When Bob and I left the First National Bank, guns were going off everywhere and Lucius Baldwin, who’d played baseball with Bob, was standing in the rear doorway of Isham’s facing us soberly like we were the sheriff’s men. I pushed W.H. Sheppard and he sprinted free across the railroad tracks, but Lucius stepped off the threshold and walked up the alley, no doubt to warn us about the Daltons. A lady’s pistol hung in his right hand.

I yelled, ‘Whoa, partner,’ but Baldwin was nearsighted and pretty confused and he continued walking with that pistol by his side.

‘What’s he doing?’ said Bob. He shouted, ‘Better hold up there, Lucius.’

Baldwin didn’t hear. He wore a clerk’s apron and he was working at the tie string as he walked. Again Bob warned him to stop but to no avail, and then he shot Baldwin in the chest and staggered him. By then Baldwin was so close that gunpowder sparks burned his apron. Baldwin sagged against the brick wall, slid down, and coughed blood into his fist and wiped it on his pants leg. It took him twenty minutes to die.

My brother took off and I ran after him to Eighth Street where the sun was yellow and hot and men in dark suits stood in shops with folded arms, talking. They slammed the doors when they saw us. A grocer in a white apron stood across the street on the sidewalk with his hands cupped at his mouth, shouting, ‘You are killing innocent people!’

I lifted my rifle and he walked back into his store.

Bob stopped when he got to the pried-up bricks of Union Street. The plate glass of the Condon bank had shattered like hardware and Broadwell placed his rifle against the door window and shot out a half-dollar hole and gun after gun was going off south of the plaza. Horse teams skittered at their tie-ups and some saddle horses ran wild and dogs were still barking at the noise. A little girl knelt at an upstairs window holding her ears.

Bob sprinted across Union Street to the brick pile at the front of the Opera House where the horses should’ve been hitched. He stood in the shade of an overhang with his

back pressed against the wall while I clutched the heavy mail sack under my coat and ran in boots heavy as twenty pounds.

George Cubine stood on the board sidewalk in front of Rammel’s and next to him was the cobbler Charles T. Brown, unarmed. I could see the black shoe polish on his hands. Bob and I walked into the street and Bob shot Cubine twice: left ankle, left thigh. He started to keel when Bob shot him again. The slug stopped his heart and tore off his left shoulder blade. His face smacked so hard on the pavement his dead eyes blinked and blood came out of his nose.

Brown couldn’t believe we’d kill as heedlessly as that. He didn’t know whether to bluster or cry. ‘Why, you bastards!’ he shouted. ‘You sons a bitches! We made boots for you boys!’

Brown got off the sidewalk one leg at a time and picked up Cubine’s rifle and my brother aimed at the old man’s shirt pocket. A pencil broke in half when Bob fired and Brown sprawled backwards clutching his heart like an actor. The boy Jack Long stood transfixed on the porch and Bob fired close to him in warning. The boy ducked inside Rammel’s again.

I started to clomp away in my heavy boots but Bob stayed where he was in the street, his rifle still lifted up. I looked down the sidewalk a hundred yards and saw Tom Ayres, the First National Bank’s cashier, jamming cartridges into a government rifle at Isham’s. He had his sleeve garters off. Bob’s shot smashed the bone under the cashier’s eye and broke out through the back of his skull. It ruined half his face but Tom lived for years afterwards and when he died I sent a sympathy card to his widow. She graciously replied.

A dozen hotel residents were crouched in a coal pile behind a board fence, and housewives hustled their children down into the cellars where the rifles sounded like the popping of corn in a skillet; a scared deputy sheriff crawled under the plows at Read’s hardware store and when a bullet screamed off one of the blades, shouted, ‘Pile on more plows!’

I switched the sack of money to my right hand and ran across Walnut Street, ducking low, and then I was off the bricks and I stopped on the dirt of English Street where I bent to take the pain from my sides. I couldn’t find enough air. The black workmen who’d torn up the street had crawled under a porch floor and they stared at me from the dark, their chins on their fists. Bob jogged across Walnut with his rifle in both hands. He stood beside me and looked along Eighth Street. Each window was like a snap-shot of a face.

‘You okay?’

‘Just winded,’ I said.

Bob grinned like he was having the time of his life. He’d torn off his worthless goatee disguise and now he peeled the dark beard off my face, leaving on the mustache. ‘Take it easy, Emmett. Go slow. I can whip the whole dang town.’

Miss Moore had sunk to the grass of the cemetery, her forehead against my brother Frank’s cold headstone, when the scary street battle began. And now she could hear too many guns making too much noise in the plaza, as loud in the cemetery as a thunderstorm with shutters banging at every window and shingles tearing off the roof and empty jars at the windowsills crashing to the floor. She sat in the grass rocking back and forth, her knees in the hug of her arms, and tears brimmed out of her eyes.

Grat bulled out through the bank doors and squared himself on the porch. The money sack bulked under his coat and his rifle was crossed in front of him and a vein stood out on his forehead. His face was a fist and he was as red as a man who’d heard his wife insulted, like he’d just run down a long flight of stairs and crashed into the parlor and was about to break off the neck of a bottle. He hulked on the porch and the shooting stopped just long enough for Powers and Broadwell to dash out into the street in their black clothes and their black hats and the blue neckerchief up on Broadwell’s nose.

