Desperadoes

The dog sat down in the snow and licked at her blood. Grat made slings for the rifle and the canteen and walked eighteen miles in cold, squelching boots, through flannel-bush and larkspur and vertical shafts of sunlight, until he got to a flatlands farm in Harmon’s Valley where a man with a neck beard named Judd Elwood was squatted against a fence post peeling the brown skin off an apple and into a paper sack. He had a two-horse team harnessed to traces and a heavy logging chain that was wrapped around an axe-trimmed sequoia. He turned when he heard Grat walk out of the forest and he looked on a mountain man, all coat and stubble and broad hat pulled down on his head, his rifle at slant on his arm.

‘Did a posse stop by here the other night?’ Grat asked.

The farmer squatted in snow and looked at the axe still stuck in the tree. ‘I suppose it was you they was cross with.’

Grat said, ‘Unhook your team and strip the harness off that near horse.’

The farmer grumbled and slammed his apple into the paper sack and did as he was told. My brother then stole a frozen gunnysack from the farmer’s shed and jars of preserves from the farmhouse cellar, dust puffing out from the sack when he tossed the plunder in.

So he could find out about himself, Grat rode the farmer’s horse from Merced to Tulare on the dirt road that is now concrete and Highway 99 and traveled by black Chevrolet coupes at 35 miles per hour. He had a skunk smell to him, his scalp hair was knotted, and his bristle beard had yellow seeds in it, so he could clomp down the board sidewalks of Tulare, raincoat over his mackinaw, and not be recognized by anyone but kin. Sheriffs stepped out of his way.

That afternoon a boy ran up to him with a note telling him to situate himself in the rear of a blue hotel that night. There he discovered an Indian pony with saddlebags crammed with hard biscuits and beef jerky and three canteens on the saddle horn. He gazed up to a second-storey window and nodded to my brother Bill who sat by a kerosene lamp.

Grat hammered thick plate shoes on his horse at Bakersfield, the cowboy capital, and he took the Tehachapi trail for Barstow and the Mojave desert, thence to Needles and across Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, sleeping afternoons in caves or in the tangled shade of mesquite or Joshua trees, feeding on fence lizards, salamanders, greasy peccary and drinking sulphur water. The land was bare as worn carpet except for the balls of tumbleweed and the animal carcasses and the purple mountains in the distance. He’d see strands of smoke from Hopi and Navaho fires fifteen miles away, but by the time he got there the cooking stones would be cool, the wickiups would be empty, and vicious travois dogs would bark and lunge at his horse. Sheep would stare as he slumped by at night; rattlesnakes would stab at his stirrups and flop down to squirm under sagebrush; small tarantulas crawled over his face to drink water from his eyes as he slept.

He lost thirty-two pounds, pried out an aching tooth with his dinner fork, blistered both heels so far down to the bone that he could pour blood when he took off his boots. I suppose Grat’s brain cracked just a bit with aloneness because he invented a cowboy named Dangerous Dan who supposedly rode an albino mule and caught turtledoves in his hands and talked to Grat about railroads and how they were going to get even. ‘Old Dan, he was good company,’ said Grat. His journey from California to Oklahoma took one hundred and seven days.

12

My brother Bill was in the Oklahoma Territory by then. Soon after Grat escaped, the railroad detectives uncovered evidence that seemed to put the blame for the Ceres train robbery on the Sontag-Evans gang and might even have implicated them in the three previous holdups. Given those circumstances, the Tulare County district attorney thought a second conviction of a Dalton might be difficult and he ordered my brother Bill, twenty-eight years old, released on his own recognizance.

Bill returned to his farm near Paso Robles for the harvest, then took a hotel room in Tulare and sat on its blue porch in a spindle-back chair, whittling dolls’ heads and gaining an audience with talk: ‘Making these for my girls,’ he said. ‘Not like when I was a boy. When I grew up we were so poor we couldn’t pay attention.’ Nervous laughter. ‘I said, ‘Momma, I don’t have nothin’ to play with,’ so she chopped the bottoms off my pockets.’ They chuckled. ‘Told my dad I wanted a watch for Christmas—so he let me.’ Somebody giggled; other men hooted. ‘Not that I learned anything. I was so dumb back then I thought girls were just bumpy boys.’ And so on.

I personally find talk like that tiresome, but the Tulare menfolk laughed and laughed and Bill would grin along with them. He’d have the porch chairs filled and men sitting on the hitches, and then he’d spice his ramble with sermons about politics and the railroad and at sundown stand up and stretch. ‘Oh me, but I’m tired. I feel like I’ve been rode hard and put away wet.’ Like as not a man would then buy him supper and whatever liquor he wanted in a saloon. And down the block there’d be a man in a gray vested suit and brown shoes with a pistol in a sweat-black shoulder holster and a Southern Pacific badge in his pocket, watching for clues and information that might lead them to the apprehension of Grattan Dalton.

