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After that, Bob and I returned to Wagoner where Grat was minding the stolen remuda. I wanted to bring the batch distinction before we sold it, so I convinced my brothers that we should raid Bob Rogers’s pastures for all his prime stock and racers. We saddled up at midnight and drove our winter haul of animals down a mud road in the rain. Young William McElhanie and Bitter Creek Newcomb had hired out to us by then and they kicked off with Bob and me to bring back what we could with lariats, while Grat squatted in his slicker with the twenty horses and made coffee for our return.
It was not a warm night. The rain hit our hats like pellets. But Bob managed to set fire to a cigar, which was merely occasional with him, and he sucked it down to a nub before we got to the loam where horses were walking in that absentminded way they have, like they didn’t notice the thundershowers. My brother and I herded them toward McElhanie and Newcomb with dangling lariats that we slapped now and then on their rumps.
The horses spraddled out and then they collected and threw conniptions when McElhanie noosed them. But we got them out of there somehow, separating the choicest from the swaybacked and lame, and drove them with whoops and ki-yi’s back to our other remuda.
But rustling Bob Rogers’s stock ruined us in the territories. He was an Indian thin as a pick handle and a man to scrimp and rage. He slept so little he never took off his clothes and usually just closed his eyes for three or four hours in a straightback Shaker chair in the dirt-floor living room. That night he woke up about three-thirty and stood in the kitchen doorway mixing piss with rain and gazing at his mower and walking plow and the horses that were standing asleep by the feed trough. That they’d wandered down seemed odd to him, but then he squinted hard and saw how many he was missing, pulled up his right suspender strap, and got the loaded cap-and-ball pistol from the pantry. He walked barefoot in high weeds to the fence and took hold of the tail of the one sprinter Newcomb had left him by mistake. Then he started tracking us.
Newcomb collected twenty dollars from Bob and shoved it into the bottom of his boot and galloped back to the Turkey Track ranch for chores. McElhanie tried to stick around but Grat kept glowering at him, so he rode to Annie Walker’s tent camp to free-lance under the name of ‘The Narrow Gauge Kid.’
We sold half the bunch in Columbus, Kansas, a dozen miles northwest of Baxter Springs, where we loitered like punks, whittling a café’s chair legs or sitting in the saloon throwing peanuts at farmers or just straddling our horses and pointing unloaded guns at all the children.
He didn’t need the bother of being a deputy marshal anymore, so Bob resigned from the Wichita court the next morning with a letter he wrote four drafts of, appending to it a list of grievances, of which most dealt with money. My heart sank when he gave the profession up since my job depended on his and I guess I’d always believed the rustling was just another form of prank that I could give up further on when paychecks became more regular.
So we were no longer peace officers when we urged our stolen remuda down the main street of Baxter Springs with bamboo fishing poles. We were grubby and unshaven horse thieves whose saddlery creaked from the rain. Grat was riding drag, Bob and I were middle and front, and we’d whipped the mustangs around a corner when we saw a posse of mixed bloods climbing out of their saddles. And carving his sprinter’s hoof with a pocketknife was Bob Rogers in his oily shirt and chaps and his hair rolled under a red neckerchief. He no sooner saw us than he snatched up his rifle and tried to blow off our foreheads. But I had shouted ‘Look out!’ and wheeled my horse, and Bob spun around stropping the stolen horses sharp and hard with his bamboo pole. They bolted and collided and pounded up on board sidewalks and Rogers’s shots only smashed windows.
Bob and I bent for the wheel-rutted road out of town, lashing our horses with leather reins. The mud flew up like shoes. Before we were out of range, though, one of Rogers’s vigilantes got off a shot and the bullet chipped off part of the right ear of my horse. The blood carried back like a streamer. We had no more than six miles’ distance from the town when my horse played out and all I could think of was a rustler who’d been caught by some Indians and cut up by squaws to the size of trout fillets. Then out of the blue came a farmer with a team of hairy Morgans and a wagon and I lost no time in lifting my heavy six-shooter in both hands.
The granger was narrow and buttoned-up and he obeyed like a weakling pupil while Bob unhitched a Morgan and led it over to where I could cross over from my sagging horse. Then we put spurs to our horses and plodded heavily toward the trees and got away clean.
Grat was not so lucky. After Bob had stropped the horses with his bamboo pole, Grat took to a back alley at a gallop, kicking a garbage pail that rang and spilled behind him. He stopped his horse to hook a ladder that banged down and threw a pursuer’s horse on its neck. Then Grat pushed his mount through yellow weeds tall as its belly until he was on the cinder siding of the railroad tracks where he tied a rope lead to the two stolen horses that had trailed him and continued down the bank to a crooked stream that was swelled brown with spring rain.
It was not difficult tracking in the soft earth, and within minutes the vigilantes were close enough to hear the splashing of horses that were led by a rope. They intercepted him at a beaver dam. He was still up in his stirrups and looking around like a tourist when the town sheriff yelled, ‘Reach for the sky, Dalton!’
My brother Grat shaded his eyes to look at the posse. He smiled and said, ‘I never been so embarrassed.’
5
So Grat was arrested once again in territory under the purview of Hanging Judge Parker, his former boss, and my brother Bob and I went into hiding in the Ozarks near the Cookson hills. Reward posters were printed with faces not to our likeness but with the Dalton name bold enough, and newspapers carried slipshod accounts of Grat’s capture, characterizing us as ‘treacherous, renegade lawmen.’ What all the publicity meant, naturally, was that we had to disappear from the territories, and that we had no influence with the judicial branch anymore; if we wanted brother Grat released, we needed to collect a gang.
