Author: Ron Hansen
Category: Western
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Bob said, ‘I think they’ve got us in a disadvantageous position. We might do better if we’re shorter.’
So we jumped down into silt as deep as our ankles. Bob stood inside the clumped roots of a tree. I crouched in a green pool of water the size of a tablecloth. The others were dispersed.
‘I’m gettin’ kind of sleepy,’ said Newcomb, but only McElhanie laughed.
Then there was Spanish shouting and the waving of pistols and they charged straight at us with what the dime novelists call bloodcurdling howls. The Mexicans lowered their pistols and their arms flew up as they fired and chunks of cliff exploded onto the hides of our horses, which skittered and walked, eyes bulging. McElhanie let go the first shot from the gang; then Bob and I and Newcomb and Bryant fired and the Mexicans’ wrists jerked high as they answered and brought their horses up again and turned them this way and that.
Holes were being kicked out of the dirt cliff and one of the Mexican horses collapsed when Bryant’s shot split its hoof apart. I aimed at the throat of a man with crossed bandoliers and pressed the trigger and struck him instead in the thigh. The skin burst out like a rosette and the man reached for it, wheeling his horse.
Then a stray bullet from the posse whanged off a skillet strapped to the pack mule and ripped into my right shoulder. The force of it knocked me off my knees and I sat down in the water looking at my pain. It felt like I’d been slammed in the arm with a crowbar. Blood was rolling through my fingers.
Bob asked if I was okay and when I nodded my brother shouted, ‘What’d’ya say we attack!’ and he rushed at the men on foot, hurdling over the dead trees.
The Mexicans were emptying their cylinders and reloading as their horses jittered and bucked, and then the Dalton gang swung up onto their own horses and raked them hard with their spurs, screaming as they turned the posse into retreat and started up a chase. They fired now with their pistols, and one of Bob’s .45 slugs plowed into the neck of a pony, bringing it down. The rider squirmed out from under it and limped as he fired his cylinder up. Three men ducked down behind the heads of their horses and rode east and the man shot down doubled up with a man in a black stetson and soon the cantina’s halfhearted posse was gone, leaving faster than they came.
McElhanie whooped and howled; Newcomb swaggered on his boot heels yelling names in their direction; Bryant tethered the horses and put away the limping one he’d ruined. Bob wiped his pistol against his pants leg to smear the gun-powder off, then pressed it hot against my neck. ‘Feel that,’ he said. ‘It’s on fire.’
I said, ‘I take it we’ve scattered them.’
‘The wicked flee where none pursueth,’ said Bob.
I had my coat and shirt off and was pouring a canteen of water over my wound. The skin was so torn it was lacy. Blood was rushing down like a sleeve.
Bob crouched and worried over the hole, picking bits of shirt and thread out of it. ‘I’d say you earned your paycheck, Em.’
I wiped at the hole with my shirt cuff. ‘I can read it with my fingers, Bob. The slug’s as clear as a jawbreaker in your cheek. Hot fire and a sharp knife and whiskey’s all I need.’
‘That’s how I picture it.’
Word got to City Marshal Canty when he was having breakfast. ‘Well, don’t that beat all,’ he said. He ordered another cup of coffee, then set about getting reliable men for a posse. And he was so upset that it was almost noon before he’d even got a saddle on his horse. The day just seemed to drag by.
Miss Eugenia Moore left Silver City that Sunday afternoon in a buckboard and team she rented but would never return. Her valuables were in hat boxes. She stopped at an abandoned squatter’s shack and put on a blue cavalry shirt and tan suede trousers and wore a headband without a hat. She clucked the team along a vacant road that went toward the Oklahoma Territory, and stopped for two men who were standing by their horses, rolling cigarettes with a bag of Bull Durham tobacco. One was Blackface Charley Bryant, the other Emmett Dalton. My arm was in a sling and I winced whenever I moved. I climbed up to the front with her while Bryant lay down in the back and smoked.
I said, ‘Bob and McElhanie have the pack mule and six hundred dollars. They’re heading west by train to my brother Bill’s place near Paso Robles, California. He said he’ll send for you when he’s established out there. I’d be with them except I got torn up by a greasy Mexican. Got me in the shoulder.’
