Rifles for Watie (25 page)

There they dismounted slowly and, once on the ground, staggered unsteadily and stomped their feet to restore the circulation. With their hands they beat clouds of dust off their pants and blouses. Some of them hawked deeply and noisily spat the dust from their throats. Others gave gruff commands to their horses and clomped about in their boots, their brass spurs jingling as they began to set up camp.

Despite their lack of hospitality, Jeff was impressed with the careful way they attended to their horses before they ate a bite of supper themselves. They removed the saddles, permitting the animals to roll on the ground. They shook out the brown saddle blankets and began to groom the horses briskly. Standing well away and leaning hard on the currycombs and brushes, they wiped the dry mud and the scurf from the horses' skin. Then they hand-rubbed the horses' legs and sponged out their nostrils and docks. Only after they had cared for their mounts and fed them hay and grain did the weary men unbuckle their saber belts and head gratefully for the mess halls at the top of the bluff.

“Jeff!”

One of the cavalrymen trudging up the rise left the column and ran awkwardly in his boots toward Jeff. Jeff didn't recognize the husky young fellow with orange freckles all over his face who grasped his hand in both of his. On the front of his soiled black felt hat was a brass insignia of swords crossed. He wore low, reddish sideburns, and his eyebrows were heavy and white as corn silk.

“Goshallmighty, Jeff, don't you know me? I'm David Gardner.”

A glad grin spread over Jeff's face. “David!” he blurted. He couldn't get over how David had grown. “Where'd you come from?”

David spat a big chew of tobacco into one of his freckled hands and hurled it onto the ground behind him. He was grinning happily, too. “From Fort Scott.”

“When's the next supply train coming out?”

David pointed back up the road. “It's only about two, three days behind us.”

“Been home lately?”

David shook his head. “Not since that mornin' you caught Ma and me jawin' in th' yard.” He looked thoughtfully at the ground. “I 'spect Ma's had a hard time th' last two years.”

“You haven't heard word from any of my folks, have you?” Jeff asked hopefully.

David took off his hat. He whipped it across his knee, and the trail dust flew. “Naw. I met a conscript from Sugar Mound several months ago when I was on the ditch crew at Rolla. He told me they'd had plenty o' rain back home the last two years. Finally busted the drouth. No more desertin' for me, Jeff. I worked out my punishment. Now I'm reinstated. You and Ma was right.”

David's voice was deeper, and there was an air of assurance and competency about him. He didn't look anything like the lonely, scrawny, homesick fellow Jeff had known back at Fort Leavenworth.

David's glance shifted back to the horses. His forehead wrinkled in surprise. “Hey, what's she doin' that for, Jeff?”

A thin-faced Indian girl carrying an empty pan glided up where the newly arrived horses were eating and began timidly to pick up from the ground the grains of corn dropping from the horses' mouths.

“She's hungry,” Jeff explained. “She'll take the corn home and wash it. Then they'll parch it and eat it. We've got more than six thousand Indian refugees here, mostly women and children, lying under trees, most of them sick and half starved. They had to come to the fort for protection. The whole country's thick with rebels and bushwhackers robbing and killing people.”

David began to fan himself thoughtfully with his hat. “I didn't know things was that bad. Le's go up to the fort, Jeff, and git some drinkin' water. I'm drier than a cork leg.”

“How'd you get in the cavalry?” Jeff asked as they walked along.

“They're convertin' lots o' infantry into cavalry at Fort Scott now,” David said. “We brought several cavalry instructors out with us. One of 'em is Lieutenant Foss. You otta see that feller ride, Jeff. He sets up there as easy as a hossfly on a mule's ear. They're gonna convert lots of your infantry here into cavalry, too. How would you like that, Jeff?”

“Corn, David, I'd like it.” Jeff had always wanted to be in the cavalry. “Only I still don't have a horse.”

David scoffed, “Goshallmighty, Jeff, that won't keep you out no more. We got hosses to burn now. The supply train escort is bringin' a thousand head down with them. It's men the cavalry needs now, not hosses. We hear they're gonna start trainin' you in a week.”

Instead, they started in three days. Jeff enjoyed the look of surprise on Noah's somber face when he told him about it at breakfast a full day before it was announced at the fort.

