Hard Way Out of Hell Page 5

  “Frank James and Black Jack Chinn come ridin’ into camp, sayin’ there’s two suspicious gents a-spyin’ on Mickey Flannery yonder,” Oll said, hooking a big, crooked thumb back toward the innkeeper. “George Todd asks … ‘What’s they doin’?’ Chinn says … ‘Just sittin’ and eatin.’ Quantrill then says … ‘That sounds like the most secretive of spies’ … so he sends me an’ the boys out to kill some spies. But you ain’t spies.” He shook his head and laughed, but the laughter faded from his voice when he said: “Saw your pap a while back, Cole.”

  “How’s he doing?” I had not seen Pa in three months.

  “Goin’ to New York.”

  That saddened me. Back in September, Pa had told me that I would be making that trip with him. And here I was, in a flea trap along the Sni-A-Bar, staring at one of the biggest cutthroats you’d never wish to meet.

  “You know your pap rented a team of matched grays and a buckboard to that damnyankee Walley?” Oll Shepherd asked.

  Every muscle in my body tightened. “No.”

  “Yeah. Figured it would help you out if he done it, I reckon. Can’t quite figure out who I hate worser … a Redleg like Jim Lane, who burns towns, kills anyone he feels like, and plunders all in the name of Kansas and the Union. Or a sneak like Walley, who pretends to be a real soldier and hides behind his blue coat.”

  “They all hide behind their damned blue coats,” I said. “I think you know why John and I are here.”

  “Reckon I do. Your pap ain’t seen that rig or them horses returned yet, by the way.” He hooked his dirty thumb toward the door. “Y’all want to ride out of here with me and the boys? Or you wanna just stay here, sippin’ cold coffee, gettin’ bit by fleas, an’ spyin’ on that skinflint yonder?”

  * * * * *

  Deep in the thickets in the Sni-A-Bar, where briars would tangle around a man’s feet, arms, or even his neck if he were not careful, Quantrill’s camp didn’t seem that much different than where John and I had been wintering. His men lived in a ravine, some sleeping in caves and some in tents that had been stolen from bluebellies.

  Quantrill stepped out of the largest tent as Oll Shepherd led John and me into camp, reining up a few feet short of the leader, and telling Jarrette and me to dismount. Men—not much more than two dozen—rose from their fires, their dice games, or their bedrolls. Each man carried maybe eight to twelve pounds of weaponry.

  As I studied Quantrill, I realized he had changed a bit. The hair was longer, the face more chapped and bronzed by sun, wind, and cold. His mustache appeared a little fuller, but he had not packed on any weight. The boots remained shining black with built-up heels, but a tan slouch hat had replaced the fancy plumed one, and, instead of a fine coat, he wore only a woolen shirt and corduroy pants. He carried a brace of revolvers, tucked inside a green sash.

  “You,” he said, nodding in my direction, “I remember.” He raised a finger to his lips as if trying to think. Then his blue-gray eyes brightened. “Ah, yes. How is your charming sister?” Before I could answer, he said: “Still spunky, I take it.”

  “Some might say so.”

  His head bobbed slightly as he turned to Jarrette.

  “But you … you I do not know.”

  “Jarrette. John Jarrette.”

  “My brother-in-law,” I said.

  “Please,” Quantrill said as he looked back at me, “say that this brute did not take lovely Caroline’s hand in marriage.”

  Hell, he even remembered Duck’s name.

  “Another sister,” I said. “I got plenty.”

  “Indeed.” His face brightened.

  “Indeed.” I glared.

  Quantrill slapped his hands together. “Well, since Oll did not hang, stab, shoot, or decapitate you, I take it that you are not spies for the Yankees. Since he brought you here, might I presume that you are here to ride under our black flag.” He gestured behind him.

  I saw no flagpole.

  I can tell you, Parson, we rode under no black flag. We took no blood oath. Put our right hands on no Bible. All John Jarrett and I did was answer one question.

  “Will you follow orders,” Quantrill asked, “be true to your fellows, and kill all those who serve and support the Union?”

  “Yes,” we said simultaneously with both hands at our sides.

