‘Back in fifty-nine?’
‘Yeah. The Paiutes had risen and there was snow in the Sierras fifty feet thick. Indians came after me like those blamed Jayhawkers down there.’
Whitey spat in sympathy. ‘Bad days, Jed. And worse to come if’n we don’t go get ourselves some good horses from somewheres.’
The posse of men after them still sat their lathered mounts and talked. Above them, the two boys lay flat on their bellies in the warmth of the Kansas sun, and waited.
The Kansas-Missouri frontier was the scene of the most savage and bloody fighting in the entire Civil War, and not for nothing was the state called ‘Bloody Kansas’ for the outrageous acts of savagery that it witnessed. The reasons for this were simple and brief.
In the Civil War, Missouri was a slave state. Kansas, immediately to the west, was a new Territory. The Union sympathizers determined to try and make Kansas what was called a ‘free soil’ area. Armed bands from both sides squabbled and fought over Kansas, with the Northern guerrillas, called Jayhawkers, gradually winning. But the conflict was fought out with great loss of life and property on both sides along the border between Missouri and Kansas. The main leaders of these groups of savage irregular troops, often disowned by the higher command, were Jim Lane and Charles Jennison for the Union and George Todd and Bloody Bill Anderson for the Confederacy. But none of them lived as strongly in the memories of men as William Clarke Quantrill.
It had been a long ride over the past few weeks for Jed and Whitey. Their first intention had been to try and join up with a Union regiment, for the powerful moral reason that they happened to be in the North at the time. Neither of the boys had any kind of real beliefs about whether the nigras should be free or not. What they wanted was some action and the opportunity to earn themselves some money.
Then things hadn’t turned out too well and they’d been involved in a run-in with the infamous group of Union soldiers known as ‘Thorn’s Raiders’, after their cold-eyed leader, Caleb Thorn. Although less than a dozen strong, the guerilla band of soldiers operated on dangerous missions behind the lines of the Confederates and had a deserved reputation for involving themselves in the dirtiest side of the War.
Their narrow escape had shown the lads that their chances might be improved if they moved south and offered their services to the Confederates. Like many high-spirited boys of nineteen, they could both ride well and hard, as well as being fine shots with either hand-gun or rifle. Jed had found a discarded bayonet as they rode near the scene of the battle of Chancellorsville up in Virginia and had fashioned a sheath for it inside his right boot The skinny albino sometimes became irritated as night after night Jed would sit honing the blade until it was keen enough to shave with and sharp enough to pick a fresh-water pearl.
The only problem was finding a Reb unit that would have them. Unlike ordinary farm boys, most of whom had never been more than twenty miles from their homes in their lives, both Jed and Whitey had travelled thousands of miles around the country, and done their share of fighting and killing. So the chores of being a private soldier in the Army of the Confederate States of America didn’t exactly appeal.
Then they heard about the groups of Southern soldiers banded together into irregular units. And they’d heard about the man called Quantrill who made Caleb Thorn and his Raiders look like angels on the wing.
So that brought them down to the borders of Missouri and Kansas, just across the line to the east, scouting around near Harrisonville, close by the South Grand River. But they came across a wall of silence from a load of frightened folks. They saw more burned-out houses and ruined farms than either of them had ever seen in Indian country.
And they had also lost both their horses.
They’d set down for the night near an abandoned homestead, tethering their animals together for safety. It had been a tough day among a load of similar days, and Whitey and Jed both slipped easily into sleep. And when they woke up, their animals had gone. They never found out who in that region would have had the skill to silence their mounts and lead them away from under their very noses, but it left them feeling very angry and very helpless.
That was what brought them into contact with the band of Jayhawkers.
There were fourteen of them waiting at the bottom of the ridge. There had been seventeen of them when they’d started out after the two impudent boys who’d tried to steal horses from them the evening before. There were two corpses back at their camp each with a thirty-six caliber bullet through the brain. And a third man dying slowly. Gut-shot.
It had never really been much of a game to start with, but right now it was as deadly as a prairie rattler.
