Rifles for Watie (32 page)

Jeff felt a strong hand grab the dun's reins. A pistol was thrust into his face. A hammer clicked.

“Who are y'all? Wheah you goin'?” the same voice demanded, coldly and menacingly. Drawing a long breath, Jeff fought to get control of himself.

Bostwick said boldly, “Hold yo' fire. We jest wanta get through to Honey Springs.” He spoke easily and with a tolerant good humor natural to him.

In the moonlight Jeff saw they were now surrounded by rebel sentries. Forty or fifty hobbled horses were night-grazing close by. Near them, using their saddles for pillows, the ground was black with men sleeping. Jeff could hear their snores.

“Lotsa people in that fix. Why y'all wanta go to Honey Springs?”

“We're on our way there to join Watie's outfit,” Bostwick lied glibly.

Jeff felt his breathing quicken. Bostwick was certainly laying it on thick. Jeff hoped the explanation was satisfactory because there was no hope of escaping now. Apparently they had blundered onto a large detachment of rebel cavalry.

“If that's all ya want, then you can climb down off yo' hosses. Cunnel Watie an' his outfit is camped right heah.”

  
19

Wrong Side of the River

Watie men! Jeff's heart leaped so violently it almost jumped out of his shirt.

Cold sweat beaded on his forehead. Bostwick wasn't a Clardy man, but Jeff was. Already he could feel the execution blindfold tightening around his eyes.

There was nothing to do but dismount and unsaddle. Surly Voice gave them each a short stake rope and they tethered their horses to small saplings nearby.

“Yuh can sleep here till mawnin',” he rasped commandingly. “Then maybe the cunnel or the recruitin' officah will talk to yuh. Or maybe they won't.”

With a gesture of mingled hostility and contempt, his arm indicated an unoccupied grassy spot.

Pillowing their heads on their saddles, they lay down in their clothes. The grass was wet with dew but Jeff was too worried to notice or care. It felt good to lie still and relax. He was dog-tired.

But he couldn't sleep. Surly Voice lay between him and Bostwick. Even if he devised a plan of escape, there would be no way to tell Bostwick. And if he got away and Bostwick didn't, things might go hard with the Missourian. Maybe they'd learn more, pretending to join the Watie cavalry, than they would consorting with rebel civilians in the rear.

Why not play along until they found out what Blunt wanted to know? The main risk was talking their way past Watie or his recruiting officer in the morning, but that seemed a much better gamble than trying to shoot their way out of an armed camp tonight. The more Jeff thought about it, the better he liked it. Turning on his side, he closed his eyes and fell asleep almost instantly.

He was awakened just after daybreak by somebody stamping the ground near his head. The stamping was accompanied by an odd, jingling noise. Opening his eyes, he saw somebody's boots. On the heel of each boot was a large rusty spur with a drag rowel. Jeff dodged back and recoiled in fright.

Over him hovered an old man, ugly as a gargoyle. He was heavily built and bareheaded. In the early morning light, the man's head was almost twice as large as that of a normal human being. His huge, misshapen nose was pock-marked. His little, round ears were cauliflowered and looked as though they had been screwed forcibly into his head. His eyes were unsightly little slits that peeped out cunningly from beneath the most beetling brows Jeff had ever seen.

When the man saw Jeff looking at him, his face broke into such a hideous grin that Jeff thought quickly about the pistol in his belt. But the man seemed to want to be friendly.

“Wake up, boys, day's abreakin', beans in the pot, sourdoughs abakin',” he mumbled in a weird, tuneless key. His voice was broken and had a low, whining quality. He sounded as if he were about to break into tears. The man walked off, awakening others with his novel method of stamping almost in their faces.

Jeff sat up. A lemon flush of daylight lay across the eastern horizon. The robins had just awakened. In the pale hush of dawn, he smelled smoke and heard something bubbling in a pot. It was light enough to distinguish objects. Scores of baggage wagons were parked ghostlike with their tongues up and hundreds of horses grazed near them. Gasping with surprise, he realized this was no rebel patrol. This was the main body of the enemy force. Something big, some major enemy movement, was in the air.

