Desperadoes

Grat asked Carpenter where he kept the gold and didn’t like the answer. So he pushed both bankers toward the vault room in the back, then saw T.C. Babb crouched down next to the purple bound ledgers. He swore and grabbed the bookkeeper by the shirtfront and swung him into a chair. Powers poked his rifle through the teller’s grill at Babb. ‘Now I want you obedient, boy.’

The Condon had a black, walk-in, two-door vault with gold leaf trim and a time lock on the safe that had clicked free at 8:30 that morning when Ball had opened up. The safe and its combination lock were guaranteed burglar-proof by the Hall Company, the manufacturers.

Carpenter dropped three canvas bags of silver coins, three thousand dollars total, into the grain sack. He was swallowing back his breakfast. ‘I’m sorry but I have to sit down.’

Grat pressed his rifle sight into the man’s cheek. ‘I want your safe opened.’

Carpenter sagged. ‘Ask Mr. Ball. I never handled those things.’

Grat pulled his rifle away. There was a red mark on Carpenter’s cheek. Grat glared at Ball, a sickly, disciplined man who couldn’t climb stairs without rests on the landings, who couldn’t take food much rougher than soup. Grat demanded that Ball open it.

‘Don’t I wish I could,’ said Ball. ‘It’s automatic, ya see. Operates off its own clock.’

Grat tried to read the cashier’s face but I guess he missed the lie. ‘What time does it open?’

‘9:45.’

Carpenter looked dumbfounded at Ball and then he looked down at his shoes.

My brother asked, ‘What time is it now?’

Ball opened up a steel pocket watch in his hand and snapped it shut. ‘9:38.’

Carpenter lightly tested the safe handle. It rattled but didn’t budge. ‘See there? It’s closed up tight as a drum.’

Grat squatted down opposite Carpenter. ‘We can wait seven minutes.’

Dick Broadwell knelt at the varnished southeast doors and sat back on his heels and stared through the plate glass at the hitching rack in front of Barndollar’s store. A man in long Johns and suspendered trousers heaved against the breast chains and traces until his horse team warily backed up and his flatbed wagon blocked Union Street. Then he yanked hard on the harnesses of another team and a lumber truck got in the way. The horses’ iron shoes grated on the bricks. The man ducked to run inside Isham’s where men with crowbars were wrenching open wooden crates. Broadwell took six rifle cartridges out of his left coat pocket and laid them down between his knees. He saw two boys at the front of the First National Bank: a boy at the railing who was squinting at Dick, kicking the bricks with his toe, and another crouched to peer under the green shades on the door. Dick saw me yank open the front door and yell for Boothby to come inside, and he saw the boy Jack Long dash into Rammel’s next door where a mustached man in a blue shirt and a leather apron revealed himself and a Winchester rifle for a second and then went back to hugging the door frame. Dick cocked his rifle to shoot the assassin but a porch post was in the way. He threw his hat down by the brass coat tree and wiped back his long thinning hair.

Meanwhile both heavy doors to the Isham Brothers and Mansur hardware store were opened and a dozen men who’d been on the street went in and crowded at the windows. Henry Isham used a claw hammer to break open the lid to a case of rifles shipped by Marshal Yoes. Isham’s clerks Louis A. Dietz and T. Arthur Reynolds loaded them and Read’s hardware store clerk Lucius Baldwin carried them front. Lucius slipped under his shirt the small Smith and Wesson revolver kept on a nail beneath the cash register.

At George Boswell’s store across the street the German John Joseph Kloehr, who was then thirty-four, sat on a keg of nails with a penknife, cutting an X into the lead of his cartridges so they’d split apart on impact. M.N. Anderson, the carpenter, lifted up Kloehr’s rifle. The silver housing was engraved with pictures of quail and turkey and turtledoves.

Kloehr said, ‘With that one I win the Kansas State Trapshoot Championship. You never seen anything like it.’

In Slosson’s drugstore, two doors north, stood Aleck McKenna and Cyrus Lee and the assistant pharmacist Frank Benson. They knelt at the lettered windows with rifles, scrutinizing the banks. John B. Tackett, a young amateur photographer then, walked in through the back with a tripod and a small wooden box that was a primitive Edison movie camera. McKenna frowned.

Tackett said, ‘I’m going to get it on film.’

‘What are you talking about?’

Tackett said, ‘Stay out of my way. That’s all I ask. Just don’t get in front of the lens.’

The barber Carey Seaman had just driven a buckboard back from the Indian Territory where he’d shot three quail and ten rabbits. They were his only meat for the month. He slid the stable door and pulled his horses in and leaned his shotgun against an old piano covered with blankets. He was a block and a half away.

City Marshal Charles T. Connelly was having morning coffee with Dr. W.H. Wells in the Masonic Hall on Ninth Street. Connelly was a thin, quiet man with a mustache and long chin beard, a professor of rhetoric and classical languages then on sabbatical. The city job was only temporary. The same yellow-haired boy whose head is in some of Tackett’s pictures’ of the dead ran up on the back porch of the hall and told Connelly about us through the screen door. Connelly set his coffee cup down and looked at the doctor. ‘Do you have a gun?’

Wells shook his head. ‘I’m sorry.’

Connelly crossed through the backyard toward some houses.

At the cemetery, Eugenia Moore got a pencil and paper out of her saddlebags and knelt in front of Frank’s monument copying down my mother’s sentiment: ‘Thou art gone to the grave but we shall not deplore thee. Whose God was thy ransom, thy guardian and guide, He gave thee; He took thee; and He will restore thee. And death has no sting for the Savior has died.’

She folded the paper into her coat pocket and stood up, She could hear dogs barking in the town.

Grat was stomping his boots on the floor. Ball sagged against the rolltop desk and swallowed two pills without water.

Grat said, ‘You used to faint in church all the time.’