Blacks and whites talked and ate together. Their children played together. Ladies chatted about their recipes, farmers looked at the sky for a chance of rain, and men like Lane and Shea and others discussed politics and the war.
“Hello!”
Alistair had just bit into a buttery biscuit. Crumbs fell onto the front of his vest, and he tried to brush them off, but wound up dropping the biscuit, which a dog promptly devoured.
“I fear I have ruined your dinner,” Maura Shea said.
“No, ma’am.” Alistair wiped his mouth. “I don’t think the ladies, or me, will miss that biscuit much.”
Giggling, she walked to his side. “So how does our celebration of the Fourth of July compare to Dover, Ohio’s?”
Beans had brought over two mugs of beer, handing one to Alistair. With that boyish grin, he offered the other to Maura, who smiled while shaking her head.
“Lemonade then?” Beans asked.
“If it’s no bother.”
“No bother at all, Miss Maura.” He waded between an American flag and a freedman, and the crowd swallowed him.
“So … Lawrence or Dover?” Maura asked again.
He had to sip his beer to think. When was the last time they’d celebrated Independence Day in Clay County? Two years back? Three? Or had they stopped during the border wars? Maybe he had merely pushed such memories in an unreachable part of his brain.
Setting the beer on the edge of the table, he smiled. “Maura,” he said, “I don’t think any city in our country could compare to this celebration.”
Lying had become as natural to him as it came to Beans.
“You sing lovely,” he said. Which was no lie.
“Have you heard that song before?”
He wasn’t prepared for that question, and his face fell. She saw the hurt, and stepped closer. “Yes,” he managed to choke out. She reached for his hand, but he pulled it away before she could trap him.
“It was at a funeral,” he said, and then the lies came flowing again, easily, smoothly. “For our captain. He died leading a charge with the Fifty-First Infantry in Kentucky.”
She found a way to grab his hand anyway. “I’m sorry, Jim.” Tears welled in her eyes. “It might help to know that Henry Washburn wrote that song … a poem, actually … for Lieutenant John Grout, who was killed at Bull Run. John was only eighteen years old when he fell. He came from Worcester, same as me, although I did not know him personally. And …”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I know.” He knew nothing about that song, other than the fact that Maura Shea sang it much better than Lucy Cobb.
He felt her squeezing his hand, and saw her bring it to her lips. He felt her kiss.
“I’m so sorry for causing unpleasant memories, Jim.”
She released his hand, and it dropped by his side. His side began throbbing from where the Yankee ball had left a ragged scar. That wound hadn’t bothered him in months.
“It’s …” He had no more lies left in him.
“Lemonade, Miss Maura. It’s lemonade!” Beans Kimbrough thrust a glass into her hand. Beans raised his mug in toast. “Happy Independence Day!”
* * * * *
On the last night of July, a bell began tolling.
At first, Alistair thought it must be some prank. Boys pulling kid stuff, but he could hear people filing out onto the street, and, despite the pillow over his head, he could make out muffled shouts. Beans tossed off the covers and crept to the window, drawing back the curtain, peering into the moonlight street.
The bell’s pealings never ceased.
“Somebody getting married?” Alistair wondered, giving up and swinging out of the bed.
“Not unless they’re getting hitched at the armory.” Beans checked his watch. “At midnight.”
The moon bathed the streets in pale light, and Beans sniggered as he raised the window, saying: “Criminy. They’re running around like ants.”
As soon as the window opened, shouts carried up, immediately wiping out any weariness Beans and Alistair felt.
“Bushwhackers are coming! Bushwhackers are coming! Get your guns, boys! Get your guns!”
Chapter Seventeen
It had been a false alarm, and those citizens of Lawrence, terrified and praying for deliverance just moments earlier, scurried back to their homes bickering, cursing, complaining. The cannon had been wheeled out in front of the Eldridge, and left there when the militia realized there was no one to fight. Soldiers, both white and black recruits, came running to the armory—those who hadn’t fled in terror to the ravines and woods—half dressed, some not even carrying their muskets. Even Alun Cardiff looked terrified, until he realized that no Missourians were charging down Massachusetts, ready to sack the town as border ruffians had done back in 1856.