Eugenia frowned sympathetically. ‘Anyone else would be flat on his back right now.’
I didn’t say anything. I merely stared at the blank terrain as we jostled east toward Jim Riley’s isolated ranch where the three of us would hole up that winter while Newcomb went back to his homestead claim near Guthrie.
I slunk down in my coat that night with my shoulder nagging me with a pain as sharp as the squeal of a saw blade finding a nail in the board. I couldn’t catnap; I couldn’t imagine the pale, naked women I’d seen on McElhanie’s deck of playing cards; all I could do was remember the smell of the oiled gun stock against my cheek and the blue glint of my rifle barrel as I swung it at the rearing horse of the man with crossed bandoliers. And it only struck me then, in that complaining buckboard, what scary things these outlaw notions were. Besieged as we’d been it seemed the most natural, sensible idea in the world to aim a shot at the throat of a man I had no argument with minutes before, and my finger sought the trigger with no more heed than you’d give to an itch near your eye.
I looked at Bryant who was hunched next to me then, driving the team, slapping the reins on the rump of a horse while Miss Moore curled in sleep under a blanket pulled out of a hatbox. And for want of conversation I said, ‘Where the bullet went in you can see blue and red and a smatter of white which is bone. I think it’s going to scar up real good.’
7
Grattan Dalton had by then arrived at my brother Bill’s wheat ranch but he did not stay long. His sister-in-law complained of him, as did brother Littleton’s wife, so he packed a duffel bag and moved to the Grand Central Hotel in Fresno where the furniture was not so frail and he could poke three-dollar whores in his room and drink until his forehead struck the table.
His occupation was gambler in those days. He would sidle up to strangers in the bar, anyone with striped pants or checkered vest, and he’d be amiable for about an hour, grinning with brown teeth. Then Grat would haul the man to a gaming table where he cheated brazenly, like it was cards of a higher intellect he played. Those who argued with his calls he glowered at until they got up out of their chairs and departed. He bashed one man in the head with a cuspidor, then dragged him outside where he slammed the man’s mouth against a wood curb. The man rolled bloody but the teeth stayed there. Looked like someone had dropped a white bracelet. The bartender, Patrick J. Conway, Grattan’s sometime friend, made sure the fearsome story got around and my brother’s winnings improved measurably. Grat paid Conway ten percent.
But my brother began to notice a hotel resident who sat in one of the Queen Anne chairs and smoked a long cigar down to a stub each night, watching Grat at five-card stud. He was a large man with a black mustache and a face made ugly with brown cancers on his cheeks that were eating into the pink. They were wet and he dabbed at them with a handkerchief. He lived not much longer than Grat did.
One evening the man put a penny down and picked up the Fresno paper and read it front to back, twelve pages. Then he folded it and slapped it down to the floor and walked over to Grat’s empty table and sat down. Grat was shuffling cards.
‘What game is it you’re playing, Mr. Dalton?’
‘I know ’em all. What’s yer pleasure?’
The man smiled and leaned forward with his hands under the table. Grat felt the barrel of a pistol punch him hard in the crotch. He groaned and snatched for the gun but the hammer clicked back.
The man said, ‘Woman once asked me what that felt like, getting punched like that in the oysters. I said it was close to having your eyeball poked with a spoon. Is that pretty accurate?’
The man said, ‘My name is William Smith, Chief of Special Detectives for the Southern Pacific Railroad. I am not pleasant to look at and more unpleasant to deal with. That’s my word of caution. You are one of the Dalton boys. Railroad circulars say you’ve had yourselves quite a time back east in the territories, stealing and rustling and such. I hear you are cousins to Cole Younger and that you used to be lawmen. I gotta say that with a combination like that I trust you no farther than I can spit.’
Grat said, ‘I wonder if you could withdraw your pistol? I’m gettin’ a bit distracted.’
Detective Smith sat back and said, ‘Mr. Leland Stanford’s Southern Pacific Railroad and the Wells Fargo Express Company lost twelve thousand dollars to bandits in Pixley in 1889, and another twenty thousand this last year. I consider both them robberies blemishes more serious to me than this meal of a face. They are my very personal shame and I’ll entertain no more. I want that understood. If I see you close to one of my trains I’ll blow a hole through your head.’
