Wildwood Boys (25 page)

Quantrill put aside the newspaper and took a small notepad
from his pocket and scribbled in it, tore off the sheet and folded it
and handed it to Gregg. “Take this to Todd,” he said. “Tell him the
company meets at the Red Creek camp tomorrow night. Go.”

W. J. would later tell Bill Anderson the note said, “Shoot the
three—
now
. Q.”

Quantrill turned to Bill. “Have you ever made visit to Olathe,
William T.?”

The list

 

“Once.”

 

“Care much for the place?”

 

He remembered the gunfight in Olathe barely two months ago.
“Can’t say I did. Might’ve been pleasant except for some son of a
bitch named Porter and a sheriff he owns like a dog.”

 

“Well, I’ve been meaning to visit,” Quantrill said. “Redlegs have
been brokering horses there, and I’ve got new boys in need of good
mounts.”

 

“It’s a prosperous town,” Cole Younger said. His grin was larcenous. “Got lots of everything.”

 

Quantrill looked around at the others, then back at Bill. “You
and your boys can ride with us if such is your ambition.”

 

Your boys
. Bill looked at his brother and at the Berrys and none
seemed to have objection to Quantrill’s view of them as Bill Anderson’s boys.

 

“Gregg and Todd have both put in for you,” Quantrill said.
“Younger and Haller have spoken for you too.”

 

Cole Younger grinned at Bill.

 

“But mark me,” Quantrill said, raising a finger in the manner of
a teacher emphasizing a point. “We have a law in this company, a
law hard as stone. We don’t inform. An informer is a traitor of the
worst stripe. We will kill an informer and every man in his family. If
any of you cannot swear by that law, then you may take your leave
and good luck to you.” He leaned forward. “Gentlemen, I’ll know
your answer.”

 

Bill looked at his brother. Jim said, “I’m for it.”

 

He turned to the Berry boys. “Me and Butch already talked
about it,” Ike said. “We’re with you, Bill—if you’re in, we’re in.”
Butch Berry nodded.

 

“Well then,” Quantrill said. He got to his feet and they all stood
too. “Do you swear,” he said, “swear before God and the devil,
before the power of heaven to grant eternal salvation and the power
of hell to punish for time without end, do you
swear
to live by the
law of this company unto death? If so, say, ‘I do so swear.’ ”

 

And swear they all four did.

An hour after they departed the Vaughn place they arrived at a farm
off the Mission Road. The sun was not yet ascended above the trees.
Most of their party remained hidden in the bush as Jimmy Vaughn
and Cole Younger sneaked around to the back of the house to guard
against escape through a rear window. Socrates Johnson and Ike
Berry rode up and hallooed the house, both of them with their pistols
hidden under their partly buttoned dusters. Sock Johnson wore a
collapsible stovepipe hat he carried in his saddle wallet for just such
occasion as this. The door opened and from the inner darkness the
man’s voice said, “Who are you? What you want?”

“Name’s Reaper,” Sock Johnson said. “The Reverend Jedediah
Reaper, of the Church of Holy Divine. Me and my boy have lost our
way and we wonder if ye might help us to get our proper bearings.”

The door opened just wide enough for a man to step out onto the
porch. He held a lone-barrel shotgun of goodly bore, the hammer
cocked, and stood warily, ready to shoot and leap back into the house
at a hostile gesture. He looked all about, then kept his narrow gaze
shifting between Johnson and Butch Berry. “A preacher, ye say?”

“That is correct, sir,” Johnson said. “A poor but dedicated servant of the Lord. And your name, if I may inquire?”

A discourse

 

“Never mind my name. How do I know you’re who ye say?”

 

“Well now, sir, I don’t fault you for your caution, what with the
countryside crawling with brigands of every stripe in these sad days
and so many of them traveling under false colors. How’s a man to
know if the fella saying he’s a preacher really is one and not just some
outlaw lying in the face of God? Believe me, sir, I take no offense at
your suspicion. Such wariness is wisdom—and it is the very reason I
carry proof of who I am. I have in my pocket a diploma of graduation from the Holy Divine Seminary. Permit me to show it to you.”

