Quantrill next stopped for a duty call to the federal garrison at Greenville. Accepting his word that he belonged to the Fourth Missouri, the post commander agreed to put up Quantrill’s men for a couple of days. The first morning, while several of his men joked and roughhoused in the barracks, another came in and chided them without thinking. “You fellows had better stop,” he warned. “Quantrill will be here directly and give you hell.”
His messmates kept playing as though nothing had been said, and apparently the remark did not register with any of the Union soldiers with whom they shared quarters. Only after they left Greenville did Quantrill, hearing about the incident, ride casually up to the careless man and coolly shoot his brains out. The story shocked Jarom, who realized that someone in his own band with Quantrill’s compulsions about secrecy and discipline would not last long. Jarom would have shot Quantrill himself at the first sign of turning on his own.
Farther east, at Houstonville, Quantrill stole some horses, one of his men accommodating a federal major who said that the particular horse Quantrill’s man had saddled would leave the stable only over his dead body. That would have been the end of it had the major been alone. But he had entered the stable with a squad of escorts, who instantly raised their rifles to even the score. As might be expected, Quantrill’s men drew their own pistols. At this point, Quantrill stepped forward as mediator, threatening to shoot the first man on either side who broke the peace. And here he applied what Jarom could only guess was his silver tongue, defusing the face-off by ordering his men to leave the barn. Once outside, they lost little time in mounting and leaving town, taking a string of thirty fresh saddle horses as they went.
After this incident, remaining in the Bloomfield area as Captain Clarke of the Fourth Missouri was impossible, so Quantrill gave up the pose. Bloody Quantrill, as Jarom saw it, simply became Bloody Quantrill. Jarom decided that the man was purely—if that was the word—a creature of expedience, a beast whose inclinations fell below the lowest rung of human decency. Quantrill wouldn’t hesitate to turn Jarom in, even shoot him, to save himself. And he remembered what Patterson told him about the Titan Cronos, one of the Greek gods, a beast-god really, who devoured his progeny as they were born. “Only the cruelest father,” he had said, “eats his son.”
A week later at nearby Danville, Quantrill once again impersonating a federal officer, quietly stood at the bar in a local saloon when a young lieutenant got the drop on him, leveling a heavy muzzle loader at his chest. Quantrill calmly put down his glass of whiskey and turned to face the man. As he told it, he knew he couldn’t fight because he had buttoned his pistols inside his overcoat. Instead, he laughed and denied being Quantrill, insisting he could prove it.
“I have special orders,” he said, “from none other than Secretary of War Stanton to bear me out.”
This comeback surprised the lieutenant, and Quantrill, as if to verify his claim, stepped to the door and yelled across the street for his crony Sergeant Barker, one of a group of men loitering in front of the hotel. Barker came in, saw the muzzle loader, and immediately drew his revolver.
“There’s no need for that,” Quantrill said, and Barker put his weapon away.
Quantrill then explained the situation and asked Barker to show his papers to the lieutenant. For a moment the lieutenant relaxed his guard, and Barker instantly pulled a smaller pistol out of his jacket and deftly disarmed the challenger.
“Colonel,” Barker asked, “should I put the mark between his eyes?”
Greatly relieved, Quantrill confessed to Jarom, he charitably let the matter go. He finished his drink and made ready to leave Danville. But before he left, he turned his Missourians loose on the town. In need of footwear, they ransacked a boot store. The also tore up the telegraph office and stripped some citizens of their watches and other valuables.
Stopping in a remote area a few miles north near Harrodsburg, he split his men into three groups so they could, as he put it, better take advantage of local hospitality. Generally, this meant stopping at an isolated farmhouse and demanding a hot supper and lodgings for the night. The party under Sergeant Barker went to the home of a widow named Vanarsdoll, asking for a meal. Their mouths were full of fried chicken when they were interrupted by a company of Captain Bridgewater’s militia. The captain, a man not easily put off, had tracked them through five inches of snow.
