Wildwood Boys (30 page)
Finally the front window went bright with lamplight and a man’s
face, hair disheveled, showed itself behind the glass, eyes asquint,
trying to make out the visitors. “Who’s there?” he called.
“Federal cavalry bound for Leavenworth,” Bill Anderson said
loudly. “Sorry to raise you from your bed, mister, but one of our
mounts has taken lame and we need to buy a horse from you right
now. Open up.”
The face left the window and they heard the scraping of the
doorbolt being removed from its holders. The door opened and the
man Yeager had come seeking stood there with his nightshirt half
tucked into his pants and his suspenders dangling off his hips. He
raised the lantern and saw Dick Yeager’s wolfish grin. “Howdy
there, Howells,” Yeager said.
Howells backed up into the store and Yeager stepped in after him
and the Andersons came behind, all of them with Colts in their
hands. Howells’ wife had been standing at an inner doorway, and
when she saw the guns she rushed to get between her husband and
Yeager, hugging hard to the stationmaster and saying, “No, no, no!”
Yeager tried to pull her away with his free hand so he might have
a clear shot at Howells, who held tight to her and cried, “Don’t hurt
her, Dick, don’t hurt her!”
They turned round and round like an intimate threesome at a
lewd and clumsy dance as Yeager tried to detach the woman, but the
couple clung to each like they were in a fearsome windstorm, the
woman whimpering, keeping herself between the men.
“Dammit!” Yeager shouted. He stepped back and aimed carefully and the woman screamed and put both hands over her husband’s head and tried to swell herself to cover as much of him as
possible. The gunblast shook the room and the round hit Howells in
the side and he cried out and sagged in his wife’s embrace, the woman
shrieking with fear and rage. The next bullet passed through both
her hand and her husband’s head and sprayed bloody hair and bone
bits over a shelf of canned goods. The sudden dead weight was too
much for her to hold one-handed and the body slipped through her
arms, smearing her with blood. She knelt with it, hugging her husband’s head to her breast, wailing like a lost child.
“Sorry about the hand, mam,” Yeager said. “It was an accident.
I appreciate you were doing your best to protect him.”
and Jim and said, “Fire it.”
recharged his revolver, then said to the woman, “I suggest you leave
him lay and get on outside.” Then he went out.
along, mam.”
Anderson struck a match and dropped it and flames jumped up the
walls. He hurried to the door and called back, “Hey, Billy!”
away, but she struggled fiercely to get loose and back to her husband.
Jim ran over and grabbed Bill’s arm and yelled, “
Come on,
dammit!”
and twisting hard in his embrace, kicking and flailing wildly, trying
to gouge his eyes over her shoulder. His face was spattered with
blood off her mutilated hand. “Damn you, woman, let’s
go
!”
her bodily and carried her out as the fire coursed across the room.
into the Kansas soil.
Several Federal outposts received vague reports of the raiders’ visit to
Council Grove, but the only one that mentioned the direction they’d
taken said they’d gone east, presumably back to Missouri, and so the
cavalry patrols concentrated themselves all along the Santa Fe
between Council Grove and the border. After several hours of roaming that stretch without a sign of the miscreants, the patrols returned
to their posts, certain that Missouri guerrillas could never have gotten this deep into Kansas anyway and that the raiders in Council
Grove had likely been a gang of local outlaws.
The rain ceased. The clouds broke apart and fell away. The sky was
brilliant with stars. A narrow cut of yellow moon showed low in the
western sky. They rode westward on the Santa Fe so that the Howells woman would give that direction to any who came seeking after
them—then they swung south at the Cottonwood Creek and a mile
farther on made their camp for the night. At dawn, they set off to
eastward, the Andersons directing the way to John Segur’s ranch.
