Author: Ron Hansen
Category: Western
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On July 7th, the jury found Grattan Dalton guilty as charged. Breckinridge stood at once to say he’d appeal the verdict to the Supreme Court of California. He packed his briefcase and Southern Pacific Detective Will Smith stepped over the oak fence toward Grat with a handkerchief at his cheek. ‘I told you I’d land you,’ he said.
Sentencing was July 29th, then postponed until September 21st so the court reporters could type transcripts for the appeal.
So Grat was kept that summer in a sweltering jail cell with a slat bed and gray wool blanket and chamber pot and water pitcher. He’d read the Visalia Weekly Delta until his eyes hurt (not long), and then he’d just sleep on top of his bed and feel the sweat roll down his ribs; or he’d stand at the jail bars at night and spit chewing tobacco as some of the other prisoners made women of each other.
After Bryant’s death, Bob and Eugenia both left the Hennessey house to travel east, Miss Moore attending the funeral at Mulhall for the gang, then proceeding to the Oklahoma town of Wagoner thirty-five miles southeast of Tulsa. There she posed as a female reporter for Harper’s Weekly, sent there to gather articles about the territory and the end of the frontier and the last of the Old West gangs. She’d step timidly into a bank and sit on the edge of the chair in the bank president’s office, taking notes like a college girl. She had lunch with a railroad official who got tomato soup in his beard, and a senior man with the express company escorted her to a Sunday Chautauqua lecture on the lessons of ancient Greece. She sat in the shade with a parasol and he bought her lemonade. ‘I find you beautiful,’ he said.
She hired a one-horse cab to drive her four miles north to a railroad depot at Leliaetta where she sat at the one bench with a heavily mustached telegraph operator who kept brushing flies from his face. His eyebrows were black as electrician’s tape.
He showed her the water tower and track switch and coal yard and the telegraph lines with the porcelain insulators. He leaned against a tall semaphore blackened with coal dust, ‘Leliaetta’s just a flag stop. If there’s danger of any kind or mail to be picked up or passengers, well this here blade with the red glass lens is swung in front of the hanging lantern and the train stops.’
She wrote that down like her brain was a little lame. ‘So red means stop,’ she said.
‘That’s right.’ He tapped the blade with the green lens. ‘Otherwise I throw the green and the train just has to hesitate some till it clears the city limits.’
‘Green means go.’
He sighed. ‘But this is where it gets complicated. Since the Dalton gang’s been boarding trains and causing such a ruckus we switched everything around.’ He stuck his hands in his pockets and gazed down the rails. ‘The engineer blows a whistle before he rounds that bend. I take a look around the place and if I put up the green blade, then the red, that means I haven’t seen any outlaws and he can brake for the mail.’ He stared at her. ‘This must be confusing as heck to a woman.’
‘But you explain it very well.’
Bob rode across the range with Pierce and Newcomb and they came to the dugout in a September rain that fell so hard it dented hats. Doolin, Powers, Broad well, and I stood under a cottonwood tree with slickers on and water on our faces or wool blankets draped over our heads. Broadwell had his cat Turtle inside his shirt. He blew cigarette smoke in its face. Amos Burton had gone to Dover the week before to dally with some colored ladies and we never saw him again until 1892.
Bob had on the white slicker he wore when he rustled horses in winter. His hat was so heavy with rain the brim was sunk down past his ears and nose and he had to tilt his head back to see us. He smiled. ‘How about robbing another train?’
We made a canopy with four tree limbs and a blanket and cooked a pot of Doolin’s herbal tea over a smoking fire. As was the habit with sod huts, mine was dissolving in the rain. Water dripped through the grass and earth of the roof and plunked on the bunks and stove like coffee and coffee grounds. So we squatted outside in the rain and discussed the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railroad, also known as the MK&T and the Katy. The summer cotton crops were being sold and the money carried to banks in Fort Worth and Dallas. A gang of men could take it, he said. Eugenia had already collected the particulars and would report the next afternoon. Doolin listened for a while, then got out kettles to collect rainwater since the river tasted of gypsum and spoilt his cakes and bread loaves.
