Wildwood Boys (15 page)

“Two twenty-pound . . .” Baker began, and then fell mute at the
sound of hooffalls that drew up in front of the store. It sounded to be
more than one rider but none reined up before the open door. The
chinking of bridle rings carried into the store and a horse blew hard.
The small front window showed no one.

Baker took off his eyeglasses and Ike Berry knew he was reckoning where the riders had come from. The road and the open country
around them had lain deserted but minutes before. Only someone
who’d been hidden in the trees nearby could have arrived at the store
so soon after they themselves entered.

“Probably some of the fellas from the wagon train,” Ike Berry
said. But he was a bad liar and Baker’s eyes cut to the door and his
hands went down behind the counter.

Bootfalls thumped on the porch and Ike turned to see the Anderson brothers come through the door with revolvers in their hands.
He flung himself against the wall and both Andersons fired at the
same time and Arthur Baker yelped and the shotgun he’d started to
bring up from under the counter discharged like a thunderclap
before the barrel even cleared the countertop and the load blew
through the counter’s front panel and gouged the floor planks and
some of the shot ricocheted and sang off a row of spades hung on the
wall. Baker ducked below the countertop and Jim Anderson shot at
the softbrain and missed as the boy dove behind the counter too. For
a moment no one moved. Then the cellar door creaked and the
Andersons rushed forward as the door slammed shut and they heard
the barlatch within slide home.

They went behind the counter and saw that the door was shaped
of thick heavy planking with gaps of perhaps a half-inch between
planks. They exchanged looks and shrugs and then Jim Anderson
bent and put his eye to one of the gaps. The cellar was in full darkness but he could hear a low whimpering and a soft pained grunting.
He straightened up an instant before the shotgun blasted and its load
slammed against the door and several pellets raised splinters as they
passed between the planks and peppered the ceiling.

Jim fell back against the counter, mouth ajar. Ike Berry laughed
and said, “Boy, you damn near got some more holes in your face.”

 

“What the hell’s going on?” Butch Berry said, peering in at the
door. He was keeping watch for interlopers and had already put his
own saddle on Baker’s good roan mare.

 

“Let’s take off the damn hinges,” Ike Berry said.

 

“No, wait,” Bill Anderson said. He looked around him and holstered his Colt. “Let’s weight it down.”

 

Hefting in concert they set several crates of heavy tools and a
large anvil atop the slanted door. No two men pushing together from
the awkward angle below could now have raised the door.

 

Then they doused the store with coal oil. Soaked all of the floor
and splashed all the shelves and walls. Drenched everything of cloth.
The smell was smothering. They stood just outside the front door
and Butch Berry broke a lucifer off a match block and struck the
match alight and put it to the remaining matches and the bunch of
them burst into flame. But before he could toss the torch inside, Bill
Anderson caught his hand.

 

“It was
our
daddy the man killed,” Bill said. He carefully took
the incendiary from Butch and then looked at Jim and his brother
nodded and Bill lobbed it through the door.

 

Fire sprang from the floor and streaked to all corners and ran up
the walls to the rafters. In less than a minute the interior of the store
was infernal. Flames billowed from the door and drove them off the
porch. They mounted up and set themselves to watch every side of
the building in case the two within might yet escape by some hidden
exit. But there was no hidden exit and in quick order the outer walls
were sheeted in fire, the roof ablaze, flames flailing and leaning in the
wind, the surrounding night illuminated by a quivering jaundiced
dreamlight shot through with black shadows. The front window
burst with the heat and they drew back still farther to calm their
horses and avoid being blistered. Now came several muted thumps
in succession and they knew the fire had found the whiskey stores.
Flaring embers went streaking on updrafts into the black nightsky.
Twenty yards from the house and through the cacophony of crackling wood and breaking glass and popping tins they faintly heard the
screams of the pair trapped in the cellar.

 

“He shouldn’t have brought the softbrain,” Bill Anderson said
loudly to be heard above the sparking crash of roof timbers. In the
wavering firelight, each man looked to the others both horrified and
exultant.

