Wildwood Boys (36 page)
. Quantrill sensed
that the heart of every man he looked on was echoing Cole Younger’s
cry that he could stand no more. Every face he looked on was set in
murderous fury.
When Richardson had named Josephine Anderson among the perished and told of the ball shackled to her leg, Bill’s only surprise had
been at his lack of surprise. Of course she would have been the one
to be shackled. Of course she would have refused to show them her
tears. Of course she would have said the last words she did. While
she’d been imprisoned, he had been near to howling with his frustration. Had been frantic in his wait for the Yankees’ answer to his offer
of a trade for her and her sisters. Now he was done with dread and
consternation.
He had not protected her as he should have, and so she’d been
arrested. And so she’d been killed. But even the crushing weight of
his guilt was as nothing beside his rage. It was beyond utterance. It
defied every form of language from poetry to madhouse scream. He
could but feel it, coiled and ready in the cold and deepened darkness
of his soul.
He regarded his brother’s grief-hung face and the fury in his eyes.
He saw the other chiefs nodding at Cole’s rantings, heard their muttered blood oaths. And then met Quantrill’s thin glinting gaze. They
held each other’s eyes and it seemed to him Quantrill was telling him
something and that he understood it, though he could not have said
what it was.
odds, he was for going to Lawrence.
Quantrill tossed aside the cigar and stepped in front of the
assembly and for a moment studied the sun, still a small distance
above the trees. Then looked at them and said, “It is not yet sundown, but if all of you are ready . . .” There was a clamor of ayes.
“Then I’ll hear each man in turn. What say you ...Todd?”
“You know my choice—we make an ashpit of the place!”
“Younger?”
“Yeager?”
pays for the girls, for everything!”
“Jarrette?”
“Gregg?”
Quantrill’s eyes glittered into Bill’s. “Anderson?”
“Lawrence.”
When they got back to the White Oak camp, Dick Yeager called the
men together to tell them the plan. Bill and Jim Anderson headed
directly for the other side of the camp, where Bill’s prisoners were
under guard in a makeshift pen of tree limbs.
The Berry boys fell in beside them and nodded their greetings.
Jim grinned and clapped them on the shoulder. As they strode across
the campground, Ike said that as soon as they’d heard what happened, he and Butch had left Pool’s camp and come to the White
Oak breaks. “They were like our sisters too,” Ike said. “If you’ll
have us back, we’d be proud to ride with you.”
Ike’s white hair had grown to his shoulder blades and he was now
cleanshaved. Butch’s mustache had thickened. His off eye looked further skewed and his good one seemed much aged. His necklace of
ears had grown heavier, and the driest, lowest ones clicked against his
belt buckle. His cheekbone showed a fresh scar which Bill and Jim
would come to learn was made by a Federal rifleball. They would
learn too that his Joey horse had been killed from under him a month
ago and he was now riding a paint, which he believed hid better in the
bush and which he had not given a name nor would.
The prisoners saw them coming and those who’d been sitting
rose quickly to their feet. As the pairs of brothers drew closer, the
captives read their faces and shrank from the front of the pen. Some
began pleading for mercy, swearing they’d never harmed anybody in
Missouri, that they’d been forced to wear the Yankee blue against
their will, that they would never take up a gun against the South
again. The guards moved out of the way just as each of the brothers
pulled a pair of Colts and started shooting.
In ten seconds the eight revolvers were emptied and all the prisoners down and done with screaming. But a few still twitched or
groaned. Bill and Butch put up their empty guns and filled their
hands with loaded ones and went into the pen and delivered one
more shot to each of them, square in the head.
Butch then set about cutting an ear from each of the men he’d
killed. Bill watched for a moment and then calculated that he himself
had done for five of the prisoners, then took from his jacket pocket
Josephine’s long ribbon of black silk and into it tied five tight knots.
Regard the town. Its clean wide streets and neat sidewalks deserted
at this gray hour before daybreak. Everywhere is evidence of a thriving community. Consider the newly cleared lots, the commercial
buildings under construction, the rising frameworks of new houses.
