Eugenia wiped charcoal off her fingers with her shirttail. ‘Julia’s easy to draw. She sits still so long. Most people shift around all the time.’
I said, ‘She got rid of all that when she was younger.’
And Bob said, ‘You know, that’s really something to comment on, Julia. How’d you get grown-up so fast?’
‘Are you teasing?’
‘No! I swear you’ve got ten years on me.’
‘You’re very mature,’ said Miss Moore,
She turned to me. ‘They’re making fun of me, aren’t they.’
‘Nope. I think that’s genuine.’
She smiled shyly at Miss Moore. ‘I can be awfully holy sometimes.’
Then it was dark and everything broke up and Charlie Pierce drove Julia home in a surrey he’d sold to someone in Kansas.
Blackface Charley had hired a blackboard to escort Miss Jean Thorne there and that was how I came to visit the Rock Island Hotel in Hennessey. I sat on the hard boards of the wagon-back, swinging my legs while Bryant hunched forward on the bench seat with his shirt collar pushed up where his scar was. He’d blotted ladies’ facial powder on it and it gave him a chalky look. He had a mean-looking canker sore pulling his lip awry.
It was ten at night by the time we hitched the team in Hennessey. There were paper balloons in the shape of donkeys tied to the hitching racks. Railroad flares were spitting and spewing in the street and some salesmen who were meeting at the Rock Island Hotel were pitching them back and forth at each other. The railroad men stood watching with their hands in their overalls.
Bryant took Miss Thorne to sit with him on a bench at the depot and I sat on the chintz furniture in the hotel parlor reading the newspapers.
A big blond man in chalk-striped pants and vest came out of his room and locked the door. He had the sleeves rolled up on his white shirt and a cowlick he’d tried to wet down. He must’ve weighed two hundred pounds. He asked the proprietor for the night register and wrote down all the names in a pocket notebook. He pointed to me. ‘Who’s that?’
Mr. Thorne told him he didn’t know.
The marshal stood on the parlor rug with both hands in his pockets. ‘What’s your name?’
I was reading about a farm boy named McLaughlin in Tulsa who knew how to make a baseball sink when he pitched it. ‘Charlie McLaughlin,’ I said. ‘How’s your day been?’
He ignored that. ‘Where you from?’
‘You ever heard of Liberal, Kansas?’
‘I was city marshal of Woodsdale when they were battling Hugoton over the Stevens County seat.’
‘Well, it’s near there all right.’
He read from his pocket notebook. ‘How come you aren’t registered?’
‘I just come here to read the papers.’ I folded it up and walked out.
I saw Bryant sitting on a pile of railroad ties alone while brakemen walked along the tops of boxcars, turning the brake-release wheels. I didn’t ask why Miss Thorne had left him. I just told him that Deputy Marshal Ed Short was in town and he’d better stay somewhere else. So he rode east to Mulhall where his brother Jim had a homestead, but there the same man kept walking his horse by the house day in and day out and Bryant figured him for a detective, so he took off again and stayed until late July in the cow camp at Buffalo Springs.
Mr. Short was a hired gun who got federal money from Chief Marshal William Grimes for policing the second judicial district. Short had put on spectacles and read through the files of outlaws that a deputy marshal named Christian Madsen kept in the Guthrie courthouse, and Short matched the cowboy from Texas called Blackface Charley Bryant with the train robber at Wharton described by the fireman and engineer of the Santa Fe–Texas Express. So he’d rented an office in Hennessey and lived at the Rock Island Hotel where a drifter had told him Bryant had a sweetheart, and Short rode west on a regular basis to sit on his horse with binoculars and see an acre away the white-painted two-storey house that he’d been informed now belonged to the wanted man’s sister, Daisy. I guess Short never saw my brother. Bob was savvy that way.
By August the four or five or six of us at the dugout had wild vegetables and stray calf to eat and Doolin and I would sit by the river at night fishing for bullhead with bamboo poles while the others squatted around a bonfire and passed a brown jug, playing spoons on their knees while Powers played fiddle. I visited Julia just once, for a Saturday evening of doing nothing, which is what I could afford. She wore a yellow dress with a lace collar and we threw yarn balls at the cameos on the piano. I stuck a knife in a tree from ten feet away and I sat in the dirt while she sat in the swing and she wet my hair down and middle-parted it. She asked me questions about Miss Moore but she was still in a snit about her. Julia thought I was being corrupted. I was nineteen years old; she was eighteen.
By August, Bryant looked awful. There was green in his eyes and his skin was yellow and he couldn’t hold a supper down. Whenever I saw him he had a washrag over his face and his hands at his crotch, rocking from side to side on his bedroll. The disease had infected his brain too, and he’d sulk under a tree and contort his mouth as if he were yelling at hecklers in his own private saloon. Then he’d explode to his feet and dash out into the sun and punch his fists very rapidly, then walk back to his seat and repeat the brawl over and over until Pierce or Powers shook him.
He left for Mulhall and his brother’s doctor on August 1st, a pint of whiskey that was hot as Tabasco beneath his shirt, his legs tied to the saddle. But he fainted and almost choked on his vomit before he spurred his horse up onto the wooden porch of the hotel in Hennessey and yelled for the hostess to fetch him.
He was carried to an upstairs room and Miss Thorne gave him a pan bath. Then, while a local physician attended him, she walked across the street to what was once a lawyer’s office. Ed Short had a checkered dinner napkin spread on his desk and his revolver disassembled under the light of a kerosene lantern. He raised his eyes to the woman in the doorway.
‘He’s here,’ said Miss Jean Thorne.