“Well, Bob, it’s all right, anyway.”
Bob submerged a little in the chair in an attitude of judgment. “Instantly his purpose flashed upon my mind. I knew I had not fooled him. He was too sharp for that. He knew at that moment as well as I did that I was there to betray him. But he was not going to kill me in the presence of his wife and children, and so he was smiling and pleasant to throw me off-guard, intending when we were on the road that night to finish me.”
Charley strode to the oak bed with a general’s carriage and after some overacted deliberations in which his eyes squinched and his mouth screwed to the left and right, Charley painstakingly uncinched the cartridge belt and in a challenging way flung the two revolvers on the mattress. Charley had been coached to remember the balcony seats and his voice was consequently a little too like a yell: “In case you’re wondering why I took my guns off, it’s because I might want to walk into the yard!”
Bob revealed: “It was the first time in my life I had seen him without that belt on, and I knew in an instant that he threw it off to further quiet any suspicions I might have that he had tumbled onto my scheme.”
Charley’s brown eyes cast about the stage with what seemed mania and Bob helpfully clarified: “He seemed to want to busy himself with something to make an impression on my mind that he had forgotten the incident of a moment before at the breakfast table.”
Charley fetched a feather duster from a wicker stand and then flagged it toward the implausible painting of a dying Caesar and, with some tardiness in matching gesture to utterance, said: “That picture’s awful dusty.”
Bob surreptitiously got up from the easy chair and sneaked downstage as he softly divulged: “There wasn’t a speck of dust that I could see on that picture.” He swiveled to watch Charley flick the feather duster over the frame as one might watch a man at a petty crime and Bob let the audience espy his five-fingered right hand as he gradually rested it on his gun. His back was turned three-quarters to them, so he amplified his speech as he confessed: “Up to that moment the thought of killing him had never entered my mind, but as he stood there, unarmed, with his back to me, it came to me suddenly, ‘Now or never is your chance. If you don’t get him now he’ll get you tonight.’ ” Bob moved within six feet of a man who was then muffling a cough and straggling the duster onto the canvas wall, making the gray illusion undulate like a slowly luffing sail. Some people in the audience stirred with anticipation.
Bob said: “Without further thought or a moment’s delay, I pulled my revolver and leveled it.” Bob did so. “He heard the hammer click as I cocked it with my thumb in throwing it down on line with his head. He recognized the sound and started to turn to the right as I pulled the trigger.”
Bob let the hammer snap and a light charge of gunpowder ignited and the great noise on the stage made some of the audience gasp and later complain of the percussion still in their ears. Charley reeled on the chair, clapped his palms to his chest, shut his eyes, and then crashed unauthentically to the floor, stopping his collapse with his left foot, then his left elbow, but smacking flatly on his back and issuing one word: “Done!”
Bob stepped back and with a perfect imitation of marvel, puzzlement, and regret, confronted the witnesses to the assassination. “The ball struck him just behind the ear and he fell like a log, dead. I didn’t go near his body. I knew when I saw that forty-four caliber bullet strike that it was all up with Jesse.”
The girl playing Mrs. James ran onto the stage from the right, paused to see a man who was suppressing his breathing on the stage apron, and then permitted herself that which the script described as “a blood-curdling scream.” Then nothing happened; they froze. The houselights dimmed almost to darkness for many seconds and brightened once again on a stage that contained only Robert Ford. He slung his
gun and glared at the susceptible and with gravity proclaimed to the crowd: “That is how I killed Jesse James.”
The curtain rang down to magnanimous applause, rose to show Bob and the actress and Charley accepting their compliments, then sprang noisily down again as boys in knickers scurried onto the stage in order to change the scene.
HOW I KILLED JESSE JAMES was mentioned in only one newspaper and then as a skit of mild curiosity value in an evening of middling entertainments—by Thursday so many seats in the Manhattan theater were empty that George Bunnell couldn’t meet his expenses and he moved the show, on the 25th, to his Brooklyn museum on Court and Remsen streets, where the competition for theatergoers was not nearly so dismaying and public captivation with the Ford brothers was emphatic.
