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Soon as he said that we heard the second train and Bob smiled broadly at each of us. ‘Wheoo!’
‘Ain’t that somethin’?’ I said.
A kerosene lamp was turned up inside the depot and the train came on with gas jets burning in all of the coaches and some of the window shades were pulled down and even Doolin was grinning. ‘Well, la dee
da,’ he said. ‘La dee da.’
When the train stopped we spurred our horses and Grat banked up to the engine cab alone and knocked the two-man crew into their handles and pull-rods and switches.
Broadwell climbed onto the caboose and opened the door. It was dark inside but he could see bunk beds. ‘Is anybody in here?’
A man got up on his elbow. ‘Who is it?’
Broadwell sat on the guard rail and balanced his rifle on his knee. ‘The next time you’re in this situation and somebody asks you that, you oughta just play dead.’
The rest of us sat on horses alongside the train. We didn’t whoop or shout or fire guns at all, and some of the people who slept in the coaches didn’t know the train had been stopped by us until the newspapers said so the next day.
Two Wells Fargo employees have since sworn they engaged in a shoot-out with us but I recall no such thing. I recall that Bob and Doolin and Newcomb rolled the door back while I pranced my horse this way and that on the siding, pointing my weapon everywhere.
Bob told the money attendant to open the safe door but the man said he didn’t know the combination. Bob had been through all that once before at Wharton and he found it more than a little boring. He pulled his blue bandana down and unfastened the hooks of his raincoat for the cool. The halves of his raincoat swished and dropped to the floor as he sat down on the spindle-backed chair as if just that much drama had exhausted him. Newcomb took over and threatened the messenger with every manner of penalty and discomfort; then Doolin brandished a sledgehammer he’d unearthed.
‘Hey now,’ said Bob. ‘That’ll work.’
Doolin made a horrible face and swung the weight up and posed with the sledgehammer high as the ceiling and only a sudden fall away from dashing the messenger’s head down into his rib cage.
Bob sucked with horror. ‘No, no! I meant on the safe.’
‘Oh, I know, Bob! Damn it! I was just trying to get a laugh.’
Doolin tapped the safe mechanism with the sledgehammer head, testing. Then he laid into the latch once and the door indented; with the second blow it cracked. Newcomb pried it free with a crowbar and pitched the money into a mail sack while Bob yawned and Doolin looted the mail for boxes of merchandise.
Bob hopped down to the cinders, took hold of the bridles of Newcomb’s and Doolin’s horses, and pulled them to the express car.
Grat bounded down from the engine ladder and I took his horse to him; the others trotted along the siding.
In Kingfisher, my brother Bill opened a pocket watch and said, ‘Golly, ten o’clock. If I don’t get to bed pretty soon I’m going to turn into a pumpkin.’
Chris Madsen brushed his mustache with a thumb, put his untouched snifter of Madeira down on the coffee table. ‘What was the reason for all this tonight?’
‘Can you keep a secret?’
Madsen pulled his vest down over his belt and looked at Bill without emotion.
Bill said, ‘I was going to be in a real jam if I couldn’t prove I wasn’t at Red Rock tonight. I needed an ironclad alibi.’
‘What happened at Red Rock?’
‘Oops! There I go again. Kiss and tell, that’s me. Well, you’re going to have to learn the rest by yourself. I’m not going to be the one to spill the beans, not even if you tickle.’
‘Did your brothers stop a train?’
‘You’re the detective, Chris. I just dabble in real estate.’
Madsen said, ‘It is only a matter of time, Bill.’ He lifted his snifter, then put it down again. ‘It is now June of 1892. We’ll have them stopped before the year’s out.’
At Red Rock, Doolin walked off the express car platform onto his mount, strapped his rifle into its saddle boot, and snatched two lunch boxes off the express car floor. The guard and messenger were hog-tied with baling wire next to the broken safe. Their faces were red as apples. Doolin gave the lunch box with the liverwurst to Grat, and Broadwell came up from the caboose and then we all crashed through sunflowers and vamoosed west into the blue hang of rain.
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