‘Figure they’ll carry on?’ whispered Whitey, the red light of his eyes shadowed as he lay flat.
‘I reckon. They got maybe three dead back there. I surely hoped we’d thrown them the other way up that water course. They got some damned fine trackers with ’em to trace us up this way.’
‘They’re moving.’
Most of them were riding on out. The lads’ trail had faded out in a band of rocks along the bottom of the ridge, and the leader was splitting his command, sending five men around to the right. Himself and five others to the left. Leaving three men to stand guard at the bottom, in case the boys tried to double back on their own tracks.
It seemed a good idea to the Jayhawkers. Like most of the irregular soldiers fighting in the region, his men were well-trained in shooting and riding. Jed and Whitey had been seen as they ran and the leader of the Union guerrillas knew they were only young boys. Barely out of their teens. And they were on foot.
The albino and the handsome youth with the broad shoulders hadn’t been around Missouri or Kansas before, so there was no way that the Jayhawker could know who he was going to tangle with.
The three men left behind wore shreds of Northern uniforms. One with a long coat of dark blue, and a saber at his belt. Another in a blue cap. The third with a neat pair of pants and a shirt that looked as if it was only the holes that held it together. He carried a long Kentucky flintlock musket, while the other two both held Spencers.
As their comrades rode away into the baking heat of the day, vanishing around the far side of the long ridge, Herne and Coburn watched the three sentries making themselves comfortable fixing up a bivouac with sabers and bayonets against the fierce sun. They tethered their horses to a bunch of scrub, leaving them between the higher ground and the two boys watching.
‘Know damn-all ’bout tactics,’ hissed Herne to Whitey, who grinned in reply. A ferocious grin that barely left his pale mouth and made no effort to climb all the way to those fearsome eyes.
‘No point puttin’ a cork in a bottle if n the cork don’t fit right,’ said Coburn, pointing at the three men. From where they lay, all Jed and his friend could see were the boots of the three men. It looked as if they were lying down, snatching a sleep.
‘Better move. Those other sons of bitches’ll be back in less than an hour,’ said Herne.
‘They’ll hear shootin’,’ commented Whitey. ‘Be back and after us ’fore we get to runnin’.’
‘Cold steel,’ grinned Jed, tugging out the sharpened bayonet in a whisper of gleaming death.
‘You been waitin’ to use that ever since you picked it up. Me, I’ll stick close to this.’ Holding up a broad-bladed butcher’s knife, with one edge honed and the other left dull. There were stains all around the brass-bound handle that looked like brown rust.
But, of course, they weren’t.
Virgil Kane knew what bad times were. The winters when they’d been so hungry they’d been barely alive. Living with his wife in Tennessee, before the ague took her. Like his father before him, he’d worked the land, and like his elder brother, Virgil had taken the Union cause. A Reb bullet had laid Joseph Kane in his grave, and the shock had killed his father. That had left Virgil on his own with nothing but a horse and a gun and a deal of hatred.
Now he had a saber and a long coat of blue. All
owing to Jim Lane, from Lawrence, over in Kansas Territory. Jim’d helped good old boys like Virgil and got them uniforms. Well, parts of uniforms, for some of them. The good old boys that they called Jayhawkers, after the ferocious bird.
Those two kids tried to steal horses would sure catch hell from Jim when they caught them. Virgil knew well enough that the wheeler-dealers in Washington didn’t take to the way they were fighting on the borders. But they were just a load of damned bleeding-hearts who would have given in and left Kansas to the Rebs if it hadn’t been for Jim and the good old boys.
Virgil stretched out in the warm sun, protected from the worst of the heat by the screen of cloth. He had used his spare saber to thrust into the dusty grass, keeping his best one in case the boys made a try at escaping. Not that any of the three sentries thought they would. Jim’d catch them and they’d all watch them dancing on air, the hemp nooses biting deeper into their tender young necks and their tongues sticking out and turning black.
In the sweltering August day, Virgil Kane smiled at the thought of what would happen to those Reb kids. And let his fingers toy with the ornamented hilt of his sword.
