The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

ped on the coach’s doorglass with his gun; Frank swiveled and waved him in; Dick and Charley jostled ahead into the coach as Frank shouted, “Just work your way toward the middle.”

So a number of feuding, keening voices mixed as the gang visited each adult and ordered him or her to shell out. If too meager a sum was exchanged, a cocked revolver was pressed to the person’s forehead and he was told to delve a little further. A bearded man with spectacles lost seven hundred dollars to Ed Miller but Jesse had a hunch about him and after a bickering investigation turned up one hundred dollars more. According to Williams, a Dutchman had managed to remain asleep ever since he dined in Columbia and when Charley socked him awake he at once assumed he was being asked for a fare he’d already paid. Charley pushed his revolver into the Dutchman’s cheek and stole the three hundred dollars with which the man intended to purchase a farm in Joplin. Mr. C. R. Camp was host of a tour of New York land buyers and later tallied their losses at $4,021. Clarence Hite squatted to remove the white shoes from an infant so he could poke his finger inside and rescue God knows what. John O’Brien had stuffed inside his pants a bundle of several hundred dollars clenched by a rubber band, and on the demand of Frank James delivered one thousand dollars that had been for business expenses. The bundle of his own money slithered to the floor and rolled as Frank walked on and O’Brien’s small daughter redeemed it, saying, “Here’s some more money, Papa!” Frank turned and snatched it from her hand. Dick Liddil dictated that Mrs. C. A. Dunakin raise her hands overhead and whirl four times as he inspected her. He said, “Next time we pull off a job like this we’ll have a lady along to search you female passengers.” She retorted, “You might have a woman with you or a man dressed as one, but you’ll never have a lady.” An immigrant had his wallet tossed in a sack and soon beseeched Jesse to recover it so he could withdraw his insurance papers. His plea was denied as too time-consuming. Children wailed in corners, several women became hysterical and remained so throughout the night; men sat in chairs with blank faces, their hands lumped in their laps, having lost fortunes: their crabbed savings, the cost of a cottage, the auction sale of six Holstein cows, a laggard Silver Anniversary watch.

Jesse squeezed past the porter, Williams, who had already been frisked, and pushed into the sleeping car, flinging green velvet drapes aside as he passed each berth. He shocked a yellow old woman whose hair was braided, whose frail hands were in prayer; otherwise the sleeper seemed empty until he parted the exit drapes and saw in the foyer two women in nightgowns and a piano of a fat man all huddled around the conductor. Something in the group’s timidity dispirited Jesse and he exited onto the platform, where he saw that Frank and some of the others were on the cinder bed shedding loot into a flour sack. Near the caboose were workers on the freight train who’d slunk forward to innocuously watch and whisper about the activities. Horses had been fetched and they nickered and fussed in the attic of weeds and timber over the cut. Wood Hite and Ed Miller had entered the sleeper with fire axes that they used to rip bedding off and snag mattresses from their boxes. The gang’s visitation on the Chicago and Alton had now lasted nearly forty-five minutes and was beginning to deteriorate into carousal. Jesse went back inside the sleeping car and shouted, “Okay! Let’s vamoose!” Then he twisted the neck of his grain sack and limped forward outside the sleeper and ladies’ coach, exaggerating the heft of the valuables as the victims peeked under the curtains. He saw Frank Burton sitting on a platform, looking bankrupt, and asked how much was stolen from him. The young brakeman answered that he’d given up fifty cents and that was all he had.

It was later recorded that Jesse dug into the grain sack and gave Burton a dollar and fifty cents, saying, “This is principal and interest on your money.”

Jesse delivered the loot to Jim Cummins, who’d reappeared after one of his typical evaporations, and he uttered a kindness to Henry Fox, who was looking scalped and catatonic, his ears sirening. (He resigned from his job within the month and sued the express company for damages, without luck.) Having been relieved of his assignment, Bob Ford scrabbled up the bank to the woods and scuttled through bracken, nettles, and thorns to the gathered horses, where he removed the white mask with the cut-out eyes. Charley Ford sidled over to his kid brother and said, “I was in top form tonight.”

“That messenger, he’s going to have trouble recalling his name!”

Charley leered. “Surely gave him a goose-egg, didn’t I?”

“Goodness!”

Charley asked, “Did you see me roast that one gent for standing on his cash?”

“No,” Bob said, “I missed that. I was outside, y’see.”

“He kind of skidded when he walked was how I knew. Must’ve had his shoe atop fifty dollars. And his wife, she was in a state, her beady little eyes all squinched up.”

“Really took the cake, did she?”

“Oh my, yes,” said Charley. “Jesse’s gonna be satisfied with me.”

