Author: Ron Hansen
Category: Western
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‘Hey now,’ said Bob. ‘That’ll work.’
Doolin made a horrible face and swung the weight up and posed with the sledgehammer high as the ceiling and only a sudden fall away from dashing the messenger’s head down into his rib cage.
Bob sucked with horror. ‘No, no! I meant on the safe.’
‘Oh, I know, Bob! Damn it! I was just trying to get a laugh.’
Doolin tapped the safe mechanism with the sledgehammer head, testing. Then he laid into the latch once and the door indented; with the second blow it cracked. Newcomb pried it free with a crowbar and pitched the money into a mail sack while Bob yawned and Doolin looted the mail for boxes of merchandise.
Bob hopped down to the cinders, took hold of the bridles of Newcomb’s and Doolin’s horses, and pulled them to the express car.
Grat bounded down from the engine ladder and I took his horse to him; the others trotted along the siding.
In Kingfisher, my brother Bill opened a pocket watch and said, ‘Golly, ten o’clock. If I don’t get to bed pretty soon I’m going to turn into a pumpkin.’
Chris Madsen brushed his mustache with a thumb, put his untouched snifter of Madeira down on the coffee table. ‘What was the reason for all this tonight?’
‘Can you keep a secret?’
Madsen pulled his vest down over his belt and looked at Bill without emotion.
Bill said, ‘I was going to be in a real jam if I couldn’t prove I wasn’t at Red Rock tonight. I needed an ironclad alibi.’
‘What happened at Red Rock?’
‘Oops! There I go again. Kiss and tell, that’s me. Well, you’re going to have to learn the rest by yourself. I’m not going to be the one to spill the beans, not even if you tickle.’
‘Did your brothers stop a train?’
‘You’re the detective, Chris. I just dabble in real estate.’
Madsen said, ‘It is only a matter of time, Bill.’ He lifted his snifter, then put it down again. ‘It is now June of 1892. We’ll have them stopped before the year’s out.’
At Red Rock, Doolin walked off the express car platform onto his mount, strapped his rifle into its saddle boot, and snatched two lunch boxes off the express car floor. The guard and messenger were hog-tied with baling wire next to the broken safe. Their faces were red as apples. Doolin gave the lunch box with the liverwurst to Grat, and Broadwell came up from the caboose and then we all crashed through sunflowers and vamoosed west into the blue hang of rain.
15
Then began the great manhunt.
Conductor Harry Wilcox got off the train and sent a telegram to the Santa Fe dispatcher in Arkansas City, Kansas, then unwound the wire from the wrists and ankles of the men in the express car. The station agent tapped out a message of the robbery to depots along the line and it was intercepted in Wharton by a spectacled widow who’d replaced the boy murdered a year previous by Blackface Charley Bryant. The railroad detective there showed her longhand transcription to the Wells Fargo man in the gray suit, then commenced organizing the others. The man in the fedora whistled a tune from his chair and then read the woman’s note when the others were done with it. ‘You have nice handwriting.’
The woman said, ‘Yes. I do.’
Deputy Marshal Heck Thomas pounded doors that night until he’d collected a reliable five-man posse, and he hurried north from Guthrie to Red Rock. About an hour behind him was Deputy Marshal John Swayne and the Santa Fe special officers from Purcell, Oklahoma. Logan County Sheriff John W. Hixon had breakfast with a newspaperman, then stood in front of twenty-five brand new deputies so they could be photographed with their shotguns and dirks and bandoliers, pistols at each pocket. He said, ‘We’ll press on until the trail ends or until the robbers are overtaken.’
Deputies Frank Kress and George Orin Severns and thirteen other lawmen chose to hunt us in the Cimarron Hills, which is country mean as a brickyard. Ransom Payne and sixteen men thundered westward for Greer County whence rumors had come regarding a married woman suspected of being Daisy Bryant. Cherokee police, some of them Bob’s deputies in a happier year, sat on the Red Rock depot floor, chewing on straw, and they rode out with whatever party they felt wouldn’t botch things. And some businessmen from Caldwell, Kansas, rented horses and strapped on three too many guns and went full tilt after the villains, horsewhips clenched in their teeth.