‘Yeah,’ he sighed, quietly, hardly aware of the other two men dozing at his side.
It was very warm. Only a breath of wind to disturb the cloth they’d hung from the screen of bayonets and swords, jammed into the dry earth.
It was only a breath of wind, but it was just enough to tug at the material, unbalancing the clumsy shield, toppling the whole thing on its side.
It wouldn’t have mattered much.
Not to Virgil Kane and the other two members of the Jay-hawker patrol.
Nor to Isaiah Coburn and Jedediah Herne.
If it hadn’t been for the fact that the two boys had crept their silent way to within five paces of the Union soldiers, and had just risen to their feet, holding their weapons ready, about to plunge in and attack.
From being well hidden, Jed and Whitey were suddenly exposed. Utterly helpless and stuck out in the open, a long way from cover. With no way of going back, even if they’d wanted to.
And that meant they had to go forward.
Virgil eased his eyes open at the noise of the screen falling over, feeling the direct heat of the sun strike at him like a slap in the face.
He had just enough time to blink once in disbelief at what he thought he saw.
Two figures, black against the bright blue of the sky. Things in their fingers that gleamed and shone like silver.
Moving.
‘Kill ’em, Jed!!’ screamed Whitey, diving at the nearest Jayhawker, knife out in front, probing for the man’s bare neck.
‘Jesus!’ gasped Herne, feeling the breath clamp in his chest with the unexpected crisis, the bayonet gripped tight. Jumping the last couple of steps to land on top of the second of the Union irregulars.
Virgil couldn’t believe what was happening, trying to rise to his feet. The pounding of his heart in his chest so loud it nearly deafened him, feeling his bowels turn to water and the flush of warmth and wetness as he fouled himself in terror.
‘Nooooo!’ he tried to yell, but his lips had gone dry and there wasn’t enough air left in the whole of Kansas to force out the word.
The man that Whitey attacked never even saw what hit him. By the time his mind had registered that someone was on top of him, and that there was a pain in the side of his neck, his blood was splattering from the severed artery, just beneath the right ear. Pattering into the dust, turning it to a soggy mess of red mud.
There was a last, mind-freezing glimmer of bared teeth and eyes like crimson pits, then darkness closed in on the man.
Herne’s victim went nearly as fast.
Jed’s dive landed him short, but he reached out with the needle-pointed knife, thrusting it up and into the dozing soldier’s chest. The tip ripped through the shirt and the red flannel under-shirt, slicing through skin and flesh. Tearing between the fourth and fifth ribs on the left side of the chest, puncturing the heart.
The guerilla tried to yell, but his mouth filled with blood and he began to choke. Nearly crying with the shock and fear of the attack. Spitting out blood all over his assailant. Herne twisted the handle of the bayonet, mangling the muscular walls of the heart, making death swift and irrevocable.
The Jayhawker’s last thought before the shutters slammed down on his mind was that he was going to die with his boots still on. But he couldn’t remember why that was important.
That left Virgil.
The appearance of the two strangers from the rolling grassland was almost too much for him. And when the air filled with fountaining blood that touched him with its warm stickiness, Virgil’s brain was emptied of everything except blind panic.
He had a pistol at his belt, and the saber in its sheath. But for all the use they were to him they might never have been made. His only thought was to run. Far and fast.
Both Herne and Coburn were still involved in bringing death to the other Union men, and neither was able to stop Virgil from scrambling to his feet, a low moan bubbling in his throat, the blue uniform coat flapping at his knees.
The Jayhawker started to stumble from the shambles of killing, his feet leading him towards the high ground, away from the horses. As he ran the saber rattled at his hip and the pistol banged against his leg. He pumped his arms high in front of him, fists clenched as if he was trying to knock on heaven’s door for entry and sanctuary.
‘Get him,’ snapped Herne, tugging his bayonet free from his victim’s chest.
‘You get him,’ replied Coburn, rolling himself off the other dying man, trying to avoid getting kicked by the flailing convulsions of the soldier’s legs.
Still Virgil ran, his boots kicking up clouds of dust at every stumbling step.
