Desperadoes

She said, ‘You’re the kind that becomes prosperous.’

Bob grinned. ‘This your full-time occupation, ma’am?’

Bob massaged her breasts by the fire, and during the night Bryant, then McElhanie, stole into the tent and used her under the blankets, and the five members of the Dalton gang argued into the small hours about where to go after we got my brother free from the Fort Smith jail. Options were New Orleans and California and Eureka Springs, Arkansas, where there were hot medicinal baths. But my brother Bob wooed us into deciding on the gambling town of Silver City, which was located in an unpopulated section of the country that would become New Mexico in 1912. There a former neighbor of ours named Ben Canty was now the city marshal. He lived on bribes and was mostly tolerant of rustlers.

That was May of 1890 and the five of us decamped and rode through the spectacular Ozarks to Fort Smith, staying in our saddles as McElhanie—who wouldn’t be recognized as a criminal—walked bandy-legged into the office of the Fort Smith Elevator and moseyed up to a man in visor and sleeves who was setting type. We could see the man talk and point directions; then McElhanie came out with the names of the jury and judge and prosecutor listed on a blank newspaper page.

Then we set about making fools of ourselves. We delivered to every prospective member of the jury a letter that had a crude skull and crossbones drawn over script that read: ‘There is no evidence implicating Grattan Dalton in the horse-stealing business. He is a respected former deputy marshal and a victim of circumstances.’

Bitter Creek and Blackface Charley and I then visited Judge Isaac Parker, riding up so close to his house that the horses potholed his spaded flower garden.

His fat daughter came out, drying her hands on a tea towel and said her father wasn’t home, what did we want?

I elbowed Newcomb and he said, ‘We’re associates of a prisoner of your papa.’

‘The innocent Grattan Dalton,’ I said.

‘Ah,’ said the girl. ‘You’ve come to intimidate us.’

Bryant stood in his saddle, opening up his coat. Inside it a white hen ticked her head. Bryant yanked her out and wildly wrung her around, the chicken flapping and squawking until the neck broke off and the body flew up on the porch. The chicken walked around spurting blood while Bryant pitched her head on the roof. It rattled down on the shingles.

The Parker girl merely picked the chicken up by a white wing and walked into the house, locking the screen door behind her, and we walked our horses back to the street through the yard pansies.

I said, ‘That didn’t work worth beans, did it.’

Bryant said, ‘It stunk, is what it did.’

And Bob rode his horse up the porch steps of the federal prosecutor’s white house in the middle of town. He opened the screen and ducked low to ride in under the lintel. The animal knocked over a porcelain candle stand and a lamp of dangling prisms and then thudded over the woven rug to the kitchen. A little girl turned in her chair like a spinster. ‘What on earth!’ she said. The attorney was getting out of his chair, a napkin around his neck, when Bob ducked under the doorway. They were having a supper of liver and onions. The wife was gone. Two daughters were at the oak table and the man was saying things like, ‘See here!’ and ‘This is an outrage!’

Bob slapped his pistol up from his boot holster, just like he’d practiced. ‘My name is Robert Dalton. You have a warrant for my arrest and you have my brother Grat in jail.’

The attorney sat back down, wiped his mouth with a napkin, and tossed it. ‘That’s so.’

‘You can persuade a grand jury to no-bill him.’

‘That’s exactly what I intend to do.’

That stymied

Bob. ‘You’re letting him off? Just like that?’

The attorney had eaten of the liver. He was chewing. ‘Aren’t you going to thank me?’

The horse stepped from one shoe to the next. Its tail swished flour on the counter. The girls were looking at that. My brother said, ‘Excuse me but I’m just the least bit pixilated by all this. Can you explain why you’re letting him go free?’

‘The evidence inspires it. He was arrested on the suspicion he stole Bob Rogers’s horses, but none of those mustangs carried the Rogers brand. Plus there’s a problem with the arresting officer abetting a vigilante group. And your brother’s defense attorney was going to call on Judge Isaac Parker as a character witness. That might have been humiliating. It’s a complicated case. I’ve got plenty to do just pleading the easy ones.’

My brother hung onto those words like he could listen forever. ‘Well, shucks,’ he said. ‘Now you got me sorry I mussed up your house.’

The older girl said, ‘Just don’t tarry,’ and Bob walked his horse down the back stairs and through the staked vegetable garden.

My brother Grat was released from jail the next morning and the Elevator for May 8th used our language, explaining that there was ‘no evidence implicating him in the horse-stealing business.’

Grat walked out of town with his hands in his pockets. He could stand incarceration better than any man I’ve ever known. Parker had executed many rustlers in his past but Grat never suspected evil until he saw it plain, and all the time he was in jail he’d make gurgling, strangling noises whenever one of his keepers walked past, and he fashioned a hangman’s noose out of torn strips of his bedding and wore it under his collar like a necktie. And it was closing his collar still when I clambered up from under the bridge with a horse and a mule on a leash.

He whispered, ‘You better skedaddle, Em. I bet the law is trackin’ me.’

‘I already checked. There’s a boy with field glasses in a cotton wood tree staring at us right now. Don’t turn around.’ I gave my brother a big-bore Colt Dragoon wrapped in a gun belt and said, ‘You’re supposed to ride north to a train depot and use the ticket to California I stuck in your saddlebag. Bob sent telegrams about you to Littleton and Bill, and here’s fifty dollars expense money, but that’s the bottom of our funds.’