Desperadoes

‘Well, it’d serve me right for being so stupid.’

Bryant gasped for air and wiped his face inside his sleeve. The baggage man said, ‘I wouldn’t’ve suspected you was so sick.’

‘I’m as bad off as a man can be and not have maggots in his nose. Each morning when I wake up alive, I’m surprised. That’s why I needed the gun. I can’t stand the suspense anymore.’

‘This your last roundup, is it?’ the baggage man said.

Short bumped back through the cars with Bryant’s Winchester at carry. A black porter stood on the platform between the Pullman and the baggage car holding a step stool against his knee. Short took his hat off and leaned out into the air. His blond hair blew flat on his head.

‘What’s the next stop?’

‘Waukomis. About two minute away.’

Blackface Charley Bryant heard Short’s voice, shoved the baggage door open, lifted the deputy marshal’s revolver up. ‘You should see the surprise on your face, Mr. Short.’

Short glared at him, then swung Bryant’s rifle up to his hip and fired it just as Bryant pulled the trigger of Short’s revolver. It sounded like two doors slamming, and all the air was blue. Bryant was flung back against the steel of the car; Short staggered back a step with a dark hole in his vest that he brushed at like it was food crumbs. Bryant grimaced and started to sag down and the deputy marshal shot him again and Bryant sat down hard.

Bryant saw his legs twitching and the urine making a stain on his pants but his back was broken and the nerves were dead: his pain was small as heartburn. He closed his eyes and lowered the pistol and Short took him for dead. Short leaned against the railing with blood oozing through his vest and saw the depot a quarter-mile ahead with women in bustles on the dock. He pushed away to drag his prisoner out of the doorway and spare the women’s eyes, but he hadn’t walked a half a yard before Bryant lifted his pistol again and fired five explosions, even clicking the trigger through three empty cartridges before he let the pistol drop to his lap.

Short slammed back against the Pullman door with the blasts and took bullets in his lung, his liver, his kidney, his spleen. Smoke rolled between the cars and sucked out as the brakes screeched on the rails. The porter and the conductor were crouched at the end of the Pullman and passengers knelt on the floor. The baggage man shoved the baggage door wide and wrenched the pistol from Bryant’s hand and dragged him back by the collar of his shirt and kicked his head until it was soft, shouting, ‘You bastard!’ over and over again.

Short heaved forward from the Pullman car and walked across the platform and into the baggage car. (I’ve never heard of a stronger man.) The front of his suit was blood. ‘Let’s lay him up on this trunk,’ he said.

The baggage man stared at him, disbelieving. Short bent for Blackface Charley Bryant’s trouser cuffs and the baggage man took his shoulders and they lifted the body up that way. The dead man’s eyes were closed and blood slid out of his mouth like saliva.

Short said, ‘I’m pretty woozy,’ and sat himself down on the board floor. Then he leaned on his elbow and sagged against the trunk. He shut his eyes. ‘Have you ever rode a horse hard for two days without sleep and laid yourself down on a feather bed?’

When the train stopped in Waukomis he was dead.

10

That summer Grattan Dalton spent in a California jail. Railroad detective Will Smith came by his cell in middle May with an Oklahoma paper. He put on spectacles and read aloud the accounts of the Wharton train robbery. The coward Ransom Payne was one of the quoted witnesses. Smith folded his spectacles up and said, ‘I’ve been puzzling it in my mind but I can’t figure out why your brothers would do such a thing when you got a jury trial coming up. Seems to me that might prejudice the court just a little.’

Grat lay on his mattress with his hands behind his head. He said, ‘Maybe there wasn’t nothing better to do. Maybe choir practice was canceled.’

Smith walked six cells down to where Bill Dalton was reading a law book, his finger moving under the words. Smith inquired about Bill’s family and his upcoming trial but my brother started reciting aloud from the text until the detective left.

Bill had so many friends in the county it seemed unlikely to the prosecution that they’d convict him for anything, so they let him out after the arraignment. It was not so with Grat. His trial for ‘assault to commit robbery’ at Alila was held in the Tulare County courthouse in Visalia on June 18, 1891. His attorney, Breckinridge, walked into the courtroom reading his law clerk’s

brief for the first time. He shook hands with the prosecution and several Southern Pacific executives in the gallery, whispering something and laughing longer than they did. He sat down next to Grat, smelling of witch hazel. Grat’s hair was shaved off because of lice in the jail pillows. His ears stuck out; his face was pale. He wore a white shirt that was too big for him and a tie he’d already unknotted.

‘Are you nervous at all?’ Breckinridge asked.

‘I learned the tiniest bit about the law from being a marshal in the Oklahoma Territory and I know for a fact you can’t convict an accessory unless you’ve got one of the supposed principals arrested, I don’t see how this trial can last longer than afternoon.’

‘Stranger things have happened,’ said Breckinridge, and he unfastened the clasps on his briefcase.

The trial lasted three weeks and defense lawyer Breckinridge arose from his chair in objection no more than a dozen times. He did not cross-examine Smith or the other detectives. He accepted Bob’s worn spurs as exhibits, also the plug horses said to have been used for the getaway, even the locomotive engineer’s identification that Grat must’ve been the robber because he was ‘similar in size.’

In July, Breckinridge came in from a lunch recess blowing off his mustache comb. ‘I just had the best chicken and dumplings I’ve ever tasted.’

‘Good,’ said Grat. ‘Appears to me you needed the energy.’

Breckinridge glared at him. ‘The way to handle this case is to simply ride it out. Let the prosecution make all the mistakes. We’ll get a mistrial on the rules of evidence alone.’

‘Maybe I’m just the least little bit cranky because a lawyer named John Ahem told me I was being jobbed. He said the Southern Pacific Railroad made you a wealthy man.’

‘That’s nonsense.’