  Quantrill grinned and shook our hands. “The only other thing I ask of you, is that should you be killed, die game.” His face hardened. “The enemy shall give you no quarter, and he shall be granted none from us.”

  We never marched, rarely drilled, and orders came out more like suggestions. I came to join an army, but can’t say that I did.

  “Chinn!” Quantrill called out to a lean, pockmarked man. “Take the horses. But, Chinn, try not to steal them.” He nodded at Oll Shepherd. “Oll, show Private Jarrette around camp.” He made “private” sound like some sort of joke. Then Quantrill looked around before pointing a long finger at one of the men standing. I recognized him. He had been in Flannery’s inn when Jarrette and I had first arrived.

  “And, Buck, would you be so kind as to lay down the law to Private Younger here?” Again … that feel of a joke.

  Instead of saluting, this tall drink of water turned his head to spray a river of tobacco juice on a rock before walking over. He stood maybe six feet tall, a bit taller than me, though I outweighed him by maybe forty pounds. Although slender and trim, he walked with a quiet, confident ease. His face was long, his forehead square, and coarse whiskers covered his fair face. His eyes were set deeply in his head, and his black hat was pulled low over his sandy hair.

  “Name’s Frank,” Frank James told me, “but folks call me Buck.”

  That was his introduction, and he led me around camp, introducing me to other bushwhackers. It was a quick introduction, and when we were back where we started, I asked: “How long have you been sitting here in camp?”

  I was eager to do something. I did not join Quantrill to hide in these dark woods where my brother-in-law and I had already been hiding.

  Frank James shifted the quid of tobacco from one cheek to the other and cited a passage from Shakespeare, which caused me to stare at him harder.

  There is a tide in the affairs of men.

  Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

  Omitted, all the voyage of their life

  Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

  On such a full sea are we now afloat,

  And we must take the current when it serves,

  Or lose our ventures.

  When he finished, I said: “ Julius Caesar. ” This caused him to stare at me more intently. I went on: “Brutus is telling Cassius that if we wait, our power lessens, while the enemy’s grows. You seem to agree with me, I take it.”

  Again he spit. “Get your bedroll and possibles and pitch them in my tent. Don’t have many men in camp with whom I can have an educated discussion about the Bard. But don’t you worry about fighting. Or killing. You’ll get your fill.”

  Chapter Eight

  Killing became a specialty of mine. I did it often. I did it well.

  But, Parson, let me contradict one shameless falsehood that has dogged my path since the war. Never did I line up eight, ten, fifteen—the number always varies—Yankee prisoners in single file and test a liberated Enfield rifled musket to see how many bodies one bullet could penetrate. I did not say: “This Yankee gun ain’t nothing more than a popgun.” Nor did I draw my revolvers and dispatch the surviving prisoners one by one. Yes, I killed, but never murdered.

  * * * * *

  The smell of bacon and coffee wafted in the cold air, but I remained underneath my blankets, though I had been awake before the coals had been fed with fresh tinder. It was a lesson my new friend taught me.

  “Don’t be the first up, Bud. You don’t want to be getting the fire going and cooki
ng breakfast, especially when it’s cold as it is now. Let some other boy do those chores.”

  Frank James had experience in the army. Having joined the Missouri State Guard, he had been at Wilson’s Creek, although he said he saw no action. Taken sick with the measles, he had been captured by the Yankees, which might have been a good thing. The doctors treated him, and paroled him. He took the oath, and returned to his farm in Clay County. Frank could be a hard one to figure out. Maybe he got sick and tired of all the misery bluebellies kept inflicting on peaceful farmers. Perhaps he just got bored. After the war, I came up with yet another theory: That he broke his parole to get away from his mother. I never met a woman as mean as Frank’s ma.

  The fire crackled now, and I could smell coffee. So could Frank James.

  “Time to get up, Bud,” he said as he rolled out of his bedroll. “Let’s join the boys.”

