THE TRAIN CHUFFED TO a halt outside the Harrisonville depot. Up front, the conductor swung down from the lead passenger coach as the stationmaster crossed the platform. Only one passenger stepped off the train.
Clint Brannock paused a moment on the platform. He scanned the depot as though it were an unexpected curiosity. Four years ago, when he rode off to war, the railroad had not yet extended to Harrisonville. The trip from Ohio, where he’d been confined in a Union prison camp, was in fact his first ride aboard a civilian train. He thought it a big improvement over horseback.
A strapping six-footer, Clint still wore the tattered remnants of a Confederate uniform. Normally robust and muscular, he was now painfully thin from more than two years’ imprisonment. Yet his features were ruggedly forceful under a thatch of sandy hair. With a square jaw and a wide brow, his smoky-blue eyes gave him a determined look. His mouth seemed fixed in an implacable line.
The stationmaster gave him a puzzled once-over, then hurried forward. “Well, bless my britches! Everybody about give you up for dead, Clint.”
“Hello, Amos.” Clint accepted his handshake, nodded at the depot. “You’re with the railroad now?”
“Have been the last year or so. We ain’t heard hide nor hair of you since you was took prisoner. Where you been?”
“Ohio,” Clint said flatly. “Yankee prison.”
The conversation was cut short as the train got under way. Clint nodded and moved across the platform. On the other side of the depot the town appeared unchanged. There were a couple of new buildings, but Main Street looked much the same as when he’d gone off to war. Like most farm communities in Missouri, little varied from season to season. Somehow, even though it stirred memories, Clint experienced no sense of homecoming. He turned and walked off along a dusty road leading south.
The vestiges of war were with him still. On July 3, 1863, he’d been captured in Mississippi. At the time, he was acting as a courier from besieged Vicksburg to Port Hudson, another Confederate stronghold two hundred miles downriver. After being jumped by a Union patrol, he had tried to outrun them and complete his mission. A slug through the shoulder knocked him off his horse, and he ended up in a Yankee field hospital.
Later, he would learn that the dispatch he carried, intended for the Port Hudson commander, was of far-reaching consequence. General John Pemberton, commander of the Vicksburg garrison, had decided to surrender his beleaguered troops. To that end, he had requested a conference with the Union leader, Ulysses S. Grant. The surrender had been effected the next day, July 4. Following his recovery, Clint had been transported to a Union prison camp.
Life in prison had been far worse than the battlefield. Conditions were primitive, and food rations, at best, were meager. After six months, Clint had been offered a pardon, on condition that he become a “galvanized” Yankee. The term applied to Southerners who swore an oath of allegiance to the Union and were transferred west to fight Indians. Clint spent his time instead trying to escape prison camp and rejoin the Confederacy. His last breakout attempt had occurred only three weeks before the war ended. He’d drawn solitary confinement, and regulations required that he serve out the two-month sentence. On May 12, fully a month after the cease-fire, he had finally been released.
Four miles outside Harrisonville, Clint turned into a farmyard. His uncle, Ezra Brannock, was chopping wood near the back door. But it was his Aunt Angeline who spotted him first and came running from the kitchen. She threw her arms around him in a maternal hug, tears streaming down her face. She was a large woman, in her early forties, her skin prematurely lined. He remembered her as gentle and infinitely wise, and he allowed himself to be fussed over like a fuzzy-cheeked boy. For the first time, he felt as though he’d come home.
Ezra, who was his father’s brother, greeted him like a son. Ezra’s only boy had been killed in the war, and his daughter had married a man in town. While Clint bathed and changed into leftover clothes of his dead cousin, Angeline went to work in the kitchen. She laid out all the fixings: fried chicken and corn bread, mashed potatoes and greens, and a savory mincemeat pie. Clucking and scolding, she forced him to eat until he felt ready to burst. Home cooking, she declared, would put a little meat on his bones.
After supper, Ezra and Clint retired to the front porch. There, settled back in rockers, they watched the sun sink westward. While they had spoken of Virgil and Earl, there had been no mention of Clint’s parents. Finally, wondering whether he should broach the subject, Ezra fired up his corncob pipe.
“Maybe tomorrow,” he said, puffing smoke, “we can ride out to the graveyard. I reckon you’d like to see where your folks was laid to rest.”
Clint merely nodded. His eyes were faraway and clouded, as though wrestling with something that resisted words. When at last he spoke, his mouth was clamped in a bloodless slash and ugly lines strained his face. His voice was toneless.
“Tell me about it,” he said. “How it happened.”
Ezra took a deep breath, blew it out heavily. “Jennison’s raiders split up into two parties. One ransacked the town, cleaned out the bank, and killed five men. The other bunch hit the farms nearest to town. They was mainly lookin’ for saddle horses.”
“Go on,” Clint said dully.
“Your pa put up a fight. Him and your ma forted up in the house, and he let loose with a shotgun. Killed three of the bastards before they set fire to the house. Just for spite, they burned down the barn, too.”
“So the folks never had a chance?”
