Miller pulled himself to his feet and swept a hand over a plate to shoo away flies. They sewed in the air and resettled. “I can’t offer you supper; my cupboards are empty.”
“How about if we go for a ride? I could buy you something to eat in town and then be on my way.”
Miller gathered his mare in the paddock and saddled it as Jesse sat on a gelding with the night all around him. Then they trotted westerly, their bodies jumping off the saddles until the horses eased into a graceful lope and then into a walk. A farmer with a hayrake recognized Ed Miller and waved and Jesse nudged his horse to the right so that he couldn’t be seen. He said, “It’s a great month, October.” Some minutes later he said, “Your mare’s cheating on her right leg. Looks like she might be wind-galled.”
Miller couldn’t get himself to say anything.
Jesse pretended a cinch problem, slowing his horse, and said, “You go on ahead, partner. I’ll catch up.”
Miller slumped in his saddle and peered ahead
.
Jesse gentled his gun from the leather holster at his left thigh and thought for a second or two before jogging his horse ahead.
When he got close enough, Jesse angrily said, “You ought to get better at lying.”
Miller stopped his horse but apparently couldn’t persuade himself to drop a hand to his pistol until he’d spun around, and just then Jesse tripped the hammer and a cartridge ball pounded into Miller’s cheek, snapping his head to the side and propelling his body off the mare so that he walloped onto the road.
Jesse stepped his gelding forward through gunsmoke and peered down at a man whose mouth and eyes were open in the rapt look of death. He got off the horse and tugged at Ed Miller’s legs, swatting weeds flat beneath the man’s coat, swishing leaves aside with each surge, towing the body under sumac and elm trees.
The mare was found browsing in its paddock two days later, a saddle rolled counterclockwise on its cinch until it was almost under the animal’s belly, the saddle fenders and stirrups sloppily bird-winged. Ed Miller was not found for many weeks and by then the coroner could only guess that the body was male and not yet middle-aged, it was little more than a bird-pecked skeleton with yellow teeth and a hank of black hair in clothes that had squashed flat in the rains.
Jesse disappeared.
DICK LIDDIL SOLD HIS HORSE in Kentucky and took a train to Kansas City, where he spent October and November in the apartment of Mattie Collins, his common-law wife. They’d met in a courtroom following her cross-examination by a prosecuting attorney. She’d killed her brother-in-law, Jonathan Dark, as he was punching his wife and she pleaded her case so convincingly that the gunshot was ruled justifiable. Dick had just been paroled from the Missouri penitentiary in which he was serving time as a horse thief and in which he’d developed an interest in legal manipulations. Mattie Collins seemed sharp, prudential, accomplished, and when she stepped down from the stand, Dick leaned over a bannister to whisper, “I admire your spirit.” Within weeks they were a couple. Their marriage was more tempestuous than happy, though, and Dick periodically separated himself from Mattie, repeatedly coming back just as he did in October, with a robbery in his past, anxiety in the present, and a promise of constancy in the future. He lied to Mattie about the previous two months; she grew petulant and burned a mincemeat pie and pitched asparagus soup at him; she coldly apprised him of his limitations and cruelty, his inability to love, the shipwreck he’d made of her life, and by midnight they were compromised.
He passed his days with sleeping and pool and penny-ante poker. Mattie took him shopping and made Dick buy her, over the course of the month, a veiled black hat, an oyster shell pillbox, eight damask naperies, and white gloves with four pearl buttons that were near her elbows when worn. Liddil kept seeing Pinkerton operatives in every floorwalker, newspaper reader, or common man poking about in a store; in the evening he would insist there were prowlers and make a simpleton of himself by going out in his nightshirt and gun. And even in the pool hall he was getting the feeling that each shot was being watched, each comment was being overheard, until the creepy sensations at last grew so strong that he spun around and saw Jesse step into the lamplight. “You want to go for a ride?” he asked, and Dick could only agree.
It was the weekend after Thanksgiving and cold weather was so regular that they gave it little attention as they rode out from Kansas City in the morning. Jesse could wake up with a speech prepared, but Dick was just the opposite, sleep kept him in its grip until he’d been up and around for an hour; so as they rode east, Dick Liddil listened and Jesse slipped in and out of topics like a man at a clothing store trying on coats. He was happily loquacious and Dick was suspicious and unnerved, but he gradually relaxed and even grew drowsy within Jesse’s spindle of yams. His was a pelican’s nest of unlinked sentences, fragmentary paragraphs, scraps of extraordinary information, variations on themes, but the issue he kept nipping at and tucking into everything else was that of the Jackson County court trial of Whiskey-head Ryan.
He said a prosecuting attorney—who’d been elected on the basis of a campaign against the James gang—had released Tucker Bassham from a ten-year sentence in the Missouri penitentiary in return for his craven testimony about the Glendale robbery in 1879. According to the newspapers, Jesse said, Bassham took the stand and testified that it was Bill Ryan and Ed Miller who recruited him into the James gang, and he furthermore claimed that he was ordered around at Glendale by none other than Jesse James, who was the man who’d looted the express car. Jesse said Cracker Neck boys had bullied some witnesses, Tucker Bassham’s house was burned to the ground, and railroad men were so scared off that none of them showed up in court; and yet, Whiskeyhead Ryan was convicted and sentenced to twenty-five years at Jefferson City. “I can’t have that happening,” Jesse said.
“How can you stop it?”
Jesse didn’t say. He looked up into cross-hatching trees and said, “The wind serenades a purified man.” He leaned back on his saddle cantle, his right hand on his bedroll supporting his weight. “Did I tell you that I moved out of Kansas City?”
“Where to?”
Jesse ignored that and said, “I’ll strap a chair on my back and walk out into the wilderness some nights. The prairie sounds just like a choir.”
“Are we going to your place?”
Jesse hooked a finger inside his cheek and flicked out the last of his tobacco chew. He wiped his finger clean, on his trousers. “I got word about you and Wood. You two ought to patch things up.”
“I’d still like to know where we’re going.”
“You seen Ed Miller lately?”
“Nobody has.”
“Must’ve gone off to California.” He scratched his neck beard and saw Dick looking at him with perplexity. He said, “If you were going to see Jim Cummins, wouldn’t you follow this road?”
“I guess so.”
“God damn it, Dick; use your head.”
James R. Cummins had served in the Civil War with Frank and Jesse under Brigadier General Joseph O. Shelby and in the late seventies had participated in many of the James gang’s robberies, though his reputation in Jackson and Clay counties was merely that of a common horse thief. His sister, Artella, married William H. Ford, Bob and Charley’s uncle, in 1862; and it was partly that connection that caused the Ford brothers to join on with the gang. And it was to Bill Ford’s farm near Kearney that Cummins withdrew after Blue Cut, prior to leaving the state for the hot springs in Arkansas.