It was plain that if we didn’t leave Kansas we would all end up either shot or hanged; Flying Jacket and the remaining Cherokees decided to absquatulate west to the Rockies. The five RMN men—Busque, Showalter, Fisk, Shaw, and me—decided to go with them. The last we’d heard was Sherman had taken Georgia. If there were other bands of Confederates, we’d stopped running into them. THE CHEROKEES COLLECTED a few Ute scalps but we avoided the Federals entirely, camping at tree line and generally sticking to the owl-hoot trail until one afternoon in the Bayou Salado we chassed into a small regiment. Normally this would have sent us scurrying over the next ridge, but there were two dozen wagons for only a few hundred men, and they all had eight-mule hitches, and this was not lost on Flying Jacket, either. We hunkered in the rocks and watched them. “They are pulling something heavy,” he said. I stayed quiet. I knew exactly what they were carrying but unless Flying Jacket agreed with me, it was pointless.