They rode onto Segur rangeland just after midday under a bright
and sparsely clouded sky. A pair of herd guards were sitting their
horses beside each other and talking about the girls they hoped to see
at the next Saturday night dance in Americus. They never caught
sight of the band of riders reining up on a low rise a hundred yards
away, nor heard the cracking of the half-dozen Sharps that took
them off their mounts in the same instant, one man’s slung brains
preceding him to the ground, the other’s heart seized around the two
bullets so abruptly entered in it. Yeager left two men with the herd to
cut out the best horses, and then the band rode over the next rise and
toward the ranch buildings.
A man at the bunkhouse door saw them coming and turned to
say something to someone inside. A dozen or so men came outside to
look, some shirtless, a few with pistols tucked in their pants. The
guerrillas heeled their mounts into a gallop and unloosed their
unearthly rebel yells. The ranchmen stood fast, mouths ajar, gaping
at the dreadful vision of their deaths thundering toward them. Before
any of them thought to draw his gun, the guerrillas were shooting
them down—the ranchmen crying out, spinning, staggering, leaving
their feet as the bullets found them, dying instantly and not so
quickly, clutching at their heads, their bellies. Not a man of them
was standing and few were still alive as the bushwhackers rode over
them.
The guerrillas reined around and came back at a trot and here
and there one or another leaned down to shoot in the head any
ranchman who looked to be still breathing. Bill recognized one of the
open-eyed dead as the man who’d thrown a rock at their wagon on
the day they were exiled from their home with their father’s body.
They loped up to the main house where an old man with a shotgun stood on the porch, shielding a woman in the door who clutched
an infant to her bosom. A quartet of large dogs came snarling toward
the riders, their napes roached, and Yeager drew his pistol, but Bill
Anderson said, “Don’t.” He gave a sharp whistle that stopped the
dogs short. “Get gone,” he said, and they whirled and fled around the
side of the house. Yeager grinned at him like he’d pulled a card trick.
They reined up in a line before the porch. The woman was young
and pretty, auburnhaired, and though she was clearly frightened, Bill
thought her aspect also bespoke familiarity with the world’s meanness. The old man took a step forward and raised the shotgun to his
chest and moved the muzzle from side to side like he was deciding
which of them to shoot first. He looked Mexican and seemed
unafraid, and Bill would have bet that the old man had known some
of life’s meaner side himself.
“Tell him put the gun down,” Yeager said to the woman. She
spoke in soft Spanish and the old man took a step back and lowered
the shotgun to his hip but kept it pointed their way.
She identified herself as the widow Mrs. Clara Segur Baker,
daughter to John Segur, who owned this property. The Anderson
brothers exchanged a look, only now realizing she was the woman
Arthur Baker had chosen to wed instead of their sister. She scanned
the distant litter of her father’s hired men where they lay slain in the
sun, but whatever thoughts she had about the slaughter, she did not
voice them.
Yeager told her they were seeking after her father. If he was hiding in the house, it would be best if he came out now. Clara Baker
said her father was in Emporia on business. “Why do you wish to
harm him?” she said.
Yeager sighed and looked at Bill. “We ain’t got time for jabber. If
the sonofabitch is in there, I know how to make him come out quick.
Buster, Lyle, Deacon—get in there and fire the place.”
The three guerrillas dismounted and started up the steps. Bill
said, “Oh hell, Dick, the woman’s already a widow and her child an
orphan. Let’s not burn her house too.”
At the name of Anderson, Clara Baker fixed a sharp look on Bill.
But now the three bushwhackers were on the porch and the old
Mexican raised the shotgun to warn them back and the one called
Deacon slapped the barrel aside and said, “Get that thing out of my
face, Pancho.” The Mexican swung the muzzle back again and
yanked the trigger and the charge carried Deacon off the porch and
into the horse behind him and the animal was stung by some of the
buckshot too and reared with a shriek and the spooked horses to
either side nearly unseated their riders.
The woman whirled into the house and Buster Parr grabbed the
shotgun and tried to wrest it away but the old man’s hold was iron.
Buster rammed him against a porch post and the Mexican lost his
grip and fell to his knees and Buster leaped out of the way as a halfdozen men opened fire. They shot the old man more than thirty times
in the next five seconds and reduced him to bloody wreckage.
