Author: Ron Hansen
Category: Western
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The next morning they took the train to Wharton, Bob looking shaved and clean in the coach with a saddle under his boot and a horse in the cattle car, Eugenia in the smoking car dressed in Bob’s photographed suit, her bleached hair slicked back to the color brown with pomade. She looked like a lady’s man.
Bob sat on the bench in front of the depot in Wharton, reading the local newspaper, and the man he got off with went inside to talk to the local express agent. ‘Hello!’ Miss Moore said loudly, but that was all Bob could hear. His horse was coaxed down the ramp from the slatted car. He watered it and wiped the sleep out of its eyes and threw on a blanket and saddle. And the man who was wearing his suit came out of the office and crossed to the water pump with a ladle. Bob walked over with a canteen. ‘What’s happening in there?’
Eugenia said, ‘I told him I was a telegraph officer from New York; that the western air was medication for my lungs. He says there will be a shipment of currency on the Santa Fe–Texas Express, stopping in Wharton at ten-thirty on the ninth. Marshal Payne admitted the same thing; said he’ll be riding with it as escort.’ She drank water and wiped her mouth crude as a man and smiled. ‘The agent looked a little scornful. I fear he thinks I’m effeminate.’
Bob smiled and put the stopper on his canteen.
She said, ‘He doesn’t know me like you do.’
That was May 6th. On the 9th Bob and I and Newcomb and Bryant rode the hard dirt highway from Newcomb’s shack near Guthrie to the stockyards south of Wharton, which was a cow town of five or six stores made of foot-wide unpainted planks. It is bigger now; named Perry. The four of us wore chambray shirts and chaps with the oil worn off and twisted red bandanas at our necks. We hung our spurs on the saddle horns and tied up our horses at the railroad cattle pens and walked to the tracks at ten o’clock, loading our revolvers in the darker side of buildings.
Bryant limped badly, swinging his leg with each step. He already had his mask up over his nose, which would’ve been a giveaway had anybody been up in the town. He noticed Bob staring at his infirmity and said, ‘I got the whore disease. My balls are swoll up like fists and my fly is caked green in the morning with pus. Brings tears to my eyes when I piss. They tell me you get suppurating sores and cankers like Bing cherries. I’d want my jaw blown off with a ten-gauge rather than worsen.’ He glanced at Bob. ‘Do you see what I’m saying?’
Bob said, ‘You tell me when you want it finished and we’ll walk behind the barn together. But don’t do anything stupid just so you can exit under fire.’
Bryant didn’t know what to do with his face so he smiled underneath his bandana.
‘Don’t kill anyone, understand? If you want to be shot dead, I’ll do it. I don’t need a murder charge tacked onto everything else.’
He stared at Bryant until he turned. Bryant said, ‘Hell, I wouldn’t want to offend anybody. Not for anything.’
Bitter Creek and I had walked on to the depot. A male passenger with stains on his clothes was asleep on the varnished bench. A boy who was the night station attendant and telegraph operator, whose name has not survived, was buffing his Sunday shoes. Newcomb asked for the ladle Eugenia had used and walked out to the pump, scouting; I looked at the reward posters for three other men and then a yellowed one for the Daltons. I walked over to the counter and folded my arms and leaned against it. ‘Pretty quiet,’ I said.
The boy looked at the shoe his hand was wearing as he buffed it. ‘You got your ticket?’
I didn’t answer. Newcomb walked back in, wiping water from his red mustache and goatee, and then the two of us left.
Newcomb said, ‘I think the lawmen must go to bed here at darn near eight o’clock. Walked all the way down the main street and never even heard a bed squeak.’
I looked down at him and said, ‘How do you suppose he got to be a ticket agent and not even sixteen years old?’
‘Maybe it’s easy, Emmett. Maybe there was a “Help Wanted” sign. Should I get you a job application?’
‘Seems like a good life to me. He’s got himself a blue suit of clothes at home I bet. Plus a railroad pension. I bet he’s got a black lunch box he carries to work. I don’t believe I’d mind that at all.’
