Then he came out of the barn and swung a working saddle up to the top board of the fence. He went inside and brought out another saddle by the horn and Minnie Johnson stood in the doorway in Mrs. Seymour’s shawl and watched Montgomery tug over a horse by its rope bridle. They spoke to each other and she shivered and went inside.
Bob told me this years later when we were on the porch stoop at Hennessey and Eugenia Moore was in the kitchen with a creaky ironing board. He said he had cocked his rifle four hours before so he did not do that then. He stood up and slowly pressed open the chicken coop’s wire mesh door. He stood still a minute, then walked toward the barn. The falling snow was a grainy sound in the trees; otherwise it was silent night.
Montgomery was reaching under the belly of the horse to bring the cinch through the brass loop. Bob brought his rifle up and stood twenty yards away as Montgomery lifted up hard on the cinch strap. Minnie came out with one of Montgomery’s coats and a carpetbag. She saw Bob and it so shocked her she couldn’t say a thing. Montgomery turned his head just a little and there was gunpowder noise and a rifle bullet ripped into his neck, splitting his throat like a swamp root. He smacked against the saddle and the horse changed its hooves; he lifted a yellow-gloved hand to his neck, his mouth open like he was yelling or had just burst through the surface after touching the mud in a deep lake. He pawed for balance on the horse but it reared away and yanked the reins from their wrap on the fence. Minnie Johnson’s hands were in prayer at her face as she sank down to her knees, and Montgomery fell off and died on his back in the snow.
Bob stayed where he was and looked at Minnie who was jerking with tears and still fairly far away. The night made everything blue. He yelled, ‘I’m a deputy marshal. That bag there isn’t yours. Those clothes aren’t. Same with the horses and bridles. So you’re both thieves. I could shoot you in the face.’
‘Don’t,’ she said.
‘What?’
She shouted, ‘Please. Don’t make me scared, Bobby. Please don’t shoot me.’
He left her there and whipped the team out of the ditch with a weed and lifted the heavy body of the man into the back of the gray board-wagon.
Cousin Minnie was gone when he returned. So was the saddled horse. No one ever heard of her again.
Bob stopped at the Dalton farm and stomped his boots on the porch and came back out of the house with me. I was buttoning up my long coat and shoving my pants inside my boots when I looked at Montgomery and saw the pockets of snow where his eyes were and a mustache white with ice. A blood-sopped scarf was stuffed around the man’s neck.
‘He’ll be heavy as a tree,’ I said.
I slumped deep in my coat against the wind, my cheeks and nose stinging with cold, holding the reins as Bob sat stolid on the front box with me, his Winchester cradled in his mackinaw coat and snow on his hat brim, eyelashes, and shoulders. We’d been on the road to Coffeyville for ten minutes when Bob said, ‘Soon as I found out Frank was dead I swore I’d be the best dang marshal the West has ever seen, and I’ve really applied myself; you know that. But I never want to let myself get shot in the mouth for a lousy two dollar reward. I feel bad, Emmett. Miserable. But I’m not going to forget what I promised myself. I don’t want to die poor like Frank, and I don’t want to croup up in bed like Simon, and I’m never going to be so stupid in love that I can be bushwacked while I’m cinching a horse, like the corpse in the back of this wagon.’
I just clucked the team and didn’t say anything, but then I saw that my brother was staring at me, waiting for some kind of reaction. I don’t think I had a single opinion in those days; I didn’t have a comment in me. I said, ‘I can’t improve on that at all, Bob. You took the words right out of my mouth.’
‘Shut up.’
It was after midnight when we reached Coffeyville. Bob woke up undertaker Lape in his brick-basemented house on Ninth Street, and Lape crouched in the back not saying a thing as we rode down Walnut Street to the sign on the wooden awning that read: LANG & LAPE, FURNITURE DEALERS AND UNDERTAKERS.
Lape said, ‘There are reports I’ll want to fill out. Questions I’ll have to ask.’
‘That’s fine,’ said Bob; then he and I unloaded the body and propped it to a slump on the board sidewalk while Lape dug out his keys. The undertaker bumped his way to the back of the store and lit a grimy lantern over his embalming table.
