Rifles for Watie (44 page)

Even Colonel Phillips had resigned his commission. In a short speech to his men, he had thanked them for their bravery and their loyalty. “God bless you all,” he had concluded. “I am now going home and help Nellie peel peaches.”

Jeff thought of the rebel Cherokee families down on Red River. The war was over for them, too, but he knew they couldn't return to their ravaged homes in the Cherokee country until the peace treaty had been made. And that might take months.

Sighing, he wondered if the Jackmans' big home near Briartown had been burned? He hoped not. His association with the rebels had taught him a tolerance and sympathy for the defeated side that he would keep all his life. He thought the South had been wrong to start the war, but now that it was over and the Union restored, he didn't want to see the rebels punished unreasonably. He hoped the country would be united again, bigger and stronger than ever, North and South.

Just before sundown they turned off the road and trotted down a long cedar lane to the home of Bill's Aunt Phoebe. It was the finest home Jeff had seen since he had left the Jackmans.

A Negro man met them at the main gate. He was carrying a pair of shears, several large towels, and a big, square bar of homemade lye soap. He looked with fear at their weapons and their blue uniforms.

“Mistus say ah'm to take y'all gennelmens to the springhouse fo a bath an' clean-up. Then yo to come to de house fo suppah.”

Bill blushed, looking around apologetically at the others. “Aunt Phoebe's cranky about dirt and graybacks. She means all right, but she was born with her hands on her hips.”

Jeff didn't mind. As usual, he was hungry enough to eat his own saddle blanket. He noticed that Aunt Phoebe's phobia for cleanliness included her servants. The Negro's curly hair was slicked down neatly, his black shoes were shined, and his clothing was neat. He smelled nice and clean. Lots cleaner than they smelled after their long ride in the sticky heat, he knew. They dismounted.

The Negro's eyes bugged whitely when he saw the fiercelooking bloodhound standing gravely beside Jeff.

“Is dat de houn dat chased one ob yo gennelmans all de way fum Red Rivah to de fote?”

They all laughed. The story of Jeff's long flight on foot from the Watie headquarters and of the renowned Texas bloodhound had been told hundreds of times all up and down the Texas Road.

“He don' look lak no bloodhoun'. He too ugly.”

Bill Earle turned toward the dog. “Sure he's a bloodhound, ain't you, Sully? Bleed for the man, Sully.”

But the hound seemed to know he was being teased. Staring at them with his mournful eyes, he stood closer to Jeff. Jeff reached down and stroked his long ears.

The Negro led them into the springhouse, a large room of blackjack logs that had been built over a live spring in the floor. It was cool there. The clear, cold water bubbled out of a short length of hickory log that had been bored by an extension auger to make a pipe. The place was almost nice enough to live in. The walls were stained a grayish white. There were chairs, a table, and a large cabinet built from sassafras saplings. Everything was scrupulously clean.

They stripped. With his shears, the Negro clipped each head carefully for lice. Then they bathed with the lye soap, toweled themselves, and donned clean gray cotton drawers, blouses, pants, and socks. Jeff felt clean and strange in the borrowed garments. Another Negro fed and rubbed down their horses and gave Jeff some beef for Sully. Missing his blue blouse, Jeff looked out the window and saw the first Negro hold it up and stare at the three yellow stripes on the shoulder before hanging it on a stone fence to air.

Jeff was going home a sergeant. He had found the promotion waiting for him the day he rode back to the fort. Blunt had seen to it personally after Leemon Jones arrived. As he stuffed his borrowed blouse into his pants, Jeff thought about how he had joined up at sixteen, wanting to be a soldier, to see battle and savor adventure.

Well, he had got what he wanted and more. Although he was barely twenty he had served the Union as an infantryman, cavalryman and scout, with two hours as an impromptu artilleryman at the Battle of Prairie Grove thrown in. And during his service with the South, he had been both a cavalryman and a teamster. He had lain ill several months in a rebel home, narrowly escaped a rebel firing squad, had nearly starved to death, been trailed one hundred miles by a bloodhound and fallen head over heels in love. Few men in either army had lived the war so fully.

Bill's aunt, tall and austere, met them at the door. Jeff had never seen a more meticulous woman. Nothing had a chance to be out of place in her parlor. If you laid something down, she picked up after you in your presence. She sent a Negro girl out onto the Bermuda lawn with a dustpan to scoop up the quid of tobacco John Chadwick had spat out.