Bridgewater surrounded the house and shouted for Quantrill’s men to surrender. In reply, Barker’s men fired a volley from the windows and door of the farmhouse. As they broke for their horses, Barker and several others fell dead, and the rest were captured. All this had been witnessed by one of Quantrill’s men who had been sent from the next farmhouse to investigate and himself fired upon. His force cut by a full third, Quantrill confessed that he became all the more anxious to combine his forces with Sue Mundy’s, mouthing the adage about safety in numbers.
Jarom sensed vividly that Quantrill had been stamped with the mark of death. What gave him this impression he could not define, but this did not stop him from speculating. First, Quantrill seemed “wore out,” the first stage of sinking into fatalism. His vocation of extinction had no specific end other than to be the last man standing. His life reflected the habits of nomads who drifted from place to place and from one livelihood to another; he had been college student, prospector, schoolteacher, husband, teamster, gambler, soldier, and now outlaw. Jarom also detected a nervous disorder of some kind that compelled Quantrill to keep on the move, to flit from place to place, a trait that may in the short run have contributed to his longevity but had obviously done little to improve his character. He seemed, like Morgan, constitutionally unable to stay still. When Jarom asked him where he called home, Quantrill answered that he called home wherever he happened to be.
Was it something in Quantrill’s appearance that foretold an early death? Not really, Jarom decided. Quantrill had no special physical quality that set him apart from others. Above medium height, he carried himself with a military bearing that made him seem much taller. He had wavy brown hair and affected fancy manners and dress. His face, as Jarom interpreted it, had a feminine cast, deceptively gentle, and his thick, drooping eyelids gave him a drowsy or inattentive look. But his eyes shone steady and hard, his irises the color of blooming chicory. They seemed most naturally employed sighting down a gun barrel. Like some hunters a dead shot, unlike most he had the look of a person who delighted in extinguishing life.
Bud Pence, one of the Missourians who had been with him longest, told Jarom that as a boy Quantrill delighted in nailing snakes to trees, torturing dogs and cats, and one time stabbing a fractious cow. Whether this was true Jarom couldn’t verify, but the eyes made a persuasive case. Quantrill himself told Jarom that in the late fifties he had divined that war would break out within the next five years. He welcomed that prospect as some men would welcome an opportunity in some lucrative career or enterprise. As Jarom read his comments and what he knew of his performance in the West, he believed Quantrill dangerous in the extreme, a man with a natural aptitude for cruelty and mayhem.
Pence also mentioned that Quantrill prided himself on his power to strike fear into those weaker, and he told a story to illustrate the point. Once, on a jaunt with his sweetheart, he acted surprised when her affections cooled after he pointed to a certain tree and said it would be ideal for hanging a man. By the time he reached Kentucky late in his twenties, he was a man wholly without illusion.
Quantrill told Jarom that since entering the state he had been down on his luck, a resource he relied on daily. He had come to Kentucky on the supposition that he would enjoy a certain anonymity, and that things would cool down for him and his men. He was wrong on both counts. As for bad luck, Old Charley, the horse he’d captured from a Union officer and rode for most of the war, cut a tendon outside Canton, Kentucky, and had to be shot. Charley, on whom he lavished affection, was the closest thing he had to a bosom friend and had delivered him from death a number of times. Quan
trill interpreted his horse’s death as an ill omen.
Events bore out his predictions. Two days later, he lost his second-closest friend, Jim Little, in a skirmish with Union cavalry. Jarom learned that Little’s death was the motivation for the murder of Barnette and two other soldiers outside Hartford, a balancing of accounts. The loss of followers at Harrodsburg, killed or captured, brought the full weight of despondence on him. The captors took some of his key associates to the prison in Lexington, including Jim Younger, Bill Gaugh, and several others whose names Jarom couldn’t remember. When Bridgewater attacked the dozen of them outside Harrodsburg, Quantrill had been in earshot of their guns. He knew that only by some fluke had he been spared. What if Bridgewater had come to his farmhouse first? He learned the painful lesson that to survive in such an alien place, he must secrete his men among those intimate with the country and its people.