The rain wore itself out by the next morning and we spent the afternoon inside a dugout that was crossed with a clothesline of drying socks and shirts and long underwear. Newcomb peeled sweet corn and shook the garden dirt from his onions, green peppers, and lettuce, and spread them out on a table for the feast commemorating our return to the train-stopping business.
I squatted naked on the bank of the Canadian River with a razor and leather strop and a spotted piece of mirror while Bob and Doolin and Powers dunked themselves in the brown water and scrubbed pretty hard with soap. Powers was white as alabaster except for his face and hands; Bob was brown all over from swimming naked with Miss Moore. Dick Broadwell slid naked down the bank, his good clothes folded over his arm, a brush and mug in his right hand. He said, ‘Lookit Doolin out there staring at his pecker.’ He shouted, ‘What’d’ya doin’, Bill, trolling?’
Doolin smiled. ‘I can always hope for a nibble.’
Broadwell waited until my razor was next to my lathered cheek; then he slapped me on the thigh. ‘Emmett, my boy! Good to see ya!’
I said, ‘You can get sort of wearisome, Dick.’
My brother stood ankle deep and grinned at Dick as he dried himself. ‘We’re gonna have ourselves a wild fandango, aren’t we?’
‘Can I dance cheek-to-cheek with her, Bob?’
Powers swam out into the river and floated on his back to the bullrushes.
At dusk I sat on the sod roof with the binoculars to my eyes while the others squatted outside with cigarettes, passing a mirror and comb around. My brother said, ‘I don’t want any rough talk or lewd suggestions or taking the Lord’s name in vain. Remember how you were taught to act around ladies.’
Then Miss Moore arrived and seven beaming men stood with their hats in their hands and white shirts and neckties on and their hair slicked down with rose oil.
Bob picked her up and swirled her around and they kissed for two or three minutes while the gang whistled and made noises. I ducked inside to stoke the stove and I could hear Bob making introductions again in case she’d forgotten names. After that she came inside and gave me a hug and a sisterly kiss. I think she wanted to tousle my hair but I had too much size for it.
I fried plank steaks of deer meat and Doolin cooked the rest of the meal with underwear tied on his head like a chef’s hat. Then we sat outside in the cool breeze and Miss Moore discussed Leliaetta and the farmhouse she’d just rented in Woodward for the winter. Bob dealt out cards to indicate who would do what on the job and Powers got out his fiddle and bow. Bob clapped his hands and did the calling for ‘Turkey in the Straw’ and some Virginia reels and Broad well and Pierce danced with each other, interweaving with Newcomb and Eugenia.
Then Bob and his woman retired to spend the night indoors with two bunks pushed together while six men slept on bedrolls under the white moon. It was near autumn but what we heard were summer noises: frogs at the river and crickets in the grass and cicadas rattling out of shells that looked like brown blisters on the trees. Night birds dived and swooped.
Newcomb said, ‘Bob’s a lucky devil, ain’t he.’
Powers rolled away to his side.
‘This is a hell of a life,’ said Pierce.
I watched the lightning bugs turn green-gold in part of the night and then green-gold someplace else. I remembered what Julia had said about her crying into a pillow, and I wanted to be rich very soon.
For an hour on the evening of September 15, 1891, seven men in black raincoats sat with their horses under cotton-wood trees across from the depot in Leliaetta. Three of them smoked cigarettes; Broadwell
sat on a tree stump cleaning the glass lenses of his dust goggles with the blue bandana he’d wear. I hunched up on my saddle cantle with my ankles crossed over the horn, tapping tobacco into paper. The horses shook their reins and pulled what green weeds they could; then they just stood there with the dumb-animal stares, sliding their jaws, tails whisking from side to side. Powers leaned forward with his calabash pipe to squint down the railroad tracks; then he and Bob chucked their horses and skidded them down to the siding where a black man and woman were walking on the cinders with a pail.
They both wore shawls on their heads and the woman’s right eye was milky with a cataract. The old man stayed two feet behind the woman, touching her coat with his hand.
Bob kept under his coat collar; Powers tipped his hat to the lady. ‘Lookin’ for something?’
