“There’ll be five of us, if Dick joins,” Roy said.
“Dick needs to stay home with his wife and that new baby,” Casey cut in.
“So should a lot of good men gettin’ their butts shot off by Yankee snipers,” Roy retorted.
“I’ll ask, but Dick can do what he wants,” Ardell said. “He doesn’t have anything to prove, as far as I’m concerned.” He looked at me. “You want some help getting back to the Flatiron, Boone?”
“No, we’ll be fine.” Stepping forward, I shook Ardell’s hand enviously. “By God, I wish I was going with you, boy.”
“You change your mind, we won’t be hard to find.”
Laughing, Punch said: “Look for where the fighting’s thickest, Boone. That’s where we’ll be.”
I smiled and shook Punch’s hand, reminding him to take care of his arm. I wished the others luck, as well, then bought a final round for the house, Eric included. We were just finishing up when the sound of pounding hoofs interrupted our farewell celebration. Casey moved to the door to peer out over the top of the batwings. “Better douse those lights, Eric,” he said. “That’s Dick Langley, and he’s coming in like he’s got hounds snapping at his heels.”
Session Four
I was the second one through the door that night, right behind Casey Davis. We stood on the boardwalk in front of the Havana House, staring nervously up the street in the direction of Fort Myers. Eric had taken Casey’s advice to heart and was already quenching the saloon’s lights, plunging the building into darkness. Glancing toward the Gulf, I realized that the whole town had gone dark while we’d been inside the Havana. Even Ashworth’s office, down by the corrals, was as black as a chunk of coal, although I could still hear the cattle bawling nervously in their unfamiliar surroundings.
Dick didn’t haul back on his reins until the last minute, bringing his mount to a plunging, head-shaking stop right in front of the saloon. “Riders coming!” he shouted. “A whole slew of ’em.”
“How many?” I asked.
“Didn’t see ’em, Boone, just heard ’em, but there’s a passel. A lot more than what Jacob Klee’s outfit could account for, that’s certain sure. Maybe thirty or forty, coming along the road from Fort Myers at a good clip.”
Several of the boys swore, and Ardell said: “It looks like you’re going to get to fight some Yankees sooner than you thought, Roy.”
“Bring on them dirty sons of bitches,” Roy snarled, drawing his handgun to check its loads.
The rest of us were doing the same, running our thumbs lightly over nipples to make sure the caps were all still snugly in place, checking that the cylinders were turning smoothly. Satisfied that my Navy was ready, I returned the gun to its holster, then started down the steps toward my horse. “Mount up, boys!” I called over my shoulder. “I don’t want to fight them if we don’t have to. Let’s try slipping out through the swamps.”
“The hell,” Roy said in a startled manner. “I ain’t runnin’, Boone. I say we stand our ground right here, and let them cold-hearted bastards know what it’s like to tangle with a bunch of he-’coons.”
“No, not here,” Ardell said, beating me to the punch. “Let’s get out of town, where innocent people won’t get hurt. Then we’ll see . . .” His words trailed off as a sound like the rumble of a distant stampede reached our ears. “Hell’s fire, that’s them, boys.”
I glanced back to warn Eric to find a place to hide, but he’d already retreated inside the Havana, pulling the big outer doors closed behind him. Jerking my reins free, I swung into the saddle without using my stirrups. “Let’s ride!” I shouted, pulling my mount toward the alley beside the saloon. Yet I’d barely moved away from the rail when a shot rang out from somewhere down the street, the bullet whistling so close past my ear that I instinctively jerked my head in the opposite direction. Two more shots came at us from the deeper shadows near the cow pens, and Ardell swore and yanked his right hand back, shaking it as if bee stung.
“This way!” I yelled, pulling my horse around and driving my heels into its ribs. My spurs, in case you’re wondering, were still hanging off my saddle horn, where I’d left them the second time I approached Ashworth’s office, although I doubt if they could have squeezed any more speed out of my little marshtackie. It was already streaking down Punta’s Rassa’s broad, dark street with a barn swallow’s speed and agility.
