Orphan Hero

by John Babb

  “Most of the Brigade was bivouacked on a high hill just to the west of the courthouse, and they pretty much controlled four valleys from there. A rag-tag bunch of Rebs held northern Arkansas, and Cassville was the southern point of the Union Army in southwestern Missouri. So Keetsville was a sorta no-man’s-land in between. There was skirmishes round about almost every day for two years. And those that was foolish enough to be Union sympathizers was terrorized or kilt by either their neighbors or the bushwhackers. So we was surrounded by Rebs.

  “We had a purty good battle down at Keetsville when we first come into the area, and my Colonel, Clark Wright, spoke true when he said that the citizens of Keetsville all knew about the coming Reb attack, gave intelligence to the enemy, and kept all knowledge of it from us. That afternoon, all the ladies quietly left town one by one, and by the time of the attack, all was out safe and sound. That alone showed every last citizen in the place was a part of the plan. The Colonel was tryin’ to figure what to do with the town and the people. He said Keetsville was the worst hole in all this country! Colonel Wright and all that come after him tried to turn those folks, but between them bushwhackers and the rest of the citizens, I don’t think we made no progress.”

  “Lieutenant, thanks for the history, and good luck on your travel home. Looks like my stage is ready to go.”

  The lieutenant looked at him with what appeared to be pity. “You best be real careful where you’re headed. You look way too much like a Yankee for it to be healthy for you down there. Just remember I fulfilled my Christian duty and tried to talk you out of it.”

  The Eureka Stage Line took the old Indian Trace from Cape Girardeau to Rolla for an all-day run, then hit the Wire Road and headed to the southwest, passing through Waynesville. It was the last week of July, so B. F. knew that Sue would already have left the town and traveled to Keetsville to prepare for the wedding. By mid-morning of the third day, they reached Springfield, where he switched to another stage and continued on until almost dark, stopping in Cassville for the night.

  There were no real quarters for travelers in town, as the Barry Hotel had been burned to the ground during the war, so the stage passengers stayed in the home of a Mr. S.K. Burton, who served as the county postmaster. B. F. inquired of the driver why they had not continued on to Keetsville, since there was no hotel in Cassville. The driver replied, “We been held up twict in the last month just south of Keetsville, so if it’s just the same to you, I druther make that trip in daylight.”

  After an early breakfast of eggs and biscuits at the Burton table, the coach departed for Fayetteville and all points south. There was very little activity in Cassville at that time of the morning, although B. F. couldn’t be sure that there was ever very much going on. At least half of the stores in town were partially burned or about ready to fall down.

  Two miles out of town, the driver paused for his team to get a good drink from an artesian spring bubbling out of a rock cliff. “This here’s McMurtry Spring. Best water in this part of the country. Spring runs all year long, no matter how dry everything else is.”

  “There’s a feller, Wilbert Ledgerwood, lives about a half a mile west of here that’s got a wet weather spring on his place, and it runs across the stage road. Every time it rained, he’d be out there on the road with a team of mules, charging anybody who got their wagon stuck to pull them out. That warn’t too bad, ’til folks caught Wilbert hauling water from McMurtry Spring down to his place to dump on the road so’s it’d stay muddy. That way people would keep on getting stuck, even when it was dry weather. Couple of his neighbors is kinda high-strung. They told Wilbert if he done it again, they wuz gonna turn him into a steer.”

  The further they rode from Cassville, the more he noted burned out farms or barns. The war had obviously been hard here. It seemed within a few miles that they had arrived on a flat prairie—certainly not anything to compare with the broad expanses of Kansas and Nebraska—but a flat plain of land that was at least four miles wide and perhaps ten to twelve miles in length. A number of the fields appeared to be in good shape, but cattle were absent. He noted other spring branches along the way and remembered what Sue had written to him about the land.