In the lingering blackpowder haze, Yeager calmed his horse and
leaned from the saddle to peer down at Deacon’s rude remains.
“Well shit,” he muttered. Then glared up at Buster and said, “Get
that bitch out here if you got to drag her by the hair and set that
fucken house afire
!”
He ordered Deacon’s body to be laid out in the house. They had
no time to give it proper burial and cremation would have to suffice.
hallway to a bedroom and found Clara Baker hunkered in a
wardrobe closet. She was escorted to a safe distance from the house
and there sat on the ground with the child in her arms. The house
now crackling with flames. Some of the bushwhackers were turning
the cows out of the barn and setting it on fire too. Over by the
bunkhouse the crows were already at their feed. Clara rocked the
baby and regarded her home’s destruction and wept without sound
in the shadow of the rising smoke.
out of the burning building. When the roof timbers began collapsing
in great sparking crashes, Yeager turned to Bill and said, “Guess the
bastard’s in Emporia like she said. Let’s ride.”
They rode back toward the border at a steady canter, taking with
them twenty head of Segur’s best stock and switching to fresh
mounts whenever the horses under them foundered. They rode
through the night, resting briefly at various creeks. In the morning
they came to the Rock Springs depot where they stopped to water
and found a single passenger waiting for the stage—a Federal sergeant. The soldier knew instantly who they were and jumped to his
feet with his hands up. Yeager laughed and shot him. The stationmaster nearly smothered his wife under his hand in muting her terrified cries lest she annoy the bushwhackers sufficiently to murder
them as well.
They rode on, driving the horses before them, using outriders to
keep a sharp eye for anyone closing on them from any direction. But
their luck held well. They’d seen no sign of military or civilian posse
as they came to the station at Black Jack, where the stage had arrived
only minutes ahead of them and carrying several prosperous passengers. From one man they took $1,500 and a diamond stickpin. This
man’s wife was the only woman among the passengers and she was
apologetically robbed of her gold necklace, diamond wedding ring,
and small music box.
Jimmy Vaughn was the one to relieve her of the music box, and
when he opened the lid and heard the opening notes of “Für Elise,”
he knew it was a gift for Mary Anderson. But a halfwit bushwhacker
named Roach wanted the music box too, and tried to grab it from
him. There was a cursing scuffle and the lid was accidentally
wrenched off and the music mechanism ruined. Jimmy Vaughn put
his hand to his pistol but Yeager stepped between them and said he
wouldn’t stand for men of his band killing each other over gimcrack
loot. Jimmy picked up the broken music box and turned it over and
saw that the bottom was stamped: “Throckmorton Novelties, City
of Kansas.”
It was nearly midnight when they fell on Gardner, less than twenty
miles now from Missouri. They robbed the express office and
rousted the guests in the hotel and herded them into the lobby and
took all money and jewelry they found on their persons or in their
rooms. One of the women was exceptionally pretty, and Bill Anderson offered to return all of her husband’s property—nearly $400, a
fine watch, and a heavy gold ring—in exchange for one kiss from her.
Dick Yeager laughed and told Bill he was crazy, no kiss was worth
that much. The woman recoiled and said she would never permit a
lawless brute to touch her. Bill thought she was even prettier in her
indignation. “What about it?” he asked the man.
The woman was appalled when her husband agreed to the bargain. The ring had belonged to his granddaddy, the man plaintively
explained to her. Couldn’t she please be reasonable? It was only a
kiss the man wanted.
“Then
kiss him!” she said—and slapped him so hard she left
the pink imprint of her fingers on his cheek. The wildwood boys
whooped and one of them yelled, “Damn right, girl!” She put her
face in her hands and cried.
Bill Anderson looked at the man and said, “You’re a fool, mister.” He turned to go but the woman said, “Wait!” She wiped angrily
at her tears and stepped up to him and said he could have the kiss on
one condition—that he wouldn’t give anything of her husband’s
back to him.