As the bushwhackers rode off down the street, Bill presented
Price with a pair of silver-mounted revolvers he had acquired from a
Federal wagon train earlier in the summer. The general was appreciative and invited him into his private office for brandy and a cigar.
They exchanged a few brief compliments and then Price told of his
plan to advance on Kansas City. He needed the guerrillas to disrupt
Yankee rail transport and to distract Federals from K.C. He had
already given Quantrill and Todd their assignments. He wanted Bill
to continue harassing the Federals throughout central Missouri and
to inflict all the damage he could to the Northern Missouri rail line.
He gave him a copy of a special order that specified exactly that mission. Bill read it and folded it and put it in his jacket. There was an
awkward pause; then Price cleared his throat and consulted his
pocket watch and said he regretted to cut short their meeting, but . . .
“He maybe weighs twice more than me, but he ain’t any more
man than me,” Archie said. “Looked a little too tender about our
prizes, you ask me.”
“Said if he had ten thousand like us he could take Missouri and
hold it forever.”
Poor Lamar sees me talking in agitation to myself and
must think I am quite mad. He does not know I am addressing you, pleading my argument that you come home. I can
say it no plainer: DAMN the war. Please, Bill, be quit of it.
Come home. Think of us in our lovely tub, our own little
boat out on the wide sea and away from all this troubled
world. . . .
I still kill the enemy where he presents himself to me, but
oh my love, I am so sick of killing them! I would quit this
war on the instant, but I cannot quit my men,—and for all
their disappointment in Price, they will not abandon him. Yet
only a fool will deny that if Price is defeated in his next
engagement he will be finished,—and Missouri finished with
him. Therefore have I made a bargain with myself which I
present to you as a pledge: I swear to you that on the day Pap
is beaten, I will be shed of my duties of captaincy and will
come home to you. May resolutions come quickly, so I may
fly to your embrace. . . .
They ambushed Union patrols nearly every day, made Union informers to know the terrible error of their ways. Unloosed storms of gunfire on every steamboat they spotted, shot apart telegraph lines.
Ranged over the hills and all along the bottoms of the wildwoods of
central Missouri.
In the course of a skirmish with a large militia force in Howard
County, Hi Guess received a bullet in the chest and one in the belly.
Frank James cradled him in his arms and others stood and watched
Hi’s legs weakly kick in the dirt, his eyes wide but seeing none of
them as he addressed a woman named Clarissa, telling her he loved
her truly and wanted to marry her and to please wait for him. Then
he was dead and they made haste in putting him in the earth.
A week later they were traversing an open stretch of country in
Chariton County when a Federal cavalry company four times their
size loomed over a hill and charged them. The guerrillas raced for the
wildwood just beyond a low rise, and once again their superior
horses easily outdistanced the Yankee mounts. Most of the company
was already on the high ground when Buster Parr’s horse was shot
from under him. Buster had been bringing up the rear and was still
on the prairie and none of them knew he’d gone down until Butch
Berry looked back and saw him a hundred yards behind and the
Yankees closing on him.
Butch brought his horse about and watched as the Yankees drew
up around Buster and some of them dismounted and pulled him to
his feet. Buster was favoring a leg and Butch heard his distant scream
when one of the Yanks kicked it. The horse was screaming too, lying
on its side and kicking awkwardly, and a Federal dispatched it with a
bullet.
The other bushwhackers had now seen Butch halted and realized
the Yanks had left off the chase. Bill told Arch Clement to stay with
the men and be ready to lead them away fast, then he and Jim rode
back to where Butch sat his horse at the rim of the rise.
The Feds had formed a battle line to either side of the dismounted soldiers clustered around Buster and holding him upright.
Some of the Yanks were spitting on him and punching him. One hit
him in the head with a rifle butt.
Buster as if daring them to come for their man.
The man was lost, he tells himself, lying in his blanket that night.
There was nothing to be done for it.
“Captain Todd stood up in the stirrups to have a better look, and
Relating this report was Charley Webb, who’d ridden with Todd
until two days ago. He’d then sought out Bill Anderson’s company in
Carroll County to join with them.
“Captain Pool said he wasn’t about to bury Captain Todd out in
the woods when there was a perfectly good cemetery right there in
the town. So we carried him down and got us a couple of shovels
from a livery and started digging a hole for him. Next thing we
know, here comes this fella in a suit and tie who says his name’s Beattie and we’re digging in his family plot and he won’t stand for some
stranger buried there. Said as soon as we were gone he was going to
have his man dig up the body and throw it in the river. Captain Pool
told him he lived in Kansas City and intended to come to Independence every few weeks to put flowers on his friend’s grave, and if he
ever heard so much as a rumor that George had been dug up, he
would find Beattie and put
The following day came the news of Price’s defeat at Westport. Pap
was in retreat with the remnants of his army, heading back to
Arkansas. Dave Pool and his guerrillas had gone with him. The word
was that Quantrill had departed to Kentucky with his meager band.
Price is finished. Many of the best of us are killed.
Quantrill is gone. My war is done. I shall take leave of my
forty good men in the morning and follow this notice to you
by a day. Then we shall evermore be Texans and sail love’s
sea in our sturdy tub.
It has rained in the night and on this chill dawn he wakes rolled in an
oilskin under a dripping hilltop maple and in each hand holds a Colt.
He has slept more soundly this night than he has in months, and he
stretches with great satisfaction. A few feet away Jim sleeps on, nothing of him showing from under the enveloping slicker but the thick
tangle of his hair.
He rises and tucks the pistols into his belt, fits himself with the
rest of his armament, then picks up his slicker and rolls it up and
regards the Ray County countryside. Pools of pale mist linger in the
swales and hollows. The trees to the east are afire with the rising sun.
A ragged white arrowhead of geese wings to southward in the reddening sky. At his back the distant woods are still steeped in lingering night shadows. He hears the call of a solitary crow. Below the hill
the camp is already roused, the men gathering at the cookfires. The
air is scented with raw earth and woodsmoke, the rising aromas of
coffee and bacon, the smell of moldering leaves. He recognizes Butch
Berry as one of the riders heading out to relieve the night pickets.
Jim comes awake and stretches with a groan, then throws off his
slicker and gets up. He buckles on his gunbelt and stands by his
brother to look down at the camp.
“Let’s get down there,” Bill says. “I got something to tell the
bunch of you.”