“They might’ve,” Ezra said darkly. “But your pa probably figured he could hold ’em off. He never was one to back away from a fight.”
Ezra thought the youngest son was much like the father. Hot-tempered and handy with his fists, Clint had been the wild one of the three brothers. Since childhood, he’d had an affinity for guns and hunting; always off in the woods, he’d been what men called a natural shot. To himself, Ezra wondered now how those skills had been honed by the war.
Clint looked at him with a disquieting stare. “You say Jennison was the leader. Was it him that raided the house?”
“No,” Ezra said, remembering. “Jennison stayed in town. His second-in-command was a no-account by the name of Jack Quintin. He’s the one that killed your folks.”
“You sound like you know him.”
“Just his name. Toward the end of the war, he got to be a regular visitor around these parts.”
“How so?”
Ezra briefly explained. In the aftermath of the raid, the Union army had disowned Doc Jennison. Thereafter, Jennison and his chief lieutenant, Jack Quintin, had operated the Jay-hawkers as irregular guerrillas. Their plundering raids into western Missouri continued through 1864, when Jennison had been killed in a skirmish with proslavery forces. Quintin had then assumed command and led the Jayhawkers until the end of the war. With the return of peace, he had quickly dropped from sight. Everyone assumed he had taken sanctuary in abolitionist Kansas.
Clint was silent for a time. “Any idea what this Quintin looks like?”
“Nothin’ to hang your hat on,” Ezra said slowly. “Why do you ask?”
“Only seems fair,” Clint said with an odd smile. “I wouldn’t want to kill the wrong man.”
Ezra squinted at him with an owlish frown. “That’s a damn-fool notion if ever I heard one. Seems like you would’ve had your fill of killin’.”
Clint’s eyes were suddenly fierce. “Let’s just call it a blood debt. I aim to collect.”
Ezra Brannock was a simple man. His hands were large and gnarled, calloused from the hardships of a lifetime spent tilling the soil. He abhorred violence, and he thought revenge was the poorest of excuses for killing another human. Yet, since the younger man had walked into the yard, he’d sensed a strangeness about Clint. He was colder and harder, somehow brutalized by the killing ground of war and his years in prison. Then, too, his eyes were pale and very direct, mirroring a personal insensitivity that was curiously detached. He looked like he’d forgotten the meaning of compassion and mercy.
“Vengeance won’t get you anywhere,” Ezra said at length. “All it does is eat away at your soul. God knows, it won’t bring you no peace.”
Clint rocked his hand, fingers splayed. “The Yankees burned my soul out of me, Uncle Ezra. I reckon I lived through it for a reason, though. Today, I learned his name.”
“Thunderation!” Ezra said gruffly. “Nothin’ good’ll come of it, boy. You’ll wind up destroying yourself.”
“Not before I square accounts with Quintin.”
“And how the devil you figger to do that? You haven’t got a glimmer of where to start lookin’.”
Clint heaved himself to his feet. “Think I’ll have another piece of that mincemeat pie. Aunt Angeline sure knows her way around the kitchen.”
Left alone on the porch, Ezra struck a sulfurhead and rekindled his pipe. He knew now that argument would avail him nothing. He could talk himself blue in the face and it wouldn’t change a thing. The boy, like his father before him, would never turn the other cheek. And like his father, it would probably get him killed.
Ezra stared morosely off into the gathering twilight.
Four days later Clint walked back into town. He was ten pounds heavier and ruddy good health showed in his features. He hadn’t eaten so well, or so much, since before the war.
Stuffed deep in his pocket were five twenty-dollar gold pieces. Though Ezra and Angeline Brannock were themselves hard-pressed, they had dipped into their hoard and provided him with a stake. His Aunt Angeline, trying to choke back the tears, had entreated him to join his brothers in Denver. He’d promised nothing, and his uncle hadn’t reopened the argument. They watched from the porch until he was out of sight.
In town, Clint’s first stop was at the local livestock dealer’s horse pens. There, after suitable haggling, he bought a dun gelding and a used saddle. His bankroll reduced by half, he then rode the gelding uptown. Several stops and twenty dollars later, he had himself provisioned with camp gear and a week’s supply of vittles. He next walked across the street to the hardware store.
With the war scarcely ended, firearms were in short supply. Yet luck, or perhaps fate, was with him today. Confederate officers, upon being paroled, were allowed to retain their side-arms. A local man, after being mustered out of the army, had traded his pistol for farm tools. It was a Colt Navy .36 cap-and-ball revolver, somewhat worse for wear but still serviceable. Beside it in the display case was the companion military holster.
For sixteen dollars, Clint bought the pistol and holster. Another three dollars went for gunpowder and a bag of .36-caliber lead balls. He strapped on the flap-top holster, which was inverted according to military custom, carrying the pistol butt forward. Then, while the store owner watched silently, he loaded and charged five chambers. Holstering the Colt, he walked back across the street.
A warm noonday sun beat down as he rode out of town. Behind him were unexpired emotions and some memories best forgotten. There was nothing to look back for, no reason for staying.
He turned the dun gelding toward Kansas.