 

Johnson’s hand went into the pocket of his duster and through
the hole cut in it to give him easy access to the pistols on his belt. He
cocked the revolver as he flicked aside the duster flap and the Colt
blasted and the farmer flung back against the wall and his shotgun
clattered to the porch planks. The man sat down hard with the look
of someone recalling an important chore left undone.

 

A scream sounded in the house and Ike Berry now brandished a
pistol too. Johnson reined his horse half-about for a clearer view of
the sitting man and then shot him again and the man’s head flung
blood on the wall and he fell on his side. One foot waggled a few
times and went still.

 

Another scream—and a woman rushed out and dropped to her
knees and cradled the bloody head and raised a high keening. A pair
of children, a boy and a girl, stood at the door and looked from
their parents to the two men sitting their horses—and then past
them to the other riders coming out of the woods and toward the
house.

 

Quantrill asked the woman her dead husband’s name but she
ignored him in her loud grief. He was about to ask again when the
older child, the girl, said, “My daddy is Morton Winstead.” Her little brother hit her with his elbow and glared at her, then turned his
fierce stare back to the men fronting the house.

 

On his thigh Quantrill held his notebook open to a page containing the names of farmers and townsmen and merchants and men of
law against whom the guerrillas had personal briefs, or whom southern loyalists had identified as informers to the Federals. He drew a
line through “Winstead.” The list was constantly under revision,
names crossed off, new names added. The Federals had their own
list, the militia had theirs, the redlegs theirs. In this part of the country, the war was this personal and had been from the start.

 

“It’s not solely that your husband was a Unionist, Mrs. Winstead,” Quantrill said in a voice raised high enough to be heard
over her lamentations. “What killed him was his unwise decision
to inform on secessionist neighbors, telling the Federals of their
kindness to us. He was responsible for three families losing their
father to a Union noose and seeing their farms burned. Tell your
friends this is what they can expect to reap if they sow as your husband did.”

 

He paused as if he would give her the opportunity to address him
if she wished, but she only continued in her loud grief over her husband’s body.

 

Quantrill looked at the children. “You tell them.”

 

The girl nodded, but the boy just stared in hate.

 

***

 

They came to the farm of another Unionist who’d been warned of
their approach. They soon enough found him hiding in a cornfield
and there left him lifeless, his blood seeping into the black earth and
nurturing a crop he would never bring in. They did no damage to the
farm itself. A soft breeze carried the calls of crows passing the news
to each other, the high cries of another family bereaved—lorn remnants of a kind of calamity as natural to the world as wildfire and
flood and windstorm, as old as the sons of Adam.

 

On their list too were the names of three men who lived together
with a Choctaw woman in a cabin about a mile off the main road.
The men professed to be ruffians dedicated to the theft of Kansas
horses, but many complaints had reached Quantrill that these men
thieved from Missourians as well.

 

When the guerrillas reined up in front of the cabin and hallooed,
the squaw was sent out to see what they wanted. Quantrill told her
to get away from the house and she scampered into the trees and out
of sight. The three men then came out without further solicitation,
calling out effusive greetings and showing stiff grins, explaining to
Quantrill that a body couldn’t be too careful anymore about greeting
strangers with open arms. They apologized for not having recognized him sooner, but they were sure glad to see him because it so
happened they had a fresh bunch of good horses they wanted to give
him as a present, and, no sir, don’t even think about offering to pay
for them, his money was no good with them. They were still blathering in this fashion when Quantrill gave a signal and a fusillade of
revolver rounds hushed them for once and all.

 

They found eight horses corralled in a clearing behind the cabin,
only two worth taking. The others they left for the Indian woman.
And left too—hanging by their heels from the lower limbs of an oak,
arms and hair adangle, coattails bunched at their armpits, their dripping blood blackening the ground beneath them—the three dead
men, one of them with a note affixed to his shirt: “Behold the wages
of thievery.”

As they rode through the gold light of late afternoon, a guerrilla
pointed to a huge and leafless oak tree and said it was the tree on
which some years ago had been hanged the notorious killer Bedford
Wills. “It’s why that tree’s gone dead,” he said. “A tree a murderer’s
hung from will die inside five years.”

