My brother didn’t look up. “Charlie,” he said, “this is where Cole Younger dies.”
I’ll never forget the look on Cole’s face, the tears that welled in his eyes, when Charlie said: “All right, Capt’n. I can die as game as you can. Let’s get it done.” Ducking, Charlie Pitts headed to some tree and brush, thumbed back his hammer, and waited.
Jim came to us, picked up a revolver I’d just finished loading, and shook his head. “A bunch of them are coming right for us, Cole,” he said. “Ten, fifteen feet apart, I’m thinking six or seven.”
“Brave sons-of-bitches,” Cole said.
“Yeah.”
Waiting.
I was twenty-one years old. Today, I felt like as though I were sixty-one.
The Yankees drew nearer, making a terrible racket in those woods. Then Charlie Pitts jumped up and fired at a mustached man wearing a badge. Charlie had always been a mighty fine shot, but he missed—don’t ask me how; maybe it was just how bad our luck kept turning—and the man with the badge dropped to a knee, brought his rifle up, and pulled the trigger.
Charlie Pitts died game. Things happened slowly, it seemed, Charlie staggering back with a bullet plumb center in his chest, then the rest of the posse opened up, and more bullets slammed into that brave comrade, driving him against a tree and, finally, to the wet ground.
Cole charged forward, leaving me and Jim, firing his Smith & Wesson, until reaching Charlie. He swore savagely, tossed his empty pistol aside, and pried Charlie’s Colt from his dead fingers, drew the Smith & Wesson from Charlie’s holster. A bullet clipped the Colt as Cole brought it up in his right hand, tearing off the extractor, but Cole acted like nothing had happened. The Colt roared back. Then he was standing and ducking, snapping shots, as bullets flew all around us.
My big brother is quiet by nature, but in a battle he is consumed with rage, like he’s a totally different person. I reckon he learned that riding with the boys during the war. I reckon the war made him that way.
“Make for the horses, boys!” Cole called out, emptying Charlie’s Colt, dropping it while tossing the Smith & Wesson to his right hand. “Ain’t no use stopping to pick up a comrade here, for we can’t get him through the line. Just charge ’em. Make it if we can!”
We were about to charge, and I was ready to follow Cole. I’d be like Charlie Pitts. I could die as game as my brother.
From the Yankee line back in the woods, I heard one of the laws shout in his Irish brogue: “Stand firm, laddies! Stand firm!”
They stood firm, and cut loose with a cannonade of rifle fire.
Cole, who I always considered invincible, fell to his knees, blood pouring from his nose and mouth.
“Cole!” I cried out. “Cole! Cole! Cole!”
All during this time I had been reloading Jim’s pistol, but now I stood, watching as Jim raced by me, firing his Colts, screaming a Rebel yell. One of the Yankees doubled over, and I thought he would fall, killed, but he straightened, raised his rifle. His face disappeared in the gunsmoke.
“Come on, Bob!” Jim yelled to me.
An instant later, a bullet slammed into Jim’s mouth, blowing out teeth and jaw bone and blood, spraying a tree trunk with blood. He fell hard, and did not stir.
I leaped forward, trying to reach him, but bullets drove me back, clipping branches off the trees, and I fell down, exhausted, pain shooting all up and down my right arm. I looked for a pistol, a rock to throw, anything, and hugged the ground tightly, looking up.
Jim I couldn’t see from my position, and I figured he had to be dead, figured they were both crossing over the River Jordan, but Cole had pulled himself up.
“Come on, you Yankee bastards. I’ll kill ever’ one of you yellow sons-of-bitches. Come on!”
Buckshot slammed into his back, but Cole laughed, turning, firing toward the shotgun blast. “Is that the best you can do?”
“Cole!” I cried out over the deafening roar of musketry. “Cole!”
He didn’t hear me. I don’t think he heard anything in those final moments. I don’t even think he knew he was in Minnesota. “Muster ’em out, Arch! Make ’em pay for my daddy!…Come on, Buck, it’s time to light a shuck…. Hell’s fire, it’s Charlie Hart, look at that brave man ride!”
Another bullet drove him backward, but he still stood, lifted another revolver, squeezed the trigger.
