The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Charley squatted against the front wall, ground his cigarette out on the floor, and suspected the governor had grown impatient and that the cottage was at present encircled with perhaps fifty policemen and two hundred state militia. Plaster would spew if they shot; glass would sprinkle, pictures would tilt, even the sofa would move.

The window sash had been raised four inches in order to ventilate the room. Jesse rested his .44’s muzzle on the sill and steered it toward the policeman’s face.

Charley peeked out the screen door and saw the policeman screw his boot down on his dropped cigarette and then cruise over to the sidewalk gate. When the man’s thumb tripped the metal latch, the revolver cocked with its soft clicks and Charley prayed, Go home. The policeman was only a suggestion away from stepping onto the rented property when he lost either the gumption or the yearning and shut the gate and strolled on.

Jesse uncocked the revolver and covered it with the newspaper.

He said, “An angel tugged on his coattails,” and then with graceful nonchalance walked back into his room.

BOB WAS IN TOWN at the time. He’d told Jesse that the cash he’d earned at the Richmond grocery store was burning holes in his pockets and that he wanted to look for an Easter suit at the Famous Boston One-Price Clothing House. And 510 Main Street is indeed where he went, there buying a fifteen-dollar gentleman’s suit of salt-and-pepper tweed. Bob told the salesman that his name was Johnson, and that he was a cousin to Thomas Howard.

The cattleman?

Bob lent his affirmation.

Good neighbors, the salesman said. Always polite and respectable, with a pleasant word for everybody.

Bob started toward Lafayette Street but then got a notion and instead skipped down alleys and cut through stores until he came to the American Telegraph office, and there Bob slanted into a standing desk for many minutes, scribbling twenty messages that he might send to Governor Crittenden or Police Commissioner Craig.

He could be a glib and even grandiloquent speaker, but writing was agony for him: the right words seemed to disappear whenever he grasped a pencil, plus he was hampered by the grim recognition that he really had nothing to say. He listed the chances for capture that Jesse had given him and came up with only two: Bob had gallivanted past the kitchen window and noticed Jesse asleep in a chair; and Jesse unbuckled his gunbelts to scrub at a washbasin and Tim had strapped them on. But Zee was ironing a blouse close by as Jesse slept, a shot would have stabbed her left breast; and Bob himself wore no gun on the second occasion and to go after Jesse with anything else was unimaginable to him.

For the man was canny, he was intuitive, he anticipated everything. He continually looked over his shoulders, he looked into the background with mirrors, he locked his sleeping room at night, he could pick out a whisper in the wind, he could register the slightest added value a man put into his words, he could probably read the faltering and perfidy in Bob’s face. He once numbered the spades on a playing card that skittered across the street a city block away; he licked his daughter’s cut finger and there wasn’t even a scar the next day; he wrestled with his son and the two Fords at once one afternoon and rarely even tilted—it was like grappling with a tree. When Jesse predicted rain, it rained; when he encouraged plants, the

y grew; when he scorned animals, they retreated; whomever he wanted to stir, he astonished.

So some of Bob’s telegrams were apologies, some were clarifications, still more were prognostications of when the criminal would be “removed,” until finally Bob settled on a coded note to Sheriff Timberlake, providing him with clues about their living situation in St. Joseph and about the contemplated robbery in Platte City on the 4th. All he could think of as he jotted it down was Jesse’s story of George Shepherd sending a telegram in Galena, Kansas, and then riding into a barrage of gunfire from the James gang.

It took five minutes for the telegraph operator to code and transmit the note and two hours for Timberlake to receive it because of the court session in Independence at which he was an expert witness. But thereafter the sheriff acted with great speed, arranging a company of fifty deputies who would ride their horses into two freight cars at sunrise on the 4th and surround the Platte City Bank while the James gang was inside. Timberlake even went so far in his preparations as to order a Hannibal and St. Joseph locomotive’s engine ignited and kept fully steamed in the Kansas City roundhouse so that it could race to Platte City or St. Joseph without much delay. Having satisfied himself that the appropriate steps had been taken, the sheriff dined with Commissioner Craig on the night of the 30th and they toasted a victory that they seemed only days away from achieving.

GOVERNOR CRITTENDEN GAVE an interview that week in which he bragged about the many members of the James gang who were already in jail or in courts of law, going on to claim that certain arrangements had been made that could snag the James brothers themselves very soon. He could say no more than that, the governor smugly asserted, as if he had not already divulged enough to put the Fords in jeopardy.

On March 30th the Kansas City Evening Star carried a leading article that stated: “Commissioner Craig, Sheriff Timberlake, and Dick Little have been closeted in Craig’s office all afternoon, the outlaw having been engaged in making an affidavit to all the operations of the old gang. The Evening Star is able to state as a positive fact that Little has been working with the officers for several months past.”

And the Evening Star for Friday, March 31st, again concentrated its attention on Dick Liddil’s confession in an article that was somewhat inaccurately titled “The James Gang.” It accused the James gang of the robberies at Glendale, Winston, and Blue Cut, but then incriminated only Dick Liddil in the alleged murder of Wood Hite, even moving the gunfight to a location near Springfield, Missouri. “Jesse was greatly incensed at the murder of Wood,” the writer stated, “and Little ran away from the gang to escape Jesse’s wrath. Thereupon Jesse offered a reward of $1,000 for Dick Little, alive or dead, saying that he would prefer him dead. When Little learned of this offer, he surrendered himself to Commissioner Craig and Sheriff Timberlake, and betrayed, or pretended to betray to them, the whole gang.”

And though the Kansas City Times published similar stories, Jesse’s subscription to it meant it came by mail, so he couldn’t read about Dick Liddil’s collusion or make the correct inferences about the Fords until the morning of April 3rd. And yet he acted with the skepticism and suspicion of a man who already knew. He scarcely acknowledged Bob’s remarks all day on the 31st nor spoke at supper except to complain about an overdone seven-bone steak that Zee promptly removed to the kitchen to steam. He then confided to Charley, “Her cooking always has been a scandal. Cut her meat and the table moves.”

He passed the evening simply enough, sitting with Mary and Tim on the sofa and reading from Five Little Peppers and How They Grew: “The little kitchen had quieted down from the bustle and confusion of midday, and now with its afternoon manners on, presented a holiday aspect that, as the principal room in the brown house, it was eminently proper it should have.”

Charley took apart his pistol, squinting away from cigarette smoke and chugging slight coughs as he twisted a screwdriver; Bob catnapped on the sitting room bed and didn’t awaken until he heard Jesse swat Charley’s foot with his hat and say, “Come on, Cousin; let’s go for a ride.”

Charley shot a scared look at Bob and then said, “Sorry, but I’m not much in the mood.”

“Stomach ache?”

“Sort of.”

“The night air will cure it,” Jesse said and crushed Charley’s wrist in his seizing hand as he yanked him to his feet.

Charley climbed sluggishly into a coat and boots and glanced again at his brother. “Don’t you want to come along too?”

Jesse said, “Bob stays,” and the two men walked out to saddle their horses.

They rode east near Pigeon Hill under a moonshade of interlaced shagbark trees. Jesse rambled to the right or left of Charley, riding the creeksides and cowpaths, rising into the woods, reconnecting with the road many yards behind Charley and then creeping up alongside.

He asked, “Do you ever count the stars?”

Charley looked overhead at the pinpricks of light. It reminded him of his father’s badly shingled barn roof when the cat he was shooting at crouched on the rafters and everywhere else it was noontime but it was midnight whenever he sighted his gun.