  And most of us were exactly that. Boys. Frank was nineteen. I had just turned eighteen. William Gaugh and Little Archie Clement were sixteen; Jim Cummins, seventeen; Billy James and Clell Miller only fourteen. Black Jack Chinn might have been thirteen years old, but he could handle his jackknife with that seven-inch blade better than Jim Bowie could use a Bowie knife—and that boy knew horses better than Hardin, Pa, or even me. Bill Anderson was twenty-two, and I don’t think Quantrill had been on this earth more than twenty-five years. We called Hiram George “Old Man” because he was twenty-eight.

  * * * * *

  As time passed, more boys kept joining our ranks. When I first found Quantrill, he had had maybe twenty-five men. But now our numbers were fast approaching fifty.

  “We don’t get up now,” Frank advised on this morning, “we’ll be hungry for the rest of the day.”

  Salt pork had started frying.

  “Suspect you’re right,” I sighed as I got to my knees and began rolling up my bedroll on the frozen ground.

  Next thing I knew, I was on my back, unable to hear a thing but smelling smoke that came from no campfire. Shaking my head, I blinked back the astonishment and reached for my Navy Colt. Frank was crouched beside me, and now I could make out the sound of guns firing, hear the zip of bullets through the air. My hearing had returned, to my eternal regret.

  “Mama …”

  “Oh-God-oh-God-oh-blessed-Jesus-I-am-kilt.”

  Screams.

  I tried to find a target, but saw only four or six of our boys lying in a blackened crater in the center of our camp.

  Quantrill swore savagely as he yelled: “The Yanks have a cannon!”

  Another ball fell in the woods behind us, splitting timbers as it exploded, showering us with flaming branches, twigs, and shrapnel.

  A sea of blue charged from the other side of the clearing, and we answered with Rebel yells, buck and ball, and pistol shots. They must have outnumbered us three-to-one, but those bluebellies came from cities. Most of us were farm boys who had grown up hunting, and all that pistol practice I had done to help protect Pa’s mail served me well.

  “God A’mighty, Bud,” Frank said as he reloaded his Remington revolver. “That Yank was sixty yards away.”

  Another cannonball landed near the cook fire, but failed to explode, and our steady, accurate fire drove the bluebellies back into the woods. My mouth felt dry. Sure, we had driven the Yanks back on their first charge, but I knew we were in a fix.

  A man slid beside me, and I turned to see William Gregg, a Jackson County man maybe twenty-four years old, already sweating despite the cold. “Quantrill wants to see you,” he said.

  “Huh?” I fitted the last cap on the Navy’s cylinder.

  “Now,” he snapped, and did not wait for any response. Crouching as the Yanks began peppering us with musketry, I lowered the hammer on the revolver and hurried after the man. Gregg weaved his way back to Quantrill’s tent. I just made a beeline, thinking that if a bullet was meant to hit me, no amount of dodging around would stop it. I made it to Quantrill’s tent without a scratch.

  “I am told you know this country, Younger,” Quantrill said as he pulled on one boot and smoothed his pants leg before he rose from the camp chair and picked up his hat from a traveling desk.

  “Well … ”I holstered the Navy. “A little.”

  “So how do we get out of this embarrassment?”

  I thought for a second, then tilted my head down the trail that cut through the woods. “There’s a farmhouse not far from here. Had a bunch of cattle penned up when Buck, Cummins, and I passed by yesterday. If we could hold those bluebellies to a standstill till nightfall, then …”

  A bullet snapped the canvas and blew apart the shaving cup near Quantrill’s bed.

  “I do not think we have till nightfall,” Quantrill stated.

  “All right,” I said. “Y’all get ready.” Without waiting for any order, I stepped away from Quantrill and his adjutant, drew the Navy, and waved it in the general direction of the little woods road. “Buck!” I shouted. “John! Oll!” I didn’t really expect anyone to follow me, and I started running toward the road. Bullets dug in the earth in front of me, snapped branches in the woods to my right. I popped one shot toward the Federals, or Jayhawkers, or whoever they were, and did not stop running.

  Once I reached the woods and followed the little track, the shooting at me stopped. Footsteps sounded behind me, and I glanced back as I continued to run. Lo and behold, Frank James, John Jarrette, and Oll Shepherd were right behind me. And behind them? Little Archie Clement, who stood five feet tall if he wore high-heeled riding boots, Jim Cummins, and Clell Miller.