The crowds there were without Southern loyalties or strong emotions about the Yankee railroads and banks, and if they thought about the West it was with contempt, as a region of Baptists, Indians, immigrants, cutthroats, and highwaymen that only the savage and stupid could take much delight in; or they thought of it with a dreamy worship inspired by nickel books, thought of it as a place of dangers, deprivations, escapades, knightly contests, and courtly love. And in that prejudiced and uncomprehending atmosphere, the Fords attained the peculiar type of respect and approval they’d sought when they started out rustling horses as teenagers.
It was an age in which common wages were twelve cents an hour, so at fifty dollars a performance they could easily think themselves rich; they were from a territory that was so critically short of women that marriages were still arranged by correspondence, and yet the Fords were everywhere accompanied by pretty, teenaged dancing girls and singers who did not vigorously protect their chastity or reputation, and who thought that Charley and especially Bob were menacing, moody, ungovernable, and wickedly appealing. They were recognized on the seashore, in grand hotel lobbies, in Brooklyn, and were warily accommodated, wisely adjudged, gossiped about as if they were Vanderbilts; they could walk into shops and see the aproned sales clerks cringe, they could jeer at waiters and maids and hackney drivers who would make the ridicule seem jolly, they ate in elegant restaurants with giggling girls who were painted and powdered in the superior fashion of the arrogant rich but who made no efforts at genteel politeness or responsibility. A significant amount of their days was without requirements or planned activities, and yet the temptations were now greater and interestingly multiplied: Turkish tobaccos, Scotch whiskies, English gins, nights spent gambling on cards or fighting dogs, Sundays spent with expert prostitutes. On the afternoon that Bob read about the flamboyant surrender of Frank James to Governor Crittenden, he was sitting in an apothecary awaiting a prescription for a stomach complaint, and when he received the telegram that ordered him back to Missouri, he’d already missed a Thursday matinee on account of intoxication. So that when Bob and Charley arrived for the court trial in Plattsburg—a change of venue caused by extreme anti-Ford sentiments—they were written about rather chidingly, as corrupted representations of the evils of city living. They were dissipated, intemperate, petulant, and overindulged. Charley’s consumption and indigestion had only become more lacerating; his eye sockets were as deep and dark as fistholes in snow, his gums were strangely purple, he wore extravagant gold rings on every finger and a clove of garlic around his neck according to the guidance of a gypsy named Madame Africa. Bob was skinny, sallow, peevish, his complexion spoiled with so many pimples that some correspondents thought it was measles.
He was beleaguered in Plattsburg, cornered in strange rooms, gracelessly stalked and surrounded on sidewalks, greedily nagged for opinions and hypotheses about Frank and Jesse, the James gang, Governor Crittenden, Wood Hite. Everything was exaggerated and magnified—if he was not religious then he was slavishly in league with Satan; if he slept little it was of course a consequence of nightmares; and it was generally agreed upon by all that Bob was plagued by apparitions, by incorporeal voices, by grim imaginings of his own grave and the stinging judgment of history—even the indignant silence that he gradually adopted was guessed to be charged with meaning.
By October of 1883, Bob Ford could be identified correctly by more citizens than could the accidental president of the United States (Chester Alan Arthur); he was reported to be as renowned at twenty as Jesse was after fourteen years of grand larceny, and though it was by then a presumption on his part, it was unanticipated by others that a poised but unscrupulous young man could be thought dapper and tempting to women: the courtroom was as packed during his second-degree murder trial in Plattsburg as was the Mount Olivet Baptist Church when the corpse of Jesse Woodson James was prayed over and dispatched to his Maker, and as the correspondents noted the crowds inside and on the courthouse steps, they were surprised by the presence of otherwise sophisticated ladies, reading in this a proof of the young man’s beguiling powers.