“Birds belong caged, don’t you know that? So let’s step inside the vault, fellows.”
He fired again. My ears rang. I think he took another hit, but, stubborn as all us Youngers, he just wouldn’t fall. Wouldn’t quit. Wouldn’t die.
“Ride out! Save yourselves!”
The hammer struck an empty chamber, but Cole didn’t notice. He thumbed it back, pulled the trigger. Another click.
“Ride out, damn you. You ain’t leaving nobody!”
Tears blinded me.
“For God’s sake, boys, hurry up! They’re shooting us all to pieces!”
I wiped my eyes, cleared my vision, tried to pull myself up as the bullet slammed into Cole’s head, and he sank into the brush and lay still, silent.
Down I fell, crying softly, unable to do anything, hating myself, trying to shake the image of seeing my brave brothers, and a great pard like Charlie Pitts, cut down before my very eyes. A few more shots sang out, and I just tucked myself into a ball and rocked back and forth, back and forth.
My fault. All my fault.
“Hold ye fire!” a voice bellowed. “Hold ye fire!”
Silence. The ringing left my ears, and sounds from the thicket drifted to me, of the bubbling water, of the wind rustling through the trees, but no birds singing. Not any more.
“Is anyone still alive? Speak up. Speak up and surrender!”
I made myself stop bawling. Hell, I was a man, a Younger, and no Yankee bastard was going to see me cry. I pulled a dirty handkerchief from my pocket, lifted myself to my feet, and walked toward the posse, waving the handkerchief over my head in my left arm.
“I surrender,” I said. “They’re all down but me.”
The man with the badge stepped forward, a taller man with a thick mustache and beard (but no side whiskers) beside him wearing boots tucked inside his striped britches, and a battered bowler hat. He didn’t look much like a fighter with his triangular face and the biggest dad-blasted ears I’d ever seen, and he had no badge pinned on his vest, but I figured him to be the man in charge.
“Put both of your hands up,” he told me.
“I can’t. The right one’s broken.”
“Then come on toward us, but walk slowly, and keep your left hand raised.”
“It’s over, Cap,” the Irishman with the badge told Mr. Big Ears.
I kept walking. That’s what I was doing when somebody on the bluff behind them shot me in the chest.
At first I didn’t know what to think, couldn’t even believe they’d shoot me while I was giving up, holding a flag of truce. Yet when my left hand dropped the handkerchief and reached over to my side, it felt sticky with blood, my knees buckled, a wave of dizziness consumed me, and slowly I sank to the ground, thinking: You lying Yankee sons-of-bitches.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
WILLIAM WALLACE
MURPHY
“If any of you jackasses fire again, I’ll shoot you myself!” I yelled, and, ripping off my bowler and turning in disgust, I screamed at the men behind me, the cowardly bastards who lacked courage to walk into this thicket with me and these six others. Yet one of them had shot down a young man while he was trying to surrender.
“Who fired that shot? Damn it, I said who fired?”
“I did, Captain Murphy.” I could just hear him from the bluff. He waved his straw hat like a fool. “Me. Willis Bundy. I didn’t know___”
“Put your rifle down, Bundy! I might have you hanged.…”
“He’s alive, Cap,” James Glispin said, and I swallowed down the bile, and approached the bandit Bundy had shot down. Shock masked his face, drained
of all color, and he just sat there, holding the side of his chest where Bundy’s round had hit him. Well, even outlaws have their angels, for the wound did not appear mortal.
“I was surrendering,” he said, his voice a stunned whisper. “Somebody shot me while I was surrendering.”
I nodded, but had no remorse for this boy, no matter what threats I had hurled at Willis Bundy. He had been shot while surrendering. So be it. What of those two dead men, unarmed men, buried now in Northfield?
I have no tolerance for lawbreakers, whether they are damned secessionists in Virginia or claim-jumpers in California. I have fought them all.
In Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania I was born, of sound Scot and Dutch stock, but took off for the California gold fields after turning sixteen. Nigh seven years I spent there, and, while I never made it rich, well not as rich as some, I did learn some important lessons. Such as how do deal with vermin. You exterminate them.
By the spring of ’61, I had returned to Pennsylvania, making my home now in Pittsburgh, and, when the call came for volunteers to save the Union, I raised a company for the 14th Pennsylvania and entered the war.
