Raiding With Morgan (2 page)

There was a single horse in the stock pen. That animal was a big, rangy pure gray gelding, except for a large splotch of black on his left cheek. “Reb ain't fancy like those Denmark Thoroughbreds your grandfather and General Morgan swear by. Reb was crossbred. That accounts for the long face, wide forehead, and big ears. What counts is he's deep in the chest and long of hip and strong in the pasterns. Plus he's gun broke and will jump a fence or hedgerow, if asked. He's the kind of animal your father and I sought with the Rangers when we had to ride miles each day. Trust me, he's the perfect horse for you. He'll outlast a Denmark Thoroughbred.”

Ty clutched the top rail of the stock pen with both hands, hard enough to splinter wood, and pretended he was studying Reb. With the horse and gun, even the clothes he required to seek out his father, he realized with a start the consequences of what he was planning. If Ty abandoned his grandfather without any warning and against Enoch Mattson's wishes, he would most likely be disowned, as his father had been. It was a huge step to abandon a safe hearth and regular meals in a war-ravaged state. The other side of the coin was the fact that if he stayed home, he couldn't avoid induction into the same blue-belly army his father was fighting.

Boone Jordan saw Ty's white-knuckled grip on the top rail and the hard knot at the hinge of his jaw. “It's a big decision, lad, a very big decision, and you're the only one who can make it.”

Somehow Ty kept his voice steady. “Do you believe I can find my father on my own, Mr. Jordan?”

“Yes, I do, lad. You're a skilled rider. You can shoot and you've traveled the road from Elizabethtown to Brandenburg on horse-buying trips with your grandfather. When you're in a hurry to be someplace, knowing the way is all-fired important.”

“How soon should I leave?”

“Right now, lad. The sun will be down shortly. If General Morgan's in Lebanon today, he'll be in Bardstown tomorrow and Brandenburg the next morning. You need to make sure you join his column on the Brandenburg Road, near Garnettsville. The meadows along the road there are large enough for his night camp. You'll need to ride straight through the night or risk being caught between Morgan's column and the blue bellies pursuing him. I don't want you shot dead or starving in a Federal prison.”

Ty loosed a loud sigh. In the end, it was a surprisingly easy decision. “I couldn't forgive myself if I don't try to locate Father. Maybe he won't be as glad to see me. I'll chance that for just one look at him. I've dreamed about him my whole life. I can't wait any longer.”

No smile of satisfaction appeared on Boone's face. He was praying silently that his allegiance to Owen Mattson hadn't condemned a young man he loved dearly to an early grave. He was also aware that Enoch Mattson might well force him out of business if his ire reached explosive proportions.

With a somber nod, he said, “I'll return your wagon and horse in the morning and tell Enoch where you've gone. He'll be furious, but it'll be too late for him to stop you. Come inside, lad, we need to figure out the best way for you to leave town.” In the tack room, Boone fired a coal oil lantern and separated the woolen trousers and shield shirt from the other items on the wooden table. “Put those on, lad. They won't attract undue attention.”

While Ty changed clothes, Boone stuffed the jackboots, spurs, holstered revolver, and wide brimmed hat into a hundred-pound hemp grain sack. He passed the leather shoulder bag to Ty. “That won't attract much attention, either. In the bag, you'll find balls, percussion caps, a powder flask, and extra cylinders for the Remington. The bag is as valuable as your revolver. Don't take it off, even to sleep. Once you're well past Enoch's gate, you can finish changing yourself into a Texan.”

Boone selected a Mexican saddle, with double cinches, and a bridle from the livery gear lining the far wall of the tack room. “Lead Reb inside and saddle him. Talk soft and easy and he'll follow you like a child. Temperamental he's not. I'll sack up a cache of grub for you.”

Old Joe had fired the lanterns hanging at the front entryway of the stable, providing Ty enough light to work by in the growing dusk. Reb was the docile animal Boone described. Ty had him saddled when Boone Jordan emerged from the tack room with a hemp bag in each hand.

Boone headed for the street and stopped just inside the livery's lit doorway. “General Judah led his cavalry on a wild-goose chase to Leitchfield, thinking Morgan would circle to the west without crossing the Ohio. That leaves a detail here in town and a few commissary wagons with the blue bellies assigned to them along the north road. You drove past them in your wagon coming to town. If they stop you, say your wagon broke down and you borrowed a horse from the livery to take home the supplies your grandfather ordered tonight, so he won't be angry with you.”

