Wildwood Boys (29 page)

“I love it,” she said. “I’ll treasure it till the day I die.”

But even in these isolate months when the world seemed to spin
more slowly and to curl into itself against the encompassing cold, the
borderland war went on. The Westport Sewing Circle had suspended
its meetings until spring, so the Vaughn place was without the
women’s weekly provision of news and hearsay and rumor, but each
time Finley went into Westport for supplies he also brought back
newspapers and reports from neighbors and stories he’d heard in liveries and barbershops and saloons. In the bushwhackers’ absence
from the region, Kansas redlegs and the Missouri militia were settling old scores with secessionist enemies of long standing and
wreaking hard times on those they suspected of being guerrilla allies.

The only Missouri newspapers still in business were pro-Union,
and they avidly endorsed the aggressive policy of seeking out and
punishing bushwhacker supporters. The meanest details of that policy were in the stories Finley brought back from town. Redlegs had
this winter burned a dozen farms along the border from Jackson
County to the Osage River. In several instances they played a favorite
game of putting a rope around their victim’s neck and hoisting him
off the ground again and again while his wife and children looked on
and pled for his life. They’d finally hang the man for once and all,
then fire the house and outbuildings before riding away and leaving
the family without shelter in the freezing cold.

The militia was not without its own breed of malice. They
burned farms and killed stock and now and then cut off a thumb as
a reminder not to give helping hand to the wildwood boys again.
When they severed a thumb from Milt Charles down in Bates
County, he cursed them for sorry sons of bitches even as his wife
worked to stem the bleeding and begged him to shut up. He said he
couldn’t wait to tell Quantrill who’d done this to him. “Well, let’s see
you tell him who did

this,
” the militia officer said, and shot him
where he stood.

They hanged Raleigh Watts in the woods about a half-mile from
his farm in Jackson County, hanged him from a high oak branch and
put a sign around his neck warning that they would kill anyone who
took down the body. Nobody dared do it. Winter preserved him
against decomposition but not against the crows, and every day his
widow wept to see them feeding on his face. Not until spring would
the blackened thing that had been her husband at last come down at
the break of the weathered rope, and she would gather into a burlap
sack the jumble of rotted clothes and flesh and disjointed bones and
carry it home for burial.

There was no end of the terrible stories. Linus Weatherford was
roped and dragged to death behind a redleg’s galloping horse.
Boland Jones was tied to the tail of a mule and kicked to death when
the animal tried to free itself of him. Jordan McCollum was shoved
into his well and large rocks were dropped on him until he was
crushed or drowned and nobody knew which. . . . There was no end
of the terrible stories.

In the final weeks of that winter, after the snow had gone for good,
Cole Younger came to visit. He’d been hiding out in a small cabin in
Cass County, near Harrisonville—where his rich father had once
been mayor before he was murdered by Yankees, and near where,
this selfsame winter, the militia had driven his mother and sisters out
of their house and forced her to set it on fire herself. The soldiers
watched the house burn until the roof fell through and then rode off.
The women then walked eight miles through darkness and blowing
snow to reach Harrisonville and refuge with relatives.

Cole looked to have grown even beefier in his winter idleness.
He’d had various visitors these past months, including some of the
men who’d gone to Arkansas with Quantrill and then chosen to
return early, and so he had plenty of news to share as he sipped at a
steaming mug of cider sweetened with whiskey. He said the guerrillas
served as Jo Shelby’s scouts in Arkansas and acquitted themselves
well in hard winter fighting. But Quantrill had not been with them.
No sooner had they arrived in Arkansas than he’d left for Richmond,
taking Andy Blunt with him and leaving George Todd in command
of the company. The way Cole heard it, Quantrill had asked the
Confederate secretary of war for a commissioned rank of colonel,
but the secretary said no, not unless he put himself and his men
under the authority of the regular army.

“He musta been keen disappointed not to get that commission,”
Cole said, “but he sure as hell wasn’t going to join the company to
the regulars. Hell, he doesn’t want to be under army regulations any
more than the rest of us, and he don’t give a damn about them cottonking sons of bitches either. It’s why we became bushwhackers in the
first place—to fight for Missouri without answering to a bunch of
Virginians with brass buttons.”

