Wildwood Boys (34 page)

They camped that night in the heavy shelter of the White Oak
breaks, near the Little Blue. Of Bill’s thirteen prisoners, two had tried
to escape and been killed for their folly, their bodies left to the crows.
He would offer the remaining eleven for his sisters.

He and Yeager were sitting at one of the fires, a jug passing
around, Yeager talking about the joys of steamboat robbery, when a
courier rode in. Quantrill was at the Blue Springs camp and calling
his officers together for a council there tomorrow night. Riders were
spreading the word to the other wildwood camps.

“He said to tell you he wants you there too, Captain Anderson,”
the courier said. “He said for each captain not to bring more than one
or two men. He wants to keep the meeting small and anyhow only
wants to talk with the captains.” He went to fetch himself supper.

There again—

Captain
Anderson. And from one of Quantrill’s
own messengers. Well, why not? Quantrill himself had called them
“your boys” since before they hit Olathe. It was all Bill could do to
keep from laughing outright with the pleasure of it, with the grand
feeling of its
rightness,
with the ticklish certainty of having come
upon his true calling.

Yeager was grinning too. “Some of my boys said today they’d
like to ride with you if you’ll have them, did you know that? Some
cousins of Lionel Ward and a couple of Clay County neighbors of
the James fella. I’d take it kindly, Captain Anderson, if you don’t
poach

all
my damn men.”

They laughed and went to retrieve plates of beans and cornbread. When they resettled themselves by the fire, Yeager said, “I bet
I know what the meeting’s about.”

“Me too,” Bill said.

 

They had spoken about Quantrill’s determination to raid

Lawrence, but neither man was decided if he was for or against it.
They yearned to turn Lawrence to ashes, of course, but they knew
too that such a raid could prove folly of the worst sort.

Bill chose his brother and Buster Parr to go with him to the council. He would leave his prisoners with the rest of the bunch. He
wrote a note to the Federal commander in Kansas City, presenting
his offer of eleven Union captives in exchange for his sisters. He
promised to move the girls out of the state if they were released. The
general could send his answer through the same courier who delivered Bill’s note.

The prison on Grand Avenue

There were eleven of them—all bloodkin to known guerrillas and
two of them wives of wildwood boys as well—the eldest of them
twenty years old. They were held in Kansas City, quartered on the
second floor of a dilapidated three-story commercial building in the
middle of Grand Avenue. The top floor was rented to a business that
used the space for storing furniture. The ground floor was taken up
by a liquor store.

Their floor was without partitioning except for a corner that had
been fitted with flimsy walls of thin board to enclose it into a sort of
privy containing several slop jars. Bunks were set along the walls in
dormitory fashion. The windows of the rear wall were small and
offered nothing to see but weedy vacant lots, but the front windows
were tall and admitted plenty of sunlight and afforded good view of
the street. A trio of guards was always on duty at the entrance to the
building, another guard placed at the foot of the stairway, and yet
two more posted on the second-floor landing.

The landing guards brought the girls their meals every morning,
noon and evening, but refused to carry out their slops. They told
them to fling them through a rear window into the lot below. The
neighborhood hogs liked to root in the shaded earth behind the
building and would make short work of the waste.

They got along well enough with a few of the guards, but most of
their keepers were Kansans to the core and made no secret of their
enmity toward all things Missourian. Josephine more than once got
into a strident exchange of insults with them and each time had to be
restrained by the other girls before she provoked the Feds further.
***

They passed their days observing the doings along Grand Avenue,
pointing out to each other the handsomest and best-dressed and silliestlooking people to go by on the streets and sidewalks and making up
stories about them. There had been an outbreak of rabies that summer and citizens had permission to shoot any dog seen loose on the
streets, so the girls occasionally heard gunshots, sometimes followed
by yelping until another report put an end to it. The dead-dog wagon
came clattering down the street every afternoon, heaped with carcasses and swarming with flies, and Josephine could not help thinking how much the sight would pain Bill.

