And There I’ll Be a Soldier Read online

“Your father is an erudite and patriotic man.”

  Ryan couldn’t believe what he had said, and found it even harder to believe that Irene V-something was laughing.

  “So …?”

  He couldn’t believe it. This Helen of Troy was suggesting that they dance … to a Baptist hymn?

  He moved closer to her, but Lieutenant Arnett stopped him by calling out his name. Ryan looked at Arnett, who was gesturing toward the stage, and Ryan cursed all officers of the Second Texas Infantry underneath his breath.

  “Maybe later?” Irene offered hopefully.

  “It would be my honor,” he said, bowed graciously, and followed Lieutenant Arnett through the people, past the kegs, and back to the stage.

  He spent the rest of the ball scanning the hall for the goddess, wondering if he had dreamed the entire thing since all he saw was his mother dancing with his father, Little Sam Houston dancing with every other woman—excepting Irene—and Gibb Gideon laughing at the jokes of the fat man with the walnut cane.

  They closed with “Dixie,” which caused a deafening applause. Ryan wiped his sweaty brow with his handkerchief, packed away his fiddle, and pretended that he didn’t hear his mother’s beckoning. When he looked up, however, he saw Irene Vardakas walking out the front door and into the midnight, her white-muslined arm intertwined with the black broadcloth of Matt Bryson’s frock coat.

  Chapter Nine

  December 18, 1861

  Weston, Missouri

  The measles epidemic had long since passed. For a while, Caleb thought it would be the only battle he and the other soldiers in Missouri would ever see. A few weeks ago, however, Major General Henry W. Halleck, new commander of the even newer Department of the Missouri, had ordered Colonel Morgan and the Eighteenth to leave Fort Morgan and head west to Weston in Platte County, north of Kansas City.

  “Our glorious mission,” Morgan had told his troops before they boarded the train in Laclede, “is to suppress those Rebel bushwhackers, provide assistance to our brave settlers who still honor the Stars and Stripes, and enlist enough men who will fight to the death to preserve the Union and provide our Rangers with a final company to make us a true regiment.”

  It sounded like a noble expedition, but Caleb would soon learn that Morgan apparently had forgotten to mention another part of the mission.

  To plunder.

  Oh, that cut both ways. Rebel bushwhackers murdered, burned, pillaged. On December 1, two Union cavalrymen had been ambushed while crossing the bridge over Bee Creek, their horses stolen, along with their greatcoats, high boots, sabers, and carbines. One of the dead trooper’s gold teeth had been pried out of his mouth, and both men had been scalped. Caleb could expect such atrocities from Rebels, but from the men he called comrades?

  Within two days of the Eighteenth’s arrival in Weston, Seb Woolard brought a silver candleholder and nickel-plated cigar case into the new tent he shared with Rémy, Caleb, and two new recruits for the company, a farmer from Milan named Folker, and Sergeant Masterson’s first cousin, Boone Masterson.

  “Where did you get those?” Boone asked.

  “Confiscated from Rebel trash.” Seb pushed the plunder into his haversack.

  When Caleb complained to Sergeant Masterson, the former barber snapped: “It’s his business, Cole, not yours.”

  For a few days afterward, Caleb considered Harold Masterson as big a thief as Seb Woolard, but Boone later told him that when his cousin had complained to Lieutenant Roberts, going through proper military channels, the one-time mercantile clerk from Unionville had proudly displayed a tray of silver utensils, asking: “And what did you confiscate, Sergeant?”

  Since then Seb Woolard had filled his haversack and now had an additional two pillowcases stuffed with valuables liberated from Rebel sympathizers.

  They had arrived in Weston on the blustery evening of December 9. As the American flag was raised once again, Colonel Morgan proclaimed that he would bring peace to Platte County if he had to kill every bushwhacker in sight.

  Missouri irregulars, however, proved really good at staying out of sight.

  They had burned the railroad bridge at Iatan, had shot down those two cavalrymen at Bee Creek. One had even sneaked into Platte City, lowered the Union flag Caleb had helped raise himself that morning, dropped the flag into a watering trough, and raised instead a filthy pair of men’s red flannel underwear.