Grat smiled and leaned forward with his cheeks on his fists. ‘Now you may impress hobos and baggage clerks and little boys throwing dirt clods with that kind of slice-yer-pecker-off skit, but I have bit off earlobes and swallowed them, so you’ll excuse me if the hot piss is not exactly running down my leg.’
The SP’s Mr. Smith got up from his chair and put the nickel-plated pistol in his belt holster. ‘I had already heard you were stupid.’
Grat was not the only Dalton observed by Smith in California. He watched our brother Littleton, who was much older and. harmless as coveralls, and after Bob and McElhanie arrived in November, he watched them in cousin Sam Oldham’s house near Kingsburg. McElhanie he swore was Emmett Dalton using an alias. I guess we looked a little alike. Also, Smith watched my brother Bill Dalton, figuring him the most dangerous.
William Marion Dalton was six feet tall and twenty-eight years old in 1891, seven years older than Bob was, two years younger than Grat. He’d married, in 1883, a rich girl from Merced County named Jenny Blivens, daughter to a reaper. Bill was a happy man with a quick wink and a slap on the back and a memory for names, a man with blue eyes and great political ambitions and a chin beard like the martyred President Lincoln. He could talk like an editorial and he was as well-liked in Clovis and Paso Robles as the class clown in a boys’ school. He considered railroads the enemy. They were the ‘they’ in all his sentences. He’d been the campaign manager for Ed O’Neill when he won the job of sheriff for Fresno County on the anti-railroad ticket; and he was the boy-I-never-had to the respected criminal lawyer T.W. Breckinridge.
He had both those men and their wives over for a dinner of roast pork and rhubarb pie; then he kissed his children in their beds and sat in the front room with his friends and smoked green cigars while the women washed the dishes and sang hymns. The men discussed a try for the seat in the California Assembly. Bill could run as a Democrat or as a Populist, with the likely financial backing of Adolph Sutro, the railroad pamphleteer. My brother Bill rolled the cigar in his mouth and listened to himself being praised.
Then Mr. Smith of the Southern Pacific knocked warily at the door and stood there all shoulders and eyebrows when my brother Bill opened it. Bill grinned at him. ‘You a voter?’
Mr. Smith identified himself and Bill joked that he’d let him in anyway and the chief of security sat to the front of a pulled-out dining room chair with a handkerchief pressed to his face. Lawyer Breckinridge poured himself some bourbon and stood to the side, observing, and Sheriff O’Neill, whose face was so much nose he had the nickname of Mouse as a boy, kept a simple conversation going with Smith about police work. He asked how the Southern Pacific was doing in terms of profits. He asked if they’d determined who the perpetrators of the last two robberies were. Breckinridge brought over a drink for Bill and sat down. Both Bill and the lawyer were listening like they had nothing better to do. O’Neill asked if the railroad had taken any further precautionary measures to stop the looting of express cars.
Smith said, ‘We are keeping a close eye on suspects; that’s the main thing.’
‘Ah,’ said Breckinridge. ‘Good.’
Detective Smith turned toward my brother Bill and said, ‘There’s a lot that’s not being said here, so I’m going to get it over with. I predict a brilliant future for you, Dalton. You might even be president some day. Just stay clear of your brothers.’
‘Nothing wrong with them,’ said Bill. ‘They’re just young.’
‘They’re brash and they’re heedless and they ain’t gonna get much older,’ said Smith, who got up from his chair and left.
My brother Bob and Bill McElhanie had started out sleeping in my brother Littleton’s fruit cellar. Littleton was in his middle thirties then but acting even older. He had a stern wife and a black beard that made him look Mormon, and he hardly talked at all and the couple went to bed each night at eight. Bob decided it felt like purgatory, so the two younger men kept mostly to cousin Sam Oldham’s two-storey house near Kingsburg, playing rummy and nine-point pitch or walking alongside girls they didn’t know, introducing themselves. They went to a Saturday night dance at the Brick Hotel and lounged against the women’s side of the ballroom like tough customers, with pistols tucked under their belts and placed just-so to look like erections. My brother was interrupted in a dance by an oily city councilman and two others who let him know that gun-toters and thugs weren’t welcome in their town, and Bob got into a fistfight later on with two teamsters and woke in the morning on a pillow crusty with blood.