Bryant was north on the road bed, squatting near the interlocking machine at the double-track junction, smoking a brown cigarette. Bob leaned against the mailbag post, his pocket watch open in his hand. I walked over next to him while Newcomb crossed the tracks and sat down in the soot-blackened grass, his back against a pile of taken-up ties.
My brother stared off down the tracks where the Santa Fe would come from. ‘I can remember the first time I rode a train. Farmers stopped their plows and wives came out of their houses, drying their hands on their aprons. Children stood in fields of yellow grass and waved until their arms got tired.’
I said, ‘Won’t that be something when the news gets back to California? Won’t those railroad detectives be peeved? Grat will laugh so hard he’ll cry.’
I heard the rails hum and I saw Bryant throw down his cigarette up ahead, and then I saw the train, all smokestack and smoke and cowcatcher, the white steam flying out from its brakes. The engine boiler made its chattering noise while the wheels screamed on the rails, and the stoker was hanging onto the cab rail by one hand, the other hand swinging a lantern low and then holding it up to see Bryant. Newcomb ran out of the grass tugging his bandana up over his nose. Bob and I lifted our bandanas up and walked onto the vibrating cinder bed and stood facing the train like gunfighters. Bob raised his pistol high over his head and fired, wincing when gunpowder stung him.
Bryant yelled, ‘Brakes!’ as the train clanked past him and he let go a shot at the firebox that rang off metal and banged into something else. Newcomb was plugging his ears at the screech of steel; then he ran alongside the locomotive and hopped up onto the footrest as it slowed. He struggled up the two-step ladder and shoved his pistol straight at the engineer’s head, striking him hard enough behind the ear to start a trickle of blood and knock him onto his right leg. Then Bob was in the cab with his red mask up and his broad hat pulled low. He slammed the stoker against the boiler and slapped him with the flat of his pistol. The stoker groaned and sat down on the floor with his cheek in his hand. Bob glared at the engineer and took him by the striped coat and swung him off the stopped locomotive. He hit the cinders stiff as a chair. I kicked the engineer off his hands and knees and pushed a boot heel down on his throat and clicked the hammer back on my pistol. I was too scared of myself to talk. The pistol quaked in my hand.
The stoker in the cab had tears in his eyes. The newspapers said he was fifty-two years old. His left cheek was as swollen as a balled-up woolen sock; his left eye was drooped and closing. He said, ‘What do you want us to do? Say something.’
‘Get down from here,’ said a masked man.
The stoker cautiously climbed down a ladder step and jumped.
Bryant was walking backwards past the passenger cars, limping like a man with a six-inch wooden shoe. He held his pistol straight out with both hands, lifting it from one window to the next. Faces ducked out of view.
After he heard Bryant’s gunshot, the Wharton ticket agent rushed out from behind the counter and suffocated the lamps. The train conductor took off his cap and sat down on his step stool, frozen. The mail car attendant, called in those days the messenger, jammed the bolt up into its seat at the top of the door and threw the double latch bolts above the handle. Then he removed the money of large denominations from the safe and stuffed the bills into a Franklin stove, where we missed them.
A tall deputy marshal in a dark, three-piece suit and waxed mustache walked down the aisle in the second class car, peering out at Bryant. He’d been reading some federal arrest warrants and he left these in his seat.
When the conductor saw the marshal’s badge he said, ‘My heart is about to erupt.’
‘My name is Ransom Payne.’ He leaned out the window and said, ‘It’s me they want, not the money.’ He opened
the door on the left side of the car and hung his large white hat on the handle and walked slow as a bridegroom into the sunflower stalks where he crouched down with his gun in his hand.
My brother and Newcomb had by then climbed the iron stairs to the green mail car, and Newcomb swung a fire axe into the door. It middled open on the second blow and Newcomb reached in to pull the bolts free.
The messenger cowered down in a far corner by a coat tree. There were varnished boxes along the right wall as they faced it, and stacked canvas bags and steamer trunks on the floor. In the center of the car was the small Franklin stove, used in the winter for heating. It was empty now except for the big money the messenger had just stuffed inside. Neither Bob nor Newcomb ever thought to look there and the messenger was later to receive a gold watch for his genius.
