The Story of Cole Younger Part 5

Retreat to the north was cut off by the other forty and they had us between them. We made for the west, firing as we went, and the soldiers fell right and left. I stayed by Joe Hardin till they dropped him in his tracks, and fought fifteen of the militia while Otho Hinton stopped to get his heavy boots off. Tom Talley, too, had one boot off and one foot stuck in the leg of the other. He could not run and he had no knife to cut the leather. I yanked his boot off and we took to our heels, the militia within 20 yards. Talley's pistol had filled with snow and he could not fire a shot. But we reached the timber and stood at bay. George Talley was shot dead at this last stand, but when the militia fell back, their dead and wounded numbered seventeen. Nathan Kerr, Geo. Wigginton, Bill Hulse and John McCorkle did well that day.

We were all in our socks, having taken off our overcoats, gloves and heavy boots to lighten our burdens, and the icy road promised to cut our feet to pieces, but we made our way to a rock bridge where a hog trail would hide our tracks, and when we left this trail, I made every one of the boys follow in my footprints, leaving but the one trail till we got to the cedar bluffs. For a stretch of three miles here, these bluffs were practically impa.s.sable to hors.e.m.e.n, but we climbed down them and found our way to the home of Mrs. Moore where we were safe again.

The soldiers took back to Independence a pair of gloves marked "Presented to Lieut. Coleman Younger by Miss M. E. Sanders" and they thought Cole Younger was dead for a time. Her brother, Charles Sanders, was one of my company.

Making our way out to Napoleon and Wellington we got new coats and gloves and also located some of the red sheepskin leggings worn by the Red-leg scouts, with which we made a trip over into what was known as "h.e.l.l's corner" on the Missouri, near Independence. Col. Penick's men, who had in many cases "collected" more horses than they really had use for, had left them with friends at various points. As we went in we spotted as many of these as we thought we could lead out, and took them out with us on our way back.

One of the horses I got on that trip was the meanest horse I ever rode and I named him "Jim Lane" in honor of one of the most efficient raiders that ever disgraced an army uniform. This horse a young woman was keeping for her sweetheart who had left it with her father for safety, as he feared it might be shot. As I mounted the nag, she suddenly grasped the bridle reins. The horse always, I found afterwards, had a trick of rearing up on his hind feet, when he was about to start off. Evidently the young woman was also ignorant of his little habit or else she would never have taken hold of his bridle in an effort to detain me. He was no respecter of persons, this horse of her sweetheart, and he rose high in the air with the young woman still clinging. He turned around and made almost a complete circuit before he came down and again allowed her to enjoy the security of having both feet upon the earth. She was a little frightened after having been lifted off her feet in this way and dangled in the air, and somewhat piqued, too, that I was about to ride away on her sweetheart's horse, and when I suggested that the horse was not as quiet as he might be and she had better not catch hold of his bridle any more, she called to me as a parting shot, "You horrid old red-leg, you are meaner than Quantrell or Todd or Cole Younger or any of his gang!"

The night we made our escape, they burned the homes of Grandmother Fristoe, and her neighbor, Mrs. Rucker, and gray heads suffered because younger ones had not been noosed.

12. QUANTRELL ON WAR

After the Lone Jack fight, Capt. Quantrell had joined Gen. Shelby at Cane Hill, Arkansas, but shortly left his command to go to the Confederate capital at Richmond to ask to be commissioned as a colonel under the partisan ranger act and to be so recognized by the war department as to have any protection the Confederate States might be able to afford him.

He knew the service was a furious one, but he believed that to succeed the South must fight desperately.

Secretary Cooper suggested that war had its amenities and refinements and that in the nineteenth century it was simply barbarism to talk of a black flag.

"Barbarism," rejoined Quantrell, according to Senator Louis T. Wigfall, of Texas, who was present at the interview, "barbarism, Mr. Secretary, means war and war means barbarism. You ask an impossible thing, Mr. Secretary.

This secession or revolution, or whatever you call it, cannot conquer without violence. Your young Confederacy wants victory. Men must be killed."