Imagine the day-long clatterings of hammers and raspings of saws in
their workaday anthem of civic expansion and prosperity on the
increase. Behold the hill of Mount Oread and the splendid homes
along its shady base, a neighborhood of leading citizens, including
the state’s first governor, including Senator Jim Lane. Pay notice to
Ridenhour & Baker’s, the largest grocery store in the state. Admire
the Eldridge House, four stories high and luxuriously appointed, the
grandest hotel, it is said, west of the Mississippi. Look on the many
shops and restaurants, the handsome office buildings, the stately
courthouse and its immaculate square. Attend the shadowy arboreal
beauty of South Park where Massachusetts Street runs through it.
See there the tents of the twenty Negro soldiers of the Second Kansas
Colored Regiment, and two blocks to the east observe the camp of
the Fourteenth Regiment of Kansas Volunteers, presently manned by
twenty-two white recruits. Remark the easy passage of the Kaw
River under its layer of light morning mist. A few windows and livery doors now showing yellow lamplight as the town comes slowly
awake. But none of these early risers will prove correct in his expectations of the day, except as concerns the weather. It has been a sweltering summer, and as the eastern sky shows its first thin streaks of
red, the air is still and already warm, presaging another day of
scorching heat.
They sat their horses on a brushy rise and looked on the town in gray
dawnlight. Quantrill sent W. J. Gregg with two men into town to
find out if it was really as unaware of their presence as it seemed.
The company stood impressed by its own achievement. Few
among them had truly expected to arrive at Lawrence. They would
be intercepted by Federal forces, there would be a ferocious fight,
and they would retreat to Missouri before Yankee reinforcements
showed up—such had been the general anticipation. Yet here they
now were, nearly four hundred strong, the town unwarned and Federal regulars nowhere about except for the small local garrison.
They’d been two days on the move, with videttes a mile out to every
direction and reporting to Quantrill every hour. They’d come into
Kansas just south of Aubrey, the moonless night as dark as ink, and
slipped past the local outpost in a long lean quiet column of twos.
Quantrill then broke up the company into various bunches and dispatched them in different westward directions so anyone who tried
to track them would not know which trails to hold to. Miles farther
on, the bunches came together again. But the darkness was so nearly
absolute they had finally not been sure where they were, and they’d
been obliged to impress one guide after another at gunpoint as they
went from farm to farm. And here they now were—redeyed and haggard. And grinning like wolves.
As the town began to clarify in the light of the rising day, Bill
Anderson heard Larkin Skaggs intone in a low rasp: “ ‘Thou mighty
city, in one hour hast thy mighty judgment come, and the light of a
single lamp shall shine in thee no more.’ ”
Skaggs had asked to ride with Bill after hearing of his execution
of the Yankees at White Oak. He was one of an increasing number in
the company who objected to Quantrill’s occasional taking of prisoners in hope of trading them for captive guerrillas. Everyone knew
the Yanks rarely made deals—when they caught a bushwhacker they
killed him on the spot or took him to Leavenworth for hanging.
Most of the wildwood boys expected no less if they should fall into
Union hands, and so believed in a black flag war—no quarter given,
none ever asked. Jim had objected to Skaggs as a lunatic, but Bill
said lunatic or no, the man was a capable killer of Federals, and
accepted him into the bunch.
Now Gregg and the scouts returned and reported that all was
well. “They got no notion at all we’re here,” W. J. said.
have a woman harmed. The man who injures a woman today will
answer directly to me. Be sure your boys bear it in mind.”
raised his right fist high, his brown guerrilla shirt adorned with the
beautiful blood-red stitchwork of young Kate King. “For justice and
Missouri!” he bellowed. “Aut vincere aut mori!”
They came howling down Massachusetts Street, shooting to left and
right, shooting every man fool enough to come outside to see what
was happening, to show his face at a window or an open door. There
were cries of “Remember Osceola!” and “Remember the girls!”