Other figures were sitting up, yawning and stretching, throwing off brown and gray horse blankets. Jeff looked for Surly Voice. He was gone.

He toed Bostwick into wakefulness.

“What are we going to tell them when they ask us where we're from?” he whispered.

“Y'all can eat with ouah mess heah,” growled Surly Voice, coming up suddenly behind them. Startled, they spun round, staring guiltily.

He was a thin, red-haired, consumptive-looking fellow with hard blue eyes. Jeff estimated him to be about twenty-five years old. He wore a medium-brimmed slouch hat. On the sleeve of his faded gray uniform shirt were the yellow stripes of a sergeant. He glared at them with open suspicion and gestured arrogantly toward the fire. It was plain he considered them prisoners until they established their identity.

At the fire, the repulsive-looking old man, who apparently was the cook, was broiling pieces of beef on a hickory spit and baking sweet potatoes in the coals. The bubbling noise came from a large fire-blackened can of coffee.

While they helped themselves, with their fingers, to chunks of the delicious hot beef, Jeff had his first look at the Watie men. They were the roughest, raggedest troops he had ever seen. Most of them were dressed in tattered homespun gray or dingy, yellowish-brown butternut. But they had tough, shrewd faces and looked as though they could obey an order or fight intelligently without one, if they had to. Despite their Cherokee blood, most of them looked more white than Indian. Jeff stared with nervous fascination at their weapons.

There wasn't a saber in the whole outfit. Instead, each man wore a broad, straight, double-edged Bowie knife in his belt. Their rude bayonets seemed to have been made by local blacksmiths from saws, butcher knives, and files. Surly Voice, whom the others called familiarly “Sam” or “Fields,” had serrated the edges of his knife so it could tear Yankee flesh. They sat around on their heels, drinking tin cups of hot coffee and smoking shuck cigarettes. Jeff could tell from their conversation that they were getting ready to go into battle.

As the men wolfed down the beef and the sweet potatoes, they called the cook “Heifer” and openly insulted him about everything from his food to his deformed face. The old man took the rough banter good-naturedly. Jeff saw that the nickname “Heifer” was appropriate: the shape of the cook's head was not greatly unlike that of a full-grown female calf.

But his food was clean and tasty, and Jeff bit hungrily into his third chunk of hot beef.

“How d'yuh expect me to fight after eatin' this tripe?”

“Heifer, yore gonna have to cut down on the sody in these biscuits. I'm gettin' plumb yaller,” a gaunt, blond fellow growled amiably. The remark drew a general laugh. Obviously there were no biscuits.

“Yuh always was yaller. Don't blame the biscuits,” Heifer retorted in his sobbing, hysterical speech, and everybody roared and slapped the blond fellow sympathetically on the back.

“Got yet that time, Ben,” somebody said, and they all laughed again. Jeff thought they were the gayest, most light-hearted troops he had ever seen.

They didn't act like men going into battle. They seemed more like cattle herders getting ready to do a long day's work on the range. Still dreading his ordeal before Watie, Jeff wondered where the rebel cavalry leader was and what he looked like. Where he had seen only fifty men last night, there were hundreds this morning, all of them eating their breakfasts over small campfires and saddling their mounts.

The cook saw Jeff had no cup. Grinning, he handed him half a canteen that looked as if it had been blown in two with powder. Jeff saw with surprise that it was a Union canteen. The Watie men had few canteens. Instead, they carried clay jugs, straw-colored bottles or just plain tin cups.

He dipped the crude vessel full of coffee from the big can on the fire.

Jeff nearly gagged on his first swallow of the foul-tasting concoction. It was all he could do to keep from spitting it out upon the grass in front of everybody. This was his first introduction to rebel “coffee,” made by pouring corn meal in a skillet, stirring it until it parched brownly and evenly, then spooning it in a pot and pouring boiling water over it.

Jeff looked at Bostwick across the fire from him and froze with alarm. Chatting in friendly fashion with the rebels around him, the Missourian was boldly drinking the cold Fort Gibson coffee he had brought along in his canteen. Nobody in the south had coffee like that. If the rebels caught a whiff of that authentic northern beverage, they would know certainly that both Jeff and Bostwick were spies.

