Sue Mundy

by Richard Taylor

  In the gathering dark Jarom looked for remembered landmarks, for he’d been to the farm briefly once before, toward the end of October when he and six others one beautiful fall afternoon simply trotted up the drive and past the house to the stables. No one anticipated that they would maraud a horse farm in daylight, since such raids in the past had occurred only after dark. Intimidating those at the stables, they seized six valuable horses—the unbeaten colt Asteroid, the promising Bay Dick, and three choice two-year-olds sired by the great stallion Lexington, and one trotting mare. Before anyone resisted, they fastened leads to their halters and led them away, the seven of them, including Berry and Magruder, making off with six horses that would not seem out of place in the stables of princes.

  Knowing a chase would come next, they rode hard about ten miles to the Kentucky River, where the owner Alexander and his men caught up with them, charging before they could cross. When the others scattered, leaving the horses to Alexander, Jarom, riding Asteroid, managed to swim safely across, though not without being fired on while still in the water. From memory he could not still the pang of the bullets striking around him. He also remembered that afterward Alexander put up a reward of a thousand dollars for the return of Asteroid and five thousand dollars for Jarom’s capture.

  Not one to give up easily, Alexander deputized his neighbor and friend Willa Viley to negotiate Asteroid’s return. Viley later claimed that during their caper Berry had been wounded in the heel by a gunshot, a claim Berry denied. Viley and two other men had dogged the progress of Jarom and the others for forty miles to Bloomfield. With great luck they happened on Magruder and Jarom, still on Asteroid, riding along a rural lane. The minute he saw Viley, Jarom knew what he’d come for, and the negotiations began. When Viley offered him three hundred dollars for the horse, Jarom finally agreed to the return, conditioning the deal on Viley replacing Asteroid with his equal, though at least one of them knew that Asteroid had no equal. As a gesture of trust, Jarom accepted his check along with the promise that another horse would be provided soon.

  So Jarom revisited, as Alexander might put it, the scene of his misdeeds. Five rode in the first time, over twenty now. When they arrived at the entrance of the farm, Jarom confirmed the location, and the whole troop passed the twin gateposts and up the slight incline to Woodburn. They had entered the domain of R. A. Alexander, celebrated for producing the best purebred racing stock in America. Just after they left the pike, Marion announced his need—his yen really, since his mount was in fine fettle—for a new mount.

  “And I know just where to get me one,” he said, “and not a nag neither but a prize.”

  Anyone who read the papers or listened to talk about horses knew that Alexander’s thoroughbred foals performed as equine aristocrats of the racing and trotting meets. Chief among them was Lexington, for years acknowledged as the most important sire on the continent. In some mysterious way he represented a convergence of traits whose pedigree spawned winners and fortunes—bloodline, stamina, speed, conformation, and, in some mysterious way, a zeal to win. Through Jarom and Sam Berry, both with an inexhaustible passion for horses, Lexington’s reputation obviously had reached the ears of Bill Marion. A heaven for horses, the farm provided a home for over two hundred.

  Looping up the long drive that was as yet printless under new-fallen snow, Jarom made out the silver roofline of an enormous house topped by a cupola. To his left, next to the main elevation, stood an extensive wing flanked by hedges and walkways. He remembered the formal garden they passed as the largest he had ever seen in which nothing was produced to eat—except, perhaps, some sprigs of mint for juleps. He kept his eyes open for the Union Jack Alexander reputedly flew to proclaim his British citizenship, which made him neutral and exempt, he hoped, from any national squabbles in America. More pointedly, Alexander raised and displayed the flag in hopes of preserving Woodburn from guerrillas. Marion, following Jarom’s directions in every particular, bypassed the darkened mass of unpainted brick, passed through the kitchen yard, and started for the stables. As they came abreast of the house, a light appeared in one of the upper windows and several dogs began to bark.

  “Halt!” a voice shouted from the kitchen doorway as they filed past.