In the moonlight, Jim Lane and Alun’s father, Card Cardiff, railed at those soldiers, cursing them as cowards. Waving a jeweled sword overhead, Lane bellowed at the sentry who had sounded the alarm. Mayor George Collamore hung his head in shame.
A long-haired man, dressed in buckskins, galloped down the street, brandishing ivory-handled pistols in both hands. “Where are they?” he yelled. “Where are the scoundrels?”
“Still in Cass County,” came an acerbic reply.
The man in buckskins cursed, slid his revolvers into the saddle holsters, turned his roan, and galloped back toward Mount Oread.
“A most interesting display.” Beans chuckled. “Most interesting, indeed.”
“Do you really think …?” A woman began, pointing her Bible under Conor Shea’s chin. Shea’s hair was tangled, his nightshirt hastily tucked inside his striped britches, a Remington revolver stuck inside a mule-ear pocket. “Do you really think Missouri riff-raff would raid us? In Lawrence? Forty miles from the safety of their god-forsaken state?”
Shea said nothing. The woman turned indignantly, and hurried home.
“It would be not only impossible,” a man chided the major, “but ridiculous.”
Still sniggering, Beans headed back toward the Johnson House.
* * * * *
Memories of the madness of that night quickly evaporated.
The newly organized Eleventh Kansas Cavalry left Kansas City, captured the Secessionist stronghold of Nevada City in Vernon County, Missouri, and left the town in flames.
Lawrence celebrated.
Vicksburg had fallen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, once seemingly invincible, had been turned back at some place in Pennsylvania called Gettysburg.
Lawrence celebrated.
Corn grew tall. Melons and tomatoes ripened.
Lawrence celebrated.
The Reverend Lowman preached one Sunday from his pulpit, not fire and brimstone and death to bushwhackers and slave owners, of fear and war and rumors of war, but rather a sermon of hope. “The beginning of the end appears unmistakably,” he said. “Hope, at long last, begins to smile over our wonderful land.”
Lawrence celebrated.
Every evening, concerts or lectures or dances were held underneath the Liberty Pole. There were Bible readings. Recitals. Soliloquies from Shakespeare. Prayer meetings. Strains of “Yankee Doodle” and “Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye” rang out across the streets. Word began coming that the telegraph would soon link Lawrence with the rest of these United States. That the rails of the Pacific Railroad would arrive a short time after the telegraph.
Lawrence celebrated.
Upstairs in his room, Alistair sat alone, trying to make some rhyme or reason out of The Shaving of Shagpat: An Arabian Entertainment, a strange novel published in London by some writer he had never heard of. He wasn’t interested in reading, especially about a Persian barber and an enchantress and some magical sword. He had his own fantasy.
If the war ended …
Which made him surprisi
ngly happy. It didn’t matter if the North won, or the South. The war would be over. Lucy and Cally would be freed. Lawrence, and Maura Shea, would be spared. He would be spared, of having to face Maura, having to see the faces of those people he had befriended in this town, having them see what a traitor, what a butcher he truly was.
If the war ended, he could go home, back to Lucy and his parents. Providing the Yankees would let those Partisan Rangers alone, not try to hang them. If the Yankees kept considering him an outlaw, not a real soldier, well, he could always continue to be Jim Alistair, cattle buyer, a good man. He could hang his hat in Lawrence—with Maura.
August brought an intense, almost unbearable, heat, and Alistair closed the book, tossed it on the table, and moved to the window, hoping to catch a breeze. Across the street, he saw Beans, chatting with a bluecoat, handing the Yank a cigar before crossing Vermont, pausing to let a freight wagon pass, and finally disappearing underneath the awning.
The breeze did not help. Alistair moved away from the window to the dresser. He poured water from the pitcher into a glass, and drank. Refilled. Drank again.