 

From the cellar of the burning store came a muffled report. No
sounds now but the rendings and mastications of the fire.

 

“Shotgun,” Bill Anderson said. “Heat must’ve fired it. They’re
done for sure—let’s go.” He touched his heels to Edgar Allan and
they galloped away.

None of them would ever know that Arthur Baker’s charred bones
would be found in the ashes with the shotgun muzzle between his
teeth and his blackened skull absent its rear portion. Or that the
hardmuscled halfwit in a frenzy of terrified digging with bare hands
did manage at the last to burrow through the cellar wall and out of
the fire raining upon him. Without witness save the indifferent moon
and stars he crawled through the grass, a smoldering half-cooked
effigy of humanity, crawled all the way to the creek and there lowered into the shallow water in effort of easing the unreckonable pain
which he could not even give proper cry for the seared ruin of his
voicebox. Those who found him at daybreak and raised his yet living
remains from the water could not bear to look on him. He was
nearly two days more in dying, the cords sometimes standing on his
neck but his screams no more than raspy hisses to his last breath. A
hapless child of God, not the first to perish horribly in this region of
the republic in these crimson years of malice, and far from the last.

II
The Company
6
1862

 

Flight

They rode hard under the high moon and met no other travelers on
the road but twice caught sight of wagon train campfires. Nightguards sat their horses near the road in the ghostly moonlight and
watched them go by. They crossed the Marais des Cygnes in gray
dawnlight and at daybreak they left the Santa Fe in favor of downcountry traces. They fed on jerky as they went, at times halted to take
water at the creeks they crossed and let the horses recruit themselves.

That afternoon they came on a medicine man driving his wagon
in desultory route over the countryside to stop at isolate farms and
hawk his various elixirs. The huckster allowed that hard experience
with towns had taught him the wisdom of plying his trade among
folk of less suspicious nature. The bright pink splotches on his face
and the backs of his hands bespoke recent burns, and portions of his
raw face were yet pitted blackly. None of them had seen a man
tarred and feathered but they’d heard stories, and they were curious
about particulars such as how much it hurt and how long it had
taken to pluck and peel himself clean, but basic politeness kept them
from asking. In the course of their exchange, they discovered that the
fellow had whiskey in his stores and they bought a jug.
They rode on. Under a cloudless blue sky they once more traversed a lake of sunflowers and then debouched onto a prairie of
green and yellow grasses leaning in a soft wind. Their shadows drew
up from behind and passed under their horses and lengthened before
them as the sun lowered at their backs to enflame the western sky.
Each man followed his own shade into the rising darkness. Just
before nightfall they put down in a hickory grove. They made a fire
and supped on the last of their jerked meat and passed around the
whiskey jug.

At first light they were moving again, in no hurry now and walking their horses as often as not. Midmorning they struck the Dragoon and followed it east to a shallow ford above its juncture with
the Marais, and in the early afternoon they arrived at Pomona hamlet. In the town’s sole cafe they made short work of platters of beefsteak and fried potatoes, then went to the general store and bought a
supply of coffee and beans and jerky. They camped that evening in
country owning no distinction but grass and lying flat to every point
of the compass and cast pale blue in the light of the gibbous moon. A
wind rose out of the south and their fire twirled and lunged in the
vagrant gusts and loosed chains of sparks to vanish in the darkness.
A distant coyote raised a high lonely cry to be echoed by another
from a far corner of the night. The tethered horses nickered and
stamped nervously and the men called soothing words to them.
Butch Berry pulled up a handful of grass and went to his new mare
and fed her from his palm and told her there was nothing to be
spooked about. He’d named her Jay and the others had smiled that
he hadn’t dared to give her but a portion of Josephine’s name.

They bore northeast all the next day under a sky endless and
empty but for the ferocious sun, the air unstirring, and settled for the
night beside a creek in Johnson County, within sight of the Santa Fe
and of a wagoncamp’s firelights a half-mile downstream. After supper they lay back and studied the waning moon and spangled sky
and Butch Berry well endured the others’ grinning remarks about the
possibility that some poor fool on one of those stars might be sitting
at his own campfire and looking up at the gleam of earth and wondering if some sorry specimen like himself was sitting here and pining for a sweetheart who didn’t much pine for him.

