Author: Ron Hansen
Category: Western
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Meanwhile, Smith’s men sat on their horses in front of Bill’s house, rolling cigarettes and smoking and writing into tablets. They followed Grat everywhere. Sheriff O’Neill arrested him on March 3rd, transporting Grat at Southern Pacific expense to the security offices in San Francisco. There, the San Francisco Examiner claimed, two other men were also interrogated: Cole Dalton and Jack Parker. This was make-believe.
Bill could only sit at his kitchen table with lawyer Breckinridge and fume as he read the local papers. He said, ‘Do you think we can pull this one out of the fire?’
‘It’s really too early to tell.’
Bob, who’d always known when to leave, checked out of the Grand Central Hotel and lived for some weeks in the livery barn of a town where wines were made. McElhanie worked for a while tying grape vines up to wood posts.
Grat was released in San Francisco and picked up again in Fresno by William Smith, who thought the harassment would prompt the rest of the gang into revealing themselves. When that didn’t happen and Smith tired of talking to my brother, he opened the jail door and Grat walked free to a whorehouse where he spent the night, and then to a shoe-shine stand and the hotel saloon. His erstwhile friend, bartender Conway, put on his white apron and gave Grat five free shots of whiskey. He said, ‘You did it, didn’t ya. You can tell me. You boarded that train in Alila. The description matches you to a T.’
Grat swallowed the last of his whiskey.
Conway lifted a pistol from under the bar. ‘Look what I have in my hand here.’
‘I think I’ve seen one of them things before,’ said Grat. ‘Some kind of noisemaker, ain’t it?’
Conway’s left hand slapped a card on the bar and he read from it. ‘I’m making a citizen’s arrest of you, Grattan Dalton, for the attempted robbery of train 17 on the night of February 6th.’
Grat shrugged and got off the bar stool and waited as Conway stripped off his apron and left the pistol beside the cash register and walked the accused man down the street.
That evening Detective Smith, acting on information supplied by Ed O’Neill, rode out to Clovis with two deputies and read an arrest warrant to Bill, who buttoned on a suit coat and kissed Jenny and his children and walked out smiling, with his hands way over his head. He said hello to one deputy, asked him how his hammer was hanging.
Smith took Bill’s four-year-old son out to the back porch, unwrapped a peppermint for him, and asked the boy where his uncle Bob was. I never figured out where the boy got the notion but he answered, ‘Uncle Bob’s gone to Seattle,’ and that seemed gospel truth to Smith. The manhunt never got close to Bob.
My brother Bill and his escorts got onto their horses and rode them in a walk to the county jail in Visalia. There Smith remanded Bill again for a newspaper reporter by reading aloud the arrest warrant under the yellow light of a gas lamp.
Bill said, ‘I sure wish I could read like you do, Smith. I bet you’ve got the women eating right out of your hand.’
The evidence against Bill was a pair of cracked leather spurs said to belong to him and found in a Dalton hideout. He and Grat were indicted as accessories before the fact since each could be placed in the fifty-mile vicinity of Alila on the February night of the crime. Bob and his sidekick, the named principals, read of this in a March 26th railroad circular supplementing that of late February and reducing the amount of the reward to $3,600.00. They did not immediately fly, but fed their horses oats and corn and spent the afternoon leaning on sticks at a billiards table. They ate a large dinner at a restaurant and did not pay the bill and by eight o’clock were riding east out of California.
McElhanie and the lord of the Dalton gang were still riding through the Mojave desert toward Needles with their shirts off and red handkerchiefs on their heads, when my brothers Grat and Bill were led into a courtroom of dark oiled wood on April 6th. Presiding was Judge Wheaton A. Gray, a friend of Bill’s and brother-in-law to the lawyer for the defense, T.W. Breckinridge. The attorney pleaded them not guilty and asked that Bill be released on his own recognizance.
‘I admit some sympathy with your case,’ said Gray, ‘but I can’t be any more partial with friends than I am with strangers. Bail is four thousand dollars.’
Bill didn’t have the money so he returned to jail with Grat. Trial was set for May 18th and then postponed to June. Meaningless evidence was accumulated and tagged as exhibits for the case. Two horses were produced that had been found roaming loose, and these were said to be those used for the getaway after the Alila raid.
