Rifles for Watie

by Harold Keith

  Jeff knew very well what was at stake. Lyon was hurrying to Springfield to meet the rebel armies of Price and McCulloch. If the Southern force of ten thousand men won a decisive victory, Missouri would fall to them, with its rich middle portion from which valuable supplies could be had and thousands of men recruited for the rebel cause.

  Jeff felt a grim satisfaction. It seemed good to be moving aggressively into Missouri for a change, instead of always waiting for the bushwhackers to come across the border and hit them first. But for half an hour the infantry stood in line, waiting.

  Impatient, Jeff twisted and squirmed in his tracks. Corn! What were they waiting for? He would explode if there was further delay.

  Daylight came finally, and the eastern sky was laced with pearl and orange. The cloud bank in the west was receding. The wind blew up softly from the south, carrying upon it the musty odors of the creek bottoms; Jeff could feel its cool flush on his face and see it gently bend the buck brush and the prairie grass close by. But still the column didn’t move.

  Suddenly he heard a cavalry bugle blowing Prepare to Mount. It wouldn’t be long now. He saw each trooper grasp his reins in his left hand and put one boot in the stirrup. At the bugle’s single toot ordering Mount! they all swung into the saddle as one, their rumps slapping the leather seats almost in unison. A dapper little lieutenant up front dropped his arm violently downward, and the cavalry moved out in single file.

  Quickly the infantry received its marching summons too, and amid the muffled tread of thousands of feet, they were off at last. Jeff heard the creak of harness, the jingle of chains, the chucking of cannon wheels and the pounding of hundreds of hoofs as the horses and mules plunged obediently to obey the shouting, cursing teamsters and the cruel popping of their long black bull whips.

  It was fine to be marching in the cool of the morning. As Jeff marched he squinted suspiciously out of the corner of his eye at Pete Millholland, the big lout of a sergeant who plodded along out of step beside the squad. Millholland was bowlegged and walked with an awkward roll, as if he were following a plow on his dirt farm back in Douglas County. Nothing he wore seemed to fit him. His shirt sleeves were too short. His wafer of a cap perched on the side of his blond head, and its bill fell almost over one ear. He seldom spoke, preferring to enforce discipline with a stern half-scowl. Despite his inaptitude for military life, the new sergeant was trying to better himself. Each night Jeff saw him laboriously studying a well-thumbed army manual by the light of a campfire. At times he seemed like a fairly decent fellow. But he was an officer, and Jeff didn’t like officers.

  Jeff thought it was a great sight to see the army, like a gigantic bull-snake, serpentining through the countryside in a long, loosely jointed column a mile in length, the cavalry leading, the infantry in the middle, and the artillery riding behind. His heart beat high. They were leaving the last jumping-off place, going farther and farther away from the security of the fort. Every mile they traveled took them nearer to battle.

  The sun rose higher and higher in their faces, and the morning grew hotter. Now the exhilaration was gone, and the marching became hard work. Sweat began to drop off the tip of his nose, and he was conscious of black gnats crawling into the hairs on his arms.

  He plodded steadily forward, his footsteps blending with thousands of others ringing off the hard pike. Grasshoppers snapped noisily in zigzag flight, bounced on the hot ground, and were upended in the dust. Cicadas sang from the roadside elms. The heat was so great the trees were losing their leaves; it reminded Jeff of his mother’s hens dropping their feathers as they molted.

  The men began to murmur. One complained he couldn’t go a step farther. Millholland wiped the sweat off his nose with his sleeve and gave him a dirty look.

  “Sure you can,” he growled. “You can always go farther than you think you can. This is pretty hard, but we can stand it.”

  The sergeant was right. Jeff had learned in his training marches across the Missouri that fatigue is mostly mental. Browned by the Kansas sunshine, his body was wiry and tough. He felt as if he could keep going all day.

  Every time the column stopped to rest, Millholland reached over and, with a powerful tug of his right hand, helped ease the heavy pack off Jeff’s small back. Each soldier was carrying about forty pounds—his musket, canteen of water, haversack of rations, a twenty-pound knapsack and forty rounds of ammunition, besides the heavy shoes on his feet and the clothes on his back. Jeff should have been grateful for the assistance. Instead, he felt embarrassed.

