“You made an attempt on a Northfield, Minnesota, bank.” Bob rummaged in his memory and asked, “Was it owned by General Ben Butler? The Scourge of New Orleans?”
“That’s right,” said Jesse.
“Knew it.”
Jesse said, “Bill Chadwell, Clell Miller, Charlie Pitts—they were killed outright. The Youngers have been in prison ever since. It’s painful to recall.”
Bob added unnecessarily, “And you never got a plug nickel from that bank.”
Jesse failed to register a facial reaction; he merely replied, “So you can see how this date would have an aroma for me.”
Then Jesse seemed to pick up a sound as a receptive animal might, twisting sharply to the east, specifying and assessing and then grasping his lantern to walk off the cliff, hopping down ten feet in three plunging, dirt-sloshing steps. He stamped his boots (a pain shooting up his injured ankle) and shook out his trouser cuffs, then knelt to hear locomotive noise translate through the rails. The steel was warm and burnished with wear and smooth as a spoon to his ear. The hum was like insects in a jar. He called to his older brother, “She’s right on schedule, Buck.”
Frank was smoking another cigarette and beguiling Dick Liddil and Charley Ford with long passages from The Life of King Henry the Fifth, ending with, “ ‘But if it be a sin to covet honor, I am the most offending soul alive.’ ”
Dick Liddil asked, “How much of that you got memorized?”
“Over a thousand lines.”
“You’re a man of learning.”
“Yes, I am.” Frank rubbed his cigarette out against the rough bark of a tree. “You’d better go down to Jesse.”
Jesse raised his blue bandana over his nose as soon as he could make out the boiler cadence, and he placed his right boot on the rail as Dick Liddil slid down the southern cliff, ouching and cussing and clutching weed brakes. Dick then tied a red bandana over his nose and ambled over, shaking dust from a beige shirt and from brown pants that were so long for his legs and were so creased with constant use that they looked like concertinas.
The locomotive’s chuffing was growing loud. Jesse’s right foot tickled with rail vibrations. He looked around and saw Liddil to his right with his Navy Colt hung in his hand, the Hites and Ed Miller to the east, preparing to strongarm the passengers, many other boys ranged along the cut with Henry rifles slung over their wrists, Bob Ford on the cliff behind him, looking like a gunfighter.
Jesse could hear the locomotive decelerate on the grade, hear the creaks and complaints as the carriages listed north on the curve. The brass headlamp’s aisle of white light filled the passage called Blue Cut and streaked across scrub brush and into the forest, causing Charley Ford to blind his eyes, and then the light bent and flooded toward Jesse. The cowcatcher hunted the tracks and the black smoke billowed into hillocks and mountains over the smokestack and train, and Jesse swung his flannel-red lantern over the rails in a yardmaster’s signal to stop.
The engineer was Chappy Foote. He had his elbow and goggled head out the cab window and his left fingers on the handle for the steam brake valve. On seeing the lantern, he leaned his body out and concluded that a freight train had stalled on the grade until he saw the man’s bandana and ten yards behind him the high rubble on the rails. He turned to his fireman as he yanked the valve handle and yelled, “Looks like we’re going to be robbed!”
The young stoker, John Steading, cupped his ear because of the boiler roar but picked up enough of the sentence to swing out for a look and say, “Mercy.”
Jesse avoided the cowcatcher and saw the toggle-joint between the brake blocks rise, compelling them against the steel tires with a scream that made him clamp his ears. Hot steam broke over him and couplings banged and sparks sliced off the rails. The running speed had been twenty-five miles per hour; it was fifteen a few seconds later; then five. Steamer trunks slid; the mail agent was thrown enough to punch through a slot of the walnut route sorter, bruising his thumbnail and knuckle; a fat man in the sleeper careered half its length and clobbered the door like a rolling piano; in the caboose a mechanic used his handkerchief to dab macaroni soup off his clothes. The engineer braked in time to creep the locomotive into the rubble, the cowcatcher just kissing the rock with the chunk of a closed ice-box door.
They could hear a quartet of Englishmen in the Pullman car singing pleasantly, “Come out, ’tis now September, the hunter’s moon’s begun, and through the wheat and stubble is heard the distant gun. The leaves are paling yellow and trembling into red, and the free and happy barley is hanging down its head.”
Then the gang was running and bounding and skidding down the embankments. Jesse watched as Bob Ford slid down like a debutante in petticoats, his left hand snatching at weeds and roots as his right unveiled his eyes enough to peek around at the commotion. Men were rushing alongside the train and levering their rifles and slouching about in a manner they fancied was ghoulish and frightening. Frank James was on the south side of the train with a rifle slack in his arms, his cardigan sweater closed with a fist, instructing everybody. Steam trickled from the locomotive trucks and spirited in the breeze, and the engine huffed “church” and once again “church” and then sighed with embering fire as Jesse hiked onto a cab step and brandished his cocked revolver.
The engineer cringed down under his hands, shouting, “Don’t shoot! Ain’t no call for that!”