Noah frowned, stirring his coffee. “I'd druther stay on the ground. Ridin' a hoss makes my head spin an' my feet hurt. But it's a wise move. Cavalry is more important out here in the West than it is back East. Here the distances are greater, and the rival armies smaller. If a blow needs to be struck here, it might take the infantry several days to walk to where it's goin' but cavalry could get there in a few hours. Wonder where they gonna train us?”

The training began on the fort's drill ground located on the open prairie to the west. Despite the unfamiliar routine of the cavalry drills, Jeff liked the change. Back home, he had ridden horses almost before he had learned to walk, so he had no trouble managing the big, slow sorrel checked out to him.

He discovered that the animal, which had belonged to a cavalryman who had died of dysentery, could teach him more than any of the drillmasters, and without cursing him, too. When the bugles blew “right about” and “left about,” the sorrel knew instinctively what to do and when to do it. He was smarter than any sergeant on the premises.

But not even the horse could help him when they were introduced to the saber drills. Jeff didn't like the short, curved cavalry sword known as the saber. In the first place, he couldn't walk, wearing one, without its barking his legs or tripping him up. On a horse, it was even worse. When he was commanded to draw and brandish it while galloping, it became positively dangerous. He did pretty well with the commands “right cut against infantry” and “left cut against infantry” but when ordered to execute the “rear moulinet” he quickly came to grief.

At the first pass of the saber behind his back, Jeff slashed a long gash in his new oilskin slicker rolled up on the rear of his saddle. Later, he was reminded of it every time it rained, and cold water rushed through the rent and down his back. And when the command was “front moulinet” he whipped his blade so near the sorrel's ear that the horse lurched in fright, and he was almost unseated.

“Do it like this!” bellowed Lieutenant Foss, a tall, leatherfaced Coloradoan, bowlegged as a hoop. He was in charge of the drill and skillfully performed the various passes.

“Corn!” Jeff marveled to Stuart Mitchell, riding nearby. “He makes that old cheese knife spin like a circular saw!”

But the lieutenant was the only man in the outfit who could come even remotely close to doing the saber cuts correctly. Jeff decided that if he ever got into a cavalry battle, he would forget about the saber and try to get in all his licks with his one-shot Sharps carbine or his “pepperpot,” as he called the big cap-and-ball pistol he was given to wear in his belt.

When he looked over his shoulder at Noah astride a hardmouthed bay, Jeff straightway forgot his own troubles amid the hilarity of watching another's. Noah was obviously no Cossack. His face turned a chalk white when he first mounted the bay.

Panic in his face, he dropped his shiny saber in the green prairie grass and lost one of his bridle reins, too. His infantry cap, not much bigger than a postage stamp, had fallen forward over his eyes. His mount was trotting roughly and every time Noah's gaunt body came down, it bounced so high in the saddle that Jeff could see a foot of daylight under the seat of his pants.

“Circle yore leaders and keep up the drags!” a former cowboy in the company yelled, giving Noah's awkward effort the flavor of a cattle stampede.

Noah's big feet escaped the stirrups and his long legs, swinging comically far below the bay's belly, began to churn so violently up and down the sides of the horse that his blue trousers were pushed up high, exposing the legs of his long red underwear. Jeff rode out and caught the horse by the bridle until Noah, cursing beneath his breath, could recover his lost rein, pull down his pant legs and thrust his feet back into the stirrups.

The new cavalry was quickly pressed into service despite its greenness. The guerilla warfare, that summer of '63, was increasing in savagery every day. The position of Fort Gibson was critical. When Colonel Phillips sent eight hundred cavalry up the Texas road as an escort to the first Federal supply train that had come through in months, the rebels boldly crossed the Arkansas River and captured more than one thousand Union horses and mules. General Douglas Cooper's rebels were now camped so close that every night Jeff could see the rebel campfires across the river.