  Onto the porch stepped a frail-looking, florid man in his mid-forties, a pistol in his hand, another in his belt. Slight, with a high forehead and thinning brown hair, he looked to Jarom every ounce the child of privilege who might own such a place.

  “Halt!” the man shouted again as the file kept moving until all but Marion, in the front rank, stopped and turned back, the other mounts forced to stand as one came upon the other. A minute passed before the entire company had reined in. Looking down on the small, neatly dressed man in his sober clothes and trimmed whiskers, Jarom at first thought him a lost Quaker who had wandered or been carried south of the Ohio.

  “What will you have, gentlemen?” the man asked curtly, placing the slightest edge on “gentlemen.”

  “We only want some provender,” said Marion.

  “How much?” said the man on the porch, apparently wishing to waste no time on amenities but to get down to cases.

  “Oh, I would expect enough to feed two hundred horses,” Marion said.

  “That’s a pretty large order,” said the man on the porch. “I have provender enough but no place to feed to so many.”

  At this juncture Marion took another tack, explaining that his detachment had been sent to press horses into the service.

  The man on the porch identified himself as R. A. Alexander and asked to see his orders.

  At this point Marion and the others drew their pistols.

  “This is our order,” Marion said, holding his pistol up as though to admire its mechanism.

  Alexander said he had a body of armed men in the house prepared to fight to protect his property. In fact, Jarom had learned that after the first raid Alexander thought it in his interest to hire armed watchmen to protect his stables. Alexander added that he held British citizenship, that as a foreign national the law of nations protected his property.

  “I suppose,” he said, a bit imperiously, “if you are bound to have the horses there is no necessity for a fight about it, but if you are disposed to have a fight, I have some men here and we will give you the best fight we can.”

  Marion announced that he had a hostage with him, Alexander’s neighbor and friend Willa Viley. Jarom recognized him as the man who had negotiated the release of Asteroid at Bloomfield. Viley had been captured when several of Quantrill’s men stopped at a neighbor’s and liberated a buggy horse from the stable. Outraged, Viley, a man in his late seventies out paying his neighbor a visit, became so worked up he mounted a horse in his bedclothes and pursued the marauders riding bareback. Brought along in custody, Viley urged his friend to give up his horses without causing bloodshed.

  “Alexander,” he pleaded, “for God’s sake let them have the horses. The captain says he’ll be satisfied if you let him have two horses without a fight or any trouble.”

  Alexander apparently reconsidered, for he gave in and told Marion that, all right, he would surrender two of his horses. He even agreed to seal the bargain with a handshake, walking over to where Marion was sitting astride his horse and extending his hand. Marion surprised Jarom by taking it.

  “But,” said Marion, “you and your men must also surrender your arms.”

  Alexander paused as if weighing his alternatives. “I am to give you two horses,” he said finally. “You shall have the horses, but I will neither march out my men nor give up my arms.”

  After some consideration, Marion grudgingly agreed to let Alexander and his hirelings keep their arms. “ “But,” he said, “if you fire a shot at us, I will torch the place.”

  “If a shot is fired,” Alexander retorted, “it will be you that fired first.”

  “Where’re the horses?” Marion demanded. “We’re in a hurry and have no time to dance with shadows.”

  As Jar
om read the other raiders, they began to grow weary of so much talk and so little do. Alexander pointed to the nearest stable and told him that inside they’d find the horses they wanted.

  Alexander went along with them to the stable, wading through the snow in what appeared to be slippers. Stopping in front of a long, dark stable, he told Marion that he would bring out the first of the two horses he’d promised.

  “Is he a good ’un?” Marion asked.

  “Yes, as good as you will find anywhere.”

  “Bring me the bald horse,” Marion said.

  Jarom deduced that Marion had very specific knowledge about Alexander’s holdings and this confirmed it. By bald horse he meant the one with the white blaze in his face, the one known as Bay Chief, the prince of Alexander’s entire stable of horses.

  Alexander agreed that the bald horse was a good trotter but protested such a horse had more value for him than for Marion, that he had twenty horses better suited to his use.