And Jesse said, “You two best come down from your machine and bring a coal pick along.”
Chappy Foote replied, “You’ve got the gun,” and obediently removed his goggles and hooked them over the brake handle. His stoker was scared sick and worked at getting his gumption back by resting on the fold-down bench, his sweat crawling over the filth of his face. He looked about sixteen. The engineer dropped a coal pick onto the cinder bed and lingered on each step as he climbed down. The stoker followed, neglecting the last two rungs. Then Jesse shook the hands of both workers, introducing himself as Jesse James, the man they’d read so much about.
AFTER THE LOCOMOTIVE slammed to a halt on the grade known as Independence Hill, a porter named Charles Williams bent down from the platform of the ladies’ coach (where tobacco smoke was forbidden) and made out three or four men near the engine and Chappy Foote disembarking onto the cinder bed. Williams was a small, brook-no-guff child of ex-slaves, dressed in a brass-buttoned, navy blue uniform and a blue hat that was cocked on his head. He retrieved his lantern, intending to learn the nature of the predicament, but no sooner did he scurry around the cars than a man near the caboose shouted, “Get back inside, you black bastard!” and four bisecting gunshots sent him back onto the platform. He opened the door to the ladies’ coach and saw the women inside lowering the thirty-four curtains and concealing valuables, hiking their skirts to tuck folding money under their corsets, poking jewels into their brassieres, shoving purses and necklaces under seat cushions. (One woman who had secreted over a thousand dollars and a delicate watch in her stockings would compliantly offer her embroidered handbag to Frank James and have it courteously refused.) Men rushed in from the smoker chucking dollars into their derby hats and then sloped down in their seats with their children huddled next to them or under lamp tables or between the tasseled chairs and the walls.
Williams scurried down the coach and ducked out the rear door at the end of the passageway. (The vestibules that connected coaches and kept out the weather had not yet been invented; the only protection was a platform railing and roof.) He snuck down the stairs and saw three masked men beneath the lamplit second compartment of the sleeper, one man smoking a cigarette, another kicking soot clods from the carriage. It had been several minutes since they’d stopped the train, they wanted activities and hobbies; soon they’d be looking for bottles to break.
The man with the cigarette glanced over and inched his shotgun at the porter. He said, “Better get back inside, you black devil, or you’ll have your head blowed off.”
That would have been Ed Miller, who was only a few months away from having his own skull shot in;
THE CONDUCTOR was named Joel Hazelbaker. He was a severe man who had for ten years worked on freight trains and broke most of the bones in his fists boxing hobos. When the locomotive braked he swung down to the roadbed to determine what the cause was and witnessed the gang swooping down into the cut. He told the crowd in the second-class coach about the robbery in progress and then had the presence of mind to trot around the bend toward the caboose to solicit a flag man. They’d overtaken a freight earlier and he was afraid it would crash into them (a common accident then) unless warned: the back cars would accordion, the freight’s boiler would explode. Near the first-class palace cars, Hazelbaker encountered a raincoated man with two revolvers who was crouched like a nickel book gunfighter and who ordered him to halt but listened when Hazelbaker explained that he had to stop the freight train. A brakeman named Frank Burton tottered over the smoker roof and climbed down with a red lantern, and the two hurried back to the caboose but were shot at with so many rounds that Hazelbaker was momentarily convinced the outlaws commanded an R. J. Gatling cluster gun. He saw Frank Burton’s coat flapping with near-misses as the boy ran on and then the shooting sputtered as Frank James walked the roadbed irritably waving his arms overhead, calling in a big voice, “Cease firing!” over and over again. Frank James simmered, searched out an oaf to hit, found his cousin Clarence Hite, and cuffed him on the ear. He then gave the conductor permission to proceed.
Hazelbaker would later recall for newspaper reporters that he and Burton needed to run less than ten rods beyond the caboose before the freight locomotive announced itself with many long whistles, the engineer having guessed at a problem ahead because of occasional boiler sparks he’d seen swirling through the crowns of trees. The brakeman motioned the lantern across the rails, as Jesse had, and when the locomotive’s brakes screeched into lock on the tires, the conductor returned to the rear of the sleeper, unhooking his nickel-plated watch and chain from his vest and unsnapping a leather wallet that was big as a summons envelope and attached to his suspenders with a shoelace. He separated his seventy-five dollars from that evening’s railroad collections and released his cash and time-piece into an iron water tank that was lashed next to the Pullman door. The watch made a gone-forever noise in the water and Hazelbaker’s stomach queered.
ON THAT TRAIN the express and baggage and mail cars had been combined into one green, windowless coach with government property divided from the rest by means of a wooden partition and screen. The mail agent was O. P. Melloe. After the locomotive stopped, he opened the door on the north and sagged on the doorframe to observe the gang’s business with the engineer. He also saw that in the rear section of the car the baggagemaster and express messenger had tilted their heads out the open door at radically different heights. The baggage-master said, “Opie? We’re going to bolt this door from the inside.”