“War kilt off a lot of good ol’ boys.”
“Ain’t it the truth.”
The two were silent for a spell.
“Sue Ellen’s married to a fellow over to Dennison way,” Luke went on. “Got two young’uns, a boy and a girl. Named the boy after Pa. Ma’s living with them.”
“Imagine that! Last time I saw Sue Ellen she was a pretty little slip of a thing, and now she’s got two young’uns of her own,” Johnny said, shaking his head. “Time sure does fly... .”
“Four years is a long time, Johnny.”
“How was your war, Luke?”
“I been around. I was with Hood’s Brigade.”
“Good outfit.”
Luke nodded. “We fought our way all over the South. Reckon we was in just about every big battle there was. I was with ’em right through almost to the finish at the front lines of Richmond, till a cannonball took off the bottom part of my leg.”
“That must’ve hurt some,” Johnny said.
“It didn’t tickle,” Luke deadpanned. “They patched me up in a Yankee prison camp where I set for a few months until after Appomatox in April of Sixty-Five, when they set us all a-loose. I made my way back here, walking most of the way.
“What about you, Johnny? Seems I heard something about you riding with Bill Anderson.”
“Did you? Well, you heard right.”
Hard-riding, hard-fighting Bill Anderson had led a band of fellow Texans up into Missouri to join up with William Clarke Quantrill, onetime schoolteacher turned leader of a ferociously effective mounted force of Confederate irregulars in the Border States. The fighting there was guerrilla warfare at its worst: an unending series of ambushes, raids, flight, pursuit, and counterattack—an ever-escalating spiral of brutalities and atrocities on both sides.
“We was with Quantrill,” Johnny Cross said.
“How was it?” Luke asked.
“We gave those Yankees pure hell,” Johnny said, smiling with his lips, a self-contained, secretive smile.
His alert, yellow-eyed gaze turned momentarily inward, bemused by cascading memories of hard riding and hard fighting. He tossed his head, as if physically shaking off the mood of reverie and returning to the present.
“Didn’t work out too well in the end, though,” Johnny said at last. “After Bill’s sister got killed—she and a bunch of women, children, and old folks was being held hostage by the Yanks in a house that collapsed on ’em—Bill went off the deep end. He always had a mean streak but after that he went plumb loco, kill crazy. That’s when they started calling him Bloody Bill.”
“You at Lawrence?” asked Luke.
Lawrence, Kansas, longtime abolitionist center and home base for Jim Lane’s Redlegs, a band of Yankee marauders who’d shot, hanged and burned their way through pro-Confederate counties in Missouri. In retaliation, Quantrill had led a raid on Lawrence that became one of the bloodiest and most notorious massacres of the war.
“It wasn’t good, Luke. I came to kill Yankee soldiers. This business of shooting down unarmed men—and boys—it ain’t sporting.”
“No more’n what the Redlegs done to our people.”
“I stuck with Quantrill until the end, long after Bill split off from him to lead his own bunch. They’re both dead now, shot down by the bluebellies.”
“I’d appreciate it if you’d keep that to yourself,” Johnny said, after a pause. “The Federals still got a grudge on about Quantrill and ain’t too keen on amnestying any of our bunch.”
“You one of them pistol-fighters, Johnny?”
Johnny shrugged. “I’m like you, just another Reb looking for a place to light.”
“You always was good with a gun. I see you’re toting a mighty fine-looking pair of the plow handles in that gunbelt,” Luke said.
“That’s about all I’ve got after four years of war, some good guns and a horse.”
Johnny cut an involuntary glance at the empty space below Luke’s left knee.
“Not that I’m complaining, mind you,” he added quickly.
“Hold on to them guns and keep ’em close. Now that you’re back, you’re gonna need ’em,” Luke said.
“Yanks been throwing their weight around?” Johnny asked.
Luke shook his head. “’T’ain’t the Yanks that’s the problem. Not yet, anyhow. They’s around some but they’re stretched kind of thin. There’s a company of them in Fort Pardee up in the Breaks.”
“They closed that at the start of the war, along with all them forts up and down the frontier line,” Johnny said.
“It’s up and running now, manned by a company of bluebelly horse soldiers. But that ain’t the problem—not that I got any truck with a bunch of damn Yankees,” Luke said.