But she set a good table. After supper they went into the parlor.

There Aunt Phoebe thawed a little. Bill sang several religious hymns while she accompanied him on an organ. She pumped with her foot and fingered the keys with long, flowing gestures of her hands and wrists.

One of the songs was “Amazing Grace” and with a stab of melancholy, Jeff's thoughts went back to Boggy Depot, and he heard Heifer humming the same tune in his broken, sobbing voice as he pounded out his steaks with the butt of his double-barreled pistol.

When they changed back into their own clothing next morning and got ready to leave, Bill elected to stay behind and rest up a week before going on to his home in northern Kansas.

Jeff thanked Aunt Phoebe. Then he shook hands with Bill, feeling kind of foolish. Bill promised to come and visit the Bussey homestead after he got settled.

“What are you going to do when you get home, go back to school at Bluemont?” Jeff asked.

“Heck no! I'm gonna git me a rockin' chair an' sit in it an' rest. After I rest about six months I might even rock a little. You goin' to school, Jeff?”

Jeff nodded. “I hear they're opening the new university next year at Lawrence. That's where I'm heading. It's only about sixty miles from home.”

He put his foot in the stirrup and swung up on the dun's back. The bloodhound got up from where he had been lying on the grass and looked at Jeff with doleful expectancy. Jeff glanced once more at Bill and raised his hand.

As they rode off down the cedar kite track, Jeff swallowed a couple of times. It was hard to leave a comrade you had eaten with, bunked with, and fought with so long. It reminded Jeff of his parting with Noah. Noah had gotten his discharge in May and returned to his home in Illinois.

With a lump in his throat, Jeff had taken Noah by the hand and thanked him for all he had done. He told Noah that he would never forget him and made him promise to stop at Sugar Mound and see him the first time he came through Kansas on one of his long hikes as a tramp printer.

“I'll come by an' see you, youngster. But I won't be walkin'.” Noah pointed over his shoulder. Jeff saw the bay bridled and saddled and tied to a cannon wheel. “Old Cold Jaw here is gonna be my locomotion from now on. Now that I've finally learned how to stay on him, he's so gentle, I can stake him to a hairpin.” Noah had bought the bay from the government the same way Jeff had purchased the dun, for seventy-five dollars taken out of his pay.

Jeff had found Leemon Jones, too, when he got back to the fort. The Negro boy had decided to stay in the North and join the First Kansas Colored Infantry, a Union Negro regiment trained at Baxter Springs, Kansas. He had seen some hard fighting and been shot through the shoulder during a skirmish at a hay camp near Flat Rock. When the war ended, he intended to homestead a farm somewhere in Kansas and bring his old mother to live with him.

Clardy never returned. After Jeff told Colonel Wattles about the repeating rifles, the colonel rushed a full report by courier to Fort Scott. It was telegraphed to Leavenworth, St. Louis, and Washington, and the illegal traffic through Kansas stopped. No one knew what had become of Clardy. He was nowhere to be found.

When Jeff didn't return from his scout with Bostwick, General Blunt personally wrote his parents, sending them Jeff's personal belongings, including the Medal of Honor he had won at Prairie Grove. Later, when Jeff turned up at the fort, Colonel Wattles wrote again to Jeff's father, detailing the important service he had rendered the nation.

When Jeff and David and John crossed the Kansas state line just southeast of Baxter Springs, their excitement grew. They arrived first at the timbered boundary of the Gardner farm, and David stared unbelievingly from beneath his heavy white eyebrows at the corn growing in the thin, rocky soil. The rows were straight, and the crop looked good. A sleek, fat cow grazed in a pasture with a new calf gamboling at her side. Farther on they saw a small patch of wheat and a garden heavy with tomatoes. Apparently there had been plenty of rain.

As they rode up to the house a small black dog charged them, barking shrilly at the bloodhound. Jeff had never seen it before. He felt a vague alarm, wondering if David's mother had moved.

But when David called, the redheaded Gardner brood poured out of the house into the yard, and Jeff was surprised to see how much they had grown. Both girls were taller than their mother, but they had her plain, homely face and freckles. David got down off his horse.

