Two or three special deputies were firing from the smoking parlor car, a foot-long blaze with each report, but they didn’t have much for targets. About six volunteers braced themselves at the rail of the smoker trying to muster up courage with their guns in their belts and their brains as slow as cattle and sheep and mud hens. They saw my brother Bob stand from under the baggage car and two of them had the wherewithal to yank pistols from their holsters at least, but Bob potted just one gas lamp over their heads and they withdrew back into the dark of the car like slugs.
With the shooting from the coal shed stopped, Grat and I clambered out of the engine cab with the hoghead and the stoker, who carried a coal pick over his shoulder. Dick Broadwell grabbed it from him and chopped the pick into the sliding door, wood barking and yelping and flying away in splinters. We heard a key and the padlock clicked open and the door rumbled as it rolled wide. Oven air rushed on us and the messenger trembled there with his hands high and his blue shirt black with perspiration, sweat trickling down off his nose.
Bob couldn’t figure out why the attendant had opened a door t
hat was secured, so he stood back and asked, ‘Is it just you in there? Are you alone?’
The messenger swallowed and shook his head from side to side.
I could hear the Texas badman sit down hard on the mailbags. ‘Shee-oot, Williams! Real flaming smart!’
Broadwell and Grat jumped up inside the express car and covered the hired man in the corner. Grat hurled the man’s rifle out into the night and I saw it glint once, twice in the moonlight as it wheeled. Broadwell said, ‘You wanted that reward money pretty bad, didn’t you. Would’ve been Christmas in July, wouldn’t it.’
The hired gun ignored him. He glared at my brother Bob. ‘We ain’t gonna give you squat.’
But of course they did. They offered the worn-out argument about not knowing the combination and Bob tantalized Williams with a pistol shot that was so close to his brainpan it singed his hair and repeated itself in the messenger’s ear for most of the following week. The safe was opened and we carried money out in a mail sack and threw it down into the clattery springboard wagon that Pierce had driven down from the water tower.
My ox of a brother, Grat, pushed the ticket agent and fireman and engineer back to the front of the train where he told them to hurry it out of town. Then Grat hopped down from the ladder and bumped the ticket agent onto his seat just for meanness.
Doolin and Newcomb backed along the train with their rifles on the faces of the distraught volunteers; then Newcomb and Broadwell started laughing about something and instead of coming up with Bob and me, they jumped in the wagon with Pierce, and Pierce slapped the long leather traces against the horse team and they barreled down the siding past the coach cars, howling and ki-yiing, shooting their pistols through windows. Broadwell stood on the wagonbox, glamorous as Custer, and shot a man of fifty-five in the shoulder, then plowed a bullet into the vest pocket timepiece of a passenger named Frimbo. Afterward, Frimbo laid the watch out on a sheet of paper and demonstrated for Chris Madsen’s men that it was in so many pieces it could be gathered up and sifted through his fingers.
Broadwell, Pierce, and little Newcomb ringed the train twice, taunting the volunteers, daring them to shoot; then the train clanked and squealed and strained in its hard pull forward.
Newcomb said, ‘Why don’t we board her and run through the coaches assassinatin’ the villains? Wouldn’t that be havoc?’
But they saw Bob fussing and me waving them back and they turtled the wagon over the moon-gleaming tracks.
I inquired of my brother, ‘Wasn’t that Sid Johnson shooting at us?’
Bob had on his surprised and mirthful and enchanted-with-life expression. ‘And Charlie LeFlore!’ he exclaimed. ‘Can you beat that! You’ve got to help me think of a way to really rub it in next time I see those coots. Something really humiliating.’
I saw the brakeman’s lantern on a second-class coach as it rolled past. I said, ‘I bet they’re so danged embarrassed already they’ll shoot ya soon as you walk into town.’
‘Naw! Do you think so? Naw. They know the conditions. It’s like a prizefight, Emmett. You don’t go slamming the other guy around after he’s out of the ring.’
‘I forget: we’re gentlemen.’
He looked at me like I was simple.
