“What good would that do? I ain’t got no horse.”
“Man, things must be tough in Hangtree County.”
“Like always. Only more so since the war.”
They set out for Hangtown.
Johnny Cross was of medium height, compact, trim, athletic. He had black hair and clean-lined, well-formed features. His hazel eyes varied in color from brown to yellow depending on the light. He had a deep tan and a three-day beard. There was something catlike about him with his restless yellow eyes, self-contained alertness and lithe, easy way of moving.
He wore a sun-bleached maroon shirt, black jeans, and good boots. Two guns were strapped to his hips. Good guns.
Luke noticed several things right off. Johnny Cross had done some long, hard riding. His clothes were trail-worn, dusty; his guns, what Luke could see of them in their holsters, were clean, polished. Their inset dark wooden handles were smooth, well worn with use. A late-model carbine was sheathed in the saddle scabbard.
The chestnut horse was a fine-looking animal. Judging by its lines it was fast and strong, with plenty of endurance. The kind of mount favored by one on the dodge. One thing was sure: Johnny Cross was returning to Hangtree in better shape than when he’d left it.
The Cross family had always been dirt-poor, honest but penniless. Throughout his youth up till the time he went off to war, Johnny had worn mostly patched, outgrown clothes and gone shoeless for long periods of time.
Johnny Cross handed the other a canteen. “Here, Luke, cut the dust some.”
“Don’t mind if I do, thanks.” Luke fought to still the trembling in his hands as he took hold of the canteen and fumbled open the cap. The water was as warm as blood. He took a mouthful and held it there, letting the welcome wetness refresh the dust-dry inside of his mouth.
His throat was so dry that at first he had trouble swallowing. He took a couple of mouthfuls, stopping though still thirsty. He didn’t want to be a hog or show how great his need was. “Thank you kindly,” he said, returning the canteen.
Johnny put it away. “Sorry I don’t have something stronger.”
“That’s plenty fine,” Luke said.
“Been back long?”
“Since last fall.”
“How’s your folks, Luke?”
“Pa got drowned two years ago trying to cross the Liberty River when it was running high at flood time.”
“Sorry to hear that. He was a good man,” Johnny said.
Luke nodded. “Hardworking and God-fearing ... for all the good it done him.”
“Your brothers?”
“Finn joined up with Ben McCullough and got kilt at Pea Ridge. Heck got it in Chicamagua.”
“That’s a damned shame. They was good ol’ boys.”
“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.
“’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.”