‘He’s free to disagree,’ said Bill. ‘He didn’t have to go off and pout.’
Madsen sat in a corner of the sofa, squinting at Bill, a full snifter clutched in his lap. ‘Maybe he was tired.’
The prosecutor climbed the hotel stairs, his right hand dragging along the bannister. Bill could hear the slow crump of his shoes in the carpet. My brother smirked at Madsen and shouted, ‘How can you fellas sleep at night with those Daltons running around loose?’
In the coach of the Santa Fe train, men with rifles sat next to a boy curled up in the wooden seat, a woman resting her brow on three fingers, and a man rattling a newspaper open and reading through bifocals under the light. A white conductor in a blue suit walked down the aisle touching all the seat backs. ‘Red Rock, the next stop. Red Rock.’ Then the men stood up and sidled out to the aisle and followed each other to the smoker. The front man knocked just once and the smoker door wrenched open. It was black as a movie theater inside.
A railroad detective slammed the door shut behind them. ‘How’s it look?’
‘Normal,’ the first man said.
‘There’s empty places in front.’
They ducked low and scuttled forward past windows where men with shotguns were scrunched down, picking shotgun shells out of boxes or squashing cigarettes out.
The railroad detective went out the front door onto the grated platform and hopped onto the green express car’s carriage. He thumped the door with his elbow as he held onto the ladder.
When the back door was opened a slide of light bent to the cinder roadbed and the weeds. He stepped in and the door was kicked shut behind him. Three men in suits sat on chairs with shotguns held like pole lamps; a man in a gray fedora sat on an empty safe idly kicking it with his shoe heels. A man in suspenders and arm bands was loading a rifle next to the wooden mail slots; the messenger was braced against the side door, a pistol hanging from his hand. The man on the safe took his fedora off and tossed it onto some mail sacks. ‘How’d you know about this?’
The railroad detective said, ‘One of our operatives. Madsen put him to work in the area.’
(Eugenia Moore had gone to the Red Rock railroad station in a pink flounced dress and talked to a boy who wrote shorthand whenever the telegraph signaled. When he next worked the graveyard shift, she had allowed him to take her into a broom closet and she showed him how the French kiss and she asked him questions about trains and money shipments, and when he answered she pushed his hand under her blouse.
Two or three minutes after she left, a man in a black suit and bowler walked in throwing his badged wallet down on the boy’s desk. ‘I hope it was pretty good.’)
Then the Dalton gang saw the train, grimy lantern and smokestack and roiling black smoke, a dead robin splayed in its cow catcher. And noisy enough to make you deaf, all steam brakes and bells and steel versus steel as it slacked speed near the station. Over all that, I said, ‘Something’s wrong when a smoking car’s dark. Lookit that dang thing.’
‘I only just noticed,’ Bob said.
Grat nudged his horse forward but Newcomb grabbed its mane hair and jerked it to a stop. ‘The practice is to wait on Bob. He’s the one with the caution.’
Broadwell pulled out of line and nuzzled his horse in next to my brother. ‘Something’s inappropriate, Bob.’
‘That’s been a subject of discussion.’
I could make out the coach windows: a sleeping man, a baby’s hand flat against the glass, a man turning a newspaper page, a gas jet turned down to dim. But that smoking car was black, not even the glow of a cigarette ash, not even a gas jet lit, and the shades up on every window.
Grat had his Winchester unstrapped and standing barrel up on his thigh. He slapped Bob in the right shoulder with the back of his hand. ‘Come on, Bob! Fool! You’re acting like an old woman.’
‘It’s a deadhead, Grat. A setup.’
Powers sagged and crossed his arms on his saddle horn and moved a toothpick over his teeth. ‘Surely does have that appearance. Looks like a little ambuscade.’
The front door of the depot opened and the ticket agent stood on the threshold with a rifle in his hands, looking right and left, somehow missing us. He walked out to the siding with his eyes as big as they could be, and he banged twice on the express car’s wall before he returned to the depot brushing sawdust from his knees, his rifle in the crook of his arm.
As the train pulled out, the conductor peered out the window but couldn’t see us for our black slickers. He broke open his shotgun and extracted the shells. ‘Wharton, next stop!’ he said.
The men in the smoker got up off the floor, slapping the dirt from their seats, releasing the hammers on their pistols. One said, ‘That was a real disappointment.’
The men in the express car were breaking open their guns, rocking with the train. The man with the fedora was still alternating his shoe heels against the safe door. His hands were under his knees. ‘Do you know what’s going to happen next? They’re going to stop the second section, hold up the regular train. My goodness, we’re sharp as tacks, aren’t we.’
Powers got off his horse and ventilated his saddle. Grat said, ‘I need a plug of tobacco. Who’s got a plug of chew they can lend me?’
Doolin got down and yanked hard on his cinch, making his horse look askance. ‘I think we’ve been buffaloed,’ he said. His raincoat squealed when he moved. He mumbled, ‘Skimpity dinners, heels off my boots; damn scurvy hat makes my hair itch.’ He said aloud‚ ‘Coulda been there wasn’t no smokers on that train. You ever consider that? They mighta been Latter-Day Saints.’
‘Maybe we oughta be quiet,’ said Broadwell.
‘May I ask why?’ said Doolin. ‘May I ask why we’re sittin’ here? Seems to me the engineer pulled the throttle a couple of minutes ago.’