‘Oh, come now,’ Breckinridge said, but that was all. He assumed the trial would never occur, and he assigned the preparation of the case to one of his legal assistants.
Since our retreat from the New Mexico Territory, Bryant, Miss Moore, and myself had stayed at Jim Riley’s place sixty miles southwest of Kingfisher, a white-painted, three-storey, ten-gabled house with scrolls and gingerbread for the porch trimmings. Riley was a huge, hearty, blustering man with a sudden laugh that was loud as a slamming door. He had a dark squaw wife who seemed to stand all day at a kettle in the kitchen and slipped through the house barefoot, holding her skirts up over her knees.
Grattan had been Riley’s go-between at selling cases of muddy whiskey to the Indians, and Riley made such a profit in the transaction that he felt beholden to every Dalton. So for a dollar a week he put each of us three up in what an eastern designer had intended as a music room: a long, sunny, yellow expanse of seven windows and oak planking in which Bryant hammered up clotheslines and Eugenia pinned up privacy blankets.
Bryant slept on a floor mattress striped like engineer coveralls and stained so bad I half expected it to sprout vegetables in the spring. I had an iron bunk and a tatter-crossed quilt and a rocking chair with a forest glade and piping nymphs carved into the headpiece. I could sit for hours in that chair and watch snow softly attach itself to the mullions of the window or listen to Eugenia’s pen scratch at a letter to my brother Bob.
She kept mostly to herself that winter in that house. I’d nudge her privacy blanket up with my toe as I lay on my bunk, and see the blond hair on her ankles as she walked across the room to her drop-leaf table, see a green buttoned shoe pump up and down at her treadle sewing machine, see her step naked out of the pool of her fallen robe and hear her twist a sponge into her white ironstone basin as bathwater speckled the floor and balled up on a dropped magazine. On Saturdays she was allowed the claw -and-ball bathtub off the kitchen, and after supper she and I smoked black cheroots together while she read to me. Cowboys from the bunkhouse visited Miss Moore constantly, presenting her with boxes of candy and dates and dried fruit, conducting themselves as if they had an audience with the queen. It was enough for them to hear a lady’s voice and kiss her hand when they left, but some would get drunk and incautious and I’d have to brain them with a bronze ashtray that bore the name of the Hotel Savoy.
My brothers in California sent letters and telegrams about the railroad frame-up, so Eugenia was not very much surprised in March when Deputy Marshal Ransom Payne stopped by to interrogate Riley as to the whereabouts of Newcomb and Bryant and McElhanie, who’d been seen once or twice on his spread. Eugenia was polishing silverware and had the sleeves of her dress rolled past her elbows and she brushed her yellow hair off her forehead as she pulled open the door for Payne, who mistook her for Daisy Bryant, Blackface Charley’s sister, an identification he never swayed from unto the very last.
Payne was a tall, vain man born in Iowa and educated in Kentucky, a former real-estate agent who was forty years old and considered himself a rake. His pride was a waxed blond mustache that was wide as his ears, and when he sat in the parlor to make his inquiries, he was careful of the crease in his pants. Eugenia made tea and he talked of himself for two hours, mentioning his investigation of the Dalton gang for a California railroad. And he visited her again and again, giving her iris bulbs, a mezzotint of the new Eiffel Tower in Paris, a chocolate Easter egg that you could hold to your eye to vi
ew a handsome Jesus sitting among small children, and withal Eugenia got such complete information from Payne about the troubles in California that we were more enlightened one thousand miles away than any of the alleged conspirators.
In April I’d almost resolved to board a train for Fresno or San Francisco and turn myself in to Special Agent Hickey as the vaunted Emmett Dalton and thereby confuse the prosecution’s case, but word came to Miss Moore via Ransom Payne that Bob Dalton had escaped the state, and I waited for his opinion, staring at the ceiling, flat on my back, listening to Bryant pare his toenails with a knife or mutter nonsense about a man named Esterhazy or take his pistol apart and assemble it, with a pocket watch near his knee; sixteen reconstructions in an hour was his best time.