I had the honor of serving under General Phil Sheridan, the honor of receiving wounds from Rebel sabers and muskets, at Lexington and Piedmont, and the dishonor of spending three and a half months in the miserable confines of Libby Prison after being captured at Mimms Flat. I despised being out of the fight, but that brief period in that horrible dungeon taught me another important lesson about vermin. Fellow officers wouldn’t let me exterminate the traitors amongst us, but we could brand those callous fiends, and that we did, carving at on their turncoat foreheads.
Freed from prison after the surrender of General Lee—they should have hanged him, too, and Jefferson Davis and all those mutineers, seditionists—I had hoped to continue the fight in Texas, where Company D was ordered, but, alas, the Rebs there surrendered while we marched to Fort Leaven-worth in Kansas. Deprived of further glory, one good thing came out of the march. In Kansas I met my lovely bride, Inez, married her, and moved here to Madelia after being mustered out of the service of my country.
Since then, my fights had been confined to the state legislature, to which I had been elected in ’71, but when I by chance found Sheriff Glispin in need of volunteers to track down and capture the Northfield plunderers, I was more than ready.
It is little wonder that I took command when we had our prey snared. The only thing that surprised me was the fact that only six, and not all, of my troops had the courage to march against brigands with me, and that one had the audacity to shoot a man while he showed the flag of truce.
So be it.
“I think you’ll live,” I told the boy, then took in the scene of battle. Three bodies lay spread in the thick brush, their bodies riddled with bullets, and relief washed over my face at the sight of the six members of my volunteers standing before me.
“Is anyone injured?” I inquired.
Colonel Vought let out a nervous little laugh, reached into his vest pocket, and withdrew a chunk of his large rosewood pipe, now shattered by a ball. “I found the piece of lead in my cartridge belt,” he said, shaking his head.
“God looks after you,” I told him.
Vought said nothing, looking away as if ashamed. ’Twas a good thing he had not been smoking the pipe, else the bullet might have killed him.
“You ought to have a watch fob made out of that,” Ben Rice said, “for luck.”
The colonel’s head bobbed fretfully. He shuffled his feet.
“You’re bleeding,” I told George Bradford, who clutched his wrist.
“Scratch is all, Cap,” Bradford told me. “Ruint my aim, though. I’ll be fine.”
Yes, I thought, God has looked after us all.
“Come in!” I shouted to the rest of the posse. By now the slough was surrounded by scores upon scores of men who had taken up arms to rid this county of vermin, or men who’d come along as damnable tourists, hoping to pick up souvenirs and touch the bodies of the dead. “It’s all over!” I cared not a whit to be in the company of cowards, but I needed pallbearers for the slain and Doc Overholt to tend to Bradford’s scratch and the living border man’s mangled arm and other wounds.
“Come in! The bandits are all dead, except one, and he has surrendered and is wounded!”
As soon as I had spoken those words, one of the outlaws I thought dead climbed to his feet, and I swear Big Jim Severson leaped as if he had stepped on a nest of rattlers or seen a ghost.
“Cole!” the young outlaw beside me said, and rushed toward the man I now knew must be the nefarious Cole Younger of Missouri. The reports had not been in err. The James and Younger brothers had been the bushwhackers behind the North-field raid.
“Come on, you Yankee sons-of-bitches,” the gravely wounded Cole Younger said, his voice slurred but his spirit strong. He spit out blood, mouth frothing like a hydrophoby wolf. Blood leaked from his nose and countless other wounds. “I’ll fight your two best men at the same time. I can lick all you sons-of-bitches.”
Waving a little pocket pistol in his right hand, one I knew was empty, having heard the metallic clicks as he pulled the trigger before we downed this haughty lion, Cole Younger kept on challenging us.
“Cole,” the other one said. “It’s me, Bob. Come on, Cole. Come on. Come, or we’ll all be hanged.”
“Let’m hang me. Let’m try!” He coughed, spit out more blood and saliva, and the slim one threw his brother’s arm over his chest and helped lead him toward me. “I’d as soon be hung today as tomorrow,” Cole Younger said. “Come on….”
