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A tall deputy marshal in a dark, three-piece suit and waxed mustache walked down the aisle in the second class car, peering out at Bryant. He’d been reading some federal arrest warrants and he left these in his seat.
When the conductor saw the marshal’s badge he said, ‘My heart is about to erupt.’
‘My name is Ransom Payne.’ He leaned out the window and said, ‘It’s me they want, not the money.’ He opened
the door on the left side of the car and hung his large white hat on the handle and walked slow as a bridegroom into the sunflower stalks where he crouched down with his gun in his hand.
My brother and Newcomb had by then climbed the iron stairs to the green mail car, and Newcomb swung a fire axe into the door. It middled open on the second blow and Newcomb reached in to pull the bolts free.
The messenger cowered down in a far corner by a coat tree. There were varnished boxes along the right wall as they faced it, and stacked canvas bags and steamer trunks on the floor. In the center of the car was the small Franklin stove, used in the winter for heating. It was empty now except for the big money the messenger had just stuffed inside. Neither Bob nor Newcomb ever thought to look there and the messenger was later to receive a gold watch for his genius.
Bob glared at him and tapped the barrel of his pistol on the safe. ‘Open it,’ he said.
‘I can’t help you there,’ the employee said. ‘I don’t know the combination.’
Bob kept tapping the safe to annoyance.
‘The vaults are closed in Kansas City and the combinations wired down to Gainesville. I never hear a number.’
Eugenia had been told otherwise, so Bob splintered the coat tree with a bullet. A wood chip flew into the messenger’s eye. The eye turned red immediately.
‘He thinks you’re fibbing,’ Newcomb said.
The man reached for a chair back and pulled himself up and held a handkerchief at his eye socket. Newcomb unbuttoned his shirt front and unfolded a burlap sack he’d stuffed under his belt and he stood to the left of the messenger as the man moved the safe’s dial numbers around. The mechanisms dropped and the man pulled the handle down and offered Bob a large wrapped package which my brother took to be the big money but was actually waybills and canceled telegrams and newspapers torn to pieces. We would not discover the ruse until morning.
My brother pitched the bundle into the burlap sack, as he did the smaller package which was the one and two-dollar bills we eventually divvied up. Newcomb kept the heavy bag wrapped around his hand, letting the bulk of it hang by his knee.
Outside, Bryant kept the stoker and the engineer shoved down into the cinders while I tended to the getaway horses. ‘Pretend you’re snails,’ he said. He fired his pistol randomly anywhere it wanted to go. He said, ‘Your passengers are fouling themselves by now.’
I was low ranny on the job so I had to sprint down the street to the stockyard where I unwrapped the reins from the fence and pulled the horses long-necked and into a trot. Bob and tiny Newcomb were banging down the mail car stairs when I neared, Newcomb holding the filled sack aloft and grinning under his mask. The two of them swung up onto their mounts at a run, not even using the stirrups. They pushed their horses up a short cliff and over onto a road that they pounded down.
I stayed behind on my horse with my scabbard rifle shouldered, scanning the area as Bryant released the stoker and engineer and limped on over toward me.
‘Go on,’ he yelled. ‘I’ll stand the cowards off.’
‘You sure?’
Bryant spit tobacco. The scar on his face looked purple.
I kicked my horse up to the road and caught up with my brother and Newcomb in a dark farmyard among apple trees. ‘What’s taking Bryant so long?’ Bob asked.
I shrugged. ‘When Charley’s definite about something I don’t like to interfere.’
Bob frowned at me. ‘Where’d you learn words like that?’
The horses shifted and stamped and rubbed their chins on the stirrups as the three of us counted nickels and dimes and quarters from the canvas currency bag.
Bryant stood spraddle-legged on the rockbed siding, looking down the quiet train of railroad cars, a rifle in the crook of his arm. He unbuttoned his pants and pinched himself open but could only shudder a minute. He wiped his eyes with his gloved hand and lifted his left boot into the stirrup. He shoved his pistol into his holster and cradled his rifle in his arms and watched the stoker and engineer spider under a coupling to the left side of the train. People were walking inside the cars. He nudged his horse with his knees and walked it slowly past the depot, talking to himself.
The male passenger in the depot walked outside thinking the gang had disappeared. The Wharton ticket agent lit a kerosene lantern and hung it by the calendar over the telegraph key and opened up his Morse book.
Bryant saw the boy begin his signals; then he lifted his rifle some with his elbow and smashed window glass with a cartridge that slammed the boy in the ribs. His body didn’t know he was dead until he’d spun and walked backwards over a castered chair and pulled the wooden ticket slots down. The boy looked flabbergasted.
Bryant nudged his horse into a trot and never said a word about the killing so that we didn’t discover it until several days later. And then we didn’t know what to do about it. Bob made no diary entry.
After it had stayed quiet in Wharton for a minute or two, Ransom Payne got up out of the weeds and solemnly boarded the train. He was already writing reports in his head. He said, ‘That was the Dalton gang.’
The conductor stared at him.