Boone took a deep breath. “You best be going, lad. If you hear riders approaching from ahead or from behind you, abandon the road and hide as best you can. Don't trust anyone—man or woman—until you find Morgan's column. You hear a challenge from a sentry, then yell out that you're Owen Mattson's son. Given how you'll be dressed, he'll have his sergeant take you to him.”

Ty followed Boone into the street and mounted Reb. The livery owner tied the hemp bags together with a leather cord and slung them over Reb's withers.

“How will I recognize Father, Mr. Jordan?”

“No different than looking in a mirror, lad. You spy a man your size, with ox-yoke shoulders, red hair, green eyes, a mouth full of white teeth, and voice deep as a well, you've found your father.”

Ty shook the hand Boone Jordan offered. “Thanks for everything, Mr. Jordan.”

“My pleasure, lad, my pleasure,” Boone said.

Ty reined Reb toward the Brandenburg Road. He didn't turn and wave good-bye.

He feared he would lose his nerve at the last second.

We are bound for the Ohio in a bold bid to carry the war and its bloodletting and destruction into the enemy's lair. We will etch the terror and fright of our passage in the minds of every man, woman and child we encounter as well as those who hide in fear of us. The fame and glory garnered by our victories will shine forever in the hearts of our southern brethren and earn us the hatred of northern sympathizers. May the Lord ride with us.

—Journal of Lieutenant Clinton J. Hardesty, Morgan's Confederate Cavalry, 7 July 1863

T
y came fully alert as he approached the Yankee commissary wagons flanking the north road. In broad daylight, the Union detail had paid him scant attention, treating him as just another unarmed young lad driving a farm wagon to town for supplies. Ty worried that they would have pickets out ready to challenge anybody traveling by horseback after dark; and if they stopped him and insisted on searching his feed sacks, he was a goner for certain.

He advanced Reb a few steps at a time and watched for shadows around the flickering campfire visible through the trees lining the road and the openings between the parked wagons. When he thought he'd gone as far as he dared, without being seen, he halted Reb and considered what to do next.

There were no sentries in sight. Music from a fiddle floated on the night air, interrupted by laughter at the end of each verse of whatever ribald song the Yankees were singing. The commissary soldiers were apparently comfortable that they need not fear attack, as the fighting had moved well to the north of their position. Ty suspected the blue bellies had found a source for corn liquor, for their singing was stunningly loud, boisterous, and off-key, best characterized as a rambunctious jamboree.

He tapped Reb's side with his toes. The big gray moved out at a steady walk. Ty counted on the noise at the fire to muffle the soft pad of his shoed hoofs. The trees bordering the road thinned out and Ty gained a clear view of the open meadow and the four wagons resting there.

The seated revelers surrounding the fire didn't interest him. What did was the circular stack of rifles in front of the middle wagon, well out of their reach, and the absence of saddled horses. With no sentries in sight to challenge him, Ty made his decision. He couldn't risk being searched.

He touched Reb with his spurs and scrunched down in the saddle, his cheek touching the gelding's mane. They shot past the Yankee encampment, a gray blur against the trees on the opposite of the road from the wagon yard. He and Reb were into the night before any Yankee who spotted them could gain the attention of his fellow songsters. Ty was still finding it hard to believe that the officer in charge had posted no sentries.

Ty galloped Reb for a half mile and then reined him into a ground-eating trot; a pace the gelding could sustain for miles, if asked. By roughly nine o'clock, the heart-wrenching sight, which he wasn't sure he could handle without breaking down, loomed at the roadside: the archway and gate of the Mattson estate. He went past the padlocked gate without slackening Reb's pace. He'd made his decision and there was no turning back. Nonetheless, though he avoided tears, his heart was burdened with the knowledge he'd willingly closed the door on the past he'd known since birth for a future that could put him in great danger with the prospect he might be felled by a blue-belly bullet.

Around midnight, he halted Reb long enough to don the balance of his new Texas clothes and strap the Remington about his waist. The change made him more confident of facing whatever might pop up the balance of the night and beyond. He wasn't a trained soldier, but flight was no longer his only means of defense.

A ravenous hunger laid hold of him. He rummaged inside one of Boone Jordan's feed sacks and found cloth-wrapped cold fried chicken and soft bread. He ate a large portion of each on the move. After his meal, he and Reb paused at a small stream and enjoyed a drink of water. Come morning, he must locate an isolated spot, where the big gray could rest and graze.

A bright moon painted the roadway silver-gray and Ty had no trouble choosing his course when it forked twice in the next hour. In the middle of night, he slowed Reb to a walk and began thinking about the coming dawn. Odds were that the quiet black cocoon he was riding through would be dispelled by other travelers, not just all kinds of nature. He was fully aware that his revolver, horse, boots, and spurs were possessions his enemies would prize and gladly kill to obtain.