The door opened, and Beans slid in quickly. Another man followed, and Alistair instantly dropped the glass, and reached for his pocket .31. The man raised his head, removed his straw hat, and Alistair took a step back.
It was Frank James.
“Pay your bill,” Frank said. “Check out. Can you get horses?”
“We’ll have to rent them from the livery,” Beans said.
“Do it.”
“We can say we’re going to go looking for cattle,” Beans went on. “Check on those darkies on the far side of the Wakarusa.”
“Whatever you think sounds best. Just meet me and Henry Wilson at Blanton’s Bridge. Pronto.”
Frank gripped the knob, opened the door, checked the hallway, then slid out of the room. “Something horrible’s happened back home,” he said, and, as he closed the door, Alistair could just barely hear him whisper: “And the day of reckoning is coming.”
Missouri
Chapter Eighteen
Slowly the cortège moved through Centerville. Two mules pulled the cart that carried a lone pine coffin, the top laden with roses, wildflowers, and a wreath.
A wreath of glory? Alistair thought, then brushed aside a tear.
On the left side of the road, just beyond the small town, he sat in the saddle on a blood bay, watching the solemn rider lead the coffin out of Centerville and into the country. Alistair’s heart ached, like it had been pierced by a dozen Yankee balls. Balls that could only torture, not kill.
Then came the farm wagon, driven by Mr. Todd, and, dressed in black. Beside him, wailing like a woman who had lost all reason, Mrs. Cobb cried in anguish.
Alistair dared not look at her. He made himself focus on Frank James, mounted on a dun horse on the other side of the street. Draping the reins over his horse, Frank removed his slouch hat with his left hand as the procession passed. His right hand gripped a Remington .44, in plain view.
Alistair remembered another time, an eternity ago, when they had attended another funeral. He recalled Frank’s words about Mrs. Cobb: “Not strong stock like most Clay County farm mothers.” Well, how many mothers could stand losing a son in this horrific war, Alistair thought, … and now … a … daughter?
He groaned, and could not dam the tears that washed down his cheeks but could not clean his face, his soul.
The parson from New Hope followed on foot, hatless, head bowed, clutching a Bible in both hands, muttering a silent prayer.
Other mourners followed, solemn, silent, some with Bibles, others with shotguns, muskets, revolvers. When the last passed, Frank nudged the dun, Alistair kneed the blood bay, and they joined two other riders who kept the rear guard: Beans Kimbrough, and William Quantrill.
The bay gelding wasn’t the horse he had rented from the Lawrence livery. That horse wouldn’t do in a fight, so Alistair had traded it and $30 for one of Jim Cummins’ spare mounts. Likewise, Beans Kimbrough also rode a good thoroughbred.
Silently they followed all the way to the Cobb farm, but the riders stopped on the pike, not turning down the path toward the farmhouse, not following the mourners.
Quantrill faced the riders: “I will pay my respects, but I fear it unwise, and not desirable for Missus Cobb’s health, to have us all so close as she buries dear Lucy.” He addressed everyone, but his eyes burned into Alistair. “Is this amenable to you, sir?”
Alistair wet his lips, but could not speak. His head barely bobbed.
“You may pay your respects at your own home, Alistair,” Quantrill said. “See your sister.”
“I saw her yesterday.” He could speak, after all. He wanted to add: Would to God I had not.
“Beans?” Quantrill asked.
“I druther picture Cally when she was whole.”
Again Alistair’s heart burst.
“What the hell happened?” Beans broke the silence with a cry of exasperation.
They knew. Well, they thought they knew.
On August 13, that three-story brick building the Yankees had turned into a “Female Prison” in Kansas City had collapsed.
Practically every Secesh or Southern sympathizer in Western Missouri believed that those walls had not tumbled down on their own. This wasn’t Jericho. No act of God. Yankees, soulless sons-of-Satan, had murdered six girls, not a one more than twenty years old, some as young as nine. Scores more had been scarred, maimed, crippled. Their only crimes had been their names. They were kin to the boys who rode with Quantrill.