The next day Bob and McElhanie gave up on Kingsburg and rode their horses up the gangplanks into a cattle car and then sat forward in the smoker as train Number 17, known as the Atlantic Express, made its regular run from San Francisco to Los Angeles. They stayed at a health resort two days, taking steam baths and drinking mineral water and bowling on a green lawn. Bob wrote a letter to Eugenia Moore that he mailed to Jim Riley’s ranch. They ate oranges picked off a tree and rolled up the legs of their suit pants to wade into the Pacific. McElhanie walked into the ocean as far as his knees and turned to my brother, grinning. ‘I’d say this here is a major accomplishment for a simple Arkansas cowhand.’
‘William,’ said Bob, ‘you’re going to have along happy life.’
When they returned to brother Bill’s house, Bob gave his nieces dolls with heads of porcelain and mailed our mother two fifty-dollar bills with the face of Ulysses S. Grant on the front.
Sheriff O’Neill didn’t show for Christmas dinner though he’d previously accepted, and lawyer Breckinridge stood in the doorway only long enough to see that Bob was there and leave his presents under the tree.
‘What is it we’ve got that’s catching?’ asked Bob.
Bill said, ‘You’re Satan’s tools, that’s all.’
Coming back from the outhouse wearing just trousers one morning, Bob saw a man with purple cancer on his face sitting on a horse and staring at him, but the man rode off when Bob stared back. My brother walked through the kitchen buttoning on a shirt and saw that Bill was standing at the living room window with the lace curtains pulled aside. Bill said, ‘I think it’s time you left us.’
They did. They rode to a railroad siding in Tulare County where they made a camp among fruit trees and read borrowed books with pages so thin you could see your fingers through them. Bob would get bored after ten or twelve pages and search in his sack for another. Grat brought him a letter in red ink mailed six weeks earlier by Eugenia Moore who was signing her name Daisy Bryant. She said she was weary from playing house and mother-me-do with all the ‘cowboys with six hands’ on Jim Riley’s ranch.
She said it was sleeting against a window and she was writing by candlelight and she missed him terribly. Bob read the letter aloud to McElhanie; then he had my brother Bill read it to him. When they rode into Fresno for the weekend in February, Bob left behind a pair of cracked leather spurs by the fire. One of the sta
r rowels was so rusted it wouldn’t turn. The spurs became evidence.
Evidence because on February 6, 1891, the Southern Pacific’s Atlantic Express was boarded by three masked bandits at the water stop of Alila. It was not us, but the Daltons were blamed. The best proof of our innocence was the flummoxed method of the bandits, which was never characteristic of any of our jobs. No money was lost because the engineer fired four shots at the robbers who got shook and leaped off the car into weeds and threw bullets hither and thither, like the guns were loose in their hands. The fireman was struck in the stomach before they escaped to their horses and he died the next afternoon spitting blood into a pan.
The Southern Pacific dedicated Special Agent W.E. Hickey to investigate the robbery attempt and murder, and Detective Will Smith was assigned as his special assistant. Smith hadn’t even begun his investigation when he sat at a rolltop desk in the Fresno railroad yards composing a telegraph message to Hickey in San Francisco. After the words MAJOR SUSPECTS: he wrote: Grattan Dalton, William Marion Dalton, Robert Renick Dalton, Emmett Dalton, Jack Parker.
Parker was the brand name of the fountain pen he wrote with.
My brother Bob and McElhanie, the boy resembling me by a little, were then staying at the Grand Central Hotel in Fresno with Grat, gambling most of each day until the middle of March, and they were having breakfast at a linen-covered table when the bartender, Grat’s friend, who also lived there, folded a piece of toast in his mouth and walked over. He talked to Grat about the Alila holdup and the manhunt for the murderers. He kept saying, ‘I wonder who it could be?’ Before he started his ten-hour shift at two, bartender Conway ambled over to Sheriff Ed O’Neill’s office where he read again the circular on the wall that offered ‘a reward of $5,000.00 for the arrest and convictions of all parties concerned in the attempted robbery.’