William Clarke Quantrill. Jarom wondered about the Clarke. Were they related at some remove through generations that broke off from their Virginia cousins and emigrated to Ohio? Was there something in the blood that linked them? He hoped not. If Patterson and Morgan were substitute fathers, Quantrill was a false one—devious, autocratic, devoid of all fellow-feeling, a man who had seceded not only from the federal Union but from all humanity. Jarom took some consolation from the fact that William Clarke Quantrill was wifeless, childless, a line that likely would end soon and violently.
When Bill Marion first met Quantrill, at a farm near Taylorsville, he suspected the man was just what he had been saying he was—a federal officer leading a party whose mission was to hunt guerrillas. Quantrill originally asked to meet Sue Mundy, and Marion told him that Sue Mundy wasn’t in the county. True enough. Quantrill had then said he wanted to join forces with Marion. But Marion was suspicious. Before he could seriously consider the offer, he insisted that the newcomers prove they were who they claimed to be. He would put them to a test. After consulting Magruder and Sam Berry, Marion agreed that a party of Quantrill’s men would accompany him to Georgetown, a smart little county seat north of Lexington, to do some mischief to the Yankees garrisoned there. Quantrill readily agreed, especially when it became clear that he was to remain behind.
“A hostage, you mean,” said Quantrill.
“A token of good faith,” Magruder said.
So in early February most of the Missourians and a few Kentuckians set off for Georgetown to test the mettle of the Missourians. Jarom, at large in Owen County north of Georgetown at the time, didn’t join them until later, but Marion grudgingly reported what happened. The night before, the whole band, posing yet again as federal cavalry, lodged at the house of a Union man who lived within a two-hour ride of Georgetown. Their host, a middle-aged farmer who served as a deacon in the Baptist church, seemed to accept their story. At the supper table, however, someone let slip a remark about hoodwinking Union troops the next day in Georgetown, and the deacon’s daughter heard it. After everyone turned in, she saddled a mare and rode to town, where she alerted the military. Then she rode back, returning before dawn with no one, at the time, any the wiser.
Next morning the party, still costumed in federal uniforms, rode into the sleepy town with its college and Baptist seminary, unaware that an ambush had been set. None of them knew that the plucky daughter, fearing for the life of her fiancé, who was stationed there, had sounded the alarm. Frank James, whose father had attended the college as a ministerial student, noticed something amiss when he saw the main street deserted. While he was telling Marion things weren’t as they should be, they spotted four men a block away, stooped and running across the street, rifles in hand. Marion was swinging his horse around when the street erupted with gunfire, shots coming from almost every shop front and second-story window in the business district. Frank James had his horse shot from under him, and several of Quantrill’s men took wounds. Ducking his head, Marion ordered a withdrawal, though in fact most everyone had already skedaddled. From one of the pickets they captured on the way out of town they learned that the deacon’s daughter had alerted the town.
Marion later told Jarom that he had headed northwest into Owen County, where sentiment strongly favored the South. When he was certain no one had followed, he veered south, where he met Jarom, Magruder, and five others on the Owenton Pike near Monterey, a little steamboat town on the Kentucky River. At a crossroads Jarom beheld Marion’s riders, bedraggled and saddle sore, a little unnerved. Even the horses seemed used up, listlessly grinding the shelled corn purchased from one of the hill farms they’d passed. Several of Quantrill’s men nursed minor wounds. Two of the other Missourians, one of them Frank James, had to double up because they’d lost their horses in the fusillade that greeted them at Georgetown.
In need of fresh mounts and hoping to scrape past any large units of cavalry, they continued south through country dingy and gray, the weather having turned bitter cold. Midway became their destination, where they hoped to press more horses from a region that Marion described as producing the best horseflesh in the world. Situated eight miles or so from Versailles on the railroad between Lexington and Frankfort, Midway had a display of handsome houses and a few storefronts, a village of some pretension. Marion, never one to forget an affront, reminded Jarom and the others that Burbridge had murdered four Confederate prisoners there in retaliation for the death of Adam Harper, an incident whose particulars he didn’t dwell on.