  He took particular note of some property just before they arrived in Keetsville. It ran off to the west for a good half mile and was bordered on the south side by a running spring. Although there was a farmhouse, the yard was grown up and it did not appear to be occupied. He resolved to find out more about it.

  Forty

  They Cooked The Skin Off His Feet

  Keetsville, Missouri 1865

  The stage stop was only that—a stop. The Eureka Stage Line would run another forty miles or so before they exchanged teams in Arkansas and continued their journey to Fayetteville, then on to Fort Smith. B. F. dismounted the stage and got directions to the home of John Durham, which was just a couple of hundred yards back up the road.

  As he walked up to the door of the large farmhouse, he began to feel very awkward. It was the first day of August, two days before the wedding, and he was totally unknown to these people. He paused at the bottom step, thinking that there must be a better way of introducing himself than to simply show up with a traveling bag in hand. The prospect of walking back to the stage stop wasn’t appealing in the heat of the day, but perhaps they could direct him to someplace in town to stay.

  About the time he finally decided to turn around and walk back out the gate, the door opened behind him and a woman’s voice called out, “Can I help you?”

  With some embarrassment, he turned around. There was a woman of about forty standing there in a blue house dress. But looking over her shoulder was one of the prettiest women he had ever seen, a tall, slender, curly black-haired and blue-eyed version of his cousin Sue. “Is that really you, Ben Windes?”

  He couldn’t help grinning at the joy of seeing his cousin. “I’m sorry for just showing up without letting you know I was in town.”

  The older woman came down the steps and slipped her hand through his arm. “Shush. I’m Minnie Durham. This girl has been talking about you ever since she got here. Come on in the house and tell us about your trip. How on earth do you get here from Brazil? Isn’t that the other side of the world?”

  They sat him in the parlor and the older woman disappeared into the back of the house. B. F. wanted to sit and talk to Sue for about a month, hearing everything about her life. But that conversation didn’t get started before Missus Durham reappeared, carrying a tray of lemonade, with yet another pretty, tall girl.

  B. F. stood up, looked first at Sue, then at the newcomer, then at his hostess. “How many pretty women have you got in this house, anyway?” They laughed at his red face, and it got redder.

  “Ben, this is my best friend, Crocia Rayl from Waynesville. She’s come all the way here with me for the wedding.”

  B. F. noticed that she was almost as tall as he was. He couldn’t remember seeing a girl that could look him straight in the eyes like that. “Hello, Miss Rayl.”

  “Mister Windes, all I’ve heard about was you as a young boy. You hardly fit the image I had. Not too many eight year olds have a beard.”

  He grinned. “I’m sorry to disappoint you.”

  She peered closer at him, then glanced at her friend. “Why, Sue, I don’t believe his eyes are nearly as black as you said!”

  Matthew, Sue’s husband-to-be, had matching red hair and a red beard. B. F. couldn’t help noticing that his head and his hands seemed to be way too big for his body. He walked with a decided limp as a lasting reminder that half of his right buttock had been shot away at the Battle of Pea Ridge two years previously. That he survived at all was due to his captain sending him home in the back of a two-wheeled ambulance wagon.

  It had been a trick to stay off the Wire Road, avoid the Yankee patrols, and travel the long way around via the little settlement of Semmesbury. Matthew had spent the trip face down and buttocks in the air, but would never forget the four hours of rut
ted track, switchbacks, and deep valleys that stood between Pea Ridge and the loving care of his mother.

  Matthew and his father farmed 160 acres east of their home, and his father, John, had been a local magistrate before the war. The Yankees hadn’t put much store in his judicial impartiality, so since 1862 he had spent all his time farming—or at least trying to farm. Their property ran toward the south and behind the stage stop. About twenty acres of their land was in corn, twenty in sorghum, twenty in hay, and the rest in fenced pasture, but right in the middle of the sorghum they had created a huge, two acre vegetable garden. The placement of the garden was important, as they wanted to keep it completely out of sight of foraging Union troops.