With the first peek of daylight over the eastern horizon, the deep woods fell away and Ty made out farmhouses, barns, outbuildings, most back from the road a piece, and the shadowy contours of planted fields and pastures. A rooster crowed and Ty heard the lowing of cows waiting to be milked.

Hounds began braying and Ty clucked Reb into a trot again. Soon lamps shone in upstairs and kitchen windows and smoke drifted from chimneys. The Kentucky countryside was awakening at a rapid clip.

Ty was fast approaching Buck Grove, a hamlet consisting of four houses, a gristmill, crossroads store, small wayside tavern, blacksmith shop, and two tobacco warehouses. Ty knew from his observations when traveling with Grandfather Mattson that tobacco was grown and harvested in the area. It was cured in the Buck Grove warehouses, and transported by wagon to Brandenburg Station, the L and N Siding and Depot south of Brandenburg, for shipment to the Louisville tobacco auctions. He was glad he would bear northeast from Buck Grove to Garnettsville, bypassing the siding and depot, for that was where he was most likely to find Yankee forces.

A pack of barking dogs rushed forth just short of Buck Grove. Reb ignored the spineless hounds without a single hitch in his gait. A hammer was banging on an anvil at the smithy, and the only person Ty saw on Buck Grove's single street was a small boy playing with a hoop in a side yard. It had worked with the blue bellies outside Elizabethtown, so before the hounds roused the curious and sparked a general alarm, Ty had Reb gallop full tilt again. He was through the small hamlet and beyond before a single adult citizen realized he and his mount had come and gone other than the drum of hoofbeats.

A while later, he was beginning to feel drowsy after a solid night in the saddle and started casting about for a daytime hideaway, if one could be found. He kept shaking his head to ward off his sleepiness. To keep his mind and hands occupied, he ate more chicken and bread.

The road dropped into a small valley before climbing a sizable hill. The rat-a-tat of hoofbeats on the far rise of the hill snapped Ty's head up. One horse did not present a substantial threat; a large number was to be avoided until he'd identified who rode them, and maybe even then.

By sheer chance, unfenced woodland, which had escaped the axes of many generations, dominated Ty's right flank. With open fields to his left, he spurred Reb amongst trees with butts bigger round than flour barrels. An open glade filled with tall saplings loomed. Ty halted Reb in the towering trunks just beyond the glade.

He couldn't see the Garnettsville Road from the saddle. Satisfied the gelding was hidden well, he dismounted, drew his Remington, and angled back toward the dusty thoroughfare afoot.

The hoofbeats grew louder as the riders crested the hill to the north. Ty scrambled forward in a crouch, counting on the intervening trees to shield him until proper cover presented itself. Spying an open section of the Garnettsville Road, he plucked his hat from his head and went to ground behind the leafy brush that plugged the gaps between the tree butts. He carefully parted branches with his hand and, sure enough, the oncoming horsemen would pass in plain sight without being aware of his presence.

That was, unless Ty moved and exposed himself. He mouthed a silent prayer of thanks that his grandfather had insisted he master the art of staying absolutely still in a game blind during long stretches of their deer-and-turkey hunts. Just a scratch of the nose was forbidden there.

The armed horsemen were nothing like the organized cavalry Ty had read about in history books. He couldn't imagine a more motley bunch of combatants. Not a single piece of their apparel, hat, or weapon matched. Ragged beards and untrimmed hair proliferated. Other than a creek bath by accident, none appeared to have washed clothes or body in a coon's age. Ty couldn't tell bare skin from filth.

The bunch of them were riding nonchalantly, slugging liquor from clay-fired jugs and laughing and ribbing each other. Ty assumed that the two fine-limbed bay horses without riders at their rear, with better bloodlines than their current mounts, had been freshly stolen.

These ragamuffins were classic examples of the irregulars—misfits and miscreants who bore no allegiance to either the Yankee or Confederate flag and preyed on the weak and defenseless. They had no purpose other than feathering their own nests at the expense of the innocent. Grandfather Mattson swore such men pursued nothing except their own drunken, lecherous pleasures. They were the riffraff whom loyal soldiers detested.

Ty counted eleven riders. A clipped order halted the irregulars smack in front of him. Two of the ragamuffins stood in their stirrups and stared into the woods.

Had they spotted him?

The same chilling fear that he'd felt the night the panther had screamed within an arm's reach of him birthed an ice-cold trickle of sweat in the small of his back; the urge to flee tightened his leg muscles.