Marion stated his intention to burn the train depot on the main street, and neither the Missourians nor Jarom raised any objections. An eye for an eye was an exchange that even the dimmest lights among the federals could understand, a just response to Burbridge’s policy of reprisal—a policy that Palmer seemed to have embraced as well.
Jarom doubted that Palmer would change his ways, no matter how many lessons were delivered.
HORSE COUNTRY
After riding into Midway about suppertime one February day, Jarom witnessed Quantrill’s men, masters of the craft, quickly gather the makings of a fire and ignite the railway depot. It was vacant but for the agent, whom they ushered out to mild protestations but little real resistance. They disconnected the telegraph and robbed the depot’s safe, then helped themselves to provisions at several stores and chopped down two dozen telegraph poles, hoping to retard the inevitable pursuit. They also robbed several citizens of their pocket watches and greenbacks. Helping stack and upend the poles into an enormous teepee, Jarom stood by as two of the Missourians poured lamp oil on the wood and ignited it, fueling a fire that soon rivaled the one at the depot. He watched the spitting flames in that semihypnotic state that is fire’s fourth power behind consumption, heat, and light. The Missourians lost little time in bagging a sizable amount of cash and loose silver from the agent and a nearby storekeeper, both of whom stood helplessly by. Though citizens came out of their houses to watch, no one spoke or dared offer any objection.
The fire provided some welcome warmth against the weather, which again turned bitter cold. Bud Pence, his forearm bandaged, passed Jarom a flask of something that distracted him from the cold more than it relieved the numbness. Watching the flames as they stabbed through the shingled roof of the depot, Jarom felt the raw alcohol burn a course down his throat, a parallel conflagration that fired his vitals. On the Good Book he would have sworn he could feel it in his feet. As the flames rose higher, he and the others pressed closer until the roof groaned on the brink of collapsing. They all stepped back as it caved in on itself, shooting cascades of sparks into the heavens. When the fire at the depot dwindled, Jarom and the other onlookers backed up to the burning telegraph poles until Marion summoned them to their saddles. Even as he mounted Papaw, Jarom couldn’t keep his eyes from the fire. It formed a bright parabola against the darkened houses, throwing wavery shadows against the water tower on its wooden stilts, the blue flames and billows of sulfurous smoke illumining the darkness with a yellowish tinge. He hadn’t seen such a blaze since the destruction of the trestles at Muldraugh’s Hill.
Leaving town without having fired a shot, they rode briskly out the Midway-Versailles road into the heart of horse country. At dusk the large farms they passed seemed remote and deserted, only a dim light or two showing in the odd window as they passed. Along the way they saw everything from tenant and slave cabins to well-fenced stockfarms whose manicured lawns lay under a bed of snow, the twin wheel tracks on one driveway silvered under the high winter moon. Well back from the road stood columned houses where Jarom pictured owners sleeping and dreaming their lives away, pampered and safe. When they awoke, someone would make their beds, cook their breakfasts, and empty their slop jars. Everything was done for them except sire their children—and that wasn’t always certain. Whoever won or lost the war, he sensed that those behind the columns would prosper. These were not his people, at least not any longer. Stopping in the road, he could still see over his shoulder the fire’s faint glow above Midway, a fading rose of pinkish light.
At a crossroads Frank James pointed out the stagecoach inn where his mother had been born, a combination of log and stone. Rather than pass through the intersection, they turned west on the Lexington-Frankfort Pike, an unusually beautiful stretch of macadamized road that ran between stone fences and remnants of the old forest, whose unleafed limbs formed a woven basketry over the right-of-way. In the darkness the mesh of dark limbs seemed to crowd down on them, and Jarom braced himself for the flash of carbines he expected at any moment from behind the fences. Their shield of stones he recognized as perfect for ambush.
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