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of Kansas a few years after the Andersons, their father bent on getting clear of the violence back home. But
two weeks before Butch’s sixteenth birthday, Alston Berry went by
himself into Emporia to pick up some harnesses he had ordered from
Saint Louis, and in the course of things he found himself in a saloon
where he entered an affray with three men later identified as jayhawkers of Jim Montgomery. He was carried home in the bloodstained bed of his wagon and holding his bowels to himself where a
jayhawker blade had slashed his belly. Their mother repositioned the
entrails as she best could and sewed the wound closed and prayed
over him and expected him to die. But he did not, and three months
later he still lived, though the wound would never heal. Some days it
seemed to be improving and then a few days later it would worsen
once again. Yellow pus and watery blood seeped constantly from the
suture. His pain rose and ebbed by intervals but was unremitting. It
precluded him from sitting up for more than an hour at a time or
sleeping through the night. Bedsores rooted into his back and buttocks. The stench of the wound was unabating and different from the
stink of the bedclothes, which his incontinence persistently soiled and
which the two Berry sisters were ever washing and drying and changing. He wasted to a coal-eyed skeleton hung with waxy skin. His
voice was a raw croak each time he told his family he was shamed by
his lack of courage to shoot himself and end the ordeal for them all.
    The Berry boys made quiet inquiries, and over time they learned
the names of the trio of jayhawks who had ganged on Alston Berry.
On a dark night a month after their father’s maiming, they hid themselves in the bushes beside the Emporia house of one of those men.
When he passed by a lamplighted parlor window they fired their
Sharps rifles and the thunderous muzzle flares illumined the bushes
and the pair of .52-caliber bullets removed the top portion of the
man’s head and slapped it across the wall in a scarlet paste of hairy
bone and brain. As the brothers ran through the shadows to their
tethered horses they heard the rising screams of the man’s wife and
children.
    Three weeks later they set up in the brush alongside the trace
leading from Americus to the wooded cabin of another of the three
jayhawkers. When the man came riding along in the last of the
evening twilight they hupped their horses out onto the trail and
forced him to rein up. The man thought they were highwaymen and
said they would be fools to rob one of Jim Montgomery’s men. If
they had any sense at all they’d ride away right now and never show
themselves to him again. Angelfaced Ike Berry smiled at him, his
lank pale hair hanging to his collar. “Mister,” he said, “we
promise you won’t never see us again.” Then brought his Sharps up and shot
him in the belly and the man went off his mount as though he’d been
yanked from behind by a pullrope. They walked their horses to
where he lay moaning in the grass, hugging himself tight, his knees
drawn up. Butch Berry had his five-shooter in hand. He said “Hey!”
and the man cast his eyes up and Butch shot him in the head.
    The third man they were denied. He was killed in a drunken
brawl in Topeka before they could attend to him.
     
Will Anderson was much impressed by the Berry boys’ revenging
of their daddy. He suggested they join him and his sons in the horsebrokering business. The Berry boys didn’t have to think about it.
They said they’d be proud to ride with them. Then proved quick to
learn the trade and fearless in the practice of it.
    Shortly after the first frost of autumn Alston Berry woke his wife
with a strangled cry in the middle of the night and she fired the lamp
in time to see his last breath rising palely on the chill air. The Andersons helped to bury him under a wide oak overlooking Wabaunsee
Creek on a day denied all color by a leaden sky.