By then I had resumed courting Julia Johnson and I didn’t hanker to leave her again, for she was not so moon-eyed or convinced about Emmett Dalton after she heard I robbed the cantina. I’d ride a horse on slick roads to Bartlesville and shamble up to her porch steps in goat hair chaps that were snaggled with mud, and mud splattered on me like freckles and moles. And with an idiot’s grin spreading over my face, I’d scratch my hat-matted hair and say, ‘I’m a regular tar baby, ain’t I.’
I’d wash in her kitchen and smear her dish towels drying my hands and I’d scatter cookie crumbs saying how pretty she was. A pharmacist from town would stop by in a spotless, pencil-striped suit to ask Julia to a church social, or an Army surveyor wearing dress blues and a sword would return from someone’s party with a pint carton of melting ice cream, and he’d skewer me with one of those haughty first lieutenant looks before he galloped away. She was flattered and wooed by every unmarried man in the district and I was no woman’s prize. I was a raw, scruffy, clumsy ranch hand, without education, without a cent, without even swarthy good looks, and with little more than my brothers’ wanted posters to offer the girl I yearned for. I was infected by Julia’s heartsickness. I worried so much over what we’d talk about that I’d outline conversations in advance and practice fancy ways of putting news about sorghum and down spouts and rim-fire cartridges. I’d work up an enlarged vocabulary with Eugenia, then insert the words cleverly in my spiel: ‘But I’m being verbose, aren’t I?’ I said. And yawning in my chair I’d say, ‘The cold weather months really bring on the ennui.’
So it might have been out of desperation that I invited Julia down to the ranch where she could meet Bob’s woman, Miss Eugenia Moore, whom I’d talked so much about. They were as different as oil and vinegar but I thought that would merely make them provocative and amusing to each other. That was not one of my champeen ideas. I did not win the nickel with that one. Riley had taken his squaw to a Dallas rodeo and Bryant was off experimenting with whores, so we had the house to ourselves. I hung around in the kitchen while Julia and Eugenia tried to cook an extravagant dinner, but they kept colliding with each other. Miss Johnson bumped Miss Moore’s tin measuring cups of seasonings onto the floor; Miss Moore banged Miss Johnson’s saucepan off a hot plate with a cauldron of water she wanted to boil. They each seemed to have designs on the same tablespoon, the same ladle, the same cannister of salt, and what started off with some good-natured titters turned frosty after an hour until Eugenia snapped, ‘Will you please get out of my way?’
We dined at a polished table that had a purple color to it. The wallpaper insisted that roses bloomed out of roses, and overhead there was a glass chandelier that was adrip with white candle wax. I played the jolly old king with ladies at right and left. They’d smile at me but rarely lifted their heads to see the provocative woman across the way, and when the table talk diminished to a five-minute lull of clinking knives and forks, Eugenia decided to fill it with confessions about her past.
She said, ‘I was expelled from Holden College in Missouri for moral turpitude. I was discovered flagrante delicto—’
‘I don’t know what those words mean,’ I said.
‘Latin,’ she said. ‘“While the crime is blazing.” The man was a bachelor geography teacher with a beard large as a neck bib. He took me down to a refectory table, and rucked my skirt up to my shoulders, and traced me with clammy hands. My chief regret about our brief encounter is that he heard footsteps and panicked before I could be defiled.’
Somewhere in the midst of that I tried laughing, ‘Ho ho ho,’ but no one else seemed even tickled, and Julia’s face was on fire.
Miss Moore continued, ‘I managed my fall from grace soon after that, then tried to restore my reputation by becoming a schoolteacher in Oklahoma, but found it ungratifying. Then I cohabited with an Indian gambler named Jesse White Wings who instructed me in horse thievery. And I learned how to walk out of jail scot-free simply by consenting to a turnkey’s secret wish. Sometimes an abandoned pose was enough. None of it struck me as very distasteful.’
‘My! So many skills,’ Julia said. ‘I guess you’ll never lack an occupation.’
‘Ho ho ho,’ I said.
Eugenia said, ‘I suppose I never considered virginity an enviable condition; and innocence seems no more blissful than admitting you can’t read. I don’t want to be one of those sweet, blank, coddled girls whose highest ambition is their impregnable chastity.’
I made a deathbed appeal with my eyes but Miss Moore must have assumed it was the result of Julia’s cooking because she went on, ‘I don’t want to be one of those puling, simpering, sterile aunts who worry over the state of their souls if they let the dishes sit. The only approval I want is my own.’