Quantrill hung on in Richmond for weeks before he finally
returned to Arkansas and found W. J. Gregg in charge of the company. Todd had quickly got his fill of army rules and gone back to
Missouri with a dozen men. They’d been sheltering in an abandoned
half-burned mansion a few miles from Cole’s cabin.

Jim Anderson asked if he’d had any word of the Berry boys.
“Oh my, yes,” Cole said. “Everybody says those two been a pair
of devils in the fighting. But hey, listen to this story Gregg told me
about . . .” He paused and glanced at the girls, then gave Bill an
arched look. Bill told the girls to leave the room. They whined and
grumbled but got up and went out and closed the door behind them.

Yeager’s raid

 

“This was in Springfield,” Cole said, “where things got so hot
they was fighting house to house. What happened was, the off-eyed
boy, Butch, he goes busting into a house with Gregg right behind him
and there in the parlor stands this woman wearing nothing but a
smile and a little shimmy. Trouble was, she was
real
skinny, no more
than skin and bone under a big hank of hair is the way Gregg
describes her. No tits to tell of, ass like a board. Well sir, she looks at
them boys and says, ‘Ravish me if you will, I won’t resist nor raise a
cry.’ Gregg
swears
that’s exactly what she said. He’d never seen a
woman wanted it so bad, but not only was she terrible skinny, she
had this
smell,
like it’d been a goodly while between baths. W. J. said
that all in all he just couldn’t raise the enthusiasm for it. He was trying to think of how to turn her down polite-like, when that Butch
boy says: ‘Truth to tell, mam, I wouldn’t go poking in there with a
borrowed dick.’ ”

 

There was laughter all around. Then they heard the smothered
giggling at the door and Bill rushed to it and jerked it open and the
girls shrieked and fled like spooked birds, still cackling over Cole’s
story.

 

But Cole had some sad news too. After Todd drove him out of
the company, Will Haller had joined with a band of guerrillas up in
Gentry County, then shortly afterward was wounded and captured
by Federals. They stood him against a barn wall and shot him dead,
then hanged his noseless and earless remains from a tree alongside a
main-traveled road as a warning to all other bushwhackers in northwest Missouri.

 

“It’s a mean war, boys,” Cole Younger said, “and it’ll get meaner
yet, you mark me.”

The days warmed. The early morning hills were hung with blue mist.
The rains came briefly every afternoon and the air smelled of the
newly ripening earth. The first grasses broke ground. Buds sprouted,
fattened, opened to leafery. Bloodroot unfurled its white flower in
the meadows and oozed its deadly sap. . . .

They were now going to the woods every day to shoot their pistols. They worked their horses hard, the animals as high-strung as
their riders with winter’s pent energy. They sometimes recounted to
each other the raid on Olathe, remembering the exhilarations of that
night, and they saw in each other’s faces an eagerness for more.

Finley brought rumors from town that Quantrill and the company were on their way back from Arkansas, traveling in small
bands, that some had already arrived and were encamped in various
regions of Jackson and Lafayette Counties. But still no word from
Quantrill himself.

They watched the greening world around them and waited. As
she hugged to Bill in the night, Josephine could feel his readiness
to go.

One morning at breakfast they heard Josh shout, “Riders coming!”
They rushed to the window to see a band of horsemen loping out of
the woods, nine of them, every man wearing a slouch hat and bush
shirt and hung with various revolvers and knives.

They ran out to greet them like children set free of the schoolhouse. At the head of the column, Dick Yeager grinned broadly
through his muleskinner mustache. “We’re bound for Kansas,” he
said. “You boys care to come?”

“Quantrill’s making a
Kansas
raid?” Bill said.

 

“This got nothing to do with him,” Yeager said, “and I ain’t got
time to jabber. You coming or not?”

They rode through the forest in a column of twos, a boy named
Buster Parr far ahead on point. Word had come to Yeager that the
jayhawkers who’d stolen his family’s wagons and teams had sold
them all to a stationmaster in Diamond Springs, a man named Howell, who’d known Dick’s father and surely recognized the property as
belonging to him.

