Desperadoes

The next morning she walked into Bryant’s room with a tray of breakfast under a white hand towel. He was flat on his back in bed with his Winchester against his leg on the blankets. All he moved was his eyes.

‘I don’t think I can eat,’ he said.

She left the door open and set the tray down on a bureau and then United States Deputy Marshal Ed Short appeared in the doorway in a black suit, his gray hat held over a pistol.

‘We’re going to Wichita, Charley,’

Short took Bryant’s rifle and put his six-shooter in his suit-coat pocket. He let him use the bedpan and wash himself in the basin, then handcuffed him and pushed the limping man into the hallway where the pregnant girl who cleaned rooms was wiping lamp smoke off the ceiling. Short and Bryant stayed in the deputy marshal’s office that night, eating chicken gizzards, playing cribbage. And on

the afternoon of August 3rd, a crowd followed the two men to the Hennessey depot and stood behind them as they sat on the bench awaiting the northbound train. A tall man with a stationary face told Short he’d heard the Daltons were going to stage a desperate rescue. Short said, ‘Let ’em try.’ Then the train came chuffing in and they boarded with two coach tickets.

The train stopped again at Enid and Bryant asked to have a cigarette, so they both walked forward to sit in the smoking car. Short rolled one for Bryant and one for himself and then he looked around at the smokers on the parlor furniture: men with handlebar mustaches and dark suits and derbies, reading newspapers or the Bible. One opened a pocket watch and snapped it shut. The cars banged forward into a roll and the tobacco smoke grew toward the opened tops of the windows where it was sheared off by the breeze. The men were staring at Bryant, who had to raise up both manacled hands to take the cigarette out of his mouth.

‘They’re gawking at my face,’ said Bryant. He turned his shirt collar up.

‘They never seen a murderer before.’

‘That’s just the excuse. It’s my scar they’re staring at.’

He said that so loud the men turned their heads away.

When they’d smoked their cigarettes down, Short stubbed them both out on the floor and told Bryant to stand. They lurched down through two swaying, vestibuled Pullmans until they got to a baggage car that he hammered with his fist. ‘You won’t be so uncomfortable here,’ said Short.

A slot opened and closed and then the baggage door slid and Short pushed Bryant inside. A bald man in suspendered trousers and a yellowed union suit that was stained with food near the buttons sat down on a chair next to a trunk. He had an inch-long beard along his jaw.

Short handed across his own revolver. ‘I left his rifle in the coach. Can you watch him while I get it?’

‘Wasn’t doin’ much anyways, Ed.’

The man put Short’s revolver in a mail sorter over his head. Bryant sat down on a box with his hands between his knees. He rocked calmly with the train. With his mind focused he wasn’t crazy at all. He said, ‘This scar come from when I was a four-year-old child. Slept too near the stove and my mother tripped over me one morning.’

The baggage man looked. ‘Ain’t hardly noticeable at all.’ He cut a chunk of barbwire with a tinsnips and stapled the wire to a board.

‘That a hobby, is it?’

‘My barbwire collection.’

‘I bet you get plenty of examples, travelin’ as much as you do.’

The baggage man faced a board of twelve strands towards Bryant. ‘You an old cowhand?’

Bryant squinted. ‘That top one’s a Kelly with a staple barb.’

‘Patented 1868. What’s this one?’

Bryant got up from the box and walked over. ‘Hell, that’s just a Glidden barb on two wires.’

‘When was it patented?’

‘How am I supposed to know that?’

‘I do: 1874. I’ve made a regular study of this,’ the baggage man said.

‘That last one I can’t get at all.’

The baggage man looked down. ‘This one? This is what they call an A. Ellwood spread.’

Bryant kicked the board away and snatched Short’s pistol out of the pigeonhole. He snapped the hammer back and slumped down on top of the trunk. He was panting with just that little movement. ‘Don’t you stir now. You just continue with what you were doing. I don’t have no reason at all to hurt you yet.’