“I’d say that’s a good idea,” said Melloe.
Their door slammed and through the chicken wire above the partition the mail agent heard the two young men shuffle bags and boxes. He ascended canvas bags of mail until he could see the two stacking chicken coops, thereby forbidding detection underneath of the Adams Express Company safe that was also en route to Kansas City. Melloe said, “If they push you to the brink, do what you must to save your skin.”
Henry Fox, the messeng
er, banged down a crate of plumbing fixtures and glanced around for other valuables to camouflage. Fox answered, “Thanks for the reminder, Opie.”
Melloe descended from the crushed mail sacks and leaned against the doorframe with his door opened just enough to see out. A man in a Confederate officer’s coat and blue bandana mask had limped down to the express section with the young fireman in tow by his shirt collar, and a wiry boy in a stovepipe hat and overlarge coat was menacing Foote in the direction of the express car.
Upon arrival at the express section, Chappy Foote ineffectually tried the doorknob and then invited recommendations about what he should do since the express company’s door gave every indication that it was locked and could not be forced. Jesse recocked his revolver hammer (the clicks like a barber cracking his knuckles) and recommended, “Why don’t you smash it in.” He then maneuvered over to Bob Ford as Foote grunted the coal pick into an underhand swing and rounded it overhead into the door near the latch, loudly splintering the wood and embedding the spike so that he had to waggle the handle to extricate it. Jesse confided to Bob, “The locked doors and the smashing them down, that’s a little skit we run through each time—sort of like grace before dinner.”
The engineer oofed and drove the coal pick again and the wood submitted to the blow, screaming and folding inward near the edge. The messenger saw they’d get in anyway, so he pulled the bottom and overhead bolts free inside, saying, “All right! You can come in now!” and Jesse moved forward to sock the kickboard so that the door gave in, quivering into darkness. Henry Fox retreated with his hands high as the baggagemaster snuffed the lights. Jesse ordered the engineer to roost in the weeds with his stoker and ordered Bob Ford to guard them. Bob poked his revolver into Foote’s side and the two railroadmen walked rather routinely off the cinder bed and sat down. Jesse heaved his chest onto the threshold of the express car and kneed himself into the room. Dick Liddil and the come-lately Charley Ford imitated Jesse and lighted a lantern as Jesse lifted packages and shook them and guessed at their contents. “That’s a woman’s satchel,” he said. “All fancy bead work and paper flowers.”
“Could be,” said the baggageman. His smile didn’t know whether to hold on or vanish.
Jesse smashed another box on a nail and snagged it open, finding inside a photograph of a child in an oval frame, the cheek torn by the nail. Jesse flung it against the ceiling, adjusted his blue bandana over his nose, and glared at the express manager. “I want you to open that safe.”
Fox looked to the baggagemaster for counsel. The man’s head was down. Fox looked back at the robber with a nervous smile, his fright making him seem complaisant and insolent. Charley Ford stepped over and struck Henry Fox over the skull with his pistol, the concussion like gloved hands clapping loudly once, like a red apple pitched at a tree. The blow chopped the messenger down to his knees with blood shoelacing his face and the baggagemaster backed to the green wall with horror as Liddil said, “You didn’t have to bop him, Charley.”
“Yes, he did,” said Jesse. “They need the convincing. They got their company rules and I got my mean streak and that’s how we get things done.” Charley grinned with accomplishment and Jesse cleared some registers off the only safe he could see, one no larger than the kneehole in a lady’s dresser. “Come over here and attend to this now.”
Melloe was at the partition. He exclaimed, “You all right over there?”
Dick Liddil heard a wild and scrambled fusillade and leaned outside to see the Crackers firing at a conductor and brakeman who were crouching with a red lantern. Frank James was hollering for them to cease, and after twenty rounds they did. Bob Ford was squatting in the weeds, his gun cocked up next to his cheek. “Scare ya?” Dick called, and Bob stood with no little chagrin. “I couldn’t tell what on earth was going on!”