And nothing came of it. We were ex-lawmen and cowhands and horse thieves and we’d studied Oklahoma geography from a saddle. We likely knew as much as any marshal or Indian after us, plus we had my brother Bill’s expensive grapevine in our favor and the fact that we had considerably more to gain by getting away than any of those fifty or one hundred did in catching hold of us.
Whenever we saw cattle that June night, we rode among them until our hoofprints were lost. We lassoed whatever ponies we could and pulled them along for confusion, then let them stray wherever they would while the eight of us split up into fours, then twos, and the rain soaked our hats down to our ears. Dick Broadwell and I sat under hackberry trees by a creek bed until four in the morning, anticipating the divvy, watching mud collapse into the brown water rush, listening to the pattering in the green-leafed summer trees.
I have maintained for over forty years that our take from that train was eleven thousand dollars. The Wells Fargo Express Company’s accounting was sixteen hundred dollars lost and that’s closer to the truth, which was actually about four thousand.
Bob divided it honestly this time, in the presence of the gang at a surveyor’s monument forty miles west of Red Rock, and we each got about five hundred dollars. And though five hundred dollars or thereabouts went farther then than it does in 1937, I had trouble seeing it last out the year, let alone get me and Julia out of the country to South America. But I was not hangdog. I recall I was weary and saddle-sore and my eyes hurt from staying awake that whole night, and yet I got out my harmonica and played without finish the tune about sweet Betsy from Pike who crossed the wide prairie with her husband Ike, and my brother Bob ambled ahead of Grat and me to the ranch of Lee Moore on the North Canadian, fifteen miles away.
I don’t know where Newcomb or Pierce or Broadwell went after the distribution. It could have been Cowboy Flat or the Rock Fort, where Bitter Creek could romance Rose Dunn. I know that Powers and Doolin made their getaway to a ranch on the North Canadian near the Texas panhandle, owned by a beefy man for whom Powers, then using the alias Tim Evans, had once been a hired regulator.
The rancher inspected their slavered horses, skating his hands along the withers and croup and cannon, wiping the sweat on his pants, and traded them for a piebald and a red he had stabled.
Doolin walked backwards to the barn. ‘How bad are we gettin’ twisted on this deal?’
The rancher smiled, his hands in his pockets. ‘The marshals are thick as fleas around here. I’m gonna have to lie pretty good.’
They gave the new horses a nose-bag of oats and then the two Bills stripped their shirts off and dunked their heads in the trough and saddled their mounts, dripping water. They cantered between two rows of fruit trees to a creek and saw three deputies slowly riding a gulley, looking at the ground.
Doolin said, ‘I could have myself three notches right this instant. They’d topple like boxes of cornmeal.’
Powers carved out a pipe bowl with his pocketknife. ‘You’ll recollect our early agreement was no unnecessary violence to marshals. Bob’s been insistent about that.’
Doolin had a cloud of gnats around his head. He brushed at them and turned his horse. ‘Bob this, Bob that,’ he said.
Doolin and Powers located the three Dalton brothers at Lee Moore’s ranch and we voted for discretion. And the five of us took off that afternoon for the Cimarron Hills, that difficult country of crags and corners and hiding places. It was reckoned we could get lost there for a good two or three weeks. However, no sooner had we made our approach than we ran spang into deputies Kress and Severns and their crowd, standing in their stirrups, shading
their eyes to make us out.
The five of us reared around and spurred our horses down a yielding slope into a coulee. We galloped along it, sinking deep where the rainwater wasn’t baked up yet. The posse split up along the breaks and almost got lucky a time or two.
A deputy would stop to wipe the band of his hat with a shirttail and see the Dalton gang in slow trot on the badlands a quarter mile away, one horse spavined and limping, white saliva dangling from the others’ bits, a black raincoat flopping loose from its roll behind the cantle. But before he could get his rifle up he’d see one of us point and one of us clamp his hat down and we’d kick around into chokers of runt trees or scrabble over orange pileups of rock and drop out of sight for an hour. They fired some shots that spent themselves with distance, that reverberated over the hardpan with the yarp of a twisted saw. Once Kress gazed up from a shaded canyon to see Bob hallooing from its roof. I went for a skillet of water one morning and saw a deputy in his long underwear fling a rattler up by the tail and hack off its snapping head with a machete. Then he saw me, a far-off boy in long underwear and boots, and lacking a gun to shoot me with, he grinned and held his trophy up high, blood dripping from the snake’s neck and onto his armpit and knee.
