Desperadoes

The same tickbird who’d got him there told us where he’d be and was rewarded with ten dollars, half what he demanded. I rode down to the sod house to see a bearded, gaunt, and pitiful-looking man, all eye sockets, cheekbones, and ribs. The first thing he said to me was how his pal Dangerous Dan could balance a bowie knife on his tongue.

I rode with Grat to a hotel in Dover and he told me about a woman from the East he may or may not have met on his trip. ‘I told her I’d read all I wanted to about New York. I said, “You got trolleys and art museums and foreigners selling hot pretzels. You got Wall Street and sneak thieves and dandies who wear spats and chew chocolate-covered cherries.” I said, “I’m glad you decided to venture west and discover human beings.”’

‘You get anywhere with her?’ I asked like a bumpkin.

He said, ‘I’ve been so long without, Emmett, I’ve lost the inclination. And I don’t like the way women smell.’

The family made a whoop-de-do over my brother’s return. Bob hired out a Dover restaurant and the entire clan, including Eugenia, excluding my inamorata, partook of a Sunday meal served by shy black girls wearing bandanas over their hair, bossed to the kitchen and back by the black cowpuncher, Amos Burton. The women were happy, the men ate with rifles crossed in their laps, the girls sang ‘A Frog Went A-courtin’ and ‘Shoo, Fly, Shoo,’ and I stood guard, leaning against the doorjamb with a shotgun in my arms, looking out over puddles of rainwater in the street, worrying about when the massed lawmen would attack and wipe us out. They could’ve had us easy then.

My mother kept a hand on Grattan’s wrist and just gazed from one to the other of us most of the way through supper. She weighed about ninety pounds then and her weak right eye drooped pretty badly. She smiled and said, ‘Have all my boys come home at last?’

After supper, Bob walked outside with Eugenia for an hour, discussing a railroad depot in Red Rock she’d visited. Then he stood at the doorway and nodded at Grat and me. I gathered up my saddlebags and my mother followed me. ‘Are you boys going—so soon?’

Bob sagged against the door frame and said something sonly to her.

She gave him a pinched look and said, ‘Well, keep your courage, and leave this wild country before you hurt anyone. Seems it’s too late now to do anything else.’ She put a hand on my wrist and Grat’s. Grat seemed hypnotized by a lantern hanging over the door. ‘Promise me you boys will always stick together.’

Then we pushed out through the door and unhitched our horses. Bob said, ‘I hate that kind of stuff, don’t you?’

I was almost in my saddle when Eugenia remembered my harmonica for me. She held my horse by the bridle and when I returned to the table for my Harpoon, my mother asked me to pray with her. I took my hat off and bowed my head, sliding my eyes at my younger kin who were snickering at me in the restaurant. She said, ‘May the Lord bless you and keep you and may His light shine upon you, in this world and the next.’

I hung there.

‘Say “Amen.”’

‘Amen‚’ I said, and soon as I got out the door I hopped on my horse and galloped away as fast as I could.

I don’t recall the dates for any of that. I only know that it was in May that my brother Bill, sweet-talking and convincing, in brown jodhpurs and tie, rode with Bill Doolin to Ingalls and Stillwater and to a cattle lot in Texas, collecting Charlie Pierce and Bitter Creek Newcomb and Bill Powers and Dick Broadwell. And it was on June 1, 1892, that the Dalton gang, minus my brother Bill as always, but including Grat at long last, rode to the railroad station at Red Rock on the Otoe reservation.

It was a dinky town and still is: depot and a section house and a cluttered store with all it sold lettered on its outdoor wall advertisement. Red Rock sat about twelve miles north of Wharton on the Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe lines that connected Wichita, Kansas, with Guthrie and Oklahoma City.