My brother Bill was aware of that and of the detectives on horses in the Russian olive tree shade back on his Paso Robles farm. Yet there he kept, in plain view, until the winter rains came and he saw an oily, wild-looking man with a beard and a skunk smell to him clomp along the board sidewalk on the other side of the street. Then Bill sent a boy with a note and he paid out a hundred dollars and tied an Indian pony up behind the hotel and sat at the screened window that night, watching as brother Grat, in all his coats, rode off for Oklahoma.

Bill packed a suitcase and carried his best serge suit down the street on a hanger and left it with an actor friend named Lonnie, I believe, who thereupon shaved his jaw beard until it duplicated Bill’s chin brush. He proved a good impostor.

The railroad detectives lost Bill in Tulare but the men staked out at my brother’s farm said they’d picked him up there. And for two weeks they sent reports to San Francisco saying Bill was puttering in his toolshed or picnicking at Pismo Beach on Sunday or driving his wife to town in a buggy, wearing his blue serge suit.

It was only then, two weeks after Bill took a night train to the Oklahoma Territory, that the detectives learned they’d been duped.

And it was about that time that Chief Marshal William Grimes and authorities of the Southern Pacific decided to combine their manpower and intelligence to bring in the infamous Daltons; and dispatched to San Francisco was a new U.S. deputy marshall from El Reno named Christian Madsen.

Chris Madsen was our undoing.

He was a wide and blue-eyed and sober man, built from the belly up like he should’ve been six-foot-six, but he walked on runty legs that sawed him down to five-foot-five. His sideburns were cut off at the top of his ear; he had a brown mustache that was six inches across his face; he was losing his wispy blond hair. He was foreign-born, forty-one years old, a Dane; slow to anger, methodical, organized; a retired Army supply sergeant from Fort Reno who’d bought sides of beef in the past from Nannie’s husband, J.K. Whipple, and who knew my brothers and me and Eugenia Moore—whom he called ‘a hard-bitten bitch’—ever since my brother Frank was shot dead and promoted to Glory.

He had a three-ring notebook of wanted posters and a mahogany file cabinet with information about every criminal who’d spent any time whatsoever in the territories. When he boarded the train for San Francisco, he had a twine-wrapped bunch of manilla envelopes and printed on each was a name: R. Dalton, E. Dalton, George Newcomb, and so on. When the train made a water stop at Kingfisher, he looked up from his notes to see my brother Bill with a goon face on, his nose smashed up against the window so that he resembled Charlie Pierce. Bill backed away, grinning, rubbing his nose, and shouted through the glass, ‘Hello, Chris!’

‘How’d you get back here?’

Bill cupped a hand to his ear. ‘What say?’

Madsen glowered at him.

Bill said, ‘Maybe we can chat a little longer next time you’re passing through.’ He strolled down the platform into the station house and then the train banged into motion.

Deputy Madsen stopped first at Visalia to talk with Sheriff Kay and see the green London-made safe with three thousand dollars stowed inside, the reward for Grattan Dalton, dead or alive. Then Madsen interviewed a trustee in the Tulare jail, Sheriff Ed O’Neill, the railroad’s chief detective Will Smith, and lastly attorney Breckinridge who would die shortly thereafter with a glass of port wine in his hand, five thousand dollars richer, it’s said, for his perfunctory defense. Then Deputy Marshal Chris Madsen, with more material for his files and three new photographs, took the train back to Guth

rie, the territorial capital.

Not thirty miles west of Guthrie was the Kingfisher farm my mother Adeline was working with two of the girls. Bill would shovel silage or nail tar paper down on the roof or lard his arm to shove it up a cow to feel that her unborn calf had turned breech. Soon there weren’t many heavy chores left to do, so he borrowed a stable mare and took it to Woodward where Eugenia Moore had rented a small bungalow that was completely darkened by sagging evergreens.

Bob and I had stayed cooped up there since Leliaetta in September and now it was late November and I was growly when Bill rode up into the yard. It was seven o’clock in the morning and I was sitting in the two-seater porch swing using my fingers to rub brown paste polish into my boots. I heard his horse nicker and cocked a pistol that was folded into my coat; then Bill lifted a pine branch aside from the lintel and green needles cascaded down. He said, ‘Excuse me but I’m looking for Pecos Pete.’

I grinned and said, ‘You got the next best thing.’