They collapsed in a little sinkhole, and young Bob examined his brother’s wounds.
Cole Younger had been hit several times by buckshot and ball, including a slug that had slammed into his head, swelling one eye shut. Yet his brain must have cleared, because he let out a little sigh, and realized the fight had ended, that he, as all outlaws must eventually realize, had lost to the arm of the law, the arm of righteousness.
Answered, I thought with pride, to Cap Murphy’s law.
Studying the rimfire pistol as if it were foreign to him, Cole Younger suddenly grinned—how a man like that, in that condition, can grin is foreign to me—and whirled it around, offering it, butt forward, to Sheriff Glispin.
“Sheriff, I had the sure bead on you, but you was too quick for me. You’re Irish for sure. It’s all right.” I think he addressed the last sentence to his brother Bob.
Seconds later, to my surprise, another man rose from the dead, his mouth shot to pieces. He said nothing. I don’t think he could say anything in his condition, but he pitched a pair of revolvers at my Ben Rice’s feet, and staggered over to his comrades, collapsing beside them, conscious, but dazed, his eyes showing shock.
“Oh, Jim, damn it, Jim,” Bob said. “This is all my fault. I’m sorry, Jim. I’m sorry, Cole.”
“It’s all right,” Cole Younger repeated. “We’re all right.”
“Boys,” I told the bandits, “this is horrible, but you see what lawlessness has brought to you.”
I accepted an ivory-handled Smith & Wesson that Jim Severson offered me, my spoil of war, and found my bowler, which I placed on my head, then spied the last remaining outlaw. George Bradford and Charles Pomeroy stood over him.
“This one isn’t another Lazarus,” Mr. Pomeroy said, and kicked over the dead man.
He was a brutal-looking man, sightless eyes staring at the sky, a bullet through his heart and other buckshot and balls having penetrated his worthless, now lifeless body.
“Take him to the wagon,” I said, then thought better of it, remembering my intention. “No, have Willis Bundy and one of those other shirkers do it when they reach us.”
With that, I returned to the three surviving bandits, where Colonel Vought had knelt. Cole Younger looked at the Madelia hotel entrepreneur and, smiling, offered a bloody hand. “Hello, landlord,” Cole Younger said, and Vought shook the outlaw’s han
d, before rising, and removing his hat.
“You know him, Colonel?” I asked.
“I knew him as J.C. King,” Vought replied softly. “The dead one over there called himself Ladd, Jack Ladd. They spent a night at my hotel a few days before the robbery. I became suspicious after learning of what had happened in Northfield. Now, I see my suspicions were not unfounded.” Next, Colonel Vought pulled out his broken pipe, showing it to Cole Younger, and fingered the bent lead bullet that had lodged in his shell belt.
“The Lord works in mysterious ways, landlord,” Cole Younger told him.
“I might desire to speak of this with you later, in private,” Vought said, and I had no idea what they were talking about—none of my business—but I suspected that had been an interesting night at the Flanders Hotel.
“Certainly,” Cole Younger said, “if we ain’t hanged by then.”
“That bastard has the right idea,” someone said, revealing that the scavengers had joined us. “Let’s string up all of them now, Cap. Let’s get it done, Sheriff!”
“Yeah. Remember what they done in North-field!”
“Hang the sons-of-bitches!”
It did not matter to me if we hanged them now, and I had no intention of stopping them, for I am not the sheriff, merely a volunteer citizen, but Sheriff Glispin whirled, and sent a round from his Henry rifle into the air.
“Next one of ye yellow bastards who I even think is considering a lynching, I’ll tear ye faces apart with me fists. To Madelia we’ll be taking these laddies, and taking them in alive. Now let us get them in the wagon.”
I led the way out of Hanska Slough, my six brave comrades helping the badly wounded Younger brothers to the wagon, for Sheriff Glispin had countermanded my order, the one I had never verbally given, except to Rice and Pomeroy So be it. Perhaps the Irishman was right. The Youngers were brave men and, though outlaws and vermin, deserved better treatment than being manhandled by shirkers and craven cowards. The rest of the sightseers, cowards, and gawkers scoured the earth for trinkets, shell casings and such. It disgusted me, disgusted Sheriff Glispin even more.
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