She gripped the pail with both hands. The old man slowly looked up. He wore glasses but one of the lenses was gone. She said, ‘This old man and me, we tryin’ to find a little stray coal to warm the shanty up. We be camped over yonder by the sidin’ and the hawk been talkin’ awful bad. Get measly cold in the night.’
The old man asked, ‘You gentlemen be wantin’ a man for a job of woik?’
‘Nothing you could handle,’ said Powers. ‘But you go on up the track to the gantlet and see if you don’t find some coal after the express goes through.’
After they’d gone, Bob said, ‘You did good, Bill.’
‘Thankee.’
I licked a cigarette paper and twisted it tight and struck a match off my stirrup. The old woman stared at the red of my cigarette in the dark as they walked along the tracks. Broadwell lifted his saddletree to ventilate his horse, then tightened the cinch again. Newcomb climbed off his horse, complaining. ‘What’s he doin’, talkin’ to niggers?’ He spread a big raincoat that was long as his heels and unbuttoned his pants and leaned his hand against a box elder. Our saddle leather creaked. Somewhere in the dark town a dog barked. Doolin said, ‘My back hurts.’ My brother and Powers stayed down at the siding. The cinders crunched as the horses picked their shoes up and put them down again. I watched the depot where a man had been bent over a desk all night, turning the pages of a book and penciling in all the closed letters, every a, e, g, o, b, d, q, and p.
Bob stabbed his spurs and his horse clambered over the tracks and trotted along the siding to the semaphore with Powers skirting beside him with a forked branch he’d stripped and whittled on our ride over.
The station attendant glanced at the pendulum clock behind him, then walked from his desk, opened the door, and stood on the loading platform, scanning, three wide boards between his boots. Two mail sacks sat on the trolley. Bob and Powers had their gloved hands clamped over their horses’ noses not fifty yards away but the attendant’s eyes didn’t get used to the dark before he heard the smokestack of the train and started to close the depot door behind him. Then he stopped and saw the five of us in the trees across from the loading platform and he gave us one of the most comical faces of shock I’ve ever seen before he slammed the door and bolted it.
I saw him sidestep around his desk and then he was out of sight. Pierce twittered like a bobolink and Powers shoved up the green blade of the semaphore with his branch and held it there until the train got to the tall white whistle signpost and the steam whistle cord was pulled. Then he let the blade drop and the depot’s air pressure semaphore swung up and the danger blade glowed ruby in front of the lantern. But the engineer had already seen the green and the locomotive started braking.
My brother put my binoculars down and the solemn man beside him said, ‘You got yourself a good woman.’
‘You bet.’
The five of us still in the dark of the trees coaxed our horses down the incline. Mine had tugged the leaves off an elm tree but it didn’t think much of the taste.
Doolin said, ‘Bryant’s dead now. Let’s have no wanton murder.’
My brother urged his horse and it knocked up onto the wooden stairs and across the loading platform to the door. The kerosene lantern inside the depot had been snuffed. My brother got off his horse and stood next to the door, his pistol next to his cheek. ‘Hey? Hey, I’d like you to live through this.’ He heard a desk drawer slide open and closed. He heard the desk chair squeal.
Meanwhile Newcomb and I took positions on the east side of the tracks, Broadwell and Pierce on the west. There we lifted blue bandanas over our noses and backed our horses up as the bell clanged and the whistle went off again and I got the scares like you do when you’re next to monster machines. The locomotive was black and hot and big as a shoe store. The cowcatcher had tumbleweed in it and the front lamp was grimy and spattered with insects. Smoke rolled brown out of the tall stack and tore apart gray in the trees and white steam climbed out of pipes and jets and nozzles everywhere. My horse jerked its head from the steam as from a bad smell. I held my ears at the noise and watched the steel rails squash down on the ties and then lift up spikes and squash down under the wheels again. The tender and express car and baggage car creaked by and the train jolted to a stop with me facing the single Pullman. There wasn’t a dining car or smoking parlor, just three more coach cars and a caboose. I saw a woman standing next to a Pullman window lifting a blue-veined breast with the back of her hand. Her baby lost the long maroon nipple and jerked around until he found it again.