Quantrill had neatly laid out his plan and his captains executed it
exactly. Andy Blunt’s men went to block the west end of town while
W. J. Gregg’s bunch swung away to cut off escape from the east.
Dave Pool took a dozen men directly to the top of Mount Oread to
watch for Federal cavalry. In minutes they had the town closed off.
Bill Anderson turned his men off Massachusetts and onto a side
street and bore toward the camp of the Fourteenth Kansas Volunteers. The white recruits heard the pandemonium and came scrambling out of their tents in their underwear. Their mouths fell slack at
the apocalyptic vision of wildhaired guerrillas galloping at them on
mad-eyed horses showing huge teeth. The frontmost Yankee raised
his hands in surrender and Bill Anderson’s bullet struck him above
the eye and slung him out dead. Some of the soldiers were too frightened to come out of their tents and so were trampled when the
raiders rode over them. Half the boys were killed on the guerrillas’
first pass, and then the bushwhackers came around and set to dispatching the wounded and to looting the meager camp.
A recruit with a bloody hip was on his knees, hands clasped and
stretched up to Bill Anderson, pleading for his life as Bill walked
Edgar Allan up to him. The boy could not have been more than sixteen years old. “When you enlisted for the blue,” Bill said, “you gave
up every claim on mercy.” And shot him. He reckoned his tally at
five, withdrew the black ribbon and tied the new knots. They’re paying, Joey, he thought, they’re paying.
Twenty yards beyond the camp, a barechested recruit was running hard for the woods, but Butch Berry loped his horse after him.
When he came even with the boy he laughed down at him. The
recruit looked up as he ran and Butch shot him and the boy’s legs
quit altogether. Butch reined up and dismounted and unsheathed his
shortblade.
Larkin Skaggs ripped down the Union banner from its pole in the
center of the camp, tied the flag to the end of his horse’s tail, then
rode about the camp whooping and trailing the Stars and Stripes in
the dust, his horse shredding it under its rear hooves.
While the Anderson bunch was at killing the white soldiers, the
Negro troops bivouacked to the west were taking flight into the surrounding woods. They’d heard the gunfire and the screams and
knew a bad reckoning was at hand. By the time the guerrillas arrived
at the colored camp, it stood deserted.
Bill at last regrouped his bunch and they went trotting back out to
Massachusetts Street. The town clattered with gunfire and quivered
with rebel yells, rang with the cries of wounded and dying men, the
keening of witnessing women. The air was misting with woodsmoke
and assuming a scent of blackpowder. The streets were littered with
bloodstained men at awkward sprawl. Wherever a fallen townsman
was trying to regain his feet or crawl away to some imagined haven,
a guerrilla rode his horse over him and then shot him again. Bill saw
two dogs lying dead but no sign of others anywhere.
The government and newspaper offices were the first targets put
to the torch. Now the guerrillas were at looting the banks and stores
and business offices, bearing away money, jewelry, whatever of monetary worth they came upon, then setting afire each ransacked place.
The entire business district was ablaze, the dark smoke rising
straight as pillars into the windless sky. Many of the wildwood boys
wore new boots, new hats, new clothes with the price tags still dangling from them. Bill spied George Todd galloping across the intersection ahead, bedecked in a handsome new suit and hat.
Some of the raiders carried lists of the names and addresses of
the town’s politicians and lawmen, its newspaper editors, its traffickers with jayhawks and redlegs—death lists compiled by Quantrill’s
spies—and they were hunting these men all over town. As Bill and
his men made their slow way down the street, their attention was
pulled in every direction by sudden concentrations of gunfire and
shrieks and death screams. Everywhere stood houses in flame, and
more being fired. Women were trying to save what possessions they
could, shoving furniture out into the yard, flinging clothes from the
windows, and some were assisted by the same men who’d set the
fires. At the addresses on the death lists, guerrillas sat their horses in
front of the burning house and waited for the people within to come
running out, coughing and crying, and then shot the men among
them and every boy too who looked old enough to use a gun.