  “Thank you, sir,” he told the sergeant. “I can heft it.” Millholland gave him such a dark, glowering look that from then on he accepted the sergeant’s aid in resentful silence.

  “Wisht I had me a cavalry hoss,” John Chadwick said enviously. “Them fly-slicers shore got it easy.”

  “Not as easy as the batterymen,” said Ford Ivey, switching his rifle from his right hand to his left. “Them wagon sojers always gits to ride.” The back of Ford’s blue cotton shirt was stained dark with perspiration. Ivey upped his canteen and took a long pull of the water. His Adam’s apple oscillated as he drank.

  Tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp. Soon the sun was almost directly overhead. The heat was searing. Jeff felt every tissue in his body was being wrung dry. He knew the horses must need water, too, but they hadn’t passed a pond or stream for miles. Tramp, tramp, tramp. Now their marching footsteps were slower. The sun began to slant westerly, behind them and over their right shoulders. They passed a meadowlark sitting on a rail fence, gasping with its bill open. The heat came up through the soles of Jeff’s brogans, burning his feet. In the hot south wind the roadside grass rippled in long waves. Wheels rolled, wagons creaked. Canteens flashed in the burning sunshine as the men drank heavily during the rest stops.

  They seemed to suffer more from drinking too much water than from lack of it.

  “Jest take a sip,” advised Millholland. “Don’t drink too much. It’ll make you sick.”

  But not all the thirsty Kansans accepted his counsel. Three boys in Jeff’s company guzzled too deeply and had to drop out and be picked up by the ambulances. It was on the third day of the march that Jeff discovered with surprise how much water a single company could drink.

  “Here’s water,” somebody had called, and without waiting for the officers to give the command, the soldiers broke ranks, hurrying through the dusty woods. Carrying little ropes and buckets, they crowded around a farmer’s stone well near the road.

  Jeff got one good drink and filled his canteen, then watched incredulously as his company scooped water so busily that soon all splashing ceased, and all he could hear was their empty buckets scraping the well’s rock bottom. It was the first time he had ever seen a well drained in fifteen minutes.

  Refreshed, the crawling column again was put in motion. Jeff noticed that Noah Babbitt, the tramp printer walking next to him, swung along easily and effortlessly and seemed to be standing the heat quite well.

  “How come you like to walk so well, Noah? Don’t you ever get a hankering to straddle a horse?” he asked.

  Babbitt shook his shaggy head. “Ridin’ makes my head dizzy and my feet sore. I’d rather walk. I like to touch the earth, eat haws, smell the wheat, an’ mingle with the quails, bluejays, and woodpeckers in God’s great outdoors.”

  Jeff blinked with surprise. Noah was certainly an odd one. Always pausing to finger and study the leaves of some tree he did not know, or stooping to inspect some wild flower, or glancing keenly into the bushes at a strange bird. But Jeff liked him. Noah was easy to get along with. And he knew more geography and natural history than all the rest of the company put together.

  “What’s the fartherest you ever walked on one trip?” Jeff asked.

  Noah gazed abstractedly at the parched ground passing beneath their feet. Then his white teeth flashed briefly in his tanned, leathery face.

  “I guess it was two years ago when I hiked from Topeka, Kansas, to Galveston, Texas. Why?”
r />   Jeff shrugged. “Oh, no particular reason. I just wondered.”

  They tramped fifty yards more in the broiling sunshine.

  “How come you walked clear from Kansas to Galveston?”

  Noah turned his somber face seriously toward Jeff. “You probobly won’t believe me, youngster, but I wanted to see the magnolias in bloom.”

  Jeff caught his breath in surprise. Estimating fast, he reckoned it was roughly about nine hundred miles from Topeka to Galveston. If a fellow could stand all that walking, it would take about a month and a half to hoof it down there and another month and a half to hoof it back. Eighteen hundred miles just to see some flowers. Jeff stole another look at Noah. If anybody would do it, Noah Babbitt would be the man.

  Jeff said simply, “I believe you. Did you get to see them?”

  Noah nodded solemnly. “Shore did. An’ they was worth every foot of the trip.”

