Press Webb, a Born Scout
Press Webb was a born scout crossed upon a highlander. He had the eyes of an eagle and the endurance of the red deer. He first taught himself coolness, and then he taught it to others. In traveling he did not travel twice the same road. Many more were like him in this—so practicing the same kind of woodcraft and cunning—until the enemy began to say: “That man Quantrell has a thousand eyes.”
Press Webb was ordered to take with him one day Sim Whitsett, George Maddox, Harrison Trow and Noah Webster and hide himself anywhere in the vicinity of Kansas City that would give him a good view of the main roads leading east, and a reasonably accurate insight into the comings and going of the Federal troops.
The weather was very cold. Some snow had fallen the week before and melted, and the ground was frozen again until all over the country the ground was glazed with ice and traveling was made well nigh impossible. The Guerrillas, however, prepared themselves and their horses well for the expedition. Other cavalrymen were forced to remain comparatively inactive, but Quantrell’s men were coming and going daily and killing here and there.
On the march to his field of operation, Webb overtook two Kansas infantrymen five miles west of Independence on the old Independence road. The load under which each soldier staggered proved that their foraging expedition had been successful. One had a goose, two turkeys, a sack of dried apples, some yarn socks, a basket full of eggs and the half of a cheese; while the other, more powerful or more greedy than the first—toiled slowly homeward, carrying carefully over the slippery highway a huge bag miscellaneously filled with butter, sausages, roasted and unroasted coffee, the head of a recently killed hog, some wheaten biscuits not remarkably well cooked, more cheese and probably a peck of green Jenniton apples. As Webb and his four men rode up the foragers halted and set their loads on the ground as if to rest. Piled about them, each load was about as large as a forager.
Webb remarked that they were not armed and inquired of the nearest forager—him with the dried apples—why he ventured so far from headquarters without his gun.
“There is no need of a gun,” was the reply, “because the fighting rebels are all out of the country and the stay-at-homes are all subjugated. What we want we take, and we generally want a good deal.”
“A blind man might see that,” Webb rather grimly replied, “but suppose some of Quantrell’s cut-throats were to ride up to you as we have done, stop to talk with you as we have done, draw out a pistol as I am doing this minute, cover you thus, and bid you surrender now as I do, you infernal thief and son of a thief, what would you say then?”
“Say!”—and the look of simple surprise yet cool indifference which came to the Jayhawker’s face was the strongest feature of the tragedy—“what could I say but that you are the cut-throat and I am the victim? Caught fairly, I can understand the balance. Be quick.”