Free Wildwood Boys by James Carlos Blake Page B

his voice now seemed strained, as if he didn’t
     
believe his own words, as if he were uncertain of purpose, he who
     
had not hesitated to impale a man with a pickax for touching his
     
daughter.
     
Will Anderson rubbed his face and sighed tiredly. “I ain’t been
     
keeping out of the war with the Union just to get into one with some
     
peckerwood for crawfishing on a marriage promise,” he said. He
     
fixed Bill and Jim with a stern look. “We couldn’t win it no way. If
     
we kill him we’d have to stand trial or run. The man’s got friends all
     
over and the jury’d be full of them. And I’ve run enough. So that’s an
     
end on it.”
     
Mary Anderson wept all that day and night, but by the following
     
morning she had settled her mind about the situation and penned a
     
brief note to Arthur Baker without salutation or signature:
    Thus did the matter seem concluded. Until a Sunday evening two
weeks later when the Berry boys came by with an interesting tale to
tell. They had recently made a visit to Miss Juliette’s house of pleasure in Emporia some thirty miles southeast of Agnes City, an establishment they deemed to be worth every mile of the ride. The
Anderson brothers were known to Miss Juliette’s girls too, having
patronized the place now and again for a change from the Reedy sisters. It was only natural that the whores the Berrys consorted with—
a frolicsome pair named Ida and Brenda—would inquire after Bill
and Jim, and only natural that the girls, vast repositories of gossip
and rumor, had heard of Arthur Baker’s jilting of Mary Anderson.
They thought it was a damn shame, the fella asking Mary to marry
him just because he was having a tiff with another girl and then
throwing poor Mary over when he made up with the first one, who
happened to be the sole daughter of a rich daddy and whose only
brother was a born halfwit. Thus did the Berrys learn of Arthur
Baker’s betrothal to Clara Segur, daughter to John Segur, a horse
rancher in Lyon County. Three weeks ago, Segur had invited all his
friends to his ranch for a picnic in Baker’s honor and there
announced Clara’s engagement to him.
    As Ida and Brenda told it, Baker had started courting Clara back
in autumn, but he hadn’t yet proposed to her when they had a quarrel of some kind in February and stopped seeing each other. That was
when he met and began calling on Mary Anderson. The gossip conveying from the Segur ranch was that Clara knew he was visiting
some girl who lived near Agnes City, but she thought he was only
trying to make her jealous. When she heard about his engagement to
the Anderson girl, however, she thought he might be angry enough to
go through with it if she didn’t act fast, so she wrote him a long and
sweetly apologetic letter. Shortly afterward came her daddy’s picnic
and his announcement of the engagement.
    “This is the same fella who wrote to Mary he’s unready for marriage as a man can be,” Jim Anderson said sardonically. “Bastard
went and got engaged to that other girl before he’d even broke it off
with Mary.”
    “I never met the shithead myself,” Butch said, “and he best hope
I never do.”
A foray
     
They were sitting on the porch, each man sipping from his own
jug, and they were all a little drunk but for Will, who was very
drunk, having been drinking since morning. Now his face was
drawn, his eyes gone narrow and bright and fixed on some outraging
vision in his head.
     
“There’s more,” Ike Berry said. “Somebody asked Baker where
you all were from, and he said Kentucky, but somebody else said you
were from Kentucky like Abe Lincoln was from Atlanta. Said he
knew for a fact you all were from Missouri and so he could hardly
blame you for lying about it. The way the story goes, Baker was
mighty put out. He said marrying into a family of pukes would’ve
been the most shameful thing he ever did.”
     
For a moment no one spoke, and then