It had crossed my mind by this time that my special evening might very well be crumbling, and I sought to save it by exercising one of my learned words. ‘I’m sorry you’ve taken such umbrage, Eugenia,’ I said.
But then Julia rushed in. ‘I suppose you want excitement, don’t you? You’re one of those women who can’t stand to be bored, who wish life could be more interesting. I’m frankly sick of things happening every second. Why does everyone have to be famous? Why do they want their names in the papers? What’s so wonderful about being fascinating? I think I’d rather be sweet and blank and coddled and not fuss so much about recognition.’
‘Landsakes,’ I said. ‘Nothing I like more than a spirited discussion.’
Eugenia ignored me and said, ‘Oh dear, I’ve disturbed you, haven’t I? I’ve spoiled your appetite. Pity me for my bad manners. I believe I’d better excuse myself now and go tantalize the bunkhouse.’
She smiled at me when she got up from the table and as she walked down the hall I could hear her exclaim like the most soulful tragedian, ‘Evil! I embrace you!’
‘Well!’ I said. ‘Lot of food for thought tonight, ay Julia?’
Julia was staring at her plate and making an effort not to cry.
I said, ‘I think if you made an inventory you’d find you two really have a lot in common. You’ve got different philosophies, is all.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I think she just wishes Bob was here.’
I reckoned that was true. My brother there would have been a relief to many people. In late April, Bob and McElhanie made it to the Arizona border and slid their horses down the orange west banks of the Colorado River. They let them drink and crop at the weeds, then pulled them into the river and gripped the saddle horns and lost a mile with the currents as the horses lurched and coughed and swam scared across the red river, leaving California.
The boys uncinched the saddles and lay back in the river grass on their elbows while the horses rolled in the dust. McElhanie said, ‘My brain’s too awkward for robbery, Bob. My hands are only happy with tools.’
‘What’s that mean?’
‘I’m tired of the chase, is what I’m saying. My stomach’s all topsy-turvy.’
‘You want to split up,’ said Bob.
‘That’s it,’ said McElhanie. ‘You put the hammer square on the head of the nail.’
So they sold their horses to a man in a shepherd’s kraal and hopped a train for the Oklahoma Territory where the two split up. ‘The Narrow Gauge Kid’ h
iked to Arkansas where he would eventually work a small farm and die in his bed with a kitten under his hand and the radio on in the kitchen.
Bob would have gone to the family home in Kingfisher except he’d crouched in the top limbs of a sixty-foot cotton-wood tree all of one afternoon and saw that he was being trailed across the badlands by a railroad detective in a dark suit and gray businessman’s stetson who would kneel by a track and look around and pack down his pipe with a match stick.
So instead Bob sequestered himself in a twenty-five-cent room in the ex-slave settlement of Dover, Oklahoma. Cowhands in flophats and raincoats would canter their horses down the main street, frowning and spitting and acting like nobility, but otherwise it was dark men in suspenders and rough wool shirts, dark women in bandanas, and children with their hair tied who’d throw things at Bob and run. My mother visited him once in the afternoon behind the Free Will Baptist church. They linked arms and strolled under blossoming trees and she smiled as he told her of Littleton and Bill and her grandchildren. Her only comment about money and work with him was that they were hiring in the coal mines.
Bob stopped shaving and took up snooker with some of the males and paid for a teenaged girl who smelled like a cellar floor and who had straightened her hair with a clothing iron.
He walked back from snooker one night and saw the curtains flying out the window of his upper room. He took the stairs three at a time, his pistol cocked high at his shoulder, and pushed the open door to see Eugenia Moore smoking a cigarette by the window, a kerosene lamp the only light. She turned and smiled and unbuttoned her blouse as she walked to him. ‘I hope you haven’t used yourself up.’
8
Afterwards they sat in the narrow bed with a bottle of red California wine Bob had wrapped in a gunny-sack, and the two of them made plans. He said he was tired of being poor and he was tired of being pushed around and he wanted to make a strike of some kind instead of always reacting to whatever the railroads did. She said Bryant and Newcomb were hungry enough for anything, that it was Emmett who needed convincing, but she had an inkling I wanted to make a name for myself, make a haul that would guarantee lots of money so I could stop mewling about it.