Then Grat took off in a crouch and the three bank robbers rushed west across the pavement and guns started going off again. Broadwell and Powers got into the alley and Grat walked backwards firing across into Isham’s store and a man kneeling by the door shot back and knocked Grat down to the bricks with a bullet that blew part of his stomach into the back of his coat. Grat sat up and another shot struck him so hard in the chest it kicked him back to his elbows. He rolled to his knees and the money sack slipped from his vest and belt but he wasn’t thinking one thousand dollars at all. He saw the horses down the alley at the pipe tie-up and staggered for them. His shirt flopped heavy with blood.

Bill Powers got hit with a shot meant for Grat. It ripped through his left coat sleeve and stopped inside his bicep somewhere next to the bone. He slumped against the wall of the McKenna and Adamson store and skidded down a little before he leaned a shoulder against the wall of the building and stumbled to a back door and rattled the latch, wanting in. He pounded the door with his fist and then his rifle stock; then he quit to hug the white door frame close so he couldn’t be seen. He crushed his hat in his armpit to slow the bleeding and waited with a revolver in his hand. His coat smeared red on the wood.

Dick Broadwell made it as far as the oil tanker parked next to the icehouse. The horse team backed up from him and stamped their shoes and their hitch chains clanked when they tossed their heads. There was black oil on everything. Broadwell saw the Long-Bell lumberyard down the alley and scurried to it, cradling his arm. But the defenders were walking out into the street now and a man in a collarless shirt and a bowler hat more than eighty yards away stood still and aimed a buffalo gun and the bullet slammed into Broadwell’s lower back like something five inches wide. He was kicked forward but he kept rockily on his legs. He squeezed the pain in his belly and his boots crossed over each other as he lurched into the lumberyard. He collapsed against a stack of warped two-by-twelves and bunched a handkerchief inside the back of his shirt. He could smell pinesap and sawdust and the urine of children. He closed his eyes. ‘Get me through this, okay? Just let me ride out of this town.’

My brother Grat was spilling blood from his mouth when he pitched inside a small dark barn the size of a two-car garage. He propped himself on the wood studs of a wall that held shovels and rakes and hayforks. There were packets of seeds on the workbench. The barn doors were open so he could shoot into Walnut Street but Slosson’s outside stairway to the second floor of his drugstore was deflecting whatever was thrown at Grat. He fired southwest at the Masonic Hall and some men standing there dived to the grass. He unbuttoned his shirt and saw how his blood bubbled pink from his chest when he took air. But the pain in his stomach was displacing everything else. He walked over to the workbench where a potato was rooting white in a clear water jar. He picked out the cutting and drank the water, staring west through a four-pane window to the horse tie-ups where Bob and I stood loading our rifles with cartridges from our saddlebags. Grat smiled.

Bob and I had trotted down the middle of Eighth Street until we reached Wells Brothers’ store where the south-running alley was. We walked down that way looking for snipers in the buildings. I rubbed gunpowder off my face with my sleeve. We’d guessed Grat and the other two were out of the bank and shooting from their saddles by then but it was not yet so; Ball was still shoving currency into the sack and raking the cumbersome coins away.

Bob stooped at the Wells loading dock and was as careful as an assassin with his shots. One struck a butter churn directly in front of Henry Isham; another just missed two cases of dynamite next to the stoves. A shot fired at Louis Dietz struck the monkey wrench in his pocket and veered off into a roll of Isham’s brown wrapping paper. The shock of the blow knocked Dietz out but he was only sore in the chest for a while. Bob had as good an eye as there was in the West. Whenever he missed he meant to.

Then Grat was on the porch of the bank and Broadwell and Powers rushed out to the plaza bricks like outlaws in the dime novels. The sun flashed off their rifles and Grat backed across the street shooting everywhere. I fired nine times, quick as I could, at the wagons and window and rooftops. I saw Grat stagger back but then I lost him because of the buildings. Bob pushed away from the loading dock and pulled his Brisley Bulldog out of his shoulder holster and took off for the alley. I heeled after him and ran for the horses and fired whatever I had into the plaza while Bob loaded and walked straight into the guns.

I tied the money sack to the saddle horn and laid my rifle on the bedroll to fire east over the considerable distance to Isham’s hardware store where they had us good, had the notorious Dalton gang walking in front of their guns in an alley as open as a main street in early morning.

Bob was by then crouched against the barn where Grat was, jamming cartridges into his rifle. He pushed his hat down on his head and ran down to the Consolidated oil wagon where he leaned on the bench seat and fired into a plaza that was screened blue with smoke. There were sparks red as cigarette ash whenever they fired back at him.

I saw Carey Seaman standing with the German, John J. Kloehr, on the corner of Ninth and Walnut. Seaman broke open a twin-hammered twelve-gauge, shoved in two shotgun shells, and snapped it closed. I could see this because of Munn’s vacant lot which was to my right and overgrown with Russian thistles. But then Kloehr nudged the barber and they walked west on Ninth Street and it was too late when I saw them again.

Tags: Ron Hansen Western
Source: readsnovelonline.net