After two days of chase, the horses were dying. You could hear it in their lungs. Blackflies bunched at the eyes and ears of the horses and one keeled over from sunstroke. I can still feel the shock in the road. It was like the front of a building collapsing. Two others lost their shoes and Grat’s animal bloated with sulphur water and we might have been done for except that Bob and I were able to swipe five healthy Cherokee ponies, and we abandoned the others at an old squatter’s shack.
Severns found our spent horses and the hoofprints of our fresh mounts and the poor lawman’s heart almost broke with frustration. Soon thereafter they larruped those animals left behind up into a slatted stock car and took a solemn train ride back to Guthrie. Kress limped to the smoking parlor of the train and fell exhausted into a seat across from Severns. And at the next stop the two deputies were joined there by Deputy Marshal John Swayne. ‘You lose ’em too?’ Swayne asked.
Severns lit a cigarette and sat back and looked out the window at the badlands. ‘Sons a bitches,’ he said.
On June 17, the Still water Gazette announced: ‘All the pursuing party have now returned and the chase of the bandits has been entirely abandoned.’
Sometime in June, the house in Greer County was broken into by Ransom Payne and sixteen men. He walked up onto the kitchen porch in his stocking feet, his black suit white-ringed with sweat, and he busted out the storm window with his pearl-handled pistol butt. He opened the glass doors of the pantry and lifted up new china plates. Another deputy hunched to poke into a brown wooden ice chest next to the sink. They heard the drumming of men walking above them in the bed-room, shifting stuck drawers out of the chest, ringing hangered dresses to the other side of the closet. The woman they wanted was gone.
She’d returned to Guthrie to spy. In her absence, Mundy walked into her room, sunk the springs of her bed, and touched the pedal sewing machine he’d given her to make dresses. He stood in her closet and pressed her clothes to his face. He sat down on a divan and unfolded spectacles and read a letter addressed to her that he’d found pressed in the book Italian Journeys by William Dean Howells. The letter said:
‘I have since loaned my share to B. as he was mighty strapped for cash what with the impending arrival of his family from California. So you will need to secure one thousand dollars somehow! The house I have in mind resides in Argentina near Buenos Aires and is spoken of in glowing terms by the engineer who used it. His acquaintances will handle the transaction. It is white stucco with a red tile roof and three bedrooms, so maybe E. and J. could join us. The one thousand dollars is essential and if you cannot come up with it, I will have to seek elsewhere and I am hesitant to do so. Otherwise we are all well here. We have had some close encounters but are a jump ahead of them every time. Sincerely yours, Bob.’ Undated.
I was with him in the sod house when Bob wrote that. The words ‘impending,’ ‘transaction,’ and ‘hesitant’ were mine. Mundy couldn’t make heads or tails of the letter and folded it back in the book. At night he got up from his bed and put his ear against her door. He tapped on it with a finger. ‘Can I come in?’
‘Of course,’ she said.
She closed the book Italian Journeys and slid it under the vanity. He stood next to her bed in his striped pajamas, his fingers twitching by his legs. ‘Can I climb under the covers with you?’
She smiled and pulled the quilt aside. He curled down with his cheek on her breast and his eyes pooled. ‘I don’t know what comes over me sometimes. I get so suspicious and angry. I resent everything you do. Then I contradict myself. I want to give you the world, fulfill your every heart’s desire. But I’m not a rich man; I’m a butcher. I’ve already spent everything I had. You’re a beautiful lady in a country of rude, evil men.’ He kissed her breast, her nipple, the hand that lay on his head. ‘All I can offer you is myself. And I get so scared that I won’t be enough.’