Some agreed with this belief but others jeered it as an old wives’
tale. Some said they knew of hanging trees that had been in use for
years and years and they hadn’t died yet—but several of them argued
that some trees died slower than others, just like some men, and a
tree could be dying on the inside for a long time before it gave any
sign of it on the outside.

Sock Johnson said the whole thing was bullshit, the same as
believing that the way to end a drought was to kill a snake and drape
it belly-up over a fencepost. This opinion raised several loud assurances that the snake cure for a dry spell was a true fact and had more
times been witnessed to prove true than Sock Johnson had hairs on
his face.

They argued whether sunny days could be counted on if you
spied a rabbit a long way from its hole, and whether a pig with a
stick in its mouth meant a bad storm coming—a portent which Ike
Berry said he had never known to fail. Was it really a sure sign of
death in the family if a bird flew into the house, as many of them did
believe, or good luck if a redbird made its nest nearby? They snickered lewdly as schoolboys in debating Cole Younger’s claim that a
woman could snare a man to her will by seasoning his food with her
intimate female secretions—and Dave Pool raised a loud laugh all
around by exclaiming, “Sweet Jesus, so

that’s
how that Greene
County bitch got me to play the fool!”

They argued about countless supposed sources of bad luck, but
when Will Haller claimed that a cross-eyed person was bad luck,
especially if encountered at an intersection of roads, Cole Younger
nudged him and nodded at Butch Berry. Haller hastened to assure
Butch that he didn’t mean him, because after all, he wasn’t really
cross-eyed, just off-eyed, which was a whole different thing and only
affected one eye anyway, not both, like cross-eyed did. The others all
agreed with this distinction and said so. Butch looked around at their
serious miens, then grinned and shook his head and said, “I got to
say, that’s a heavy burden off my mind”—and they all broke out
laughing.

At the head of the column, Quantrill smiled.

 

A reunion and a fracas

The company numbered eighty men when it came together that night
at the Red Creek camp—a meadow engirt by heavy forest and hard
by the Blue River. Their various fires swirled and wavered in a fitful
breeze. In the dark distance a lobo called high and keen under a low
amber moon and the high spangle of stars, under paledust clouds of
constellations already ancient beyond reckoning at the advent of
men and their stone-ax antagonisms.

Every fire held a circle of men and there were rounds of visitation
from one fire to another. Introductions were made and old friends
greeted, rumors passed on, whiskey jugs shared, new clothes and
weapons displayed. Larkin Skaggs exceeded all descriptions Bill
Anderson had heard: the old man looked like a mad-eyed prophet
wandered in from a wildland unknown to any history or map. Andy
Blunt seemed wary on meeting the Andersons, expecting them perhaps to be seeking redress for his offense against Josephine. But Bill
simply asked if he’d learned any recent lessons in the proper use of
his hands. Blunt smiled wryly and rubbed the eye Josie had clouted
and said, “Damn right I have.”

Dick Yeager was hearty and friendly, his yellow teeth often bared
in laughter through a drooping muleskinner mustache. The Andersons would come to know that his family had owned a prosperous
wagon business in Kansas until jayhawkers raided one day while
Dick was gone to Santa Fe. They took every wagon and mule on the
place, burned everything they didn’t steal, killed Dick’s little brother
and crippled his father, distracted his younger sister near to madness.
Even in his loudest laughter, Dick Yeager’s eyes seemed to Bill as
coldly isolate as a winter field.

Fletcher Taylor had been with John Jarrette’s small band of guerrillas when it joined with Quantrill. Short and near to handsome in his
close-trimmed copper goatee, Taylor was a thoughtful and practicalminded man given to the frequent observation that if a frog had
wings it wouldn’t bump its ass so much. For his part, Jarrette was
now one of Quantrill’s best officers. A lean man of high cheekbones
and pointed black imperial and eyes blue as sulfur fire. This devilish
aspect all the more pronounced by his black guerrilla shirt and its
strange yellow stitchings—crescent moons and stars, triangles, mystical symbols whose meanings he admitted not to understand, but his
sister, he said with a grin, swore they would protect him in battle.