We broke from trot to canter at the limits of the town and our horses threw their nozzles up, clicking the bit with their tongues. Grat was so excited about our intentions that he couldn’t bring himself to slow, so he galloped ahead and backed his horse up to the store and waited, his flop hat wadded in his hand. There wasn’t any cover near there, because it was wheat and grass and bicycle country, but we wore what we had at Leliaetta—black raincoats, black hats, blue bandanas—so we were unseen as we stood our horses stock-still on the main street of town about fifty yards from the trestle: eight strong and violent and unafraid men, the largest bunch we ever were. Doolin and Pierce shared a pouch of Bull Durham tobacco and used the same match on their pipes. Newcomb rolled the long sleeves of his raincoat up. Twenty miles west I could see rain hanging from thunderheads. Lightning was crooked out of the purple clouds; then it flashed in threes, each split like divining rods, and all I could hear was the slightest grumble of noise, as if an old boarder were reading aloud in his room.

At that time in Kingfisher, my brother Bill strolled into a hotel lobby with his hands in his pockets, a green cigar in his mouth. That afternoon a grand jury from the fifth judicial district had questioned sixteen local men regarding the whereabouts of Bob and Emmett Dalton and asked each to confirm or deny the rumor that Grat was back in the territories. The jury got nary a word from those store-keepers and farmers. Bill had a list of every name and he wasn’t shy about knocking on doors and reminding folks of gifts and favors and of how surly and cross we could get. And he’d grin at the witnesses as he was grinning when he plumped himself down on the gold satin couch across from Chris Madsen and the federal judge and the federal prosecutor. He rolled his cigar to a cheek and folded his arms and smiled largely at each man. ‘Well. It’s nine o’clock and we’ve got nothing to do. Why don’t we play charades?’

At Red Rock, Bob dismounted and gave me the bridle reins, worked the lock on the depot door, and walked around to the side porch. He leaned into the window glass, cupping his eyes, then walked to the rear of the depot and looked hard through that window. He saw an uneven table with a kerosene lamp and four yellowing newspapers, also an oak fence and gate and the telegraph key, another cold lamp, a grilled ticket counter, and the edge of an oak desk. He had a feeling the depot wasn’t vacant, that a station attendant was crouched down behind the grill or in the cubbyhole of the desk. He pressed his ear to the glass and closed his eyes and walked down the road to me and his horse. He forked his saddle and gingered his horse into backing up to the dark of a

cottonwood tree. ‘Let’s be a little secret why don’t we, and not get illuminated.’

I looked over my shoulder and danced my mare back; the others did the same; and Grat jogged back from his walk along the railroad tracks, scratching the knuckles of his hand. ‘I think I heard the train.’

Bob smiled. ‘That right? Then it’s early.’

Pierce said, ‘I think you’re speculatin’, Grat.’

I asked, ‘Nobody home, Bob?’

‘I haven’t figured out just what the peculiarity is. Maybe the attendant is having supper.’

Bitter Creek took out a tin of tobacco and pinched some under his lip, while left of him Grat took every bullet out of his pistol chamber and pressed them back in again.

Bob said, ‘Don’t be too disappointed if we let this opportunity go by.’

Broadwell questioned Powers in whispers about that, but Powers didn’t react. Doolin bit his pipe and leaned over his saddle horn to glower at Bob but he didn’t say a word. Grat let some brown soup of tobacco cud drop out of his cheek to the dirt. It sounded like marbles hitting the road.

In Kingfisher, the federal judge had already retired in disgust to his room. The fifth district’s prosecutor swirled Madeira in a snifter and listened to my brother Bill entertain. (Whenever I tune the radio to NBC and hear Jack Haley joke on the Maxwell House Show Boat, I think of Bill and smile. He had real zest with people.) After some stories for Madsen and the lawyer, Bill began rather loudly noticing women: ‘Wow, what about the galloons on that one!’ or ‘I bet her legs go all the way up to her playground. How about it, prosecutor?’

The attorney banged his snifter down on the coffee table and pulled himself up from the sofa. ‘Marshal, it’s nine-thirty.’ He bowed toward Madsen, glanced some disdain at my brother, and walked across the green carpet of the lobby.