Mrs. Mundy was quiet: then she said, ‘I’ve been misleading you. I don’t have sick cousins anywhere. I’ve been gone because I’ve been consulting a variety of doctors about a serious illness I’ve contracted. None of their medications seem to work. My last hope is a rest cure in Silver City in the New Mexico Territory, but they say it will cost in excess of a thousand dollars. You’ve been so generous with me already that I couldn’t possibly mention the malady or their prescription for fear you’d want to care for me and we aren’t married, I’m not your responsibility, anything you did would be just too much, too much, and I don’t deserve it. I’ve treated you very badly.’
‘A thousand dollars?’ he asked.
‘I’m afraid so.’
He crawled up to her and whispered, ‘Who’s B? Who’s E and J? Who’s Bob?’
They were motionless for a long time; then Mundy slid out of the bed and walked in his old man’s slump to the door where he leaned a hand on the wall. ‘I don’t want to know about him,’ he said. ‘I want you out of this house.’
By then Bill’s wife Jenny and two of their six children had arrived in the Oklahoma Territory. He’d mailed her a post office money order of a hundred thirty dollars to pay off a bank note in Visalia but she’d used it to buy three railroad tickets and some twenty-five-cent basket lunches and she made the long trip east by train with three rope-tied suitcases and a hatbox.
Bill left his little boy and girl with Littleton in Kingfisher and took his wife up to Coffeyville for a second honeymoon. They stayed in the pink suite of the Eldridge House and saw Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial by Jury at the Opera House across the street. He introduced her to Charles Ball of the C.M. Condon and Company bank and they asked for a loan on a two-storey house in Havana, Kansas, that would be big enough for a family of eight. His collateral was the wheat farm in California that his father-in-law was now managing. But there was a financial panic in Wall Street and Washington in 1892 that was nearly equivalent to the Depression we’re just climbing out of, and it was a bad time to need money. Ball gave them an application to complete, a procedure not common then, and Bill tore it up and littered it as he stomped out of the cashier’s office. He crossed the bricked plaza to the smaller First National Bank, which looked like a hardware store, and parlayed for a while with Tom Ayres, the chief cashier. Again he was denied. Ayres said, ‘I’m not trying to crawfish out of it, Bill, but it’s something I simply can’t do. This bank can’t be dealing with Daltons. Your brothers’ve gummed it up for you.’
So Bill remained with his wife and kids in Bartlesville for a week and then he snuck down to the sod house, bringing two angel food cakes and his fiddle, and we had a jamboree that night: the Dalton gang and three stout whores who sashayed in corsets and garters, plus two scrofulous job applicants about three years younger than I was whom Bob invited to stay for chow but then to mosey on.
/> Visitations like that were becoming common as we gained in notoriety. Plowboys and scudders and gandy dancers, sneak thieves and Mennonite farmers, would stand next to their horses in the rolling grass a mile or two away and then wade in to the sod house with their coats buttoned up in the heat, grinning from two hundred yards out so as to illustrate confraternity and good will. All they wanted was to see us up close and clamp handshakes on an outlaw and say that when the subject was Daltons, they read every word the newspapers had to say, disagreeing the while with the slant most publishers took. They said we were great lions of the plains, living legends, saints, that we’d already bested the James gang and our names would be enshrined and writ large in the annals of history. At nightfall once a girl of thirteen hiked her dress up for Bob and pleaded, ‘I want to have your baby.’ My brother merely said he was in the middle of the Farmer’s Almanac and he wanted to see how it ended. It did not surprise me that Deputy Marshal Chris Madsen had us under surveillance there, nor that a photograph of the sod house was in a swelling file kept closed with three rubber bands.
The day the news arrived that Robert Ford, the coward who shot Jesse James, had himself been assassinated in Colorado, my brother Bill came down to celebrate with two angel food cakes. He asked me if I wanted to go to the river and squeeze cornballs on hooks and maybe snag some channel catfish. I didn’t mind, so Bill and I lazed in sticker grass with trotlines set out and fishing line tied to our toes, like a calendar painting of a better American past.
Bill said, ‘I’ve got another job planned.’
I spit the shells of sunflower seeds.
He said, ‘It’s in our old stomping grounds: Pryor Creek. Train runs from Kansas City, Missouri, to Denison, Texas. Should be perfect for us.’