Johnson, Kinney, and LeFlore had struggled up the stairs of the smoking parlor car and sat down bleeding onto newspapers in the aisle. The ticket agent had ducked inside the depot and bolted shut the doors and was probably at that moment signaling yet another posse. And the Dalton gang backed down the main street of the quiet town of Adair, taking some last shots from the caboose without reply.
I was sick of trains and the mulish routine of robbing them and I was frankly a little scared of being shot at, scared enough to make my stomach hurt. Pierce drove the wagon ahead to where the horses were hitched and we walked through town as we had entered it, seven slimy men in noisy raincoats, striding out of Adair under elm trees, except now we were alone in the town, every lamp was extinguished, the doors were shut, and children were crouched down in closets like we were boogey-men. I was as hot as I’ve ever been, and I had to keep slapping at mosquitoes that swarmed at my face and hands. I took the boardwalk in front of the drugstore and saw a shattered window with the two doctors flat on their backs in shards of glass.
My brother Bob and I stood there, struck mute and motionless by what we saw, which was Dr. W.L. Goff, who’d suffered the freakish accident of a wild pistol shot that exploded his left eye. Blood covered all of one half of his face and slid away from his head with the slope of the floor. He’d die within the hour. The other doctor, who was named Youngblood (according to the newspaper clippings), had been struck in the throat with a ricochet. His fingers curled and uncurled. He saw me staring and turned his head and blood and food surged out of his mouth like he’d spilled a soup pan onto a table. ‘Help me,’ he said. ‘Please help me.’ And I ran away as fast as I could while my brother Bob looked on, fascinated, his hands deep in his raincoat pockets.
17
The Dalton gang rode northwest toward Kansas and into the Dog Creek hills, while three posses of over a hundred city boys, each a clanking arsenal, strove after us in several wrong directions. At four in the morning, the spoils of Adair were apportioned, Bob doing the mathematics as always, at which he was baffling, fast as a gambler with cards.
Bitter Creek Newcomb stole twenty eggs from a farm chicken coop and fried them with wild onion in a skillet, talking as he did so about the engagement ring he was going to buy for his fiancee, Rose Dunn. The other men loitered next to the fire or washed their faces in the creek and I napped with last year’s rusty leaves while a daddy longlegs walked over my neck and ear.
If I slept at all it was with a nightmare about that Adair holdup. That was the first time we’d really been shot at during a robbery, the first time I’d ever been scared of dying. I could hear Newcomb sizzle onions at the camp fire but with that I heard railroad detectives shouting and the noise of guns going off and the whiz of slugs crossing the air near my head. I could open my eyes and see Powers tamping tobacco into his meerschaum or tinkering with his alarm clock, but if I shut them I saw running men and muzzle flashes and pistol chamber sparks near a coal shed, or the drugstore and the shattered plate glass window and the exploded left eye of Dr. W.L. Goff. It doesn’t seem exactly real to me now; it seems like cap pistols and chicken blood and dead men who’ll rise up and dust themselves off and eat cafeteria food at the RKO film studio. But that morning in the Dog Creek hills I was pretty shaken and whenever I thought about Dr. Youngblood, I saw Bob lying there. My brother would see me staring and turn his head and blood would brim out of his mouth. ‘Help me,’ he’d say. ‘Please help me.’ And I’d run.
I wanted to quit but my brother Bob didn’t; he wasn’t haunted at all. He handled Adair like all the other jobs and after distributing the shares he delivered Bill’s percentage to Bartlesville in a shoebox and stayed for a lunch of fried tomatoes on toast with the child Grace in his lap, her steel and leather leg brace hanging from the back of the chair.
I combed out horse manes with a stolen lady’s brush; then Bob rode in at sundown, breaking through river cane, green circles under his eyes and dust and chaff in every wrinkle of his clothes. He told us to saddle up, so we did. And we walked our horses up to Coffeyville, Kansas, arriving at two in the morning.
Bob hammered the door to the Farmers’ Home on Eighth Street, a hostel no bigger than a camera store. I could see the owner sleeping with his wife in a brass bed in the dining room, saw him scrape a match and feed it to an oil lantern and spread the window curtains apart. What he saw was a hulking young man with a dark, brooding look and my black pistol cocked and pointed at his eye.