watched the boys gambol on the grass but had not the spirit for games. I scooped the wood away, leaving a deep dish, intending this depth to aid in the settling of mud before drinking.
I squatted next to Coleman Younger, who had a bottle of whiskey that he had not won but that he intended to drink. He did not look my way when he handed the bottle to me. I dropped the ladle and sheathed my knife, then accepted the bottle. I appreciated his generosity to the measure of a quarter-pint on the first swallow.
“Do not think you are a good man,” Coleman Younger said. “The thought will spoil you.”
“I am a southern man,” I said. “And that is as good as any man that lived ’til he died.”
Coleman Younger was reddish in skin and hair with the temperament that is wed to that hue, and girth and grit enough to back it up.
“You are a southern man—that is proven,” Coleman Younger said. “But a rare one.”
For Coleman Younger to speak of me so set a glow in me that whiskey could not match, nor doubt extinguish. It was for this that I searched, communion and levelness with people who were not mine by birth, but mine by the taking. We drank into the dark, then slept, our bedrolls but a rifle’s length apart.
In the night Captain Quantrill and his party had hallooed our pickets, then rode in and joined us. In the morning there was much cutting up as old comrades were reunited over salt pork and oat cakes. The James brothers from Clay County, Buck and Dingus as they were then known, frolicked with Coleman Younger, Arch Clements, and Black John. Captain Quantrill stood apart, his eyes flat beneath sleepy hoods, and his tongue wiping his lips like a frog sensing flies.
They had taken ten prisoners from the Union Home Guard at Waverly. General Ewing, the leader of the Union occupation scum for the entire district, had issued an order concerning rebels as a mass, and our sort in special, that said if caught we were to be tried and hanged, or shot, whichever took less trouble. This led to some debate among us as to what we should do with the Yankees now in our possession. There were a few among the prisoners known personally to some of us from before the hostilities. There was a sunken-chested, half-sized one among them I knew as Alf Bowden, who hailed from my town. I had once helped him raise a barn on a summer day and danced with his sister ’til her face flushed and we both sweated, but I was not in his debt, nor he in mine. It was a good war for settling debts—some were settled before they were incurred, no doubt—but thin-skinned fairness rarely crabbed youthful aim. Alf said hello to me and I to him, but the courtesy of that situation required no more than that, so there we left it. It would be sad to see him killed, but sadness was on the flourish in those times.
There was no rain on the wind, only the smell of thawed mud and early blossoms, but the boys were lazied by the previous days, so we made a carnival of the camp and sought no demonstrations with our enemy. The ball of leather was trotted out, with nearly the whole of both parties joining in on the sport, stomping the mud into a glue that sucked down boots and held them there. The whiskey was running low and this raised tempers. Riley Crawford, not yet sixteen but the deadest shot among us, missed the ball with a kick of vigor and shinned Big Bob Flannery. Big Bob knotted him one on the head, and Riley cut him under the armpit by reflex. Captain Quantrill then snatched up the ball and hid it away, saying he would shoot any of us who murdered a comrade.
After the noon meal, Captain Quantrill and Black John announced that there would be haircuts for all, because we were to be disguised as Yankees once more for a ride into the Union district around Lexington, and our rebel locks would be noticed. There was much grumbling about this, for our locks were of the southern style and our pride and banner. “I’d rather robe myself with dog skins,” Big Bob Flannery said. “For if we must look like Yankees to win, we will be defeated in victory.” The bulk of us saw the sense in the notion, however, and went along with it, shaving and cutting our hair as if spiffying up for a church dance, but Big Bob had to be held down while Arch Clements harvested his hair patch. Little Arch being that close to his scalp with a Bowie knife sobered Big Bob, for he, like all of us, had witnessed the fashion in which Arch barbered dead, and practically dead, Yankees.
After that Coleman Younger, Little Arch, Pitt Mackeson, and me sat under the husky tree that the prisoners were roped to. Captain Quantrill had made a present to Coleman Younger of a new Enfield rifle that had been captured. We admired the weapon and made chat about its supposed power, the prisoners joining in with a remark here and there.
Pitt Mackeson tried to flare me by mentioning in a bad mouth the incident with the Dutch boy.
“If the boy had freed the rope the hanging would’ve been scotched and required doing over,” I said.
“Judas worked quick, too,” said Pitt Mackeson.
Coleman Younger stroked the Enfield and chambered a round. “You did right,” he said. “Dead from the front is no more dead than from the back. It is a question of opportunity.”
“So is chicken stealing,” Mackeson said.
My arms ached already from the thought of digging his new home, for I was thinking he would soon be in it.
“Jake did right.”
Arch Clements untied the prisoners and told them to stand, then retied them in a file of sorts. “Stay in your line, soldier boys,” he said in his squeaky voice. “For we shall march your meals down.”
Coleman Younger placed his hand on top of my head as he stood. “It was nothing,” he said, “but right.” He ran his hand along the smooth stock of the Enfield, then raised it to his shoulder. He sighted into the belly of the prisoner at the head of the column.
“Leave off with the jokes,” the prisoner said.
The Enfield fired and the first three Yankees tumbled.
Coleman Younger chambered another round. “I would’ve thought more,” he said. “So far this ain’t special.”
The rest of the camp was dropping letters, gun rags, needles, tin cups, and favored corncobs to watch. I thought Captain Quantrill might be peeved by this employment of his prisoners, but he made no move to halt it.
The next shot felled only two, and not cleanly. Their moans sounded like man and wife in a feather bed.
Coleman Younger chambered another round.
“Not exactly a Sharps, is it?” he said.
Little Arch made a straight line of the Yankees again as they had drifted some. Alf Bowden was among the standing, and he called my name, which it must’ve hurt him to do.
“Let us save one,” I said. I pulled Alf Bowden from the line, he being so limp he fell at my touch. “We can send him back to General Ewing, maybe, as a witness that his new law will cut both ways.”
There was blood in the air. It drifted over my bare hands, spotting them like some rare mist. Alf Bowden was yet on his knees, his hands clutching at my legs, pulling himself toward me. The rare mist had freckled one of his cheeks, and his hair had been touched up at the ends by the same breeze, giving him a vaguely pheasant aspect.
The man and wife in the feather bed slept now, and the silence was glass, poised for the shatter.
“We all had friends,” Coleman Younger said. He chambered another round. He was staring at me more thoughtfully than I found comfortable. “That is all off now.”
“There is something to be gained by this sparing,” I said. I did not believe what I had said, but I said it, and hoped only to utter more dream-babble that would justify it.
“I yearn to hear about it,” Coleman Younger said.
I was losing a comrade, this I could see. I had no retort.
A murderer of slyer instincts saved me and made of me a hero. Captain Quantrill had cozied up to us as we were engaged. He held a palm toward Coleman Younger, Little Arch, and Pitt Mackeson, who was fiddling with something near his holster. He then fixed me with a reverent gaze, an approving light coming to his eyes.
Alf Bowden babbled into my toes, his arms encircling my boots, his face between them.
“I quite see it,” Captain Quantrill said. “Yes. We shall send him over to Sigel’s brigade of Dutchmen near Warrensburg.” Captain Quantrill worked his hands together as if to wash them. His feet were moving in little hops, and he would surely have danced had there been a suitable partner handy. “Oh, yes. They far outnumber us. They will want to make quick time and to do that they will come through Creve Coeur Gap. Oh, my, yes.”