  At Grand River, Lyon and his three thousand Missourians and Iowans were waiting for them. Quickly two columns were formed side by side and the march resumed. Jeff gazed with interest at his new comrades. The only Missourians he had ever seen were the bushwhackers. He had supposed that everybody in Missouri was for the rebels. But these men were unmistakably Union. They were outfitted much more completely than the Kansas Volunteers.

  Their blue uniforms were newer, and they carried rubber blankets, bayonet scabbards and Springfield muskets. Their officers were equipped with Colt six-shooting revolvers. The Iowans sang while they marched and wanted to go swimming in every creek they crossed.

  As they marched along together, one of the Missourians, weighed down by his pack, staggered a little in the torrid heat and nearly dropped his gun. Looking closer, Jeff saw a boy even smaller than himself. He had big blue eyes and a mop of curly black hair.

  “Here, I’ll help you,” Jeff offered, reaching for the gun. But the lad refused the assistance, clinging tightly to the weapon.

  “Thankee,” he mumbled, doggedly. “I can make it.”

  Jeff handed his own gun to Ford Ivey. Stooping, he picked up a handful of dead grass and turned to the boy.

  “Give me your cap a minute. I’ll show you a way to turn the heat.”

  Obediently the lad handed it over. Jeff put the dried grass in the crown, poured water from his canteen over it, and handed it back to its owner. It was a trick he had learned with his own straw hat while plowing. The boy clapped the cap gratefully onto his black curls.

  “Thankee,” he said, shyly. “That’s real cool.”

  Trudging along, Jeff asked the Missouri boy, “What’s your name?”

  “Jimmy Lear. What’s yours?”

  Jeff told him, and they fell to talking. Jimmy was from St. Louis and belonged to Lyon’s army. He had walked all the way except for a short boat ride near Boonville. He told Jeff he had belonged to a military club in St. Louis, organized by Frank P. Blair, a leader there of the unconditional Union men. They had drilled for weeks without guns. When war was declared, they had promptly joined the Union army. Riding in steamboats, they had already been in a couple of skirmishes at Jefferson City and Boonville, breaking up small concentrations of state troops that were being pointed for service with the rebels. Jeff listened enviously. Nothing so exciting had yet happened to him.

  They were deep in Missouri now, and Jeff stared with curiosity at everything he saw. Everything here seemed so different from Kansas. The houses were much older, and the country more heavily populated.

  All afternoon long, Jeff had felt something itching under his arms and in the edge of his hair. He thought it was gnats or heat rash until after supper, when he walked to the persimmon grove where the Missouri troops were camped and hunted up Jimmy Lear.

  Instantly Jimmy clapped his eyes on Jeff’s arm. Reaching over, he began to pick several small gray-looking objects off Jeff’s skin.

  “Look!” Jimmy blurted. “You got graybacks.”

  Jeff’s forehead wrinkled in puzzlement.

  With a quick motion of his right hand, Jimmy captured another of the tiny insects. “Boy, you got ’em, all right!”

  “So have you,” said Jeff. With thumb and forefinger, he trapped one on Jimmy’s forehead. For a moment the two boys stood toe to toe, pulling the insects from each other’s skin. Finally Jeff asked, “What are graybacks?”

  “Lice,” said Jimmy. “Only we calls ’em Arkansas lizards. Lookie here. I’ll show you how to make ’em kill each other.” He put two of the small insects together on a piece of white cartridge paper, and they began fighting fiercely.

  “Corn!” marveled Jeff. “Watch ’em go after each other. Just like hogs fighting.”

  Later that evening both boys stripped and Jimmy showed Jeff how to shake his clothing over the campfire. When the lice dropped into the flames, they popped like salt. But the soldiers never seemed to be entirely rid of them.

  Day after day they marched, usually covering twenty to twenty-five miles from morning to dusk. The more they marched, the more they got used to it. Now the heat didn’t bother them so much. The flat land began to give way to hillier country, and they encountered more streams and saw more trees, mostly hickory and oak and persimmon. Each night they tried to camp beside a small river, and when everybody but the mess cooks stripped off and went swimming, the stream would be so full of naked men that Jeff couldn’t see the water. As they dressed he could smell the smoke from the campfires and hear the hiss of the bacon frying.

