Wildwood Boys (59 page)
of the wildwood.
They went ten miles at full gallop before they were sure of no pursuers, then reined up on a bluff overlooking the Missouri. Their
horses blew great smoky exhalations. The trees stood darkly skeletal
in the stark moonlight and the river shone like a silver ribbon. Cole
uncorked a bottle and they handed it around and all took a drink in
turn but Jesse, who simply passed it along every time it came to him.
They sat their horses under the moon and drank and caught each
other up on things. Frank had been with Quantrill in Kentucky. He
said Quantrill’s mean-ass horse Charley threw a shoe one day and
Quantrill took him to a blacksmith who wisely put leg restraints on
the animal to keep from getting his brains kicked out, but the horse
kept trying to kick him anyway and broke a leg in the trying.
Quantrill had to shoot the beast. He wept when he did it, and he said
it meant the end was near for him too. He was right. A week later a
gang of hired Union manhunters caught up to them, and in the fight
that followed, Quantrill was shot in the spine and paralyzed from
the chest down. The Feds carried him away to Louisville and it took
him a month to die. The way Frank heard it, he’d left a goodly sum
of money to Kate King, and the story held that she’d used it to buy
herself a fancy whorehouse in Saint Louis.
Last spring Jesse decided to take up the Federal offer of parole to
all bushwhackers who turned themselves in. Together with a bunch
of other rebels worn out with the bush life, he’d ridden into Lexington under a white flag—and the Yankees had opened fire. He was
shot in the chest for the second time in a year, and for the second
time was thought to be a goner—and for the second time beat the
odds. He was now engaged to wed the woman who nursed him back
to health, his cousin Zerelda.
The word on Arch Clement was that he was raising hell in Texas.
Dave Pool had been granted amnesty and was now a lawman in
Lafayette County. W. J. Gregg was a carpenter in Independence, had
a wife and two children and another babe on the way....
said, “Well, what do you boys have in mind to do now?”
On an afternoon of driving snow, they robbed the Clay County Savings Bank in Liberty of $60,000 and made their howling, shooting
getaway.
An hour later and twenty miles to the west—the storm now
abated and the countryside white and still—a one-armed farmer
wearing a ragged Confederate cap was searching for a lost calf near
the Liberty road when he heard singing at a distance and coming
down the trace. Soon there appeared a band of riders on prancing
steaming mounts. As these horsemen passed by, they returned the
man’s smile and touched their hatbrims to him.
would make of them, they kept on with their song:
Oh, I’m a good old rebel, that’s just what I am.
And for this Yankee nation I don’t care a damn.
I’m glad I fought against it, I only wish we’d won.
And I don’t want no pardon
About the A uthor
james carlos blake
has written seven
books of fiction, including
In the Rogue Blood
(winner of the Los Angeles Times Book
Prize),
Red Grass River
(winner of the
Chautauqua South Book Award),
Borderlands
(winner of the Southwest Book Award), and
the critically acclaimed
Wildwood Boys
. He is
also the author of
The Pistoleer
and
The Friends
of Pancho Villa
. He resides in southeast Arizona.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information
on your favorite HarperCollins author.
FOR
Wildwood Boys
“A superb and engrossing novel. . . . Blake [is] one of the best and
most original writers in America today.”
—El Paso Herald Post
—Austin American-Statesman
highly readable style . . . [tells] a gritty, gripping adventure.”
—Publishers Weekly
“What makes this richly reimagined story of William Anderson
truly horrific is the pure poetry and haunting beauty of Blake’s
writing. . . . He navigate[s] the human bloodstream with substance and style.”
“Blake takes readers on a wild ride with Anderson and his guerrillas.... His novel would translate well to film—another portrait of
the down and dirty Civil War of the West.”
“Blake reminds us that . . . as in Vietnam or Rwanda or the
Balkans, civil wars can be the dirtiest wars of all. ...[I]t’s Blake’s
achievement to get us to understand . . . an attitude that outlasted
the war, fostering public support of ‘populist’ outlaws.”
Wildwood Boys
has] more than its share of lyric beauty.”
—Tampa Tribune
—Copley News Service
unheroic hero who will stick in the reader’s mind.”
—San Diego Union-Tribune
James Carlos Blake
Borderlands: Short Fictions
Red Grass River
The Pistoleer
Designed by Nancy Singer Olaguera
Credits
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are
drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely
coincidental.
ISBN 978-0-06-136903-2
WILDWOOD BOYS
. Copyright © 2000 by James Carlos Blake. All rights
reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive,
non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen.
No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded,
decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any
information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means,
whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented,
without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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