon could practically hear gears spinning inside Ty's mind. He knew what was coming. The keen edge in Ty's voice deepened. “I'll see him dead, one way or another, and they can bury me with him. I'll keep a stranglehold on the bastard's throat till the Lord or the Devil, I don't care which, pries my fingers loose.”

Lieutenant Shannon took a deep breath. Any objection on his part to what Ty was proposing was pointless. Owen Mattson had made life-endangering decisions with the same kind of rock-hard conviction that ruled out waffling, self-doubt, and recrimination. The Mattson bones of fate had been cast upon the blanket, and they weren't to be touched again, period.

“Ty, did he recognize you?”

“I doubt it. He was in a heap of hurry to keep from wetting himself in front of everybody.”

“That's good. He's a coward and a back shooter. He figures you know who he is, he might swallow the dog—take the Union Loyalty Oath—and agree to fight the western Indians with the Yankees. And if he does, he's beyond our reach faster than the flare of a dying match.”

Shannon squeezed Ty's forearm. “I want Stedman's bushwhacking turd of a son to pay the piper as much as you. Promise me, you won't seek him out without talking with me first. I'll back you, but I want a chance to tell you if I think you're taking the wrong path. Then I'll step aside. I won't try to stop you.”

It was an offer Ty didn't dare refuse. He was fully aware he lacked the rough-and-tumble fighting experience of his father and Shawn Shannon. He'd participated in two full-blown horseback charges, firing with his pistol from the saddle. Never had he engaged another man, blow for blow, to the death as they had. In close quarters, he was an amateur with gun, knife, and fist.

“How would you go about it?”

Rubbing his cheek with a knuckle, a relieved Shawn Shannon thought a long moment, then said, “First we learn as much as we can about him. I'm acquainted with the Rebel master sergeants responsible for each of the barracks. I have a hunch our man is like a bear with a sore paw dealing with enlisted men and a handful of grief for his master sergeant. I'll ask about him as one officer talking to another. Then we'll talk again. How's that—”

A rough growl arose by the boiler. “I hear any more chatter, we'll fall out and sit bare-assed in the snow till it melts beneath you.”

The Yankee officer's threat echoed through the barrack and captured the ear of every prisoner. The long room grew quiet—so still that Ty swore he heard one of the prisoners bunking below him gulp. Not a single Rebel wanted to endure that particular punishment a second time. The weather ten days past had been right balmy compared to the howling New Year's Eve blizzard that continued to breach the walls and roof of the barracks. Thawing out a pair of frostbitten haunches was a unique agony, one that made the toughest of men well up and cry.

Shawn Shannon shushed Ty with a finger against his lips. Shooed away from the boiler by the guards, jovial Ebb White joined them and the trio rolled into the blankets for the night.

Still wound up, Ty lay awake long after his bunkmates were asleep and snoring. He prayed devising a plan to confront Jack Stedman's son wouldn't prove as frustrating as another endeavor of his had been, to date. The sighting of the White Oak Square Post Office as he passed through the camp gate the first time five months ago had squelched temporarily the dread of his coming imprisonment and thrilled him to the bone. He soon learned mail and packages were delivered daily from all points of the compass, north and south, and that the post office sold postage, paper, and pencil to those prisoners with the necessary funds. But the cost of postage for a single letter—three cents in Federal stamps and ten cents in Confederate—and that of paper and pencil seemed an insurmountable sum to a penniless prisoner such as Ty. The post office did forward outgoing mail minus the Confederate stamps, leaving the collection of the ten cents due to the final post office delivering it to the addressee. So, for want of three 1-cent Federal stamps and paper and pencil, Ty was against the wall when it came to writing letters.