Fox gathered himself and dialed numbers on the U.S. Express Company vault and after two failures had the combination correct enough to jerk the door open. Then the baggagemaster helped him over the chicken coops, on which he sat down heavily, cracking two frames. The baggagemaster carefully backed onto the coop that covered the Adams Express Company safe, where the greater amount of money was.
It was Charley Ford who emptied the U.S. Express Company safe, with such concentration and sedulousness that he stole receipts, waybills, non-negotiable notes, and a calendar schedule of express deliveries, in addition to more than six thousand dollars in mixed currencies. Jesse then tested the weight of the grain sack and slunk over to the lantern, puzzling over the contents. “Isn’t no hundred thousand dollars here, Dick.”
Dick looked into the grain sack himself and said, “I’m real disappointed.”
Bob Ford was standing over the engineer and stoker when Jesse jumped down to the cinder bed from the express car and encouraged the messenger and baggagemaster outside with his gun. Blood had trickled into Henry Fox’s right eye, so he looked at Bob with his left as he staggered over the weeds and crashed down.
Bob gaped at the injury with some panic; Fox admitted to the railroad crewmen that he had a gruesome headache; Jesse was walking with Charley and Dick as he called that they were going to go through the cars. “If any of them so much as twitch, give their coconuts a sockdolager: that’s language they understand.”
BY THAT TIME Frank James had ascended the stairs at the rear of the ladies’ coach, catching himself with the brass door pull as an ache branched over his chest. Ed Miller and Clarence Hite climbed after him and Ed Miller entered the coach first, his boot slamming the door aside, an eyeholed flour sack over his head, his sawed-down twelve-gauge straight ahead of his right pocket. He was reported to have said, “Throw up your hands, you sons-a-bitches!” and then, for emphasis, slapped a man in the mouth.
Then Frank James strolled inside in his gray coat and yellow bandana mask, looking colossal and mean and sick. He saw about thirty men either cowering or flinching or accusing him with censorious eyes, while the wives scrunched down behind their husbands’ shoulders. He hypothesized at least twenty handguns among the travelers, so he strode down the aisle, imperious as Victoria’s consort, his boot-heels barking on the oakwood flooring, and he scowled and lingered over those investors and vacationers who seemed recalcitrant, ticking a button or collar with his Remington .44 Frontier revolver, which he would surrender to Governor Crittenden in little more than a year.
Frank shouted, “Are any of you preachers?”
No one raised a hand.
He shouted, “Are any of you widows?”
Some frowned with curiosity.
He said, “We never rob preachers or widows.”
Four hands shot up.
“No; no, you’re too late.”
Having satisfied himself that he had conquered any thoughts of rebellion, Frank nodded to the rear of the coach and an emaciated Clarence Hite scuttled in, a Colt Navy .36 caliber six-gun dominating his right hand. He had a skulking hunchbacked look and his hazel eyes kept double-checking his actions with his cousin. He punched his revolver into the green, knee-length coat of a man and said, “I’m Jesse James, ya damned yellow dog! Gimme your money!”
The man fiddled his hand inside his coat and presented Clarence with a worn envelope containing seventy-five dollars and with an English gold watch that would fastidiously chime the hour no matter what skullduggery Clarence was up to at the moment. Clarence shoved the gray-haired man back and joyfully dangled the watch and envelope in Frank’s direction. Frank came back down the aisle and chucked the goods inside the belly of his shirt, and Ed Miller, Clarence Hite, and the infamous Frank James sallied down the coach, stealing coins, dollars, watches, bracelets, rings, stickpins, pendants.
From the express car that was just behind the locomotive and tender came Jesse, Charley, and Dick. They clanged up the stairs at the head of the smoker, saw it was vacant, and rushed down the lighted car, sliding a little on the narrow Persian runner, ringing a brass spittoon against an oaken Doric pedestal. Upon reaching the platform, Jesse rap