Rifles for Watie (2 page)

Curious, he had leaned on his father's corral fence of peeled cottonwood logs and asked some of them where they were going.

“Back to Ellinoy,” or “Back to Injeany,” they replied in their whining, singsong voices. “Don' wanta starve to death here.”

Although Jeff had felt sorry for them and their families, his father, a veteran of the Mexican War, was disgusted with their faint-heartedness. Emory Bussey believed that in one respect the drouth had been a blessing to the new state.

“We got rid of the chronic croakers who never could see good in anything,” he maintained. Emory was a Free State man in the raging guerilla warfare over slavery that had divided people on the Kansas-Missouri border into free and slave factions. It was a political dispute that was far more serious than the drouth.

Jeff yelled at the mules and whistled piercingly between his teeth to keep them going. He liked the new Kansas country. He meant not only to live and work in it but also to go to college in it. His father had told him that the first Kansas constitution, made in 1855, contained a provision saying that “The General Assembly may take measures for the establishment of a university.” Jeff wondered if the drouth would delay its coming. At the end of the row he halted the mules.

He took off his hat to cool his brown head. His mother had made the hat from wheat straw she had platted with her own hands at night, shaping the crown to his head and lining it inside with cloth to keep it from being scratchy. While Jeff stood bareheaded, enjoying the warm breeze blowing through his hair, his dog Ring trotted up, panting, and nudged Jeff's leg affectionately.

Jeff reached down and pulled Ring's ears, and the big gray dog's plumed tail waved in slow half-circles of delight. Ring was half shepherd and half greyhound. He had big shoulder muscles and a white ring around his neck. Although the dog weighed almost ninety pounds now, Jeff recalled how six years ago he had brought him home in his coat pocket. His father and mother hadn't wanted him to have the dog; they already had a collie and a feist. But Jeff begged so hard that they relented on condition that he keep the animal at the barn.

However, that first night Jeff had heard the pup crying lonesomely for its mother. He slipped out of bed in the dark, walked to the barn, and brought the pup back to his bedroom. The next morning his father and mother discovered the dog in bed with him. When they scolded him, Jeff hung his head and took his reprimand without speaking. Now he and Ring were such good friends that Jeff couldn't wrestle with the other boys at the three-months district school without Ring taking his part.

He put his hands back on the plow handles and looked around, smelling the freshly turned sod. The morning was alive with a soft stirring and a dewy crispness. Jeff heard the sharp, friendly whistle of a quail from the waving blue-stem beyond the plowed space, and from somewhere in the warm south wind his nostrils caught the wild, intoxicating whiff of sand-plum blossoms. But the boy felt strangely out of tune with the beauty and freshness of the morning.

His mind was filled with a restlessness and a yearning. At breakfast his father had told him that six Southern states had seceded from the Union and that a war would probably be fought between the North and the South, a big war that might easily spread to Kansas.

Jeff's heart beat faster beneath his blue homespun shirt. If, by a miracle, a general war could be avoided, soldiers were still needed to halt the guerilla warfare in Kansas, brought on by the Missouri proslavery faction across the border. Jeff's dearest wish was to become a soldier.

It was all he talked about at home. He was small for his sixteen years but strong, wiry, cheerful, and not at all abashed in the presence of strangers. There was no doubt in his mind which army he wanted to enlist in.

He had known ever since that time he and his father had ridden horseback through the snow in the winter of 1859 to Leavenworth to hear Abraham Lincoln speak in behalf of his candidacy for the Presidency. Lincoln had just touched the northeast tip of the new Kansas Territory on his tour, speaking at Elwood, Troy, Doniphan, Atchison, Stockton and Leavenworth. Jeff never forgot him. He could still repeat from memory portions of Lincoln's speech he had heard.

The day was bitterly cold. Lincoln and his party had traveled in sleighs and were wrapped in buffalo robes.

Before the meeting Jeff saw Lincoln's kindly face and his rangy profile through the window of a Leavenworth barber shop. Conducted there by Kansas City newspapermen to get his hair cut, Lincoln was reading the New York and Chicago newspapers they had bought for him at the post-office newsstand while he waited his turn in the chair.

Later the cold prairie wind rocked the little bare-walled courthouse in which Lincoln spoke. Not more than forty people were present. Jeff was surprised when the tall lawyer from Illinois rose up behind a rough table and, with his long hands wandering awkwardly in and out of his pantaloon pockets, began, in a tenor voice freely punctuated with “jist” and “sich,” not to orate but just to talk. At first Jeff had squirmed in his seat.

If the people of Illinois considered this a great man, their ideas must be peculiar. Despite his youth, Jeff knew a lot about slavery. It was all his father discussed at mealtime.

But as Lincoln talked on and on, Jeff began to change his mind about the gangling visitor from Illinois. Speaking as informally as though he and another man were exchanging thoughts while driving a buggy across the prairie, Lincoln discussed the question of slavery in the Territories with kindly but naked frankness. Although Jeff's father had told Jeff that Leavenworth was a slavery town, the frontier people there believed in fair play, and Jeff noticed that they listened courteously to Lincoln.

Jeff never forgot one thing Lincoln told the proslavery audience. “Your own statement of it is that if the Black Republicans elect a President, you won't stand it. You will break up the Union. Do you really think you are justified to break up the government? If you do, you are very unreasonable, and more reasonable men cannot and will not submit to you. If we shall constitutionally elect a President, it will be our duty to see that you submit. We have a means provided for expressing our belief in regard to slavery. It is through the ballot box, the peaceful method provided by the constitution. But no man, North or South, can approve of violence or crime.”

