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, was a 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 gun belt,” 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.
“’Course not.”
“What with no cavalry around and most of the menfolk away during the war, no home guard and no Ranger companies, things have gone to rot and ruin hereabouts. The Indians have run wild, the Comanches and the Kiowas. Comanches, mostly. Wahtonka’s been spending pretty much half the year riding the warpaths between Kansas and Mexico. Sometimes as far east as Fort Worth and even Dallas.”
“Wahtonka? That ol’ devil ain’t dead yet?”
Luke shook his head. “Full of piss and vinegar and more ornery than ever. And then there’s Red Hand.”
“I recollect him. A troublemaker, a real bad ’un. He was just starting to make a name for himself when I went north.”
“He’s a big noise nowadays, Johnny. Got hisself a following among the young bucks of the tribe. Red Hand’s been raising holy hell for the last four years with no Army or Rangers to crack down on him. There’s some other smaller fry but them two are the real hellbenders.
“But that’s not the least of it. The redskins raid and move on. But the white badmen just set. The county’s thick with ’em. Thicker ’n flies swarming a manure pile in a cow pasture on a hot summer day. Deserters from both armies, renegades, outlaws. Comancheros selling guns and whiskey to the Indians. Backshooters, women-killers. The lowest. Bluecoats are too busy chasing the Indians to bother with them. Folks ’re so broke that there ain’t hardly nothing left worth stealing any more but that don’t matter to some hombres. They’s up to all kinds of devilments out of pure meanness.
“Hell, I got robbed right here on this road not more than a day ago. In broad daylight. I didn’t have nothing worth stealing but they took it anyhow. It’d been different if I’d had me a sixgun. Or a good doublebarreled sawed- off.”
“Who done it, Luke?”
“Well, I’ll tell you. First off, I been living out at the old family place, what’s left of it,” Luke said. “Somebody put the torch to it while I was away. Burned down the ranch house and barn.”
“Yanks?” Johnny asked.
Luke shook his head. “Federals never got to Hangtree County during the war. Probably figured it wasn’t worth