A street affray

Noon of the next day saw them trotting into Olathe, a prosperous
town of some eight hundred souls. Ike Berry had persuaded the others that they would long rue the day if they neglected this opportunity to take dinner at Coogan’s Restaurant, reputed to serve the best
fried chicken in Kansas. They trotted their mounts down the main
street through a boisterous traffic of wagons and horsemen and
found the eatery on a street off the courthouse square. They hitched
their horses at the sidewalk post and went inside.

The room was loud with talk and the clatter of dishware, the air
hot and rich with savory aromas. They took a table near the back
wall but with a clear view of the front of the room. A half-hour later
the table was covered with platters of chicken bones amid congealing
white gravy and remnants of roast potatoes and biscuits. They paid
the bill and were contentedly at work with toothpicks as they exited
to the sidewalk.

Six men stood beside the horses and one had unhitched Ike
Berry’s gray and held it by the reins. One brandished a two-barrel
shotgun and the others except one had pistols in hand. They were all
young except the one holding no firearm, and they were all looking
at the Andersons and Berrys and none of them smiling.

“That’s him right there, Sheriff,” one of them said to the older
man. Red hair showed under his hatband and his face was rife with
raw sores and he was pointing at Ike Berry. “That’s the one rode in
on the gray.”

“This your horse, son?” the sheriff asked Ike. He wore heavy
drooping mustaches and there was about him an air of tiredness.

A decision

 

“Surely is,” Ike Berry said. He spat away his toothpick and
looked narrowly at the young man holding the horse by the reins.
“You catch this fella trying to steal him?”

 

“I asked Junior to hold him till Mr. Porter has a look at him,” the
sheriff said. “I sent a man to fetch him from the Jefferson Hotel.
Won’t take but a minute to settle this.”

 

“Settle
what
?” Bill Anderson said. “Who’s Porter?” A small
audience of townfolk was assembling to both sides of them on the
sidewalk.

 

“Harrison Porter,” the sheriff said. “Owns a ranch north of
town.” He nodded at the redhead deputy. “Cyrus used to wrangle
for him and was out there when a bunch of horses got stole last year.
One of them was a gray with a white stocking just like this one here.
It was Mr. Porter’s favorite pony and Cyrus is sure this is the one.”

 

“The animal have a brand?” Bill Anderson said.

 

“H with a P pressed to it,” the sheriff said.

 

“You can see that’s exactly what this was,” Cyrus the redhead
said, pointing at the gray’s haunch, “before somebody tried to make
it look like a double B. Jackleg piece of work, you ask me.”

 

“Look here, Sheriff,” Bill Anderson said, “I got a herd of cows a
mile south I got to get to Kansas City. I don’t have time to waste.
Henry here’s been with the outfit about six months and I haven’t
known him for a thief yet.” He turned to Ike Berry. “Tell me true,
Henry, you steal that horse?”

 

“Hell no,”
Ike Berry said. “That badface peckerwood is crazy. I
bought the horse off a fella in Emporia three months ago.”

 

The redhead spat and scowled. “I’ll just bet you did. If you ain’t
a Missouri horsethief I’ll kiss your ass.”

 

“You can kiss my ass anyhow, you ugly sonof—”

 

“Hush up!” the sheriff said. “Both you.”

 

The word “horsethief” went muttering through the spectators
and there came a clear utterance of “pukes.”

 

The sheriff glared at the onlookers. “You people get on about
your business.” The assembly retreated a small distance in both
directions but did not disperse.

 

“I guess you got a bill of sale,” the sheriff said.

 

“Damn sure do,” Ike Berry said. “It’s with my possibles at the
cow camp. I’ll just go and get it.”

 

The sheriff told him to stand fast. Ike sighed hard and shook his
head in the manner of one sorely burdened by unfair accusation. The
sheriff peered down the street and said, “What’s taking that fool so
long to get Porter? I can’t give him the simplest damn job—”