  But Marion insisted on having the trotter.

  “If he’s valuable to you,” he reasoned, “he’s valuable to me.”

  Alexander went off and consulted a man named Hull, his stable master, apparently to arrange to give up some horse of lesser value. Alexander returned to say that there was some confusion about who had the key to the stable. Jarom sensed that this was another stall, another ploy to eat up time. Finally, Alexander said he would fetch his own key and strode off toward the house.

  What happened next, Jarom later pieced together from Tom Henry, one of Quantrill’s men who’d gone into the Alexander house. Seeing two horses without riders in the kitchen yard, Alexander surmised that two of the raiders had gone inside. He rushed in, going down the long passageway from the kitchen room to the dining room where he found three females: Mrs. Daniel Swigert with a babe in arms; a nurse with child in her arms; and Mrs. Swigert’s teenaged daughter Mary. An armed raider stood by the fireplace with a cocked pistol in his hand. The other guerrilla—most likely Bud Pence—stood at the other end of the room loaded down with pistols and a rifle or two he had collected from around the house. Though neither of the women seemed frightened to the point of hysteria, Alexander, seeing them considerably upset, stepped in. Determined to get the guerrillas out of his house, he told them that their captain said that if he gave up two horses without a fight or any trouble, he could keep his arms. And that he meant to do just that.

  Highly displeased with this challenge to his authority, Tom Henry, the guerrilla with the cocked pistol, approached Alexander and raised it menacingly.

  “Damn you,” he said, “deliver up the rest of those arms or I’ll shoot you dead!”

  According to Henry, Alexander knocked his pistol away and started to grapple with him, pushing him out of the dining room and into the hall, in an effort to bolt the door. But when Alexander tried to trip Henry, Henry pulled him down on top of him. Before he knew it Alexander had pinned him to the floor. Henry shouted for Bud Pence to shoot Alexander, but Pence refused, saying that Alexander wasn’t armed and couldn’t really do much harm. Thinking he could end the fracas, Pence ordered Alexander to let Henry up, but Alexander again refused, saying that Henry would shoot him. They grappled again and Henry’s gun went off when it struck an iron safe that was in the hall. Henry thought that he’d broken his arm, and while he fought the pain, Pence pushed him into the kitchen, prompting Alexander to close and bolt the door.

  As the light grew fainter, Marion ordered a fire of straw built in front of the stables so they could inspect the horses as the groomsmen led them out. Frank James took Mr. Hull aside and explained that that if anyone resisted their taking the horses, that person would be shot. So Hull and some of the stable hands stood helplessly by as Marion, James, and other guerrillas selected the horses they would take with them, including such highly valued ones later identified as Abdullah and Bay Chief. Jarom felt some sympathy for Hull and others of Alexander’s men, who offered large sums to the guerrillas if they would forfeit Bay Chief and Abdullah, two of the most exceptional horses in America. The amount offered not to take Bay Chief reached ten thousand dollars, but Marion refused it. Jarom was fairly certain that Alexander’s help had switched some of the named horses, including Asteroid. They had no time to determine which was which.

  When Jarom asked specifically for Asteroid, the stableman told him that Alexander kept Asteroid in another barn, along with his sire Lexington, blind and too old to ride now. Jarom had a hankering to see the famous sire, having heard that he still stood stud, housed in special quarters of equine splendor. But Jarom didn’t want to push the point because he knew that to the Missourians Lexington was only a place, not a prince of sires. Skittish and unfamiliar with this alien setting, they had no wish to stay a minute longer than necessary. These men, Jarom considered, had been hunted not for weeks or months but years. Whatever else they were, they weren’t sightseers but desperate men primarily bent on survival.

  Jarom suspected one of the trainers, a trim little man whose pointed ears gave him an elfish look, of working the switches, but he didn’t betray him. Though he didn’t like being trifled with, he knew that without knowing each of the horses individually he had in the end to accept what they brought forth, hoping for serviceable mounts and not jades. He also suspected that Alexander had no jades, no spavined, foundered, or inferior stock—not a man who owned the garden so carefully cultivated by the side of the house.