My brother removed his gloves and brushed snow from the dead man’s face and coat; then he just squatted there, staring at him. He said, ‘He was caught burglarizing Seymour’s stable and house; then all of a sudden he was dead. I don’t know if I meant to kill him or not. I took myself by surprise.’
I could see Lape in back in a rubber apron and gloves, limbering some hose. I said, ‘That’s the amazing thing about guns.’
4
Much of what I know I owe to the letters Eugenia Moore and I exchanged during my first years in prison. Mine to her were unsigned and brief as the notes on Christmas cards, all mailed to post offices in small towns I’m sure she never lived in. Her letters back were long, nine or ten pages of history and recollection that I marveled at. She wanted to know everything about my brother Bob before she met him in Silver City, New Mexico, and she supplied me with stories about him thereafter.
I once wrote Miss Moore, ‘Horse stealing was how we occupied ourselves in 1889 and 1890,’ and then rambled with suspicious detail for seven pages of cramped pencil writing on prison stationery.
She replied, ‘It seems rather headlong, doesn’t it.’
Rustling, it was called, and it paid well. A brood mare might fetch forty dollars, a gelding fifteen, and we could stay in hotels with plumbing and spend on ourselves like faro dealers. So we kept on as pretty good lawmen but at night we picked the hated Indian ranchers to pieces. We’d rope a stray or hobble the last of a string of ponies and generally take what we could without risk. The more comfortable white ranchers we’d deprive in a larger way, opening up corral gates sometimes and simply stampeding the stock.
For example, once on a bitter February morning, the three of us rode up to a ranch before daybreak. Bob stayed in his saddle on the road, like a general, hunched out of the wind in a white slicker and blowing on his fingers. Grat broke through crusts of drifted snow as he walked through a skimpy wind-break of fall-planted trees: apricot, apple, and pear. It was a plank house with mud mortar and a sod roof. There were yellow stains in the snow where the woman had thrown out a slop pan. Grat pressed his bare hand to the frosted window till the glass was glass again and spied through it. Red burnt logs were fizzing in the fireplace. Man and wife were asleep in twin beds. He waved his left arm up and down and I scurried out of the barn with rope halters and a feed bag of oats, my hat squashed down with a wool scarf for my ears.
The corral was made of tree limbs that were almost straight. I lifted the poles of the gate and shoved them away and walked inside with the oats in the palm of my glove. The older horses were sleeping on three hooves with their heads hung out of the wind. Two mares blew air hard and clopped away from me on frozen ground, but a gelding came up to sniff my hand and raise his lips for the oats. Then another horse nosed him away and the gelding balked and made believe there was grass in the snow. A three-year-old with a blaze on its face took what I had in my hand while Grat climbed the fence behind the other horses. They were insulted and shied away but by then I had the lead horse walking forward to shovel at the feed bag. I backed outside the corral and wiped my nose on my sleeve and shook the bag. The horse looked at me like I was stupid and it had better things to do, but some others in the corral were smelling the air and murmuring and pushing each other out of the way, and the leader consented to walk into the feed bag and a bridle. Grat slipped a bit on a filly and we pulled them out to the road as the sun rose.
Bob was hunkered up in his coat on the road. ‘My feet have turned into stones,’ he said.
The two of us waited for Grat who came riding up last, having propped a spade against the front door; then we ran up the road in a racket.
We galloped toward the river and broke through the ice and waded the stolen horses east to the bowl of a dry creek bed that was all yellow leaves and snow. There we built a roaring fire and warmed up under blankets and I tampered with the brands where I needed to, burning new letters through a wet towel.
By afternoon, Grat and Bob were riding into Annie Walker’s tent camp where rustlers and buyers congregated. A dog slept in the breath of some tied-up horses. A blood-smeared man was ripping his knife through a milk cow, butchering. Her stomachs fell out like laundry and steam rose up in the cold. A man stood under a tent flap in long brown bear hides, smoking a pipe. He was the middleman for the transactions, and he acknowledged Bob by backing inside.