  When Morgan himself raised the relatively dry Federal flag the next afternoon, he declared that if any American flag was ever lowered in any city or town in Platte County, that town would be sacked.

  Thus, the Eighteenth Missouri became night raiders.

  Caleb found himself storming into farm houses, watching as Sergeant Masterson or Lieutenant Roberts or even Seb Woolard pulled a man out of his house, wearing nothing but his undergarments, while his wife and/or mother and/or children cried, begged, prayed.

  Sometimes the man was flogged, then forced to take the oath of allegiance to the Union. Sometimes he took the oath willingly, then was flogged as a reminder not to forget his loyalty to the Union. Once, the man of the house was not home that night, so Colonel Morgan had the home, barn, privy, and lean-to burned. The milch cow, pigs, and chickens were, Morgan proudly bragged, “conscripted into the Union Army.”

  The next time Colonel Morgan gave orders to burn a citizen’s home and farm, Captain Clark wheeled his horse, drew his LaMatt revolver, and faced the men of Company E. Then he announced: “If any one of you falls out of line to help perpetrate this crime, so help me God, I will shoot you myself.”

  From where he stood, Caleb could hear Seb Woolard’s curse, but the boy did not move.

  Slowly Colonel Morgan, his orderly, and his adjutant eased their horse toward Captain Clark and Company E.

  “Is there a problem here, Mister Clark?” Morgan asked hesitantly.

  Keeping the massive revolver aimed skyward, without looking back at his commanding officer, Captain Clark answered: “Yes, Morgan, there most definitely is.”

  The absence of rank, and a respectful sir, did not go unnoticed by anyone.

  “You have your orders, Captain.”

  “I answer to a higher authority.” This time Clark turned savagely toward Morgan, but kept the pistol, now shaking in his right hand, up and away. Had he moved it, Caleb just knew that Jacob Clark would have blown Colonel Morgan out of his saddle. “Sir!”

  If he lived to be a hundred, Caleb would never forget this incident.

  * * * * *

  Things had gotten worse. Oh, Colonel Morgan hadn’t pressed charges, or hadn’t ordered Captain Clark’s arrest for insubordination. Instead, he had meekly turned his horse again, and watched the inferno begin. During future raids, Captain Clark and Company E remained behind in Weston, which limited Seb Woolard’s thefts to the city proper. The farm kid resented Captain Clark and the rest of his messmates. Caleb could have cared less.

  Then, on December 14, Morgan had ordered Clark to procure mounts for six men, and send them toward Centerville, a stronghold of slave owners and Southern extremists. Morgan had received information that bushwhackers might be congregating there. Captain Clark detailed Sergeant Masterson to lead a patrol to Centerville, to pick and choose his own men. Once Morgan left, the captain fished out a few silver coins, and put them in Sergeant Masterson’s hand. “Rent the horses, Sergeant,” he had said softly, and Masterson had answered with a proud, understanding nod.

  “I’ll return the mounts with the captain’s compliments.”

  Rémy, Caleb, Boone, and Folker joined Sergeant Masterson, who said he could not find Seb Woolard, so they would have to keep the patrol to five men.

  “You give Seb privy duty, Sergeant?” Folker said.

  “What’s that, Folker?” Masterson kicked the horse he had rented from a farmer along the Missouri River into a trot. “I didn’t hear you.”
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  Folker was slow, but not stupid. His smile almost matched Caleb’s as he kicked his roan into a trot, and they rode out of Weston toward Centerville.

  They caught two Rebels coming out of the New Zion Baptist Church, surrounded them, disarmed them, and lashed their wrists to their saddle horns and their legs underneath the bellies of their weary mounts.

  “Caleb!” one of the prisoners called.

  He blinked, staring, not comprehending. Actually it was the other prisoner Caleb thought he had recognized, not this shaking kid with cornbread crumbs covering his face. Finally it hit him.

  “Parker?”

  Parker Pruitt, recent recruit of the Keytesville Methodist Rangers, couldn’t hide the tears welling in his eyes. His smile seemed genuine, however, as if he thought Caleb Cole could get him out of his current predicament.

  “You know this boy, Cole?” Sergeant Masterson asked.

  “He’s from Unionville, Sergeant. His daddy runs some flour mills in town.”