Bob was represented by Colonel C. F. Garner and the case against him was put by the prosecuting attorney for Ray County. An agreement was reached with the James-Samuels clan that if they neglected to respond to subpoenas requiring them to testify, Bob would repay the indulgence when and if Frank James came to trial, so the cross-examinations at Plattsburg were far less spectacular than many who visited the town might have hoped. Colonel Gamer opened the case for the defense by introducing an affidavit sworn to by James Andrew Liddil (who was then in an Alabama jail and in no jeopardy) stating, according to Garner, that Dick and Wood “suddenly became involved in a personal difficulty but that few words passed between them until both drew revolvers and commenced firing at each other…the firing being rapid and continuous, occupying a few seconds of time; that Liddil received a flesh wound in the leg, and Wood Hite was fatally shot, dying instantly; that Hite brought on the fight, was the aggressor, made the attack, and was firing at Liddil when he was shot and killed by a bullet from a pistol fired by Liddil, and that Robert Ford, my client, knew nothing of the difficulty until the firing commenced.”
The expected group of deponents were called to the stand: Constable Morris, who recovered Wood’s body, Dr. Mosby, who examined it, Henry H. Craig, residents of Richmond who could remember nothing derogatory ever having been said about Robert Ford’s character, and especially Mrs. Martha Ford Bolton, whose aplomb and placid deposition of even recklessly obvious lies very nearly stupefied the appalled prosecution.
It was a raucous and unruly trial interrupted by snipes from the spectators, by laughter at provocative or funny comments from the witnesses, and by applause at particularly rousing passages in the attorneys’ summary arguments. Bob ignored the exchanges to a great extent, seeming to be engrossed only in the cartoons he scribbled on a yellow pad or in smuggling silly notes to girls who flagrantly admired him. He even appropriated a piece of Henry Craig’s office stationery and scrawled out a misspelled and mispunctuated letter.
President Dear sir as have forgoton your name & addess as President of the Wabash St. Louis + Pacific R.R. will you please grant Myself and Family a monthly pass over your Road from KC to Richmond the distance of 45 miles
I Remain yours truly
Bob. Ford
Slayer of Jesse James
ON OCTOBER 26TH, after forty hours of deliberation, the jury arrived at a verdict and deputies spent the morning combing the county in order to bring back the defendant. Sheriff Algiers found him on the railroad tracks, walking a rail like a tightrope, his arms kiting out and his body hooking left or right for his precarious balance. Bob glanced at the road and grasped why the sheriff was there. He jumped to the cinders and as he swaggered to the sheriff’s buggy said, “The judge can hang me if he wants. I’m not scared of dying.” And when Bob walked into the courtroom it was with carelessness and insouciance; sitting next to Colonel Garner he seemed a worker called in from the cornfields for coffee and apple pie.
The jury foreman gave a folded note to the court clerk and Judge Dunn acknowledged that the court clerk could read it. “ ‘We, the jury,’ ” the clerk announced, “ ‘find the defendant, Robert Ford, not guilty of charges as indicated in the indictment.’ ”
Colonel Garner gleefully shook Bob’s hand and then the hands of the Ford family, and the large crowd exited as if from a play that was not entirely satisfying. Bob crossed over to the jury box, grinning a little crazily and saying, “You did the courageous thing.” One man wiped his palm on his pants leg after Bob Ford clasped it.
Practically as soon as the Plattsburg trial was over, the Ford brothers traveled east again in order to bring back to the stage How I Killed Jesse James. The repertory company went south to Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington City, and the Ford origins in Virginia, then was rerouted north again with a Christmas in New England.
Charley was increasingly superstitious, increasingly subject to the advice of gypsies and tarot card readers and poor women who lived in the slums and who promised to cure his miseries with green teas, pipe smoke, poultices, hypnosis, even jolts of electricity cranked into his jittering wrists with a magnet generator. And yet his coughing continued, his fatigue grew greater, his stomach fought all his body’s cravings, he was convinced that tapeworms were eating his organs and once hung upside down over a goblet of syrup and milk, his mouth gapingly open, tears sliding into his dangling hair as he prayed the parasites would grope out of his esophagus into more acceptable food.