Desperadoes

Then there was Spanish shouting and the waving of pistols and they charged straight at us with what the dime novelists call bloodcurdling howls. The Mexicans lowered their pistols and their arms flew up as they fired and chunks of cliff exploded onto the hides of our horses, which skittered and walked, eyes bulging. McElhanie let go the first shot from the gang; then Bob and I and Newcomb and Bryant fired and the Mexicans’ wrists jerked high as they answered and brought their horses up again and turned them this way and that.

Holes were being kicked out of the dirt cliff and one of the Mexican horses collapsed when Bryant’s shot split its hoof apart. I aimed at the throat of a man with crossed bandoliers and pressed the trigger and struck him instead in the thigh. The skin burst out like a rosette and the man reached for it, wheeling his horse.

Then a stray bullet from the posse whanged off a skillet strapped to the pack mule and ripped into my right shoulder. The force of it knocked me off my knees and I sat down in the water looking at my pain. It felt like I’d been slammed in the arm with a crowbar. Blood was rolling through my fingers.

Bob asked if I was okay and when I nodded my brother shouted, ‘What’d’ya say we attack!’ and he rushed at the men on foot, hurdling over the dead trees.

The Mexicans were emptying their cylinders and reloading as their horses jittered and bucked, and then the Dalton gang swung up onto their own horses and raked them hard with their spurs, screaming as they turned the posse into retreat and started up a chase. They fired now with their pistols, and one of Bob’s .45 slugs plowed into the neck of a pony, bringing it down. The rider squirmed out from under it and limped as he fired his cylinder up. Three men ducked down behind the heads of their horses and rode east and the man shot down doubled up with a man in a black stetson and soon the cantina’s halfhearted posse was gone, leaving faster than they came.

McElhanie whooped and howled; Newcomb swaggered on his boot heels yelling names in their direction; Bryant tethered the horses and put away the limping one he’d ruined. Bob wiped his pistol against his pants leg to smear the gun-powder off, then pressed it hot against my neck. ‘Feel that,’ he said. ‘It’s on fire.’

I said, ‘I take it we’ve scattered them.’

‘The wicked flee where none pursueth,’ said Bob.

I had my coat and shirt off and was pouring a canteen of water over my wound. The skin was so torn it was lacy. Blood was rushing down like a sleeve.

Bob crouched and worried over the hole, picking bits of shirt and thread out of it. ‘I’d say you earned your paycheck, Em.’

I wiped at the hole with my shirt cuff. ‘I can read it with my fingers, Bob. The slug’s as clear as a jawbreaker in your cheek. Hot fire and a sharp knife and whiskey’s all I need.’

‘That’s how I picture it.’

Word got to City Marshal Canty when he was having breakfast. ‘Well, don’t that beat all,’ he said. He ordered another cup of coffee, then set about getting reliable men for a posse. And he was so upset that it was almost noon before he’d even got a saddle on his horse. The day just seemed to drag by.

Miss Eugenia Moore left Silver City that Sunday afternoon in a buckboard and team she rented but would never return. Her valuables were in hat boxes. She stopped at an abandoned squatter’s shack and put on a blue cavalry shirt and tan suede trousers and wore a headband without a hat. She clucked the team along a vacant road that went toward the Oklahoma Territory, and stopped for two men who were standing by their horses, rolling cigarettes with a bag of Bull Durham tobacco. One was Blackface Charley Bryant, the other Emmett Dalton. My arm was in a sling and I winced whenever I moved. I climbed up to the front with her while Bryant lay down in the back and smoked.

I said, ‘Bob and McElhanie have the pack mule and six hundred dollars. They’re heading west by train to my brother Bill’s place near Paso Robles, California. He said he’ll send for you when he’s established out there. I’d be with them except I got torn up by a greasy Mexican. Got me in the shoulder.’

Eugenia frowned sympathetically. ‘Anyone else would be flat on his back right now.’

I didn’t say anything. I merely stared at the blank terrain as we jostled east toward Jim Riley’s isolated ranch where the three of us would hole up that winter while Newcomb went back to his homestead claim near Guthrie.

I slunk down in my coat that night with my shoulder nagging me with a pain as sharp as the squeal of a saw blade finding a nail in the board. I couldn’t catnap; I couldn’t imagine the pale, naked women I’d seen on McElhanie’s deck of playing cards; all I could do was remember the smell of the oiled gun stock against my cheek and the blue glint of my rifle barrel as I swung it at the rearing horse of the man with crossed bandoliers. And it only struck me then, in that complaining buckboard, what scary things these outlaw notions were. Besieged as we’d been it seemed the most natural, sensible idea in the world to aim a shot at the throat of a man I had no argument with minutes before, and my finger sought the trigger with no more heed than you’d give to an itch near your eye.

I looked at Bryant who was hunched next to me then, driving the team, slapping the reins on the rump of a horse while Miss Moore curled in sleep under a blanket pulled out of a hatbox. And for want of conversation I said, ‘Where the bullet went in you can see blue and red and a smatter of white which is bone. I think it’s going to scar up real good.’

7

Grattan Dalton had by then arrived at my brother Bill’s wheat ranch but he did not stay long. His sister-in-law complained of him, as did brother Littleton’s wife, so he packed a duffel bag and moved to the Grand Central Hotel in Fresno where the furniture was not so frail and he could poke three-dollar whores in his room and drink until his forehead struck the table.

His occupation was gambler in those days. He would sidle up to strangers in the bar, anyone with striped pants or checkered vest, and he’d be amiable for about an hour, grinning with brown teeth. Then Grat would haul the man to a gaming table where he cheated brazenly, like it was cards of a higher intellect he played. Those who argued with his calls he glowered at until they got up out of their chairs and departed. He bashed one man in the head with a cuspidor, then dragged him outside where he slammed the man’s mouth against a wood curb. The man rolled bloody but the teeth stayed there. Looked like someone had dropped a white bracelet. The bartender, Patrick J. Conway, Grattan’s sometime friend, made sure the fearsome story got around and my brother’s winnings improved measurably. Grat paid Conway ten percent.

But my brother began to notice a hotel resident who sat in one of the Queen Anne chairs and smoked a long cigar down to a stub each night, watching Grat at five-card stud. He was a large man with a black mustache and a face made ugly with brown cancers on his cheeks that were eating into the pink. They were wet and he dabbed at them with a handkerchief. He lived not much longer than Grat did.

One evening the man put a penny down and picked up the Fresno paper and read it front to back, twelve pages. Then he folded it and slapped it down to the floor and walked over to Grat’s empty table and sat down. Grat was shuffling cards.

‘What game is it you’re playing, Mr. Dalton?’

‘I know ’em all. What’s yer pleasure?’

The man smiled and leaned forward with his hands under the table. Grat felt the barrel of a pistol punch him hard in the crotch. He groaned and snatched for the gun but the hammer clicked back.

The man said, ‘Woman once asked me what that felt like, getting punched like that in the oysters. I said it was close to having your eyeball poked with a spoon. Is that pretty accurate?’

/> Grat pushed away from the table an inch.

The man said, ‘My name is William Smith, Chief of Special Detectives for the Southern Pacific Railroad. I am not pleasant to look at and more unpleasant to deal with. That’s my word of caution. You are one of the Dalton boys. Railroad circulars say you’ve had yourselves quite a time back east in the territories, stealing and rustling and such. I hear you are cousins to Cole Younger and that you used to be lawmen. I gotta say that with a combination like that I trust you no farther than I can spit.’