The others fell in behind me, riding strung out and low over their ponies’ necks, their revolvers and pistols drawn and ready to fire. To this day, I don’t know who tried to ambush us from the corrals, although I’m fairly certain it wasn’t Federals. They were still out in front of us, the thunder of their mounts’ hoofs rising before us like a wall of floodwater.
We met at the east end of the street, and Dick had been pretty close in his estimate—thirty-five to forty Union troopers, mounted astride their big Northern horses like they thought they could roll right over the top of us. We used our revolvers to explain to them the error of their thinking. Someone from the Yankee side of things kept yelling for us to halt, but we naturally didn’t. The disjointed report of our pistols echoed along the wide street, drowning out the cries of the Federal commander as he tried to rally his men against our charge.
I don’t think those bluebellies had any idea who was coming down the street toward them, and they quickly scattered before our guns. The Yankee in charge kept ordering his men to—“Hold firm”—in a shrill, ragged voice, but he might as well have been commanding a gaggle of geese for all the cooperation he was getting. I’d find out later that a lot of those boys had been new recruits out of New York, most of them as green as grass when it came to fighting, which was to our good fortune. I’ll tell you what, we sure scattered their asses that night.
Likely, if we’d thought about it, we could have cornered the whole bunch and demanded their surrender, but we were more interested in flight at the time and continued on into the scrub like so many fleeing rabbits. A few of those bluebellies managed to get off a shot or two, but I don’t think most of them even got their revolvers out of those closed-flap holsters the army set so much store by.
I remember glancing behind me at one point and seeing Punch and Calvin racing their marshtackies side-by-side. No one else was in sight, but I wasn’t worried. Those boys had been raised in the brush and would survive just fine as long as they kept their wits about them.
I was starting to feel pretty good about the situation, until something happened that I didn’t see coming at all. One minute we were racing east like a strong wind, and in the next, the air around us seemed to vibrate with the hum of spitting lead. Some years later I’d meet Eric Burke in Texas, where he’d gone after the Yankees burned down his saloon, and he told me it was a lieutenant named Hodges who ordered his men to dismount with their rifles, drop to one knee, then fire a concentrated volley toward the spot where us Flatiron riders had disappeared. Then he had his men reload and fire twice more, before he deemed we were probably out of range.
I ducked low over my saddle horn after the first volley and was drumming a rapid beat against my horse’s ribs when I heard Punch shouting for me to come back. I swore and pulled my mount to a stop.
“Boone, they shot Cal!” Punch yelled, and I swore again, before wheeling back to help.
I found Punch hovering fretfully over his buddy, his face pale in the starlight. Calvin’s face looked even paler. There was a dark smear high and toward the center of the chest—an exit wound, I figured—and his breathing sounded wheezy and off-kilter.
“He’s shot, Boone,” Punch said needlessly.
That was when the third volley came, whistling overhead like a scythe. I ducked and swore, while my horse struggled to break free.
“Get back here!” I hollered, yanking hard on the reins. The horse ceased its fidgeting, but was still badly spooked by all the shouting and shooting.
“Cal,” Punch said uncertainly, giving the younger man’s shoulder a quick shake. He looked up, his ex
pression filled with dread. “He ain’t breathing no more, Boone. Cal ain’t breathing.”
I laid a hand against the youngster’s chest just to be certain, then rocked back on my heels, not sure what I should say or do. It was as if my world had been suddenly cut adrift, bouncing sideways down boulder-strewn rapids with no one at the oars. Hell, you’ve got to remember that I was only a few years older than Cal myself, and he wasn’t even shaving yet.
“What are we gonna do?” Punch whispered dully.
I shook my head, then grimly pushed to my feet. “Where’s his horse?”
“It took off.”
“All right.” I hesitated, my thoughts a-whirl. “All right . . . we’re . . . we’re going to have to let someone else bury Cal. Someone from Punta Rassa. We can’t wait, and it’d be too dangerous to take him with us.”
“Leave him?” Punch asked incredulously.
“It’s our only choice. Any minute now, them Yankees are going to come busting through here with their guns drawn. They won’t give us a chance to fight or run or even surrender, they’ll just shoot us where we stand, then leave us behind while they go after the others. Someone in Punta Rassa will find Cal, and see that he gets a proper burial. Come on, now. We can tell his folks when we get back. They can come fetch his body when things calm down.”