Newcomb was the first. George was his given name, but I rarely heard it spoken. His nickname came from the lines of a song that went, ‘I’m a lone wolf from Bitter Creek and tonight is my night to howl.’ He had an alias of ‘The Slaughter Kid,’ having assisted the popular ranger John Slaughter in Texas for a while. He was five-feet-two inches tall, the shortest cowboy I ever knew, and women thought him pretty. He had a sunburnt nose and a carrot-red mustache and goatee, and brown freckles everywhere. He usually kept a plug of tobacco big as a baseball in his cheek, and he’d broken his knuckles so often in fights he could hardly close his hands. Newcomb was unschooled but he could spell his name and he’d spend nights around the fire carving it into his belts and holster, little pig-tails of leather curling from his trench knife as he worked. Late in the evening he’d walk off into the wilderness where he’d close his eyes and stand with his hands behind his back, smelling the air. His best friend was the horse-racer Charlie Pierce, who was then dealing stock for Annie Walker but would sign on with us a little later and die with Newcomb on the Bee Dunn farm in 1895.
Also from the Turkey Track ranch was Blackface Charley Bryant, the victim of a freakish gunpowder burn that he explained in a varied way every time the question came up. A third of his face was pale and handsome but the rest was a mottled patch, blue as a bad tattoo, with dark hair emerging from it so that he had to shave clean up to his left eyelid. It made him keep to the night and the darker corners of a room; it made him standoffish and resentful. He wore his coat collar up and his slouch hat down and he rested his blistered cheek on his fist whenever he sat down at the table. He was mean and stubborn and possibly insane. He once snapped the little fingers of a prostitute just for entertainment. Except for Bob and Grat, I never met a man who wasn’t afraid of Blackface Charley Bryant. He hardly spoke at all to me. Maybe he knew all I’d do was stammer. Bryant rode three days to get to the Ozarks, pulling a mule with b
eans and flour and baking powder and cured ham folded up in a tarpaulin, and, at a windmill where he’d stopped to water his animals, he was joined by William McElhanie.
McElhanie was a loudmouthed straw-haired boy, one year younger than I was, who’d been working from a saddle since he was six and therefore limped a little, both legs. He considered himself successful with the ladies and bragged that he’d raped two Choctaw squaws and a Mexican nun and a nine-year-old colored girl, but that is likely bandit talk he’d encountered in magazines. He wouldn’t’ve had a chance of staying on with us except that he worshipped Bob Dalton and my brother was coaxed by the attention. Sometimes Bob was all McElhanie could talk about. He shifted his holster to duplicate Bob’s; he watched how Bob cut up his meat; he traded a box of bullets for one of Bob’s shirts and never took it off for a week. He once said to me, ‘You know what I just asked Bob? I asked him who was his most respected American—so I could read something about him? Bob said the American he respected most was Alexander Hamilton. That just illustrates how smart Bob is. I never even heard of Alexander Hamilton. Nothing gets by your brother.’
McElhanie and Bryant rode into the Ozarks until they saw a fat woman with her hair pinned tight, slopping a pen of shoat pigs. She told them she’d seen two strangers yonder on higher ground, and that they had a string of ponies with them.
McElhanie winked at Bryant and they scrabbled up the mountain for an hour, arriving at our camp in a rain. Our tents were in a green clearing in a greener forest. There was moss on all the trees. Bitter Creek Newcomb had already come and was off somewhere with the horses; I was squatted down at a fire that was mostly blue smoke from the weather, an oil slicker draped over my head and an ancient Colt braced on my knee to point in their direction until I recognized them. Then I rose up and holstered my pistol and said, ‘You two are slow as the mail.’
The two men covered their saddles with a tarp and slapped their animals into clover. McElhanie fired three shots into the air and I grudgingly put a can of water in the fire for coffee. Soon Newcomb clopped out of the woods on my stolen Morgan horse, a currycomb still in his hand. He was grinning and hallooing. He slid from his mount and shook their hands and the four of us joshed and heckled and carried on around the smoulderings. The rain fell thin and straight as fish line. Bob rode in after sundown, doubled on his horse with a half-reformed whore and spiritualist named Kate Bender who hugged him under his coat. He grinned at everybody and Bryant cooked a slab of ham that we ate with refried beans and pan bread.
Then we washed out our mouths with moonshine from a jug while the woman talked about how she communicated with Jesse James in the murky other world. She looked at our palms and felt the lumps on our heads and predicted ailments and satisfactions; and she dangled a witch’s thimble over our hands to see if we’d become rich and if we’d get Grat out of jail.
Bryant wrapped a scarf around his face and came over to watch her work on Newcomb while my brother crouched close to peer at the thimble and thread. Bob said, ‘I bet I’ve met a hundred witches in my travels. Chickasaw woman I knew could throw her hair on a dead lake and largemouth bass would jump for it. Saw a gypsy down in Tulsa who could drop hailstones in her mouth at dawn and spit ’em out unmelted after noon. Walked into a tent at the Bailey circus in Joplin, Missouri, once and walked out with memories I never had: mumps in Rhode Island, white sailboats in Norfolk, Virginia; a fat Cree squaw nursing a striped coral snake at her breast. Returned me to Scripture, that did.’
Bryant said, ‘It’s the devil’s work, sorcery is. I’m not surprised at anything.’
Kate foretold that soon every brand of highwayman and tyro would be begging to join us but that we should keep the gang to a governable size. Then Bob sat on a three-legged milk stool while Kate read the fortune in his hand. She said, ‘You will be successful in whatever you undertake. You have been disappointed in love but a better woman will replace her. You are a born leader of men.’
‘Not very exceptional, is it.’
The woman shrugged.
‘How about Emmett?’
I was about as close to Bob as his clothes in those days; I sat cross-legged by his milk stool and shook my head, my fists behind my back. ‘I believe I’ll forego the pleasure,’ I said. ‘I like a little mystery regarding the hereafter.’