  “Land’s sakes,” said the other prisoner, spitting out a mouthful of tobacco juice, “it’s the pig farmer.”

  Now Caleb remembered him. The straw hat and gauntlets were gone, replaced by a wretched felt slouch hat, ragged clothes, not even a coat or gloves to fight off the winter chill. Captain Benedict Crane, leader of his Keytesville militia.

  “And this one?” Masterson asked.

  Caleb found no sympathy for either of them. “Last time I saw him, it was after midnight, and he was threatening my folks. They came calling for me.” He tilted his head toward Pruitt, whose smile quickly vanished. “They both were there.”

  He left out the part that he had been hiding in a pigpen, and had dug his way to freedom, escaping assassination, by covering himself with dung and hay. His face flushed in anger, and he felt his fingers clenching into fists that shook.

  “What are you doing here?” Masterson asked the two Rebel militiamen.

  The captain turned silent, but Parker Pruitt sniffled and said: “Furloughed. On our way home.”

  “I see you furloughed some cornbread and fatback from the preacher here,” Boone said.

  “The parson here”—Captain Crane had found his voice—“he is a good Southern man, not scum like you darky-loving scoundrels.”

  Which prompted Folker to launch into a verse of “John Brown’s Body,” until Sergeant Masterson told him to shut up.

  “Any more of you boys been furloughed?” Masterson asked.

  No answer, and with Centerville residents beginning to congregate outside the church, Sergeant Masterson decided that two prisoners would satisfy Colonel Morgan, and that they’d best light a shuck back to Weston.

  * * * * *

  The colonel had been pleased, too. The two prisoners were locked in a root cellar, and Sergeant Masterson was rewarded with a bottle of wine, and a promise that his name would be mentioned in the colonel’s next report to General Halleck.

  On the way back to their camp, Masterson left the wine in the root cellar with Captain Crane and Parker Pruitt.

  Captain Clark was gone, though, sent back to Laclede with a platoon to guard the railroad and look for Rebel irregulars. Lieutenant Roberts took command of Company E, and it was Roberts who led Caleb and the others into Platte City on December 14.

  Colonel Morgan met seventy or more soldiers of the Eighteenth Missouri in front of the courthouse.

  “The American flag has been removed,” he said, and Caleb’s eyes rose to the flagpole. “When God destroyed wickedness in the days of Noah, he did so with flood, but promised that the next time he would do so with fire. Well, I am the arm of the Lord, and these Secessionist sinners will kneel before me … in ash.”

  Silently the various companies went throughout the town, while Morgan, his adjutant, and his orderly crossed the square and entered a dram shop.

  Lieutenant Roberts led Company E’s detachment to the livery. “You know what to do, Sergeant.” He spoke directly to Sergeant Masterson.

  His head lowered, knowing he was powerless to defy an officer, Sergeant Masterson turned. “This fits you, Woolard,” he said.

  Woolard bolted out of line as soon as Masterson had spoken, and Caleb’s head dropped, his eyes closed. If only Captain Clark were here.

  He wasn’t, of course. He was off on some fool’s errand.

  Before the lieutenant led Company E to its next assignment, Caleb could smell the smoke.

  They set the opera house on fire, and the mayor’s home. They marched by in silence as a white man stopped swatting, futilely, at flames inside a store with a wet rug, coughing, slowly retreating with other recruited firefighters, men of color. Freedmen or slaves, Caleb didn’t know, and Company E didn’t stop to ask, or help.

  “Hey.” Rémy Ehrenreich nudged Caleb’s shoulder, and jutted his jaw toward the town square.

  Smoke burned his eyes, but Caleb could spot the red-orange glow in the cupola of the courthouse.

  By the time they reached the square, Colonel Morgan had stormed out of the dram shop, and was shouting furiously at a sergeant from Company E.

  “My orders were explicit, you numskull!” Morgan raised a half-full whiskey bottle toward the courthouse. “I said the courthouse was not to be burned.”

  The sergeant stammered something, but Morgan whirled, flung the bottle into the street, pivoted to face the sergeant again. “Go put it out!” That’s when Morgan noticed Lieutenant Roberts and Company A. “Help him. Save the courthouse!”

