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The Dalton gang abused their horses for twenty miles; then we slowed to a walking string of four on the road south and east to Orlando, a saloon town with nineteen worn-out whores. Bryant hung his head down and tried to sleep; I played ‘Just a Closer Walk with Thee’ on my Harpoon; Bob packed some of Newcomb’s Mail Pouch tobacco under his lower lip. It looked like his tongue sitting there. The horses were wheezing and they nodded their heads with each step and sometimes just stood in their tracks to jerk the leaves off low trees.
Newcomb shouted over his shoulder, ‘You’re gonna like it at the place we’re headed, Bob. Ol Yountis, the owner, he’s got an ugly sister who eats snuff and one of the dogs barks ‘arf arf arf,’ like he’s read it in some cartoon.’
We reached the Yountis homestead at four in the morning. Two dogs that were brown with mud in the belly and legs rushed out from under the porch to tell us what the property lines were. The horses just ignored them. Bryant knocked the dog that arfed in the head with the butt of his rifle and the two canines backed up to bark and settle deep in the grass and pant.
Yountis came out with a shotgun and no clothes on at all. He had unwashed, leafy hair and hands that looked blue and teeth that were so crooked in his mouth he seemed to snarl. He peed off the edge of the porch while we pulled the saddles from our horses. Ol Yountis cupped his hand in the dogs’ water dish and wiped his eyes and face. ‘How much ya get?’ he asked.
The gang walked inside his shack and emptied the burlap sack on the table. Ol’s sister came out of her room in a gray dress, parting her black hair with her fingers, wiping black snuff from her lip. She simpered some at Newcomb, who dealt with her when he was hard up, and she started fixing breakfast as Bob tore open the big package and saw the worthless paper and threw it against a wall where it slapped apart and the pieces fluttered down.
Newcomb couldn’t believe we’d been tricked and chased down every waybill and canceled check to see that it wasn’t money. Bob ripped open the other package and saw the one and two-dollar bills and I began stacking them in piles of fifty. Yountis came out of his room in awful bib overalls and he walked out of the house in disgust when he heard the whole take was barely five hundred dollars. He made only twenty dollars of that for the rental of his pasture and our board.
Esther Yountis cooked a meal of beans and suet and pancakes and sat down on a bedroom chair as we silently ate it, smiling whenever we looked in her direction. I leaned back in my chair and said what good food it was. I believed in putting the best face on things.
She responded, ‘It’s not. Not really. But thank you anyway.’
Bob turned around in his chair to tell her that he and I used to be peace officers in the territory;. we knew the geography like it was our backyard.
She said, ‘I keep asking Ol to chop down some of these trees. I don’t think we’ve got a pretty yard at
all.’
Bob turned back to his food and that was the end of conversation except for him saying over his coffee that it didn’t matter how much money we got because we were practiced now for the next time.
Esther stacked dishes, then walked the four of us down a narrow weedy cow path. There were too many trees too close together, like mourners around a grave, and there was green moss on everything. Below the trees were green grasses, green creepers, green ivy. The dogs were bounding deep in it and hardly showed their tails. Sun slanted in like rain. The place where we camped was a small clearing caused by two slabs of sleek rock and a trickle of clear water that talked as it fell into Beaver Creek. Esther walked back with Newcomb beside her and about halfway to the shack they sat down in plants that milked when they broke, and after some persuading she removed her dress so he could do it to her.
The men were asleep under blankets when Eugenia Moore stepped her horse through the briars at noon. She was dressed as a man in buckskin pants and a wool shirt that she stripped off at the creek to wash the horse smell from her with lavender soap. Then she walked naked to Bob and slid in under the blanket and woke him up by unbuckling his belt. He smiled and they kissed without speaking. She unbuttoned his shirt and he kicked out of his pants; she unbuttoned his underwear and she let his fingers find her.
Bryant was on his side five yards away, staring. He watched them for a long time, then rolled to his other side.
Ol Yountis came down at two o’clock lugging a bushel basket against his right leg. He smiled at the man and woman under the blanket and lifted her discarded clothes out of the basket. ‘I believe these might be your’n.’
She stood up naked and made no secret of herself as she buttoned on just her shirt and walked down to her horse for a long skirt.
Yountis grinned. ‘Not a bit bashful, is she.’
My brother lifted his .45 and clicked the hammer back. ‘I don’t want you weaseling around down here. I don’t want you to expect her or covet her or even dream about her. I catch you in Miss Moore’s vicinity and I’ll attach an animal to ya.’
Yountis got up out of his frog squat. ‘I like my whores just fine,’ he said. ‘There’s two that got real educations about men.’ He carried the bushel basket to where Bitter Creek and I were sleeping. He kicked us awake and set out a supper of corn bread and hog jowls and kidney beans with capped jars of grainy coffee. Then he walked up to his shack.
By which time Ransom Payne was riding drag and shouting headlines about himself to a posse of Cherokee policemen. Ahead of him were five Oklahoma marshals and an ex-sheriff from Kansas, Ed Short, a robust man who could not have suspected that he had only three months to live before he’d be gunned down in a railroad baggage car by Blackface Charley Bryant.
The posse was misled so often by informers that they soon gave up the hunt. They never got within twenty miles of the gang: the Daltons had that many friends; the railroads were hated that much.
We stayed on the sad farm of Ol and Esther Yountis three days. Whenever Yountis walked out to plow with his middle-buster, Newcomb called upon his sister. Bryant and Newcomb and I played cards and dominoes on a horse blanket spread over bluegrass and wild onion. Bob and his woman walked down to the creek where they knelt and washed each other in running water so shallow they could hear the stones click under it.
Eugenia washed Bob’s chest with a sponge and said, ‘Do women get weak when they see you?’
‘Nope. Mostly they just look bored.’
She said, ‘That’s because they’re defeated. They probably think you’re out of reach.’
‘Aren’t you a comfort,’ he said.
She said, ‘I let only one man visit my body while you were gone the winter. He was heavy and an informant and I didn’t stir until he left me. I spent my afternoons with the pleasure of you, feeling you there and wishing whenever I saw my bed I would see Bob Dalton in it with his gun on the blankets and the sparkle in his eyes and all the bones showing in his chest. I’m not a good woman at all. I’m fickle and strange and common as a hotel, but I do love you Bob Dalton; you’re my permanent resident.’
His answer was to kiss her and to pull her down to him.
She left that afternoon for Hennessey to arrange a purchase of land.