Well, they'd know it soon enough anyhow. Any minute now, they would have to face Watie. And they still didn't have a story made up.

Fields, the hostile sergeant, bulged in Jeff's path, glaring sourly down at him. “Let's go and see the cunnel.”

Silently Jeff and Bostwick followed him. He led them to a wagon in the middle of the camp and up to a handsome man who wore his long, sweeping black hair down the back of his neck. It stuck out underneath his slouch hat. Clad in open shirt and butternut pants, he was busily stuffing some papers into a haversack. Behind him, draped over a wagon wheel, was a gray uniform coat with a major's insignia upon the collar.

“Mawnin', Will. Wheah's the cunnel?” Fields greeted without saluting. With pounding pulse, Jeff realized this wasn't Watie.

“Left an hour ago fo' a staff meetin' with Cooper. Whatcha got there, Sam? Couple deserters?” The major's resonant, far-carrying voice sounded more jolly than threatening.

“Naw. Couple fighters. At least, that's what they claim. Came in about three this mawnin'. Said they wanted to join Watie.” He looked scornfully at Jeff and Bostwick and scowled at the major, as though reminding him that he expected him to do his duty.

The long-haired major turned his intelligent brown eyes fully upon them, and Jeff could tell from the color of his skin that he was part Cherokee, too. He was obviously in a hurry.

“How come y'all want to join us?” he asked seriously, looking keenly from one to the other.

Remembering Orff's instructions, Jeff decided to let Bostwick do the talking. But the major wasn't looking at Bostwick. He was looking directly at Jeff. Jeff's mind worked fast. For the first time in months, his stomach felt satisfyingly full.

He grinned. “Sir, we like the grub better here.”

“Better here than where?”

Frightened stiff, Jeff turned his grin on wider. “Better here than anywhere, sir.”

The rebel major scrutinized Jeff from the top of his tousled brown hair to the soles of his dusty boots. He saw nothing but a boy, a pleasant-faced, clean-cut boy who looked a little scared.

His face softening, he took his coat off the wagon wheel and put it on, and suddenly Jeff had the feeling that everything was going to be all right. The early morning sun peeked suddenly over the oak-covered eastern ridge, stabbing the scene with long streamers of golden light. Now the parked baggage wagons didn't look quite so spectral. Jeff saw the initials CSA stenciled in white on their sides.

“What's your name?” the major asked.

“Jefferson Davis Bussey, sir,” answered Jeff. Then he caught his breath. He had given his right name. It had never occurred to him that he might need another in enemy country.

A surprised expression came into the major's eyes. Despite his rank, he wasn't accustomed to being addressed as “sir.” He liked the boy's politeness. He began hurriedly to button his uniform coat and turned apologetically to Fields.

“Oh, bosh, Sam. With a name like that he must be all right. You swear 'em in. I was supposed to meet the colonel at brigade headquarters five minutes ago.” Snatching a high-pommeled saddle off the ground, he carried it, stirrups dragging and cinch rings and spurs tinkling musically, to his black horse staked nearby.

The hostile sergeant had no choice but to swear them into Company H of the Cherokee Mounted Rifles. Slowly and laboriously he wrote their names on the company roll. With his quill he pointed at Bostwick, who had also given his correct name.

“What's your full monicker? Robert E. Lee Bostwick?” he growled insolently.

Later Jeff learned that the major was William P. Adair, a lawyer who lived on Grand River and was one of Watie's most highly trusted officers and personal friends.

Quickly the irritable sergeant lined everybody up and called the roll. Jeff was amused at some of the Indian names in his unit—Beamer, Dreadfulwater, Duck, Doghead, Hogtoter. The sergeant rattled them off glibly, ending up with the three oddest names of all, Kickup, Turnover and Roundabout. Jeff also noticed that every man on the roll was present and accounted for. It was the stamp of a good outfit. Apparently the Watie forces had lost nobody because of desertion.