“He ought have refused to buy Daddy’s goods from thieves who
killed my brother and nearly did for Daddy too,” Yeager said. “I
guess he couldn’t pass up a jayhawker bargain price. Now he’ll know
the real price of it.”

When Yeager told them he was going to Diamond Springs, the
Andersons looked at each other and knew they were thinking the
same thing. “There’s a ranch a small ways from there,” Bill told Yeager. “Belongs to a man named Segur. We’d surely like to pay him a
quick visit. Be worth

your
while too—he’s got some fine horses.”

“Well then, we’ll just swing by there,” Yeager said. “You can
give the man your regards and maybe he’ll see fit to let us have a
horse or two as a gesture of good fellowship.” They all grinned.

They made camp that night near the border and within sight of
the Santa Fe. Before dawn Yeager began sending the men into Kansas
in twos and threes, spacing them at least a half-hour apart so they
would not attract undue attention. They were to rendezvous on
Neosho Creek, in the woods at the outskirt of Council Grove.

Three afternoons later the band had come together again. Their
scout reported no sign of Federals in the vicinity, and the locals
seemed completely unaware of the guerrillas’ proximity. But Yeager
had a torturous toothache. The molar had been bothering him off
and on for months, and then two days ago it had flared up again and
thereafter steadily worsened. By the time he arrived at the meeting
place, his jaw was so swollen it looked like he had a chaw in his
cheek, and his eyes were cherried with pain. There was nothing for it
but to see a dentist, and he knew one in Council Grove.

The sun was halfway down a western sky reefed with red clouds
when the bushwhackers reined up at the edge of town. “If we ain’t
back out in a half-hour,” Yeager said to Lionel Ward, “ride in there
and kill every manjack you see and burn the place to the last stick.”

Bill Anderson rode in with him. The band had been spotted by
now and word of their presence had spread. Half the town was on
the sidewalks and watching the pair of them in an eerie silence broken only by their horses’ steady hooffalls. Yeager reined up in front
of a door bearing the words,

J
.
H
.
BRADFORD
,
D
.
D
., and a painting of
a large white molar directly below them.

The doctor had seen them through the window and now came to
the door and said, “Dick Yeager! I

thought
it was you!” He had serviced Yeager teeth before, in the days of the family’s wagon train business when Dick and his brother and daddy had often came through
Council Grove.

“Got a tooth needs rooting out, Doc,” Yeager said. He walked in
and sat in the patient’s chair. Bill took a seat by the window so he
could keep an eye on things outside.

Dr. Bradford remained standing at the open door. He looked
from Yeager to the townsmen gathered across the street and watching his office, then back at Yeager. “If I do it, Dick, will you spare the
town?”

Yeager arched an eyebrow.

 

“Oh, I’ll pull it anyway,” the dentist said. “I’m not brave enough
to say no. But I’d take it as a professional courtesy if you’d spare the
town in exchange for my service.”

Yeager turned to Bill Anderson. “You ever been asked for a professional courtesy?”

 

Bill smiled and shook his head.

 

The grin Yeager showed the dentist was lopsided for the swollen
state of his jaw. “Let’s get to it,” he said.

 

Fifteen minutes later, they were mounted up again and headed
back down the street, Yeager’s jaw now minus a tooth and still
swollen, but his pain sweetly blunted by the cherry-flavored opiate
solution Dr. Bradford had provided in a small bottle. As they trotted
past the gawking townsfolk, Yeager said loudly, “You sons of bitches
ought to make that man your mayor for saving your sorry asses.”

 

The band rode away to eastward until they were beyond sight of
town, then turned downcountry into the high grass and rode for
more than a mile before again navigating west and passing well
below Council Grove.

Splashings and suckings of hooves in a night black as a grave, chill
with drizzling rain, smelling of mud. The guerrillas reined up and
studied the lightless form of the Diamond Springs station. Their
sloping hatbrims ran with rainwater. Whickerings came from the
corral behind the station and there was an agitation of stamping and
darting as the horses there caught the scent of the guerrillas’ mounts.
Some of the bushwhackers rode around to the rear of the stationhouse as Dick Yeager and the Anderson brothers dismounted and
went to the front door and Yeager began a steady hammering on it
with the heel of his fist.