“Right now, yes; for the time being.”
Craig flickered a smile and combed the broad wings of his mustache with his thumb. “What’s the first name on your list, Bob?”
Bob rose from the green chintz chair and walked over to the telephone. He could see that copper wires were attached to brass screws at the rear but couldn’t fathom what they were for. He flicked one with his index finger and a stab of electricity twitched into his wrist.
“Did it nip you?” Craig asked.
Bob shook his hand and smiled with embarrassment. “I never knew these contraptions had teeth before.” Bob looked down at it. “How’s it work?”
Craig sinuated his right hand. “Your voice moves on undulating electrical currents. You scream into that mouthpiece to talk and then stick your ear next to it to listen. Most times you feel like a damned fool.”
“What was the joke I read in the newspaper? Oh yes: “The telephone has developed an entirely new school of hello-cution.’ Do you get it? Hello-cution? Like elocution?”
The commissioner stared at Bob without a word. A streetcar outside rattled and clanked. Girls screamed with laughter in the corridor. Bob said, “He’s a friend. I don’t look on it like I’m betraying him though. Jesse means to kill him, even offered a thousand-dollar reward for his carcass. I look on it like I’m saving him from injury.”
Craig remained as he was.
“Dick Liddil,” said Bob.
Craig was unmoved. “Do you know where we can find him?”
“The reason is, Dick’s a conniver and I can’t figure out what his plans are, I just know he’s got some fancy tricks up his sleeve and he won’t pity me.”
Craig walked to a chest-high accountant’s desk and flipped open an inkstand to scratch Bob’s information into a journal ledger.
Bob said, “He can’t know it was me.”
Craig attended to his notes. “You give me an exact time and location where we can catch him, and I’ll guarantee your name will never get out. You’ll be cited as an anonymous spy; not even Timberlake will know. If there’s a reward, you’ll get it, but beyond that I can’t offer you any legal or physical protections.” Craig looked over his shoulder and saw that Bob’s brow was stitched, his mind in a careen. “Do you get the gist of what I’m saying?”
“Absolutely.”
“Do you know where Jesse’s living?”
“He was in Kansas City.”
Craig registered incredulity and said, “You’re pulling my leg.”
“Over on Woodland Avenue; and then Troost. He’s moved again though. My brother knows where but he’s been and gone before I could ask.”
Craig inscribed something in the journal and Bob walked over to study the entry. “Does the name Bob Ford mean anything to you?”
Craig dipped his quill in the ink bottle and scripted cursively on a brown blotter. “Is that your actual name or your alias?”
“Actual,” said Bob, and he grinned with delight when he saw the name recorded in Craig’s elegant calligraphy. “Pretty soon all of America will know who Bob Ford is.”
BOB TOLD THE COMMISSIONER that Dick Liddil was sleeping over at their rented farmhouse while his maimed leg mended and then created a crude map of the Harbison property, leaving out the creek where Wood Hite’s remains now mouldered but including Richmond and country roads and nearby railroad tracks.
That afternoon Commissioner Craig activated a special unit of the Kansas City Police, a company of twelve that included himself and Sheriff Timberlake, a Sergeant Ditsch, two detectives, a constable, and six city policemen. They were called to the central station at nine that same evening, received instructions and coffee, were issued revolvers and rifles and cold weather gear, and after midnight on January 6th, climbed aboard a chartered train that consisted of a locomotive and two blackened smoking cars. The locomotive accelerated to a speed approaching fifty miles per hour until Lexington Junction, where it was switched to tracks that carried the men beyond Richmond to a crossroads a short walk away from the Harbison farm. They came without horses and that would matter later—Craig wanted no noise.
The January thaw lasted only two days; by late afternoon on the 5th the sun was cast over by a latticework of clouds, by evening it had started to rain, and by the time the twelve moved into the woodrows the rain had turned to sleet that made tree branches clatter and iced the snow so that it was like saltines. The company circumnavigated a white, ramshackle house with oil-paper windows and a buckled roof and an elm tree that scratched at the shingles, and for a time some men tilted along a ravine that might have introduced them to the orange and petrified cadaver of Robert Woodson Hite, but the moment never came; instead of continuing on that route, the men circled close to the cattle lots and made a reconnaissance of the brown, leaning barn, then scuttled back to the fruit trees where Sheriff Timberlake and Commissioner Craig were in anxious consultation.
It was about 3 a.m. and every vista was blue or black and the sleet scored their cheeks like a cat scratch. No one could tell if any were awake inside, if rifles rested on the windowsills, if the communication with Ford were merely a preposterous bluff made to lure them into a skirmish and counterattack from the James gang. And it was the if of Jesse’s being there, the maybe, the perchance, that persuaded Commissioner Craig and Sheriff Timberlake to practice care and prudence and to wait in the cold until sunrise.
So they remained in the woodrows and neither talked nor smoked nor stamped their boots to the earth. Cold watered their eyes and cemented their mittens to their rifle stocks and turned their feet into flatirons. Craig looked at his vest watch and clicked it shut and
minutes later checked the vest watch again. Then the night lessened, the clouds ashened slightly, and the men became starkly black and brown against the gray of the snow. Craig walked out to scan the east and saw pink in the mile-off woods and he turned connotatively to Sheriff Timberlake.
The sheriff whistled succinctly and motioned forward for the deputies to move on the farmhouse and the twelve crept forward. Craig sucked on his index finger to thaw it, then nestled it next to the rifle’s trigger. Timberlake waved the company in a circle around the house and saw a boy wipe an upstairs windowpane with his fist, peer out sleepily, and withdraw into the room.