Jesse James was then walking the engineer to a locomotive that was slowly susurrating, his right arm slung over Foote’s shoulders, his manner affectionate and delighted, his mood invigorating. At the cab Jesse athletically shook the man’s hand, leaving a silver coin in the engineer’s palm like a sidewalk magician. Chappy Foote later claimed he said, “You are a valiant man and I am a little stuck on you. Here’s a dollar so you can drink to the health of Jesse James tomorrow morning.”

“Obliged” was all that Foote could think to mutter.

“Now, what about that roadblock? Shall I have the gang remove those stones? I could hitch a team to that cottonwood and tow it right off the rails.”

“No, don’t bother. To tell you the truth, about the best thing you could do for me is take yourself and your party far away from here.”

Jesse said, “All right, partner. Good night,” and clambered up the bank in his billowing gray coat, reducing into darkness.

THE JAMES GANG walked their horses south through scrub brush and over fire ash that was no warmer than a morning bed. They loped onto a road and into a gully and threshed through a cornfield with tassels high as the saddle cantles. There Frank moved among the veterans, distributing each man’s allotment of cash and luxuries, auctioning off the gold watches and Mexican jewels, burning the securities and non-negotiable papers. Clarence Hite would later confess that each share was one hundred forty dollars but he was wretched at sums and unlikely to suspect chicanery, so it is probable that he was cheated, as were Andy Ryan, John Bugler, John Land, and Matt and Creed Chapman. Jesse had already piloted them over to a cowpath by a creek and, according to John Land, explained, “Boys, we just haven’t got time to divide the loot now—they’re too hot for us—and we didn’t get the money we expected to anyhow, but we’ll all meet on the right fork of the Blue River a week from tonight and you’ll get your cut there.” He never really intended to meet them again; the country boys were only meant to provide security during the robbery and easy prey for the sheriff afterward. On the night of the 7th, they rode off in five directions, feeling rather pleased with themselves, but by the evening of September 10th, Andy Ryan and John Land had been arrested in shacks near Glendale, Matt Chapman and John Bugler had been jailed, and Creed Chapman was only weeks away from a six-month imprisonment in which he lost forty-two pounds.

The James gang segregated into three groups before riding out of the cornfield. Jim Cummins and Ed Miller navigated eastward for Miller’s house in Saline County; Dick Liddil and Wood Hite crossed the river near Blue Mills in order to rusticate on the rented farm of Martha Bolton, the widowed sister of the Fords, whom they were both trying to romance; the James brothers, the Ford brothers, and Clarence Hite rode west into Kansas City under a cold rain that moved over them from the north and knuckled their hats and sank their horses inches deep in the mire of wide, empty streets.

Zee James was asleep on the sofa when her husband creaked the kitchen door and surprised her awake with a kiss, and she boiled water in a saucepan as Jesse chaired himself in his soaked coat and lied unnecessarily about a cattle auction in Independence where he’d purchased twenty steers at below market price and right away sold them by an exchange of telegrams with a livestock buyer in Omaha.

Zee didn’t raise her eyes from the saucepan. “So you’ve got money again?”

“Come out of it real satisfactory.” He was jubilant and still energized by adrenaline, an excitement he had come to crave like caffeine. He jumped up from his chair and gandered out at the red barn. He said, “Guess who I ran into.”

She gave Jesse a wifely look and got a jar down from a pantry shelf.

He said, “Buck, for one. Then Clarence Hite and two coves of his. They’re with the animals right now.”

“They do satisfactory at the auction too?”

He grinned. “About the most they ask is that they come out of a swap with all their toes and fingers.” He then adjusted a dry hat on his head and without justifying his exit went out to the stables.

Red coal-oil lanterns gladdened the interior of the barn but Frank James was glooming about and glaring at the younger men’s slipshod management of their horses. He saw Jesse at the Dutch door and sat on a long bench, his legs wide and his forearms on them, his rough hands joined around a yellow cigarette. The James brothers were not exceptionally close as boys and as they grew older were scarcely a pair—more than occasionally they were not even on speaking terms—so it was not particularly surprising that Jesse preferred not to seek out Frank’s company but stood just inside the sloshing eave and peered at his melancholy and peaked cousin Clarence and then at Charley Ford, who gave up wiping the waxy coat of his mare to attempt juggling the weighted pins that Jesse had dropped in the stall. Then Jesse abruptly perceived that the stripling Bob Ford had approached from his right. “You must’ve creeped up on cat’s paws.”

Bob smiled. “I’ll wager that’s the first and last time you’ll ever be caught off-guard.” He no longer wore the overlarge coat or stovepipe hat, only green trousers with light green stripes and a collarless, yellowed shirt that plainly itched. He looked European, principally French, in spite of his blue eyes, and was not as scrawny as he initially appeared to

be, but was muscular in a nuggety way, each sinew strapped to its bone as clearly as shoelaces on a shoe. Jesse could smell Mrs. S. A. Allen’s Zylo Balsamum Hair Dressing (which he too favored) on the boy’s ginger brown hair. They were exactly the same height.