I could tell Punch didn’t care much for my plan, but he could definitely see the logic of getting out of there before thirty or forty Yankees showed up in a fighting mood. His face drawn nearly to tears, he stepped into his saddle and reined after me. We loped our marshtackies through the scrub, and I don’t know about Punch, but my muscles were taut enough to play like a fiddle at the thought of catching a Union minié ball in my back.
Although I really did expect those Yankees to follow us, they didn’t. According to Eric, after that third volley, Hodges led his men down to the corrals and confiscated the herd that W.B. had bought from me just a few hours earlier. Eric said there was quite a bit of speculation afterward that maybe Ashworth had been behind the Federals’ raid all along, maybe in hopes that he wouldn’t have to shell out any hard coin for our herd, and that the buyer he’d lined up for our cattle hadn’t been a Cuban ship’s captain, after all, but those Fort Myers Yankees. The fact that Ashworth disappeared a couple of days later didn’t help his position with the locals any.
As far as me and Punch, we continued on through the darkness with our imaginations filled with pursuing troops. We were still heading for the pines, but in a roundabout manner to avoid the swamps we’d nearly bogged down in only a few hours before. After a while I began to quit worrying about the Yankees behind us and started thinking about Negro Jim. I wondered if he was even aware of the Yankees’ presence, especially if he hadn’t heard the gunfire. That was a possibility. Out in the open, a firearm can be heard for a good, long ways, but trees and brush can muffle a gunshot a lot more than most people realize.
Punch and I didn’t get very far before we caught up with Roy, Ardell, and Dick Langley, sitting their heavily breathing mounts behind a screen of palmettos. Ardell perked up when he spotted us, but his expression fell when he saw the looks on our faces.
“You boys OK?” he asked tentatively.
I barely had a chance to nod before Punch blurted out the news about Cal. “We just left him there,” the youth added miserably.
“It’s for the best,” Ardell replied after a moment of shocked silence. “Those woods are likely crawling with Yankees by now. They’ll find Calvin and see he gets buried proper, or else let someone in town know where to find him.” He looked at me. “We’d best ride, Boone, if we don’t want to end up like Oswald.”
I nodded toward his left hand, dripping blood from a wound above his thumb. “How bad?” I asked.
He shook his head dismissively. “It’s just a burn. It’ll heal quick enough.”
“What about Casey and Pablo? Have you seen them?”
“I haven’t, but if they’re alive, they’re likely heading for that pine grove, the same as the rest of us.”
“Let’s go see if they’re there,” I said, heeling my marshtackie to the head of the small column. It wasn’t long afterward that I heard a whip-poor-will’s cry from a hammock on our right and jerked back on my reins. Although my hand had dropped instinctively to the Navy’s walnut grips, I didn’t draw it. “Come on out, Casey.”
A pair of horsemen emerged from the trees—Casey up front, Pablo close behind. Casey’s eyes swept the group as he drew near, then settled on me with a questioning look. “Calvin took a bullet in the back,” I explained. “He’s dead.”
Casey swore softly, but that was all. Pablo held his tongue, a stricken look on his face.
“Anybody seen Jim?” I asked.
There was a general round of noes, but nothing that concerned me yet. If Jim hadn’t stumbled into a Yankee patrol, he was probably somewhere well ahead of us.
We moved out at a brisk walk, while the sky in the east finally began to lighten. I doubt if we’d gone more than a mile when a voice hailed us from a clump of rushes growing close to the banks of a tiny creek. Reining in that direction, we found Jim extracting himself from the tangle. There was a relieved smile on the Negro’s lips, a worried cast to his eyes.
“Marse Boone, I surely am glad to see you!” Jim exclaimed, stepping forward to place a hand gently against my marshtackie’s shoulder.
“Are you all right, Jim?”
“Yes’um, but they took the horses. Took old Molly, too.”
Molly was Jim’s mule, a leggy gray with more swamp savvy than your average marshtackie, although you’d never find a cow hunter who would admit it.
