He walked her home and sat on her bed and bent over the drawings spread out on the quilt. ‘You’ve got quite a hand,’ he said.
She brought him coffee in a tin cup and they drank it facing each other.
‘What kind of work would it be they’re looking for?’ he asked.
‘Ranch work, I suppose.’
‘I thought they were free spirits these days. I thought they were doing without regular jobs.’
Eugenia sat next to him and leaned back on a pillow, wrinkling a picture of flowers in a vase. ‘You’re talking about rustling. I’m fairly certain they’ve given that up. But I can understand why life on the scout is so appealing. You take a job like yours. You are hampered and impeded every day by the very laws and regulations it is your duty to enforce.’
He leaned back on his hand, destroying a drawing of tree-tops and a church steeple. ‘There’s something you want me to delay, is that it? What do I get for the trouble?’
She said, ‘This is my last evening in Silver City. I’d like it to be really special.’
Canty thought about that and swirled the coffee in the bottom of his cup before he lifted it and drank. He glanced at her face, then back at his boots, ‘Sometimes nothing important gets done. Sometimes the day just seems to drag by.’
By ten o’clock the Dalton gang were leaning their elbows on the mahogany bar and muttering to strangers about how the professionals were misdealing the cards, so that it would seem we had an excuse for what we were about to do. Newcomb was the last to lose his stake, being swindled on what they call a cat hop at the last turn. He kicked the chair getting up and stood apart from the rest of us for his drink. He pulled his coat behind his gun butt. The bartender was rounded over, washing glasses in a tub. A senorita was talking to him. Newcomb shouted, ‘Who ya have to punch to get a drink around this place?’
The bartender said, ‘Are you talking to me, runt?’
Newcomb said, ‘Well, I don’t guess I’m talking to the spittoon.’
The bartender reached for a beer pull and Newcomb slapped the pistol out of his holster and the gang brought our Colts up in every direction. We might have been farm machinery—we were that sudden and all-at-once.
Bob shouted, ‘Hands up! Everybody!’
‘Bandidos!’ one of the whores screamed.
The music stopped. The gambler Fancy Jack quickly rolled up his paper money and put it inside his cheek. The truly dangerous in the room just glared and slowly lifted their hands.
‘You do not look much escared,’ I yelled, ‘but I think you ought to be. I have filed the sear down on this machine and have in my hands a hair trigger. So don’t anybody move, understand? Or you’re likely to find a gape in your face you could fit a beer bottle through.’
Blackface Charley Bryant had two guns out—a purse pistol and a Peacemaker—and he kept turning around in the crowd. McElhanie and Newcomb scraped money off the tables and patted down the dealers for their wallets and money belts. My brother Bob was up on top of the bar, kicking hats off heads as he walked, smashing shot glasses and bottles into a shattering mirror. He pinched the folding money out from under the spring snaps in the register.
Little Newcomb took silver and gold from the dealer who’d bilked him, Fancy Jack, then as an afterthought cracked him hard across the mouth with his pistol. Blood and teeth spattered against the oil painting of a sundown on the wall. The dealer knelt on the floor. I could see he was feeling a lot of pain. He spit out a roll of bloody money.
Each of us in the gang had two red wool socks connected with strong twine. We draped these over our necks and the weight of the coins held them in place. We did not bother with jewelry, watches, or gems, or anything the prostitutes might have hidden on their persons. Within four minutes we were backing toward the doors. Bryant’s Texas spurs were the only noise. Bob said, ‘This will teach you hospitality to strangers.’
We sprang onto our horses and blasted out the stained-glass windows. I danced my horse around, firing haphazardly until McElhanie got hold of the lead rein on the pack mule. Then the five of us in the gang galloped off, guns blazing. Shutters banged open in the few houses and men leaned out and only a dozen gamblers ran into the street with guns in their hands. Hardly any shot at us.
We ran our horses into bad shape, ran until we could barely make out the lights of the town; then we risked a walk and counted the loot in our socks and smoked
cheroots that Bryant was handing out. Our horses quivered as they cooled. Newcomb threw all his pennies away.
We were relieving ourselves and watering our horses when dawn started outlining things. Bob climbed up into his saddle and scanned the open geography behind us and spied what he first mistook as a twister, then recognized as the dust of flying hooves. He turned in his saddle and saw me picking cockleburs off my pants leg. ‘Emmett, I think we have a posse contending for us.’ He said it not loudly at all, but like a man might say he believed his son had quit school and it was a terrible disappointment.
Newcomb heard him and clambered up onto his horse before he’d even tucked his shirt in. He stood in his stirrups and yelled for McElhanie and Bryant to saddle up and by then we could hear the thunder of running horses.
The gang of us spurred our horses to speed and rode down into a dry gulch that gave itself to a canyon littered with dead timbers that were washed up flat as railroad ties. Then the five of us turned our horses around and yanked our rifles out from scabbards underneath the saddle skirts. We backed up so close to the steep side of a cliff that the horses brushed their tails against it.
The cantina’s posse was seven men, five of them wearing sombreros. They slowed a city block away and their horses nudged and bickered as the Mexicans reined back to argue the situation. They were so distant all I could see in the morning dark were animals and white shirts.
Bob said, ‘I think they’ve got us in a disadvantageous position. We might do better if we’re shorter.’
So we jumped down into silt as deep as our ankles. Bob stood inside the clumped roots of a tree. I crouched in a green pool of water the size of a tablecloth. The others were dispersed.
‘I’m gettin’ kind of sleepy,’ said Newcomb, but only McElhanie laughed.