  It was a lost cause already. Even Caleb knew that, but it felt better, trying to save a building from burning even if it didn’t quite atone for the sin of burning down a livery—and the mayor’s home—and an opera house.

  By morning, when the Eighteenth Missouri Infantry marched out of Platte City, the town lay in smoldering ruin.

  * * * * *

  “We now tighten all cinches,” Colonel Morgan said to an assembly the next day.

  “National flags will fly over every house. Every man in this county will take the oath of allegiance. Anyone in Weston leaving town must have a pass. Any person visiting Weston must have a pass. Those who do not will be arrested and fined ten dollars.”

  What went unsaid, Caleb soon learned, was that passes would cost 5¢. Morgan also did not announce that fines and fees collected would fill his pockets.

  “And we shall make an example of the two bushwhackers who have refused to take the oath. This will bring peace to this wretched county. And it will avenge the foul murders of two Union cavalry troopers.”

  Caleb Cole had serious doubts about this man’s army.

  Instead of acting like well-disciplined soldiers, most of the Eighteenth Missouri had become no better than brigands.

  On this snowy morning, it struck him that Ewald Ehrenreich, dead and buried for some two months now, had been lucky. At least Ewald wasn’t part of this. Freezing, teeth chattering, fingers numb from the cold, and sick to his stomach from the orders he had been given, Caleb gladly would have traded places with Rémy’s dearly departed twin brother.

  “Unlock the door, Private,” Sergeant Harold Masterson told a farm boy from Company D on guard duty, “and let out the prisoners.”

  Benedict Crane stumbled out first, blinking, shielding his eyes from the light, even though the sun dared not show itself on such a miserable morning. Parker Pruitt followed, shaking, face masked in confusion.

  “Captain …?” he began.

  “Buck up, Pruitt. Be a man. For once in your life.”

  The boy’s eyes widened. “Caleb?” he called out.

  Caleb stared at the snow falling on his brogans.

  “Prisoners,” Sergeant Masterson called out, “march!”

  The three-mile trek southeast out of Weston felt like thirty. No one spoke, except Rémy, and all he did was whisper a prayer, repeating his Hail Marys over a
nd over.

  At last, the bridge over Bee Creek came into view.

  The snow had stopped, but the wind still howled.

  Caleb tried to tell himself that for all he knew, the Keytesville Methodist Rangers had ambushed those two Federal troopers, that Captain Crane and Parker Pruitt were murderers. That they deserved to die.

  He couldn’t convince himself, though. Instead, a new thought popped into his mind: I should desert. Go back home. Slopping pigs is better than this. This isn’t my fight. Let the South leave the Union, and why should I care about freeing any slaves?

  In the center of the bridge waited Colonel Morgan, his orderly, his adjutant, and the captains of the other companies.

  “Prisoners, halt!”

  Masterson nodded for his squad to line up on the opposite side of the bridge. Reluctantly Caleb followed, and fell in place, at the end of the line closest to Colonel Morgan and the others.

  Masterson moved Captain Crane and Parker Pruitt across the bridge. Pruitt’s knees buckled, and he began sobbing as Masterson jerked him to his feet, shoved him almost too hard. The sergeant had to grab the boy’s shirt front and jerk him forward to keep him from toppling over the railing and into the icy waters of Bee Creek.

  “Proceed, Sergeant.” Colonel Morgan was the only soldier mounted, looking like Death riding a towering black stallion.

  By now, Parker Pruitt was screaming over the wind’s roars, begging for his life.

  Masterson headed back and fell into line beside Caleb.

  “Ready!” Colonel Morgan said.

  Nobody moved. Not even Seb Woolard.

  “By thunder, I said ready!” the colonel roared, and this time the firing squad raised muskets, rifles, one fowling piece. Gently Sergeant Masterson helped push Caleb’s weapon to his shoulder.

  “Aim!”

  Captain Crane spit tobacco juice at the firing squad.

  Parker Pruitt turned, stepped around Captain Crane, and ran.

  “Shoot the prisoners! Fire! I say, fire!”

  Crane just stood there, defiant.

  Caleb lowered his rifle, and watched Parker Pruitt run. Beside him, he heard Rémy whispering as he lowered his rifle: “Hurry, boy. Run. Run like the wind.”