“Who took ’em?” Roy demanded, his face flushed with anger.
“Yankees, Mistah Roy. Was Yankees took them horses of Marse Boone’s.”
“What happened?” I asked, before Roy could work up any more fire.
“They come outta nowhere, had me surrounded ’fore I knew they was even about,” Jim said. “Was a slew of ’em, too. They asked who I was and where I was goin’ and where I was comin’ from and a lot of other questions I didn’t answer. Then they told me I was a free man and didn’t have to be no slave no more. Said I should come with them to Fort Myers, only I told them I didn’t want to go to Fort Myers. Told ’em I wanted to go home to my woman and family, but they said I couldn’t. Said I was a free man now, and that I had to come with them to Fort Myers.” He shook his head ruefully. “Maybe I don’t rightly understand freedom, after all, marse.”
Some of the boys laughed quietly. Roy swore and spat. I said: “No, I expect you understand what it means better than most. Sounds like it was the Federals who lost sight of its meaning.”
“They surely did want me to come with them.”
“Where are the horses now, Jim?” Casey asked.
“They took ’em, Mistah Casey. All them supplies Marse Boone bought from that German fella in Punta Rassa, they took those, too. They was gonna take me, but then that Yankee with all the fancy markings on his uniform said they had to get into town to stop those dirty Secesh, and that a sergeant named Moore was to stay behind and confiscate me and the horses.” [Ed. Note: Secesh is a shortened form of Secessionist, usually used in a derogatory manner by pro-Union supporters to describe a person who endorsed the South’s secession from the Union.]
“Why didn’t they take you?” Casey asked.
“Well, when that fella with the fancy uniform took off with most of his men, those fellas that stayed behind started going through the packs like chicks under a corncrib. Once they found my bottle, they commenced to drinking, and while they was doing that, I skedaddled.”
“Good for you,” Casey said.
Jim was watching me closely. “I’s powerful sorry, marse, but them Yankees had me outnumbered by a good bit.”
“It ain’t your fault, Jim,” I told him, then kicked a boot free of its stirrup and lowered my arm. “Grab on. You can ride behind me until we catch up with that sergeant and our p
acks.”
“We goin’ after ’em, Boone?” Roy asked.
“I am. You boys don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
“The hell,” Roy growled. “Let’s go get them Yankee sons of bitches.”
Looking relieved that I wasn’t angry, Jim grabbed my arm near the elbow, and I pulled him up behind me. My marshtackie lowered its rump like it wanted to buck at the added weight, but settled down with a firm hand and sharp scolding.
We moved out at a jog, keeping our eyes peeled in every direction for Yankees, but the flat plain between us and the Caloosahatchee seemed deserted until we reached the main trail between Fort Myers and Punta Rassa. It was there that we spotted the tracks of the sergeant and his men, along with those of our pack horses. They were heading east, toward the fort.
“That’s them,” Jim said excitedly. “I been followin’ ol’ Molly so many years, I’d rec’nize her tracks at the bottom of an ocean.”
We kept riding as the light grew stronger and may not have caught up at all if those Yankees hadn’t stopped beside the road to finish off Jim’s bottle of sour-mash whiskey. We reined into the scrub as soon as we spotted them, and me and Casey dismounted, then crept forward on foot. At about eighty yards, we settled down to study the tiny detail in the misty, gray light. There were four of them, gathered around a smoldering fire under the sprawling limbs of a solitary oak. At first glance, you would have thought they were preparing breakfast, but, with a second, you would have noticed how inactive they seemed, not to mention the lack of kettles and skillets. Only one man was on his feet, and he was leaning against the trunk of the tree with his legs braced stiffly in front of him. The others were slumped in front of their fire with their chins dragging their chests, arms slack in a pose I’d seen many times after an end-of-drive spree. Shoot, I’d suffered through more than a few early bird hangovers myself since my first encounter with a bottle on my sixteenth birthday.
“How many jugs of bug juice did you give Jim?” Casey asked.
“Just the one, but I also bought a bottle of blackberry wine from Müller to take home. Looks like they might’ve found that, too.”
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