  Matthew took B. F. out to see it that afternoon. “We stuck it out here to be close to this spring. When we lay this pipe into the spring, the whole garden is trenched out so we can irrigate the two acres in less’n two hours. If it hadn’t been for this garden, we would have starved to death several times.”

  “Do the Yankees pay people when they take their crops or livestock?”

  “Depends on their mood. Sometimes they hand folks a voucher for their goods, but you have to take it to St. Louis to get any money. Most times, they just take what they want. Lots of folks been killed around here if they object about anything. Some are just called outa their house in the middle of the night and shot dead.”

  “Has that been reported?”

  “Not really anybody to report it to. We make it about forty-two civilian men and boys from this part of the county murdered in cold blood since I come home in sixty-two. The Yankees even used bloodhounds to hunt down our friends and neighbors who hid out in the hills—not bad people, just too scared to stay in their homes.”

  “Isn’t all that over now that the war is done?”

  “There’s still a company of Billy Yanks in Cassville. We don’t know how long they’ll be here, but they’re still getting even with folks every chance they get. Most of the culprits aren’t regular army—they’re part of the Missouri State Militia. Even so, the army doesn’t really make any attempt to keep them under control.”

  B. F. had seen people married before. Every now and then one of the miners in the gold fields found a woman who agreed to put up with him, and quite a crowd would gather in hopes that the groom would spring for drinks for all two or three hundred of the close friends he didn’t realize he had. But he had never actually been a part of a wedding, let alone a proper wedding. It was a good thing that Minnie Durham was around to direct them, because he had no notion whatsoever as to what was expected.

  Just before the ceremony, when he came downstairs in the suit he had purchased in Freeport, he realized that he had gone too far, as neither of the Durham men were wearing anything other than what looked like their very plain Sunday meeting suits. Had it not been for Crocia taking his arm and telling him what a beautiful suit he was wearing, he would have gone back upstairs and changed clothes to something less expensive.

  The wedding was only marred by one incident. As the guests began to arrive, a squad of Yankee cavalry cantered down the Wire Road and came to a halt, positioning themselves directly across the road from the Durham home and making it a point to closely observe every man that arrived. They made no move to interfere with anyone, but certainly made theirselves unwelcome.

  B. F. sought out Matthew and asked what was going on. “They likely figure somebody will show up that they’re looking for. They must be desperate for something to do—coming to a man’s wedding and standing out there on the road in the heat of the afternoon.”

  Just as the ceremony started, B. F. noticed a tall man emerge from the cane field and stride across the pasture behind the house. Before B. F. had escorted Sue to the waiting pastor and bridegroom, the man had arrived in the backyard and was standing close to John and Minnie Durham. It was obvious that he was well known among the guests, as almost every man at the gathering came over to shake his hand. But immediately after the vows were said and refreshments served, he walked back the same way he had come, taking special care to never come within sight of the troops out on the road.

  When B. F. had the chance, he asked Matthew about the odd visitor. “Oh, that was Shorty Johnson, an old friend of the family. He was in my regiment. You mighta noticed, he don’t care much for Yankees.”

  “Would he be the one those troops are looking for across the road?”

  Matthew replied, “Could be a whole list of men they might be out for. But they’ve been trying to get hold of Shorty for a long time. About a year ago, Shorty and some boys were suspected of stealing Yankee supplies. Captain Mitchell got all hot about it and sent some troopers out to get information. They caught his younger brother, Ephraim, out on the road at night. Supposedly he had a round of Army cheese with him, and they figured he’d been connected to Shorty some way or another.

  “They took him into Cassville to see Captain Mitchell, who musta decided it’d be easy to get a boy of thirteen to talk. They took him to their no-count prison at what used to be Crout’s Carding Mill there in town, and built up a fire in the fireplace. Then two of Lincoln’s finest held Ephraim down close to the fire. They cooked the skin right off the bottom of his feet, trying to get him to tell where Shorty was. Ephraim says his feet were sizzling like bacon in the skillet before they stopped. Fact is, his feet were burned so bad he ain’t walked without a crutch since. They transferred Mitchell outa here right after that. Just as well, Shorty woulda killed him, then they sure enough woulda hunted Shorty down.”