They gave their evenings over to harmonizing on favorite songs,
to practicing their oral imitations of musical instruments. Jenny
Anderson could mimic a fiddle, and she laughed with the others
when they teased her that she was in need of a tuning. Charity
McCorkle Kerr, sister to one bushwhacker and wife to another,
could fairly well sound like a piano, which instrument she had been
playing since age six. Among these prisoners were a pair of Cole
Younger’s cousins, and one of them, Amanda Selvey, could put her
hands over her mouth and twang like a Jew’s harp or trill like a harmonica. The other cousin, Sue Vandiver, was a small brass band all
her own, expertly oom-pah-pahing like a tuba or tootling like a
coronet or French horn. An otherwise reticent girl named Juliette
Wilson, whose brother rode with Dick Yeager, could raise guitar
strumming with her tongue and palate, and Josephine could plunk so
like a banjo that the others said she sounded better than the real
thing.

Before long the girls were dancing nightly to their own music,
waltzing to piano and horns and violins, reeling or stepdancing to
stringband tunes. People passing on the sidewalks heard them and
believed they were playing real instruments up on the second floor.
And many were the outraged complaints to the officer of the guard
every evening when the girls concluded their musical entertainments
with a rousing and harmonious rendition of “The Call of Quantrill”
that carried out their windows and down the block:

Arise, my brave boys, the moon’s in the west,
the Federal hounds are seeking our nest.
We’ll be in the saddle at breaking of day,
and the Quantrill they hunt will be far on his way.

They chase and they hunt us ever in vain,

 

no matter they search all the brush and the plain.
We ride like the wind, like ghosts in the night,
we are bold wolves in battle and swift hawks in flight.

Few shall escape us, fewer be spared,
our deadly pistols in vengeance are bared.
For none are so brave, so sure in their might,
as men of Missouri defending her right.

In this sultry summer the city smelled of horseshit and of human
waste baking in the alleyway jakes, of woodsmoke and cooking, of
dust blown in off the prairie, of thousands of people in close urban
quarter. The girls grew familiar with the sounds of the city—the clattering and clopping of passing street traffic, the iron-crashings and
whistle shrieks from the railyard, the cries of streetcorner news
hawks and calls of wagon vendors, the sharp-bark commands of
army units on the drill field down the street.

They heard other things too. The building was old and dry in its
joints, and sometimes, in the late hours of the night, they’d hear a
slight creaking in the walls or a low groan from the floor, and in the
morning they’d make jokes about the place being haunted. There
was another late-night sound as well—the faint laughter of men and
women which seemed to come up through the walls, though the
liquor store had closed hours earlier. They thought it was a trick of
acoustics, that the building was somehow redirecting the sounds
from some neighboring tavern.

In fact, the laughter was coming from the cellar, which they did
not know was being used as a temporary jail for prostitutes known
to be diseased. The building next door was serving as an army guardhouse, and some of the soldiers, in violation of orders not to fraternize with the cyprians, had hacked holes through the common cellar
wall so they could visit the whores and trade whiskey and food for
their favors, the medical dangers be damned. They snugged supporting beams into the rude passageway, but the structure was makeshift,
and in the liquor store above, sober men would feel a slight list as
they traversed the floor. One day a bottle fell and broke, and the proprietor and a patron watched in uncertain amusement as the whiskey
rivulets flowed like snakes to form a trough at the base of the wall.
The patron said it might be a right idea to shore the wall beam. The
whiskeyseller said it wasn’t his building, so to hell with it.

The girls would never know either the source of the laughter or
that the reason it ceased in their third week of imprisonment was
that the guardhouse commander learned of the shenanigans and
ordered the whores removed to more secure confinement.

The only vestiges in the cellar of the last good time to take place
there were the litter of abandoned underclothes and the empty
whiskey bottles and the various scattered carcasses of half-eaten roast
chickens. Over the following days the smell of the chicken remains
carried out through the cellar window to the snorting hogs that
prowled for slops along the rear of the building. But the window was
too small to admit them, so the swine burrowed beneath it and then
through the rotted rear wall of the cellar. And who can say whether, as
they made their way inside, they paid any hog mind at all to the groans
of wrenching girders and joists torsioning to the breaking point.