  Frank James, the fastest, caught up with me.

  “We’re … horse … soldiers …” he reminded me. “Not damned … infantry.”

  “Horses up ahead. And cattle.”

  It wasn’t long before we could see a man and his wife standing in front of the dogtrot cabin, staring in wonderment toward the battle beyond their farm. Spotting us, they ran inside, slammed the door, and pulled in the latchstring. When Clement aimed a Dragoon pistol, I snapped at him: “We’ve no quarrel with those folks.”

  He pulled the trigger anyway. “That’ll remind ’em,” he said, adding, “Bishop.”

  “No time for saddles,” I said as we reached the corral. I counted four plow horses, a mule, maybe twenty-five steers. “Some of you’ll have to ride double, or walk.” I grabbed the halter to the biggest of the horses.

  No one asked me what my plan was. And if they had, I don’t know if I could have told them. I leaped onto the big dun’s back, and, as Clell opened the gate, I loped out to the pen that held the cattle. Frank followed on a brown nag, and we opened that gate. Then I rode back behind the cattle, already prancing and bawling, acting skittish. I fired the Navy twice, and the steers took off.

  John Jarrette, on another brown mare, made for the cornfields, and Frank took the point, guiding the stampeding beef toward the woods road. Little Archie Clement and Clell Miller rode double on the mule—arriving back at our camp maybe five minutes after everything was pretty much over. Oll Shepherd took the buckskin. Jim Cummins had to walk, but he got to the fight before Clement and Clell.

  Catching up with Jarrette and Frank about the time we cleared the little trail, I helped them turn the cattle toward the Yanks. The boys, Quantrill, and Gregg realized my plan at once, and they hurried to their horses. I guess it’s one thing to be shooting at people at a distance, but it’s a whole lot different when you’re staring at a bunch of red-eyed cattle with horns bearing down on you, driven by more than forty men screaming like banshees and fighting like demons.

  The Yanks broke from the woods, cut across the field, and we followed them, letting the cattle scatter. Jarrette, Frank, and I turned our horses toward the howitzer. Frank shot down the man with the ramrod and the sergeant who kept barking orders. The others turned tail and tried to flee toward the distant woods, but they never got there. I leaped off t
he horse I’d liberated—never having cared much for riding bareback.

  A Yank who had been playing possum leaped out in my path. Scared the tar out of me, so I shot him in the head. When I came to the cannon, I stopped and stood there, scratching my head. By then George Todd had ridden up, swung out of the saddle, and was starting to bark orders at me: “We have no need for a cannon, Younger. We aren’t artillery. We’re bold dragoons.”

  “I’m just trying to figure out how you spike one of these things,” I said.

  Chapter Nine

  Such was my first taste of battle. Glorious? Maybe, but not after the Yanks had fled. As George Todd and I debated how to destroy the howitzer, our boys rode around among the wounded Yankees, shooting them in the head, then dismounting to rob them. Frank James rode up and tossed a rope around the still-hot cannon barrel, and we overturned it. Todd procured a hammer and drove a spike into the touchhole, while I shoveled mud into the barrel.

  The sounds I remember far too well. The clanging of Todd’s hammer. The popping of pistols at close range. The calling out for mercy that fell on deaf ears.

  “Strip the dead!” Quantrill yelled as he galloped into the field.

  I turned to stare, my mouth open, last night’s supper roiling in my gut.

  “Uniforms!” Quantrill continued to order. “I have need of those uniforms.” He winked at me, and called out to our boys in the field. “Several Yanks escaped. Others will come, riding fast for retribution. Strip the dead, but hurry. We should not tarry!”

  * * * * *

  Hit and slash, Parson, and ride away to fight another day. That’s how we operated. Home base was wherever we could find shelter for a time—some abandoned farm, or with family members of our boys. All too often, we lived like rats, hiding in caves or in the woods in makeshift shelters. We learned to sleep fully clothed, revolvers at the ready, our horses always tethered nearby, always saddled.