  One night Jeff wrote to his parents, “We eat breakfast early and supper late to lose the flies. But at noon the flies get as much of it as we do.” He hoped to mail the letter when they reached Springfield. The government stage would take it back to Fort Leavenworth and it would go south from there by mule train to Sugar Mound, near Jeff’s home, where his folks would get it when they came to buy supplies.

  After the meal the men usually sat around smoking and resting. Some washed their socks, shirts, and drawers in the river. Others submitted to the shears and razors of the several regimental barbers who traveled with Lyon’s army from St. Louis. General Lyon had even brought along a twenty-piece regimental band that played each night. Ever since the Missourians had joined them at Grand River, Jeff had watched the perspiring German musicians striding along stoically in the heat, carrying their brass horns on their thick red necks or under their fat muscular arms.

  One night after supper, Jeff walked over to the Missouri troops’ camp to visit Jimmy. He found him shaving under a small persimmon tree. Jimmy had placed a small broken piece of mirror in the crotch of the tree and, straight-edge in hand, was peering into it. He had lathered one side of his face and was scraping it with the razor when a husky sergeant, hairy and pug-nosed, walked up. Standing behind Jimmy, he watched him suspiciously.

  Jimmy must have seen the sergeant in his mirror because his hand was trembling.

  “How old are ye?” the sergeant asked, stepping around in front of Jimmy and looking at him accusingly.

  Jimmy’s face blanched. He looked sheepish. “Sixteen, sir.”

  “That’s a lie,” the sergeant snorted. “Likely you’re nearer thirteen.” He looked shrewdly at Jimmy. “Why are you shavin’ atall? They ain’t no whiskers on either side of yer face. They ain’t even any goose down.” With a dirty forefinger he reached up suddenly and wiped the soap off one side of the boy’s face, exposing a cheek as smooth as a girl’s.

  Jimmy stood silent, still holding the open razor.

  The sergeant growled, “Come with me. I wish I knew what recruitin’ officer signed ye. He’d get a court-martial and a dismissal, forfeitin’ all pay and allowances.”

  Jimmy’s face was tragic. Jeff saw him swallow helplessly and wished there was something he could do.

  Jimmy found his voice. “Sir, they won’t kick me out of the army for this, will they? I’m fourteen but I’m big for my age.” His big blue eyes stared beseechingly at the sergeant.

  The sergeant said, “They otta make ye walk clear back to wherever ye came
from.” Still scowling, he marched Jimmy off to see the captain. Jeff was flabbergasted. No wonder Jimmy had trouble standing the long, hard march.

  Next evening they camped twenty-five miles north of Springfield and Lyon ordered vedettes and guards posted and sent out scouts.

  “We’re gettin’ close,” Millholland told them. “Captain says the rebels are comin’ up fast from the South. Looks like we’re gonna have a battle, all right.”

  Elated, Jeff got up and took his rifle into the woods to clean it and replace the old load with a new one. If there was going to be a fight, he aimed to be ready. Pointing his gun at the sky, he fired it off so he could clean the breech.

  A sentry came running up, frowning with excitement. “Did you fire that gun?”

  Jeff nodded.

  “Did your captain give you permission?”

  Jeff stared at him innocently. “No, sir. I didn’t know I needed permission. I just shot it off so I could clean it. When I go hunting in the woods at home and want to clean my gun, I always shoot it off like that. Why? Is it against the rules?”

  The sentry raised his own rifle across his chest. “You’re under arrest,” he said sternly. “Come with me.”

  Jeff was taken before Captain Clardy. Clardy stared coldly at him. When he recognized Jeff, the long scar on his left cheek turned livid. For a full moment his wild green eyes darted over Jeff. His look was like a whip. Feeling it, Jeff writhed uncomfortably.

  “Put him on all-night sentry duty,” Clardy snarled and turned his back on them.

  Although he had marched all day in the torrid heat, Jeff walked sentry all night. At nine o’clock his eyes began to feel heavy, at eleven he was nodding, at midnight he was dozing on his feet and went to the cook’s mess to get a cup of hot coffee so he could stay awake, helping himself to the pot on the fire. As he stood drinking, he heard the cooks snoring loudly as they slept on quilts under the stars. Then he heard a voice, calling his name.