Council of chieftains

They were recognized by the pickets and allowed to pass along the
trail and into a clearing in this dense portion of wildwood.
Quantrill’s camp was a quarter-mile away and close by Blue Springs,
but here was where the council would meet. They gave their horses
to a young bushwhacker who tethered them with the others at safe
remove from Quantrill’s horse. Charley had already bitten two of the
other animals, the horsehandler said, and ruined a thumb on one of
Andy Blunt’s men, some brash youngster who claimed he knew a
horse’s mind and reached a hand out to stroke Charley’s muzzle, saying, “Ho now, boy, you ain’t gonna bite nobody, are you?”

A fire burned low in the center of the clearing, and torches stood at
intervals around the perimeter, casting an eerie wavering light on the
underbranches of the trees. Each of the captains had brought a couple
of men with him and there were nearly twenty men assembled near the
fire, some few others tending to the horses or posted as videttes. Bill
had not seen some of these men, including Quantrill himself, since the
previous autumn. There was much shoulder-slapping and sharing of
jugs. Then Quantrill called them to gather around him.

He paced slowly inside the circle as he spoke, passing before
every man so he could directly address each in turn. He said the
Union newspapers were crowing about Gettysburg and claiming the
war was all but won. He didn’t know what the Richmond high-hats
thought about that, but he believed it was time to show the Federals
just how far from finished the war was. And the best place to show
them was in Kansas—the home to killers who had been murdering
Missourians since before it even became a state.

His voice rose steadily as he recounted the devastation wrought
upon innocent Missourians by Jim Lane’s brute jayhawkers. He
retold the atrocities Lane’s Brigade had visited on Osceola. He asked
his audience to think on the barbarities beyond number that Jennison and Hoyt and their bastard redlegs had committed in Missouri—
the farmers hanged, the young boys killed, the women widowed and
crops destroyed and homes put to the torch.

Bill felt the anger in the men around him like a rising heat, heard
their low cursings of accord. Quantrill heard them too, and moved
deeper into his theme.

The black heart of Kansas, he said, was Lawrence—the favored
home of abolitionists since territorial days. It had served as the capital of the Free State movement, its streets were named after New
England, the town

itself
was named after a damned abolitionist. The
place had long been a headquarters for the murdering jayhawks. It
was where the thieving redlegs sold most of the plunder they took
out of Missouri.
And
it was home to Jim Lane—the Grim Chieftain,
the King Jayhawk himself. The man had built a mansion in
Lawrence and paid for it with the blood money he got in receipt of
Missouri loot.

“Lawrence—it is in

Lawrence,
” Quantrill said, his delivery now
evangelical, “that we can have our greatest revenge.
And
reap our
greatest reward!”

“Let’s go

Kansas City fates
kill
the sonsofbitches!” John Jarrette hollered—and the
exhortation provoked cheers.

 

“Easy to say, John,” Cole Younger said, “but there’s a thousand
soldiers between here and there.”

 

“That’s right—they got new posts all along the damn border to
watch out for us,” Andy Blunt said.

 

“Those posts are
thirteen
miles apart,” George Todd said. “How
much bigger hole you need?”

 

“And look there at Dick Yeager,” Quantrill said. “He went
a
hundred miles
into Kansas to settle a score and he lost not a man in
the doing. Lawrence is not half so far over the border.”

 

“That’s true, Bill,” Yeager said, “but I went with a dozen men.
How many would we be to Lawrence? Three hundred? That’s a lot
of riders to sneak forty miles into Kansas.”

 

“Even if we
got
there,” Gregg said, “we’d pay hell getting back.”

 

There was agreement with this point—and disdain of it as
unduly fearful. “We can slide past anydamnbody,” Dave Pool said.
“We’re ghost riders—