“It's David!” Mrs. Gardner cried and ran forward to throw both arms around his neck. She was so glad to see him that she began pounding him with both fists. Recognizing Jeff and John, she greeted them, too.

Bashful and smiling, the two girls stepped forward to be kissed. David pecked them both dutifully on the cheek. A muscular, red-haired lad of ten ran up from the new barn built of poles and straw. There was mud on his bare feet and awe and excitement in his face.

David grinned. “Hello, Bobby. Well, I didn't git killed after all. An' my bones ain't bleachin' on no prairie.”

Bobby stood there with his mouth open, staring first at his brother and then at the gaunt, sad-faced bloodhound.

A stranger followed Bobby from the barn, carrying a pitchfork. He was small in stature. To Jeff, he looked like an old gray rooster whose tail feathers had been draggled by the rain. His black hair was sprinkled with gray. Timidly he stood in the background, as though reluctant to intrude upon David's homecoming.

Beaming, Mrs. Gardner turned to David. “David, this is yore new pappy.”

Then Jeff knew why the corn rows were so straight.

He and John rode on. As they angled off to the Chadwick farm, John straightened in the saddle, watching for familiar landmarks. Grown and heavily bearded, he stood six foot two and weighed 210 pounds, easily the biggest man in his company.

“Think my old man'll still try to whop me fer joinin' up?” he laughed.

At the same woodpile where he had thrown down the armful of blackjack logs when he left for Leavenworth with Jeff, he stopped his horse. Crawling off, he tied him to the saw rack. Grinning mischievously, he stooped and picked up an armload of logs and carried them toward the house. His father and mother came to the door, staring at him as though he was a stranger.

“Howdy, Pa,” he said. “Well, I finally got back with the wood.”

Then they recognized him. Elated, they rushed forward to greet him, chattering joyfully.

Now Jeff rode alone. The dun nodded his head patiently up and down as he walked down the center of the narrow road, sweat running off his flanks. The bloodhound trotted along in the brush, his long, intelligent nose whuffing and snorting loudly as he read the roadside trail like a newspaper. If the hound had been able to talk, Jeff was sure it could have told him the identity of every creature that had passed that way for a week.

It was late afternoon. With sweet nostalgia he drank in the green Kansas countryside, the fragrance of the alfalfa and sweet clover, the pastures blued over with wildflowers, the creeks and ponds shining like glass in the setting sun, the quail whistling cheerfully from the corn. He felt good clear through about it all. No more violence and crime in Kansas. No more trouble with the Missourians. The land was calm and peaceful at last. Jeff was proud he had helped bring it about.

Impatient, he wanted to shake up the reins and gallop the dun on in, but he knew the horse was tired. In his saddlebags were a pair of prunella shoes for his mother to wear to church, a bolt of blue cotton cloth, and a skein of silk. For his sisters there were shawls and shell side combs. For his father, several twists of tobacco, a satin vest, and a new pair of calfskin boots. He had purchased it all from the sutler's store at Fort Gibson.

He passed the spot where he had thrown rocks at Ring the morning the dog had tried to follow him to Fort Leavenworth. He knew the house was just around the corner. He smelled smoke and saw a thin gray wisp curling above the trees; he knew it came from his mother's fireplace, and a fresh wave of homesickness washed over him.

As the road leaned familiarly to the left, he caught his first view of his father's house. It looked different. He saw that an extra room had been built off the west side. A new rail fence ran around the yard. The trees looked twice as tall as when he had left four years before. But the corral fence of peeled cottonwood logs was still there.

As he trotted up, a big gray dog with a white ring around his neck leaped up from the shade of the parked carryall and, with a low growl, trotted out springy-legged to smell noses with the bloodhound. Jeff's heart jumped exultantly. It was Ring.

“Ring,” he called, “don't you know me?”

When Ring heard Jeff's voice, he cocked his ears and forgot all about the hound. In two bounds he was at Jeff's stirrup, wild with excitement.

Whining eagerly and springing up on his hind legs, the dog took sky hops almost as high as the saddle, trying to reach Jeff. The dun snorted and shied to one side. Jeff quieted him and dismounted. Before he could tie the horse, Ring sprang upon him. Laughing happily, Jeff pulled the big dog's ears and scratched his back. Finally he tied the horse by the woodpile and walked across the chip-strewn yard to the house.