‘He ain’t goin’ nowheres,’ said Whitey, finally standing up and wiping his butcher’s knife clean on the dead man’s shirt. The blood had spread far and wide, and Herne saw there were gouts of it clotting in the albino’s snow-white hair.
‘All he’s got to do is draw and fire once, and we’re dead meat,’ replied Herne, starting off after the fleeing Jayhawker, his long strides closing the gap quickly.
He held his bayonet like a runner’s baton in a relay race, gripping the blood-slick hilt in his right hand, sprinting after Virgil. Who heard feet pounding after him and made the last mistake he would ever make. He tried to turn round while still running, jamming his foot into a prairie-dog’s burrow, falling face forwards, snapping his ankle with a sound like a branch breaking.
Herne was only a few paces from him when he fell and it was all he could do to avoid tripping over the helpless figure. He powered himself off the right foot, hurdling over Virgil Kane, landing beyond him in a fighter’s crouch, the bayonet out before him, held point upwards like he’d always been taught. Because it was easy to parry a blow downwards, but not one that came up into your guts from below, spilling your life in the dirt like God’s plenty.
‘Noooo,’ moaned Virgil, feeling the pain in his ankle and deciding it was the worst pain he’d ever known. Nothing could be worse.
He saw the young boy in front of him, lips pulled back from his teeth in a snarl of hatred like a timber wolf. Only then did he remember that he was carrying a gun. And there were plenty of friends only a few hundred paces off who’d hear the noise of the shot and come riding bade to rescue him.
‘Murderin’ bastards,’ he said, reaching for the heavy pistol at his belt.
But his broken ankle let him down as he tried to rise and draw. Sending him flopping sideways like a discarded doll, barely saving himself from falling face down again.
That unconscious movement nearly saved his life, as Jed had seen the hand go for the gun and had made a rapid leap at the man in the blue coat. His intention had been to slit the Northerner’s throat from ear to ear, but the stagger and fall ruined his aim.
Instead of slicing through the soft flesh of Virgil’s neck, the edge of the bayonet missed comple
tely, but the point didn’t. It caught the sprawling Jayhawker in the left eye, ripping it from the socket in a welter of aqueous fluid and pink blood.
The pain from the jaggedly broken bone in the ankle faded away to nothing by the side of the rending white agony from the wound. The steel blade hooked in the bony cavern of the eye nearly tugging the bayonet from Jed’s hand. He managed to roll with it, jerking back on his wrist to push the razored weapon deeper into the man’s face.
The needle point probed behind the bloodied pool where the blue eye had been, savaging the delicate fibers of the optic nerve, finally locating the frontal area of the brain.
Virgil reached up to try and tear out the long, narrow knife that was killing him, but the edge sliced great gouges through his fingers, like red-lipped mouths, that gaped and spat out torrents of scarlet down his arms.
Jed grimaced at the clumsy killing. Above all he liked everything to be neat and trim, and that applied even to murdering a man. If it could be called murder to dispatch someone who would surely have laughed at Herne if their roles had been reversed.
He punched sideways at the Jayhawker, knocking him flat on his back, straddling him, and keeping his hold on the haft of the bayonet, thrusting it deeper and harder into the empty socket, twisting it backwards and forwards with a horrid grating sound in his eagerness to finish the bungled kill.
At last enough of Virgil’s brain was torn apart into grey shards for him to achieve the satisfaction of slipping away into death.
Jed Herne stood up; panting with the effort of the fight, looking round from force of habit to check that there was no other threat anywhere near. He’d once killed a Paiute brave and was so busy trying to take his hair that another, buck came close to taking Jed’s scalp. Living is learning from the mistakes that don’t kill you.
Whitey had been so covered in the blood of the first Jayhawker to die that he decided to borrow the long coat from Virgil Kane’s body.
‘Not borrow, Jed. Maybe just take as part of the spoils of war. Anyways …’ kicking at the corpse with the toe of his boot so that it rolled in the bloodied grass, ‘…he ain’t got to have a lot of use for it no more.’
Massacre! Page 3