Doolin had crouched down next to the blackened switch with his pistol between his legs. Then he ran gawkily some forty feet until he could snag a boot on the cab ladder and bang on up the steps. Bob just stood on the platform like a passenger, his pistol hanging from his left hand, and stepped out onto a fender, lifting up his mask. The stoker had been about to carry coal to the boiler. He banged his shovel down when he saw Bob’s gun.
I observed that and I saw Newcomb masked and on his horse with the sleeves rolled up on his raincoat, his rifle barrel propped on the open platform between the express and baggage cars. I walked my horse along mostly dark passenger cars and to the empty caboose. In order to demonstrate to God and man what a young tough I was, I broke the glass tail lamp with the butt of my pistol and flame tore away from the wick. When I bent I could see the legs of Pierce’s and Broadwell’s horses. I saw a man walk out on a center coach platform lighting a cigarette. I raised my rifle high over my head and nodded at Newcomb and both of us fired warning shots, as did Broadwell and Pierce, so that it sounded like iron doors banging shut in a house of many rooms. The cigarette dropped off the man’s lip as he jumped back inside the coach. There were yells and screams about holdups and the train being robbed. The lights went out in all the cars. Faces disappeared from the windows. Steam leaked out from under the wheels.
Powers walked out of the darkness like a railroad inspector and he used the handrail as he climbed to the fenced platform of the express car. He tried the handle, then kicked the front door four times with the heel of his boot. ‘This is a robbery! Open up!’
The messenger said, ‘Not gonna and you can’t make me. Every door here is padlocked.’
Powers fired three shots through the porch roof overhead. Strips of tar roof flapped up on top of the car.
The messenger said, ‘You can shoot till doomsday and I ain’t gonna open this door.’
‘Well, I’ve got some encouragement here in the form of dynamite. Says on the label it’ll blow you into the middle of next week.’
Bob and Doolin had pushed the engineer and stoker back to the express car by then. Both of the crewmen wore bib overalls and striped caps but the stoker was shirtless and he smelled worse than sparrows burned dead in a chimney. Doolin had the hammer of his pistol cocked and poked down the front of the engineer’s overalls and he spoke into his ear like a lover. ‘Tell your money escort to please, please do what we say or I’ll blow your sex life to smithereens.’
The engineer shouted something convincing and after a minute of dead silence the broad side door rumbled open on its rollers and the. messenger backed to his desk. Broadwell trotted his ho
rse up with his rifle back on his shoulder; Bob threw a leg up and climbed in the car and saw canvas sacks and a stove and a wall-long mail sorter and a lunch bucket open on the desk. He lifted the iron plates on the stove and saw it was empty, then threw the latch on the south door. Powers walked in and saw the messenger and punched him in the throat. The man fell to his right knee and almost swallowed his tongue but I guess he came out of it okay.
In the passenger cars the men were throwing up windows and leaning out to see what was going on. Two had pistols in their hands but I could see they were reluctant to risk anything so I didn’t pay them no mind and they heavily sat again on their pillowed coach seats. But five or six of the bolder travelers were standing on a platform between coach and Pullman, talking to each other. A man in a bowler hat leaned out on the opened exit door and yelled to me, ‘What’s the name of your gang?’
My horse was prancing and nodding its head and lifting off of its front legs. I could hear Pierce yelling at passengers on his side to get back up the stairs.
The man in the bowler asked, ‘Is it the Dalton gang?’
A man with a drooping red mustache said, ‘Oh! How could it be, Manion? That boy’s not fifteen years old!’
‘Well, the Daltons aren’t old as you might think.’
‘Older than fifteen.’
‘I’m nineteen,’ I said.
‘See there?’
‘Don’t talk to them,’ said Newcomb.
Doolin was on his horse when the messenger staggered forward dragging a heavy meal sack between his legs. It was filled to half with silver dollars and it scraped the varnish off the floor. Pierce was at the platform of a rear passenger car yanking a mouthy boy off the stair by his coat collar. Two men leapt from the platform onto the cinders and grabbed for Pierce’s raincoat sleeve or his horse’s bridle. Pierce looked a little shamefaced at Broadwell and Bob as the men tussled over him, and Broadwell yelled, ‘You get back inside there this instant! Do I have to take a strap to you?’