Gripping the butt of his Remington with all his might, Ty clamped his jaw so tight that his teeth hurt. He hadn't run that night, despite the threat of a clawed mauling. He'd wet his drawers, but he hadn't panicked. He hadn't run, for fear the panther would hear him and determine his precise location and attack. Ty willed himself to follow that same strategy now. If he fled, the irregulars would spot him and make quick work of him. To them, taking a life was as easy as spitting downwind.

Relief nearly keeled him over when another clipped order drew the staring riders' attention to the point of their column. The irregulars lifted their assorted weapons in unison, yelled, “On to Buck Grove,” and trotted south, stirring a thin veil of dust behind them.

Ty wormed his backside against a rough-barked tree and relaxed before he started choking, for lack of air. Since he had left Elizabethtown, his luck defied belief, especially for a soul who frequently dozed off in church and earned a stiff elbow to the ribs from a certain grandfather. The careless Yankees had let him slip by without a challenge; Buck Grove had been asleep; he'd heard approaching horses, not yet in sight, soon enough to take cover in a most convenient stand of timber, with sufficient cover, in the midst of plowed fields. Could that kind of good fortune continue until he rendezvoused with General Morgan and his raiders?

Despite the slight breeze that rustled tree leaves, he heard what he'd missed before in all the excitement: water purling, deeper in the forest. Pleased his pants were dry, despite his fright, he hitched his feet under him, hiked to where he'd hidden Reb, and sought the source of that mouthwatering sound.

The three-foot-wide stream, spring fed to be running full in the middle of the summer, passed over a solid limestone bottom, making for clear drinking water year-round, except for winter freezes. Such streams wet the whistles of serious game hunters throughout Kentucky.

Reb needed no invitation. A sharp tug of the head freed his reins and the big gray dropped his muzzle to drink. With a quick, cursory look upstream and down, a dry-tongued Ty laid his hat on the bank and flopped on his belly to follow suit. The coldness of the water numbed his lips and throat with the first swallow.

A crunching of leaves preceded startling words from a high-pitched voice. “You son of a bitch, you're one of the bastards who stole Paw's mares.”

Ty lifted his head and looked straight into the barrel of a cocked flintlock rifle that was held firm and steady by a buckskin-clad female. She had brown bangs and purple eyes brimming with anger and hate.
Jesus Jump, taken by surprise by a sprig of a girl with pimpled cheeks, not more than thirteen or fourteen years old at most!
The barrel of the flintlock trained on him seemed longer than she was tall. He fought back a disgusted snort and waited for his accuser to speak again.

“Get up. We'll march back to our farm and ask Paw what he wants done with you. Don't matter whether he chooses a noose or a bullet. Horse thieves are no more account than hog shit on a boot heel. You scrape it off, however you please.”

Ty rose slowly to his feet, raising his hands to prevent his captor from thinking he had any intention of bringing his holstered Remington into play. Much to his chagrin, her short arms showed no sign of tiring from holding the heavy flintlock on him. He needed to talk his way out of this predicament, or else.

“Girl, I didn't steal those mares. A bunch of free-ranging marauders took them. They went past on the road out there not fifteen minutes ago. They let out a wild yell, ‘On to Buck Grove,' and hightailed it south. I'm traveling north, not south. They outnumbered me and I hid in the woods until they were out of sight.”

“That's a mighty lame tale, if you ask me. How do I know you didn't stop to water your horse and mean to catch up with them later?” Her purple eyes narrowed. “On second thought, you being so big and all, I believe I'll shoot you in the leg, take that horse, and let you lie right here while I fetch Paw.”

Ty suspected what he said next would be the most important thing he ever uttered and might be his sole chance to prod this steely, outraged, purple-eyed female into freeing him. He had no way of determining if she and her pa favored the cause of the Confederacy. His Texas clothes clearly indicated which side he rode for. If her father supported the blue bellies, his fate was sealed, no matter which fence he jumped. He prayed the biblical axiom “The truth shall set you free” resonated somewhere in the heavens.

“I'm no marauder. I'm Private Ty Mattson, of General John Hunt Morgan's Confederate Cavalry. I'm to report to General Morgan at Garnettsville as soon as possible.”

Skepticism replaced anger in the purple eyes watching Ty. “Do you have written orders? My paw was a soldier in the Mexican War. He says a soldier on duty doesn't do anything without written orders.”

She was smart and not easily fooled. Ty didn't doubt that if so inclined, she would shoot him. He decided to throw all his cards on the table. He needed to be convincing, and then make his move and risk being killed far from the battlefield, the sorriest excuse imaginable for a yet-to-be Morgan raider.