Bob glared at him and tapped the barrel of his pistol on the safe. ‘Open it,’ he said.
‘I can’t help you there,’ the employee said. ‘I don’t know the combination.’
Bob kept tapping the safe to annoyance.
‘The vaults are closed in Kansas City and the combinations wired down to Gainesville. I never hear a number.’
Eugenia had been told otherwise, so Bob splintered the coat tree with a bullet. A wood chip flew into the messenger’s eye. The eye turned red immediately.
‘He thinks you’re fibbing,’ Newcomb said.
The man reached for a chair back and pulled himself up and held a handkerchief at his eye socket. Newcomb unbuttoned his shirt front and unfolded a burlap sack he’d stuffed under his belt and he stood to the left of the messenger as the man moved the safe’s dial numbers around. The mechanisms dropped and the man pulled the handle down and offered Bob a large wrapped package which my brother took to be the big money but was actually waybills and canceled telegrams and newspapers torn to pieces. We would not discover the ruse until morning.
My brother pitched the bundle into the burlap sack, as he did the smaller package which was the one and two-dollar bills we eventually divvied up. Newcomb kept the heavy bag wrapped around his hand, letting the bulk of it hang by his knee.
Outside, Bryant kept the stoker and the engineer shoved down into the cinders while I tended to the getaway horses. ‘Pretend you’re snails,’ he said. He fired his pistol randomly anywhere it wanted to go. He said, ‘Your passengers are fouling themselves by now.’
I was low ranny on the job so I had to sprint down the street to the stockyard where I unwrapped the reins from the fence and pulled the horses long-necked and into a trot. Bob and tiny Newcomb were banging down the mail car stairs when I neared, Newcomb holding the filled sack aloft and grinning under his mask. The two of them swung up onto their mounts at a run, not even using the stirrups. They pushed their horses up a short cliff and over onto a road that they pounded down.
I stayed behind on my horse with my scabbard rifle shouldered, scanning the area as Bryant released the stoker and engineer and limped on over toward me.
‘Go on,’ he yelled. ‘I’ll stand the cowards off.’
‘You sure?’
Bryant spit tobacco. The scar on his face looked purple.
I kicked my horse up to the road and caught up with my brother and Newcomb in a dark farmyard among apple trees. ‘What’s taking Bryant so long?’ Bob asked.
I shrugged. ‘When Charley’s definite about something I don’t like to interfere.’
Bob frowned at me. ‘Where’d you learn words like that?’
The horses shifted and stamped and rubbed their chins on the stirrups as the three of us counted nickels and dimes and quarters from the canvas currency bag.
Bryant stood spraddle-legged on the rockbed siding, looking down the quiet train of railroad cars, a rifle in the crook of his arm. He unbuttoned his pants and pinched himself open but could only shudder a minute. He wiped his eyes with his gloved hand and lifted his left boot into the stirrup. He shoved his pistol into his holster and cradled his rifle in his arms and watched the stoker and engineer spider under a coupling to the left side of the train. People were walking inside the cars. He nudged his horse with his knees and walked it slowly past the depot, talking to himself.
The male passenger in the depot walked outside thinking the gang had disappeared. The Wharton ticket agent lit a kerosene lantern and hung it by the calendar over the telegraph key and opened up his Morse book.
Bryant saw the boy begin his signals; then he lifted his rifle some with his elbow and smashed window glass with a cartridge that slammed the boy in the ribs. His body didn’t know he was dead until he’d spun and walked backwards over a castered chair and pulled the wooden ticket slots down. The boy looked flabbergasted.
Bryant nudged his horse into a trot and never said a word about the killing so that we didn’t discover it until several days later. And then we didn’t know what to do about it. Bob made no diary entry.
After it had stayed quiet in Wharton for a minute or two, Ransom Payne got up out of the weeds and solemnly boarded the train. He was already writing reports in his head. He said, ‘That was the Dalton gang.’
The conductor stared at him.
