Ride the Panther Read Free Page B

crates and barrels aboard. A couple of young lads in faded canvas pants and loose-fitting shirts drove a herd of goats up the pier and into a makeshift pen on the lower deck of the Belle, toward the bow.
    Jesse noticed Enos Clem disembarking from the riverboat. The frock-coated gambler paused just a step off the gangplank and lit a cigar. Smoke curled beneath the broad white brim of his flat-crowned hat. He gestured to a young mulatto, a lad of eleven or twelve, who clambered down off a barrel and for the promise of a few cents took up the gambler’s carpetbag and followed the man down the pier and along the dock. No doubt Clem intended to visit the saloons along the waterfront and restore to health the contents of his much-depleted purse.
    Jesse shrugged, and slung his own saddlebags over his shoulder and headed out onto River Street. No doubt the town marshal would help him locate Doc Curtis. Jesse wasn’t worried.
    Peter Abbot was like a member of the family. He had served with Jesse’s father in the Mexican War and had become an unofficial uncle to the children of Ben McQueen. At the outbreak of war, it was to Peter Abbot that Jesse had come with a request to serve under the major’s command. Abbot had been only too happy to oblige. The major’s dispatches, however, were always cut and dried—“Report here” and “Go there” and “Wait until contacted.” Jesse never knew what to expect. However, one thing was certain: no matter where the major’s orders sent Jesse McQueen, the captain could always count on finding trouble at the end of the line.
    The marshal of Kansas City was home tending his wife and helping as best he could in the birth of his second child, but his deputy, a laconic young man by the name of Hiram Hays, managed to bestir himself from the marshal’s chair long enough to refill a blue tin cup with coffee from the stove back near the jail cells at the rear of the building. Hiram took his time, enjoying his authority and posturing with all the gravity of a man wise beyond his years.
    Jesse waited patiently, allowing the deputy his moment of glory. Come tomorrow with the marshal’s arrival, Hiram would return with broom in hand to a more humble status.
    “Doc Curtis,” Hiram repeated. “Sure I know where he lives. Been patchin’ me up since I was sloppin’ hogs on my granpap’s farm. And who might you be?”
    “Captain Jesse McQueen.”
    “McQueen, huh?” Hiram scratched a yellow thumbnail along his stubbled jaw and appeared to recognize the name. “What with all you soldier boys in town, hell, I can’t tell y’all apart. Don’t get me wrong, me and most others are glad for the troops, what with them Confederate devils about.”
    “I came in on the Westward Belle not an hour ago. But news about the Lawrence raid was all the talk in St. Louis.”
    On the twenty-first, Confederate guerrillas led by the infamous William C. Quantrill, Bloody Bill Anderson, and the Choctaw Kid had looted and burned Lawrence, Kansas, only a long day’s ride from the Missouri border. Over a hundred and fifty citizens had been killed during the raid, most of them innocent townspeople, many of them young men approaching military age who had yet to don a blue uniform. The destruction of Lawrence by Confederate guerrillas was the brutal culmination of years of border warfare that had plagued Missouri, Kansas, and the Indian Territory for too long.
    “Folks’ll be hearin’ about it long after we’re gone,” Hiram added. “Quantrill was there. And the Choctaw Kid. Bloody Bill himself hung the town marshal and his deputy from the mercantile sign.” Hiram stared dolefully at the coffee that somehow seemed as black as his prospects for the future. “He’d already hung ’em. Why do you suppose he shot ’em to doll rags? ’Cause that’s what he did afterwards. My cousin seen the whole thing while he hid under the walkway.” Hiram slapped the gun riding high on his hip and glared out the window at