Relaxing against the plow, Jeff frowned and fanned himself with his hat. Every family living along the Kansas-Missouri border knew all about the violence and crime that had arisen over slavery. Jeff was growing tired of it. Three years earlier a band of armed Missouri border ruffians had captured eleven Free State men, marched them to a gulch only eleven miles from the Bussey home, lined them up and fired a volley, killing five. Jeff's father had ridden over next day to help bury them. Jeff had begged to go along, but his mother wouldn't hear of it. That was known as the Marais des Cygnes Massacre.

Jeff put his hat back on his head and remembered the time two months ago his younger sisters Bess and Mary had ridden horseback to the trading post to buy an ounce of paregoric. Two miles from home they were surprised by five Missouri bushwhackers. The men took their horses, but the girls persuaded them to let them keep their light saddles. Later they arrived home, carrying the saddles. The stolen horses were the only ones the family possessed. One of them was Charley, Jeff's own three-year-old whom he had raised from a colt. In spite of Lincoln's speech, violence and crime over slavery still flared all along the border, just three miles from the Bussey home. And now there was going to be a war over it.

Jeff turned the mules, lifting the plow into alignment for the new furrow. He slapped the lines along the mules' backs and whistled shrilly. Crouching, the mules hit their collars together, leg muscles flexing. The leather traces tightened, creaked, strained. Grunting laboriously, they dug in and pulled hard, and Jeff felt the handles drawn almost out of his hands as the plow moved forward, hurling the black dirt off the moldboard and pulverizing it into the previous furrow.

The sun climbed higher and higher. He plowed for two more hours, then paused again to rest his team. He looked up, feeling strong pangs of hunger. Must be about noon. His home, half a mile away, was a handsome three-room log house with a lean-to barn and a sod smokehouse, nestling snugly in a clearing surrounded by oak, hickory, and blackjack. A column of gray smoke curled from the stone fireplace, and Jeff knew his mother was busy cooking among her pots and ovens there.

There would be fat bacon, corn bread in pone, dandelion greens, wild honey, and fried onions from the new garden. Jeff sighed resignedly. No dinner for him today. His mother had packed a big piece of cold corn pone and given him a bottle of water from the spring. But, boylike, he had eaten all the pone at ten o'clock in the morning and now he was hungry again.

Jeff was proud of his home. It had taken the family seven months to build it. Seven long months of hewing, beveling, chinking, daubing and plastering. Although Jeff had been small, he had helped, working long hours. So had his mother and his sisters. How pleased they all were to see the new house rising, log by log. They were tired of living in the dugout down by the creek. The new home was solidly constructed of hickory logs, warmly chinked with clay.

The floor was of split logs. The wall had been plastered cleanly with clay mud. The house was comfortable and weather-tight. Although his father referred to it as “my mud-dauber's nest,” its oak-shake roof turned the hardest rains. Jeff thought it the finest home in Linn County.

However, lately he felt a vague fear and insecurity about it. His father's views on slavery were so pronounced that Jeff was afraid their home place might some day be the target for a raid by the proslavery bushwhackers from Missouri.

Jeff frowned. He wished the Missouri bushwhackers would live by the rule Mr. Lincoln had laid down in his speech at Leavenworth. He could remember almost word for word the President's counsel:

“If I might advise my Republican friends here, I would say to them, leave your Missouri neighbors alone. Have nothing whatever to do with their slaves. Have nothing whatever to do with the white people save in a friendly way. Drop past differences and so conduct yourselves that if you cannot be at peace with them, the fault shall be wholly theirs.” But neither side had heeded Lincoln's gentle advice.

Jeff toed the warm black soil thoughtfully. If war came, he meant to join the Union volunteers already in training at Fort Leavenworth. He wanted to be in the cavalry, but David Gardner, a neighbor boy who, like Jeff, talked of little else but joining the Union volunteers, said you couldn't get into the cavalry unless you brought your own horse. Jeff frowned again. He didn't have a horse now. All he had was his father's mules, and that reminded him that he had better get on with the plowing.

All afternoon he hustled the mules and steered the plow. With pride and satisfaction he saw the tilled space behind him bulge larger and larger. Soon the sun began to slant toward the west and Jeff saw his shadow lengthen across the field. Ring had long since stopped following him and was lying in the shade of a fresh furrow, waiting for him to make another round of the field. When the plow passed, Ring got up, whined, and followed for a few steps. Then he went back and lay in the shade.

Suddenly Jeff's ears caught a sound that made him jerk the mules to a stop in the middle of the field. It was the thin, muted toot of his father's large sea horn. It was only blown in an emergency.

Worried, Jeff thought he saw men and horses in the yard. A chill of fear ran through him. Bushwhackers!

Quickly he unhooked the traces, leaving the plow in the field. With Ring following at a puzzled lope, Jeff turned the harnessed mules homeward, driving them ahead of him at a trot, and holding onto the lines as he ran behind.

  
2

Bushwhackers

Jeff guided the mules into the corral and, without removing their harness, quickly looped the gate's homemade leather clasp over the cottonwood post and hurried to the house.

He saw his father coming with his awkward limp from the garden. Two years before, Emory had dropped an anvil on his foot, laming it permanently. That was why Jeff was doing the plowing.

Jeff's mother, small, frightened, and pretty, was standing on the rock porch with two rough-looking whiskery strangers who carried sawed-off Enfield muskets. Blue ribbons were fastened to their hats and fluttered from the bridles of their horses. Bess, elder of Jeff's sisters, had slipped out the front door and blown the sea horn.

“Good morning,” said the smaller and dirtier of the two strangers, although it was then late in the afternoon. “Is this the Emory Bussey place?”

Jeff's father nodded curtly. “I'm Emory Bussey.”

The smaller man looked significantly at his companion, as though to say, “This is our man.” Then he whipped his brown eyes back upon Jeff's father, regarding him insolently from head to foot.