"What would you do, Captain Quantrell, were yours the power and the opportunity?" inquired the secretary.

"Do, Mr. Secretary? I would wage such a war as to make surrender forever impossible. I would break up foreign enlistments by indiscriminate ma.s.sacre. I would win the independence of my people or I would find them graves."

[Ill.u.s.tration: William Clarke Quantrell]

William Clarke Quantrell

"What of our prisoners?"

"There would be no prisoners," exclaimed the fiery captain. "Do they take any prisoners from me? Surrounded, I do not surrender; hunted, I hunt my hunters; hated and made blacker than a dozen devils, I add to my hoofs the swiftness of a horse and to my horns the terrors of a savage following.

Kansas should be laid waste at once. Meet the torch with the torch, pillage with pillage, slaughter with slaughter, subjugation with extermination. You have my ideas of war, Mr. Secretary, and I am sorry they do not accord with your own or with the ideas of the government you have the honor to represent so well."

Disappointed, Capt. Quantrell left without his commission. He had felt the truth of his fiery speech.

Our tenders of exchanges of prisoners had been scorned by the officers of the militia. There was a boy who was an exception to this rule, to whom I want to pay a tribute. He was a young lieutenant from Brown county and if my memory serves me right, his name also was Brown. We had taken him prisoner at Olathe.

At Leavenworth they had one of our boys named Hoy, who had been taken at the Tate house, and we paroled Brown, and sent him to Leavenworth to ask the exchange of Hoy.

Brown went, too, and was laughed at for his earnestness. Exchange was ridiculed. "You are free," they said to him, "why worry about exchanges?"

But Brown had given his word as a man and as a soldier and he came back to our camp and surrendered. He was told to return to the lines of his own army, and given safe conduct and money to provide for his immediate wants, but he vowed he would never fight again under his country's flag until he had been exchanged in accordance with his parole.

There was a cheer for that man when he left the camp, and anyone who had proposed shooting him would himself have been riddled.

13. THE PALMYRA BUTCHERY

As long as Pete Donan was the editor of the Lexington Caucasian, that paper once each year published an account substantially in this wise:

"So long as G.o.d gives us life and the earth is cursed with the presence of McNeil we feel it to be our solemn duty to rehea.r.s.e once every year the story of the most atrocious and horrible occurrence in the annals of barbarous warfare."

"On Friday, the 17th day of October, 1862, a deed was enacted at the fair grounds at Palmyra, Mo., which sent a thrill of horror through the civilized world."

"Ten brave and true and innocent men were taken from their prison, driven to the edge of the town, seated on their rough board coffins, for no crime of their own, and murdered like so many swine."

"Murdered!"

"Butchered!!"

"By the h.e.l.l-sp.a.w.ned and h.e.l.l-bound, trebly d.a.m.ned old blotch upon creation's face, John McNeil, until recently by the grace of bayonets, Tom Fletcher, and the devil, sheriff of St. Louis county."

"Murdered!"

"Shot to death!!"

"There was our poor, handsome, gallant boyhood friend Tom Sidener-"

"As pure a soul as ever winged its flight from blood-stained sod to that G.o.d who will yet to all eternity d.a.m.n the fiendish butcher, McNeil."

"Poor Tom!"

"He was engaged to be married to a young lady in Monroe county."

"When he learned he was to be shot, he sent for his wedding suit, which had just been made, declaring that if he couldn't be married in it; he intended to die in it."

"Arrayed in his elegant black broad cloth, and his white silk vest, when he mounted his coa.r.s.e plank coffin, in the wagon that was to bear him to his death he looked as if he was going to be married instead of shot."

"The very guards cried like children when they bade him goodbye."

"Raising his cap and bowing to the weeping women who lined the streets, he was driven from their sight forever!"

"Half an hour afterward six musket b.a.l.l.s had pierced his n.o.ble heart, and his white silk vest was torn and dyed with his martyr blood!"

"There was poor old Willis Baker, his head whitened with the snows of more than seventy winters-"

"Heroic old man!"