Bloody Bill Anderson’s sister was dead. Another sister maimed for life. Charity Kerr, sister of John McCorkle and cousin of Cole Younger, was dead. Soon Lucy Cobb would lay six feet under beside her brother Tommy. The last words anyone had heard from her had been: “Please, God, get these bricks off my head.”
Cally Durant might have escaped unharmed, but, two weeks earlier, the Yanks had fastened a fifteen-pound ball to the chain around her ankle. A doctor from Liberty said she would never walk again. Nor use her right hand, which had been crushed.
“This was murder,” Quantrill said. “A most fiendish plot. But the Yankees shall pay. We meet at the Perdee place tonight. I will see you there.” He wheeled his mount, and hurried around the bend.
Slowly Frank James, Beans, and Alistair turned their horses around. They rode at a walk, then a trot, and finally a canter. Never once, until they had reached Perdee’s farm, did they holster their revolvers.
* * * * *
“It was murder!” Bill Anderson screamed.
He looked like a ghost, a man already dead, and his eyes revealed a madness that had consumed him. His hands gripped the knotted yellow cord, twisting, tightening, his knuckles as pale as his face.
No one in camp spoke to Anderson. They just let him rant.
“I’ll see to your horses.” Henry Wilson took the reins from Beans and Alistair. Clell Miller led Frank James’ horse to the picket line. “Get some coffee,” Henry Wilson told them. “There’s a mess of corndodgers in that sack by the fire.”
They moved from the corral toward the fire, passing men, men who said nothing. Cole Younger sat on a rock, flames illuminating his face, but his eyes seemed dead, also. He looked older, too.
“It was murder!” Bill Anderson screamed.
Silently sitting by the fire, Dill McCoy filled two tin mugs with coffee, and handed them to Beans and Alistair.
“Murder!” Anderson paced back and forth. “As God is my witness, Josephine, I shall avenge you! Their holy temple we shall defile! We shall lay their Jerusalem on heaps. The dead bodies of their servants will become meat unto the fowls of the heaven, the flesh of thy saints unto the beasts of the earth! Their blood shall shed like water. And there shall be none to bury them!”
Few slept that night, and when Quantrill returned be
fore dawn, he met briefly with Beans and Alistair. Beans handed him the “Who We Want” list, which Quantrill eyed quickly, folded, and passed to John Jarrette.
“How many men have we?” Quantrill asked.
“Two hundred and fifty,” Jarrette answered.
That figure made Alistair turn. He hadn’t realized so many men had arrived in camp, hadn’t fathomed just how many people now sided with the Partisan Rangers.
“I thought more would join us,” Quantrill said, “now.” Sighing, he wolfed down a cold biscuit, and walked to the fire, Jarrette, Beans, and Alistair following.
“I ride to Lawrence,” Quantrill said after climbing atop a stump.
No one spoke.
“Kansans have murdered, robbed, burned, pillaged. They have stolen our property, our slaves, our dignity. Now they have robbed us of our loved ones. Our women. Our daughters. And Lawrence is the greatest hotbed of Abolitionism. We can exact revenge, and bounty, by raiding this city. We will make them regret Osceola. We will make them mourn Nevada City. My plan is to divide whatever money we reap evenly amongst ourselves.”
Alistair frowned, staring at the back of Quantrill’s head. He had abruptly changed from revenge to looting.
“You can divide it among the needy if such is your desire,” he said. “We will leave Lawrence in ruin, and we will return rich, and our thirst for vengeance, for those martyred heroines in Kansas City, slaked.”
Silence.
Alistair felt sick.
“That’s a fool’s play, Colonel!” someone called out in the darkness.
To Alistair’s surprise, Quantrill nodded. “Yes. I consider it almost a forlorn hope. Honestly I don’t know how many of us shall return. But …”—he gripped the butts of his revolvers—“if you dare not risk, you never shall gain.”
No one else said a word, and Quantrill frowned. After a long while he jutted his jaw at Bill Anderson, who had been silent for almost six hours now.
“What say you, Bloody Bill?” A boyish excitement blazed in Quantrill’s eyes.
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