Desperadoes

rse up with his rifle back on his shoulder; Bob threw a leg up and climbed in the car and saw canvas sacks and a stove and a wall-long mail sorter and a lunch bucket open on the desk. He lifted the iron plates on the stove and saw it was empty, then threw the latch on the south door. Powers walked in and saw the messenger and punched him in the throat. The man fell to his right knee and almost swallowed his tongue but I guess he came out of it okay.

In the passenger cars the men were throwing up windows and leaning out to see what was going on. Two had pistols in their hands but I could see they were reluctant to risk anything so I didn’t pay them no mind and they heavily sat again on their pillowed coach seats. But five or six of the bolder travelers were standing on a platform between coach and Pullman, talking to each other. A man in a bowler hat leaned out on the opened exit door and yelled to me, ‘What’s the name of your gang?’

My horse was prancing and nodding its head and lifting off of its front legs. I could hear Pierce yelling at passengers on his side to get back up the stairs.

The man in the bowler asked, ‘Is it the Dalton gang?’

A man with a drooping red mustache said, ‘Oh! How could it be, Manion? That boy’s not fifteen years old!’

‘Well, the Daltons aren’t old as you might think.’

‘Older than fifteen.’

‘I’m nineteen,’ I said.

‘See there?’

‘Don’t talk to them,’ said Newcomb.

Doolin was on his horse when the messenger staggered forward dragging a heavy meal sack between his legs. It was filled to half with silver dollars and it scraped the varnish off the floor. Pierce was at the platform of a rear passenger car yanking a mouthy boy off the stair by his coat collar. Two men leapt from the platform onto the cinders and grabbed for Pierce’s raincoat sleeve or his horse’s bridle. Pierce looked a little shamefaced at Broadwell and Bob as the men tussled over him, and Broadwell yelled, ‘You get back inside there this instant! Do I have to take a strap to you?’

Then a fat man in a checkered vest pulled a small caliber pistol out of a shoulder holster and stalked toward the masked desperadoes at the express car, and Doolin groaned. ‘Fools like that just make me tired.’ He pulled his pistol out of his holster and hauled his horse around. ‘Watch me make the hair stand up on his neck.’

Bob said, ‘You stick where you’re ordered.’

But Doolin broke away and whooped and hollered and flourished his pistol and fired it. He galloped his horse straight at the frozen passengers, his raincoat sailing, the front of his hat flopped back. The men scurried out of his way. At the caboose he pulled his reins left and turned his horse around and charged down the train again, jousting. The fat man in the checkered vest sat down in the cinders and covered his face with his elbows, and Doolin kicked off the man’s hat with a stirrup. Then he stopped his horse next to Powers, grinning and breathing hard. ‘Scattered like hens, didn’t they.’

Powers had the heavy money sack on his shoulder. When he tied it to Doolin’s saddle horn, the saddle canted to the side. ‘Bob’s a trifle displeased with you. He said you should carry this.’

‘Does he think that’s the dunce cap or something? Carrying away all the swag?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Powers. ‘I didn’t think to ask.’

Coming from the rear my horse stalled and stepped across the tracks like a sissy, so I was late getting in front of the locomotive. But I managed to raise my rifle up as Bob hustled the engine crew up to the cab. Broadwell heaved the sliding express door closed and Pierce brought Powers’s horse up by the reins.

Bob said to the engineer, ‘I calculate the MK&T lost about five minutes so you’d better hurry out of here if you want to hit Dallas on time.’ He stepped off the train onto the depot’s loading platform. ‘Oh, and when you get to the gantlet, slow up and have your firemen shovel off some coal. And don’t be too stingy about it or I might introduce you to serious trouble.’

Steam hushed and I saw the wheel eccentrics drop and then the five-foot drive wheels started to spin, the couplings gripped in a succession of clanks, and the coaches howled into sway.

Newcomb climbed onto the depot roof from his saddle and jinked along the peak until he found the porcelain insulators and the depot telegraph lines. Don’t know why he bothered about them. Maybe it was just meanness. The wires sprang away from his snippers and Newcomb hung by a gutter and dropped back onto his saddle; then he and Bob spurred their horses down the wooden stairs and along the creosote-painted ties behind the rolling train. The fat man in the checkered vest was shaking his fist from the last coach; the old black woman was stooped over at the siding dropping coal into a pail. It was as sweet a picture as you’d ever want to see and it did us no harm at all in that country to rob from the rich and give to the poor. That shovel of coal kept many on our side unto the very end.

The seven of us slept under yellow leaves that night. At five in the morning I sat up smelling coffee and I saw Bob walk up to each man and drop a jangling canvas sack into the leaves near his head. ‘You look like Santa Claus,’ I said.

He smiled. ‘I’ll divvy up with you later.’

I’ve said elsewhere the take was nineteen thousand dollars. I reckon it was closer to ten. Divided seven ways it would’ve come to almost fifteen hundred apiece, but Bob gave the five men of the gang not kin to him wages instead of shares: four hundred dollars for a night’s work.

Newcomb walked over to the fire and poured a tin cup of coffee and squatted to count the silver coins and paper money into his hat. ‘I can’t believe this, Bob!’

‘Believe what?’

Doolin kept his head on his saddle pillow and stacked the money on the leaves. He glared at Bob. ‘Where’s the rest of it, Dalton?’

‘That’s the arithmetic,’ said Bob.

‘But I carried that sack,’ said Doolin. ‘There must’ve been three thousand dollars just in silver!’

‘There was,’ said Bob. ‘And there’s also the sod house to supply and Bryant’s funeral expenses and implements and tools and payoffs to the local police, plus Jim Riley gets a little something for allowing us his property. You don’t give a thought to that.’