Desperadoes

I was stupid with shock and awfully woozy but I lifted my left hand as well as I could, then dropped it down. He grabbed the money sack. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Charlie McLaughlin.’

‘I got something to tell you: you’re dying. I bet you never believe it is possible.’

I turned my head. About twenty men were already in the alley and others were running through the side lots with their rifles clenched, hollering the news. Only twelve minutes had elapsed from Cubine’s first shot to Seaman’s last. Henry Isham turned around in the middle of the alley and saw four dead horses, four dead men, and me. He said, ‘We got ’em, by God, didn’t we? We put ’em all down!’

They tenderly lifted City Marshal Connelly but his head flopped back and his soul departed before Dr. Wells could see to him.

Carpenter stood at the Condon bank’s southwest doors, his fists on his hips. Ball had the discarded silver in a tin box. He sat with it in a chair. Carpenter said, ‘I guess we’d better board up these windows.’

‘Yes,’ said Ball. ‘That should be the first thing.’

Teller W.H. Sheppard of the First National Bank had ambled through Kloehr’s barn and paddock to collect the money sack, and he tilted back to the bank counter with it, escorted by three men. Women carried blankets out of Boswell’s store and spread them over Lucius Baldwin, George Cubine, Charles Brown. Children ran everywhere, dogs hopping up at them and nipping at their ankles. Some boys stood in the front of the Condon bank counting over three hundred bullet holes in the plate glass windows.

Aleck McKenna knelt by Grat and peeled the whiskers off his face. He stood and slapped his hands clean. ‘That’s Grat Dalton all right.’

Grat’s .38-.56 caliber Winchester was taken by Dr. W.C. Hall as a souvenir.

Carey Seaman had wiped his shotgun down with a handkerchief and bragged about himself to all the men. He straddled me and stuffed the handkerchief in his shirt pocket. ‘I thought I’d introduce myself. Name’s Carey Seaman. I’m the one who shot ya.’

I said, ‘You’re going to be famous, Mr. Seaman.’

‘Yes. I believe I am.’

An ugly man in a derby hat had carried a rope out of a barn and he squatted near me tying a noose and spitting through his teeth in my direction. I could hear a lot of talk about lynching. It didn’t faze me one way or the other. Colonel David Stewart Elliott, editor of the Coffeyville Journal, walked up the alley with Tom Callahan, sheriff of Montgomery County, who was to take custody of the outlaws. Some men lifted Grat’s body to a sit and Colonel Elliott agreed about who it was. Callahan recognized Powers as Tim Evans but most of the newspapers put down Tom Hedde and spelled my brother’s name Grot. Elliott strolled over to where the men were bunched and heard the talk about hanging me off a rope and he declaimed it like a stage actor. ‘We won’t disgrace our community by lynching a dying man!’

A boy sat cross-legged near my head, fanning me with the Police Gazette; then Elliott stood tall over me in his long cloak. ‘Emmett Dalton,’ he said sadly. ‘How many years has it been, and who would have thought it would come to this?’

‘Take my guns from me, Colonel.’

He took the pearl-handled pistol out of my shoulder holster and then the pistol shoved in my pants, and they bulked in the right pocket of his cloak when he turned to someone responsible and shouted, ‘How long must this boy remain here without proper medical attention? I want him removed and cared for at once.’

Women and children walked through the alley now and men were yanking the boots off Grat and Bob and some teenaged girls walked from outlaw to outlaw cutting snips of hair with a scissors. Squire Davis got Bob’s hat; Peter Sprague got the oil can from his pocket; T.C. Babb unbuckled his cartridge belt and gave it to C.M. Ball; Perry Landers removed the pair of gentleman’s gloves from Bob’s black suit coat; Hiram Smith got his five-point spurs. His trouser pockets were turned wrong side out and when the gawkers came his spent brass cartridges sold for a dollar apiece. A woman crouched with pinking shears and cut a swatch from his bloody left trouser leg. Don’t know what she did with it.

There must’ve been two dozen people bunched around me by then, spitting, kicking cinders at me, saying how puny I looked. I couldn’t see but two or three pieces of blue sky. Then my bedroll was unstrapped from my saddle and they hefted me onto it and over to an upstairs room and a long bare table in Slosson’s until Dr. W.H. Wells could come over from the alley behind the First National Bank where Lucius Baldwin was dying. They spared me nothing in the carrying. It took the bite of my jaw not to scream. A sheriff’s deputy stood on the second floor landing of the outside wooden stairway and four sheriff’s men sat on chairs inside the upstairs room with rifles on their knees. I said, ‘I used to be an assistant deputy marshal. I bet you didn’t know that.’

The men just stared at me. One of them tore off a strip of loose wallpaper and chewed it, looking at me. ‘I heard that a long time ago. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.’

I guess Miss Moore rode out of the cemetery. I guess she wasn’t seen. I don’t know where she went.

I was sinking into sleep and staring out the rear window at over a hundred men and women inching past blood spots in that narrow alley like people at a backyard furniture sale.

I was too near dying then to hurt much for my brothers. I wanted Bob alive and standing next to me and whispering instructions, but that was as close to grief as I got, and I didn’t flinch at all when I saw the sheriff’s men handcuff Bob and Grat and stand the bodies together on their stocking feet so Tackett could take a picture. Cyrus Lee lifted one of Grat’s arms up and blood gushed out the hole in his throat, spraying Lee on the shirt front. Somebody whooped with laughter and it became sport that morning for boys to jerk Grat’s arm up and dodge the blood that came squirting out like tobacco spit.

I woke up to the whispering of doctors and saw my bloody, sopped shirtsleeve being cut up the seam with silver medical scissors. Blood from my wounds traveled twenty-five feet across the floor. Wells had called in doctors G. J. Tallman and W.J. Ryan to assist him in what looked like four hours of surgery, prying out buckshot and tying my lower guts together, and amputating my arm. They had buckets of water under the table to splash their instruments in, and Dr. Ryan walked up the stairs with a bone saw he was wiping with alcohol.

I said, ‘I’m gonna keep my arm. This arm is gonna stay.’

Dr. Wells said, ‘It’s badly smashed. You won’t even be able to pick up a pencil with it. And the chance of infection is enormous. The poison will shoot straight up to your brain.’

‘If I’m gonna cash in, I want to go to the grave in one piece.’

The doctor named Tallman continued snipping my shirt away at the collar. ‘Let him keep the dang thing. Let the arm rot off. It’s better than seeing it pickled in a jar at county fairs for the next twenty-five years.’

I kept sliding i

n and out of wakefulness, but mean, thumping pains, like your fingers slammed in a car door, were with me constantly for a week. I remember hearing the clink of instruments and Dr. Wells’s voice on the wooden stairs as he argued with a shoving crowd that wanted to lynch me. He convinced them that I was already dead and he was just filling out coroner papers, and suddenly it was late afternoon in the room and a cool sheet covered me to my chin and I saw vomit on my shoulder and felt a puddle of it next to my ear on the table, heard it dripping to the floor, and one of the deputies was frowning, a rifle crossed in his lap. He said, ‘You’re making a mess of yourself.’