The Dalton gang abused their horses for twenty miles; then we slowed to a walking string of four on the road south and east to Orlando, a saloon town with nineteen worn-out whores. Bryant hung his head down and tried to sleep; I played ‘Just a Closer Walk with Thee’ on my Harpoon; Bob packed some of Newcomb’s Mail Pouch tobacco under his lower lip. It looked like his tongue sitting there. The horses were wheezing and they nodded their heads with each step and sometimes just stood in their tracks to jerk the leaves off low trees.
Newcomb shouted over his shoulder, ‘You’re gonna like it at the place we’re headed, Bob. Ol Yountis, the owner, he’s got an ugly sister who eats snuff and one of the dogs barks ‘arf arf arf,’ like he’s read it in some cartoon.’
We reached the Yountis homestead at four in the morning. Two dogs that were brown with mud in the belly and legs rushed out from under the porch to tell us what the property lines were. The horses just ignored them. Bryant knocked the dog that arfed in the head with the butt of his rifle and the two canines backed up to bark and settle deep in the grass and pant.
Yountis came out with a shotgun and no clothes on at all. He had unwashed, leafy hair and hands that looked blue and teeth that were so crooked in his mouth he seemed to snarl. He peed off the edge of the porch while we pulled the saddles from our horses. Ol Yountis cupped his hand in the dogs’ water dish and wiped his eyes and face. ‘How much ya get?’ he asked.
The gang walked inside his shack and emptied the burlap sack on the table. Ol’s sister came out of her room in a gray dress, parting her black hair with her fingers, wiping black snuff from her lip. She simpered some at Newcomb, who dealt with her when he was hard up, and she started fixing breakfast as Bob tore open the big package and saw the worthless paper and threw it against a wall where it slapped apart and the pieces fluttered down.
Newcomb couldn’t believe we’d been tricked and chased down every waybill and canceled check to see that it wasn’t money. Bob ripped open the other package and saw the one and two-dollar bills and I began stacking them in piles of fifty. Yountis came out of his room in awful bib overalls and he walked out of the house in disgust when he heard the whole take was barely five hundred dollars. He made only twenty dollars of that for the rental of his pasture and our board.
Esther Yountis cooked a meal of beans and suet and pancakes and sat down on a bedroom chair as we silently ate it, smiling whenever we looked in her direction. I leaned back in my chair and said what good food it was. I believed in putting the best face on things.
She responded, ‘It’s not. Not really. But thank you anyway.’
Bob turned around in his chair to tell her that he and I used to be peace officers in the territory;. we knew the geography like it was our backyard.
She said, ‘I keep asking Ol to chop down some of these trees. I don’t think we’ve got a pretty yard at
all.’
Bob turned back to his food and that was the end of conversation except for him saying over his coffee that it didn’t matter how much money we got because we were practiced now for the next time.
Esther stacked dishes, then walked the four of us down a narrow weedy cow path. There were too many trees too close together, like mourners around a grave, and there was green moss on everything. Below the trees were green grasses, green creepers, green ivy. The dogs were bounding deep in it and hardly showed their tails. Sun slanted in like rain. The place where we camped was a small clearing caused by two slabs of sleek rock and a trickle of clear water that talked as it fell into Beaver Creek. Esther walked back with Newcomb beside her and about halfway to the shack they sat down in plants that milked when they broke, and after some persuading she removed her dress so he could do it to her.
The men were asleep under blankets when Eugenia Moore stepped her horse through the briars at noon. She was dressed as a man in buckskin pants and a wool shirt that she stripped off at the creek to wash the horse smell from her with lavender soap. Then she walked naked to Bob and slid in under the blanket and woke him up by unbuckling his belt. He smiled and they kissed without speaking. She unbuttoned his shirt and he kicked out of his pants; she unbuttoned his underwear and she let his fingers find her.
Bryant was on his side five yards away, staring. He watched them for a long time, then rolled to his other side.
Ol Yountis came down at two o’clock lugging a bushel basket against his right leg. He smiled at the man and woman under the blanket and lifted her discarded clothes out of the basket. ‘I believe these might be your’n.’