  Alexander, surrounded by a growing circle of groomsmen, trainers, and hired watchmen, turned up at the second stable. Here he reintroduced an old theme, though even he must have known it would bear no fruit except possibly to stall the inevitable.

  “Before you do anything you’ll regret,” he said, “I must inform you again that I am a British citizen, and that Britain is yet neutral in this war. My property as a British citizen is exempt from appropriation by either army.”

  “British or skittish,” said Marion, to take him down a peg or two. “I don’t give a damn! War’s war, and I need some horses. In particular, I want your man to bring me Bay Chief.”

  “Bay Chief is mine!” the little man shouted, “No one is going to steal him from me, no one!”

  Losing all composure, he began to move toward Marion in a menacing way, elbows outthrust, arms swinging as though he might knot his hands into fists to thrash him.

  “Don’t get in my way,” Marion shouted, drawing his Remington and motioning him back.

  He turned to one of the trainers who had been standing by, trying now to dissolve into the shadow of the stable.

  “Fetch me Bay Chief,” Marion ordered, and “bring him to me now!”

  The trainer looked to Alexander for approval. Alexander, more subdued and apparently resigned, nodded for the man to do as he was told.

  In a few minutes the trainer returned with a fine trotter, slender-legged and high-rumped, his coat rich and burnished as a buckeye worked free of its hull. Alexander stood helplessly by as Marion inspected Woodburn’s greatest prize, patting him with a possessive hand and lifting the head to examine his teeth. Jarom considered that Marion’s touching his stable’s pick must have been as offensive to Alexander as another man fondling his wife. For a time, Jarom believed that the man would break down and cry.

  “If you leave me my horse,” Alexander offered in one last attempt, “I’ll see that you’re paid five thousand American dollars.”

  “I’ll not be bought off,” Marion said. “Not at that price anyway.”

  Speaking with a Scottish burr, which he must have reverted to when his dander was up, Alexander upped the offer to seven thousand five hundred. Still Marion refused, saying he wanted to try a horse whose owner prized him so highly. Again Alexander protested, finally raising the offer to ten thousand greenbacks, but Marion would hear nothing of it.

  Jarom dreamt of what he would do with so much money, how he would spend it, where on the face of the green earth he would go. Would it be somewhere like Argentina, where he could buy a ranch
and not worry about Burbridge or Palm and such scoundrels catching up with him? Maybe California. Maybe even Ireland, where some of his forebears had burned peat and stacked stone along the treeless hummocks.

  The trainer, sent off for more horses, emerged from the stable leading three more likely ones, including at Marion’s insistence the trotter Abdullah, the one that Jarom valued as the handsomest of the lot.

  The next stable housed racehorses, and Marion claimed four more, including a bay mare, a filly, a gelding named Norwich, and a colt that the groom identified as Asteroid, though Jarom had his doubts. This last attracted Magruder, who’d heard the name, but as it happened someone had slipped in another counterfeit, and Magruder learned later he’d come away with only the name.

  As Marion had some of the horses saddled and others provided with halters or leads, Alexander made his final appeal. Haggard-looking, distraught, once again he offered to buy back his own horse. Once again Marion turned a deaf ear.

  “Take the others,” Alexander said pitifully, “only leave me Bay Chief.”

  All the defiance had gone out of him. His voice quavered, pleading now. He wondered how Alexander treated his children, if he had children. Would a man who valued his animals as though they were his children value his children as though they were animals?

  Marion turned to his business, attaching the bridle over Bay Chief’s neck and fixing a bit in his unwilling jaw. He threw a blanket onto his back and cinched his saddle over it. Then his men tethered the other horses with leads, no more than one to a rider, and the whole troop clattered down the drive and into the darkness, leaving R. A. Alexander and his awakened help—Jarom counted at least twenty-five—shivering in their clothes and keenly aware that misery came in all sizes.