  B. F. spent a good amount of time during and after the wedding watching Crocia Rayl. He had discovered to his surprise that she was two years younger than Sue, as she looked and acted considerably older than seventeen years old. Her father ran a mercantile store in Waynesville, where she had lived her entire life. B. F. had no idea how she and Sue accomplished the feat, but for the ceremony each of them had created huge curls in their hair almost as big as a fist. He couldn’t decide whether Sue’s coal black hair was more attractive than the reddish contrasts in Crocia’s auburn do, but there was no doubt they were the two prettiest girls he had ever seen.

  Later in the evening, he was finally able to corral her attention and have a conversation. He couldn’t be sure if she was flirting with him or laughing at him, for it seemed that she had a clever reply to everything he had to say. It was only when he struck upon the subject of her returning to Waynesville that she became serious. “Now that the wedding is over, everybody is going to want to get back to normal. The last thing a new married couple needs to do is entertain company.”

  B. F. realized she was not just talking about herself. “I think that goes for me, too. Would you think I was being rude to suggest that I ride back to Waynesville with you?”

  She quickly put her hand over her face. “My parents would be suspicious of your motives, Mister Windes.”

  “My motives, as you put it, are to get to know you better and to provide an escort, Miss Rayl. I saw some fairly rough characters on the stage coming out here. Surely my motives are better than theirs might be.”

  “When Sue and I came out here on the stage two weeks ago we traveled much of the way with seven men that were not exactly model citizens, so I know what you mean.”

  “Would you feel better about it if I got a phaeton carriage and we rode by ourselves?”

  “My Mama would have a hissy fit if I was to ride in a carriage for three days with a man I hardly know.”

  He looked her in the eye. “I’ve been a lot of places, and nobody—man or woman—has ever had a reason not to trust me.”

  It was her turn to feel a flush on her cheeks. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply that. It’s just that my Mama would never approve.”

  “All right. Then we’ll ride back on the stage. But we both know how unpleasant it is to sit on those three narrow seats; squeezed every which way by seven other people; listening to their conversations, and snoring, and other impolite sounds; not to mention only s
topping twice a day.”

  She looked straight at him and gave him an innocent look. “I know how uncomfortable it is. You don’t have to go with me. I’ll be just fine.”

  B. F. boarded the stage the next morning with Crocia, heading back in the direction they had both come from. The bulb thermometer at the stage stop was well on its way to ninety degrees as they got under way. Thankfully there were only two other passengers during the first part of their journey.

  Their riding partners, the Rasmussens, had traveled from Fort Smith to Fayetteville, where they caught the stage the previous day. The couple had run a small store on the western border of Arkansas, and had just discovered they were almost penniless. Ironically, Mr. Rasmussen said they were millionaires eight times over. The problem was that their millions were all in Confederate scrip. Apparently, most of their business had been with Confederate forces in Arkansas, Texas, and the Indian Territory. They had faithfully clung to the belief that the South would survive as a separate nation, and their “fortune” would be preserved. But when General Stand Watie handed over his sword and his Indian troops on June 23, becoming the final Confederate general to surrender, it was inevitable that the South was no more—and the Rasmussens were ruined.

  After their introductory conversation, the Rasmussens withdrew into their own privacy on the front seat, leaving B. F. and Crocia to talk without interruption with one another in the back.

  As they drew closer to Waynesville toward the end of the following day, both of them seemed to be aware that not only their trip was coming to an end, but that neither of them had made any overture to suggest that they should find a way to continue their relationship. Over the last twenty miles of the trip, it seemed to Crocia that B. F. was withdrawing from their conversation.