Groups of Watie's rebel Cherokee horsemen made raid after raid behind the Union lines in the vicinity of Spavinaw and Grand River, destroying the fields and gardens the Union refugee women and children had planted so laboriously on their small farms. It was Watie's intention to drive every Union refugee family he could find back upon the protection of Fort Gibson, compelling the fort to feed them from the limited stores hauled at such labor by mule and ox trains from far-off Kansas. And Watie did all in his power to keep those trains from getting through. Thus he hoped to force Phillips to evacuate the fort and return to Kansas, leaving all the Cherokee Nation to the Confederates. It was the duty of the new Union cavalry, of which Jeff was now a part, to prevent those depredations if it could.

Jeff's detail was patrolling an area north of Tahlequah late one hot June afternoon when they saw a cloud of gray and brown smoke rising above the distant oaks.

“Ho!” called Jim Pike, the sergeant, pulling his horse to a stop. Scowling, Pike peered hard ahead at the smoke, trying to assess its origin.

“Look's like a haystack burnin',” guessed Sam Sukemeyer, a private.

Pike touched spurs to his mount. “Maybe we better go see. Might be somepun else.”

Riding toward the smoke, they found a small cornfield, and Jeff was dismayed to see a crude wooden drag had been pulled across the crop and the plants jerked out of the ground by the roots. Fresh horse tracks lay plain in the sandy soil.

Alarmed, they quickened their pace. Jeff had heard so many firsthand accounts of the rebel depredations that he dreaded what they might find.

They found it in the barn lot of a small farm. The troopers pulled up their horses and stared with horror.

A fine chestnut mare lay dead, her head in a pool of blood. Her two small colts stood tugging at their lifeless mother's teats. Jeff heard Stuart Mitchell begin to curse, slowly at first, then more loudly and with increasing bitterness. And then he heard something else, something that froze the marrow in his bones.

A woman was screaming hysterically somewhere in the smoke ahead. Rapidly they followed the noise. A two-room log dwelling blazed brightly in broad daylight, the red flames crackling fiercely as they consumed the thatched roof.

Beneath some cedar trees in the yard, two women and a small boy were huddled like frightened sheep around the body of a man. The older woman, obviously the grandmother, was trying vainly to comfort the mother, while the child crouched nearby, his boyish countenance stiff with shock.

The older woman heard them ride into the yard. Raising a white face etched with terror, she drew back as if expecting a blow, one wrinkled hand held over her open mouth. Then she saw their blue coats and realized they were Union.

Pike got down from his horse and questioned her. They learned the dead man was Frank Brandt, a mixed-blood soldier from the Union Indian brigade at Fort Gibson, who had been given a short furlough to help his family work the corn on their farm. The Watie party had ridden up suddenly, surrounded him, and shot him while his family stood begging for his life. Gently Noah led the wife to the smokehouse and persuaded her to sit on a log and stop her screaming.

“They came an hour ago,” the grandmother told them, her voice broken with emotion, her eyes twin pools of horror. “First they kilt Frank. Then they tuck all we had to eat, a small midgen of sugar, half a ham, all our flour. They went through the house and tuck all our blankets, quilts, pillowcases, even the children's shoes. They ripped open our feather beds with their bayonets. They said they was searching for guns, but we knew they was after rings and jewelry to carry back to their families. They went to the barn with their cavalry ropes an' stole our cow. They couldn't take the mare on account of her two small colts born three, four day ago. So they shot her. They tuck every chicken and goose. Then they fired the house. I used to love to see the spring come, but now I hate it. I knew the bushwhacking would begin in dead earnest once the leaves came out agin.” She stood indecisively, wringing her hands in her apron.

His heart in a turmoil, Jeff turned away. Suddenly there was a slight movement ahead, and he discovered a small boy cowering behind a cedar hedge. He held both hands over the stomach of his blouse and looked fearfully at the ground.

“What's the matter?” Jeff asked kindly.

Shrinking back into the hedge, the boy gripped his stomach so tightly that his hands grew white, but still he wouldn't speak.

“He's scared,” piped a childish voice behind Jeff. “The rebel soldiers told him that when the bluecoats come, they'd rip his belly open with their swords.” Aghats, Jeff looked around. The older boy had followed him from the yard.

“Pa's dead,” the older boy bluntly told the younger. “The rebels bushwhacked him.” The child stared woodenly, as though he hadn't heard.