AllFreeNovel
Share Us
My brother scratched the itch in his hands. His knuckles were big as steelies. ‘Them are my sentiments too, Mr. Breckinridge. You shoulda heard me defend your honorable self from them lies. I was danged vociferous.’
On July 7th, the jury found Grattan Dalton guilty as charged. Breckinridge stood at once to say he’d appeal the verdict to the Supreme Court of California. He packed his briefcase and Southern Pacific Detective Will Smith stepped over the oak fence toward Grat with a handkerchief at his cheek. ‘I told you I’d land you,’ he said.
Sentencing was July 29th, then postponed until September 21st so the court reporters could type transcripts for the appeal.
So Grat was kept that summer in a sweltering jail cell with a slat bed and gray wool blanket and chamber pot and water pitcher. He’d read the Visalia Weekly Delta until his eyes hurt (not long), and then he’d just sleep on top of his bed and feel the sweat roll down his ribs; or he’d stand at the jail bars at night and spit chewing tobacco as some of the other prisoners made women of each other.
After Bryant’s death, Bob and Eugenia both left the Hennessey house to travel east, Miss Moore attending the funeral at Mulhall for the gang, then proceeding to the Oklahoma town of Wagoner thirty-five miles southeast of Tulsa. There she posed as a female reporter for Harper’s Weekly, sent there to gather articles about the territory and the end of the frontier and the last of the Old West gangs. She’d step timidly into a bank and sit on the edge of the chair in the bank president’s office, taking notes like a college girl. She had lunch with a railroad official who got tomato soup in his beard, and a senior man with the express company escorted her to a Sunday Chautauqua lecture on the lessons of ancient Greece. She sat in the shade with a parasol and he bought her lemonade. ‘I find you beautiful,’ he said.
She hired a one-horse cab to drive her four miles north to a railroad depot at Leliaetta where she sat at the one bench with a heavily mustached telegraph operator who kept brushing flies from his face. His eyebrows were black as electrician’s tape.
He showed her the water tower and track switch and coal yard and the telegraph lines with the porcelain insulators. He leaned against a tall semaphore blackened with coal dust, ‘Leliaetta’s just a flag stop. If there’s danger of any kind or mail to be picked up or passengers, well this here blade with the red glass lens is swung in front of the hanging lantern and the train stops.’
She wrote that down like her brain was a little lame. ‘So red means stop,’ she said.
‘That’s right.’ He tapped the blade with the green lens. ‘Otherwise I throw the green and the train just has to hesitate some till it clears the city limits.’
‘Green means go.’
He sighed. ‘But this is where it gets complicated. Since the Dalton gang’s been boarding trains and causing such a ruckus we switched everything around.’ He stuck his hands in his pockets and gazed down the rails. ‘The engineer blows a whistle before he rounds that bend. I take a look around the place and if I put up the green blade, then the red, that means I haven’t seen any outlaws and he can brake for the mail.’ He stared at her. ‘This must be confusing as heck to a woman.’
‘But you explain it very well.’
Bob rode across the range with Pierce and Newcomb and they came to the dugout in a September rain that fell so hard it dented hats. Doolin, Powers, Broad well, and I stood under a cottonwood tree with slickers on and water on our faces or wool blankets draped over our heads. Broadwell had his cat Turtle inside his shirt. He blew cigarette smoke in its face. Amos Burton had gone to Dover the week before to dally with some colored ladies and we never saw him again until 1892.
Bob had on the white slicker he wore when he rustled horses in winter. His hat was so heavy with rain the brim was sunk down past his ears and nose and he had to tilt his head back to see us. He smiled. ‘How about robbing another train?’
We made a canopy with four tree limbs and a blanket and cooked a pot of Doolin’s herbal tea over a smoking fire. As was the habit with sod huts, mine was dissolving in the rain. Water dripped through the grass and earth of the roof and plunked on the bunks and stove like coffee and coffee grounds. So we squatted outside in the rain and discussed the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railroad, also known as the MK&T and the Katy. The summer cotton crops were being sold and the money carried to banks in Fort Worth and Dallas. A gang of men could take it, he said. Eugenia had already collected the particulars and would report the next afternoon. Doolin listened for a while, then got out kettles to collect rainwater since the river tasted of gypsum and spoilt his cakes and bread loaves.
The rain wore itself out by the next morning and we spent the afternoon inside a dugout that was crossed with a clothesline of drying socks and shirts and long underwear. Newcomb peeled sweet corn and shook the garden dirt from his onions, green peppers, and lettuce, and spread them out on a table for the feast commemorating our return to the train-stopping business.
I squatted naked on the bank of the Canadian River with a razor and leather strop and a spotted piece of mirror while Bob and Doolin and Powers dunked themselves in the brown water and scrubbed pretty hard with soap. Powers was white as alabaster except for his face and hands; Bob was brown all over from swimming naked with Miss Moore. Dick Broadwell slid naked down the bank, his good clothes folded over his arm, a brush and mug in his right hand. He said, ‘Lookit Doolin out there staring at his pecker.’ He shouted, ‘What’d’ya doin’, Bill, trolling?’
Doolin smiled. ‘I can always hope for a nibble.’
Broadwell waited until my razor was next to my lathered cheek; then he slapped me on the thigh. ‘Emmett, my boy! Good to see ya!’
I said, ‘You can get sort of wearisome, Dick.’
My brother stood ankle deep and grinned at Dick as he dried himself. ‘We’re gonna have ourselves a wild fandango, aren’t we?’
‘Can I dance cheek-to-cheek with her, Bob?’
Powers swam out into the river and floated on his back to the bullrushes.
At dusk I sat on the sod roof with the binoculars to my eyes while the others squatted outside with cigarettes, passing a mirror and comb around. My brother said, ‘I don’t want any rough talk or lewd suggestions or taking the Lord’s name in vain. Remember how you were taught to act around ladies.’
Then Miss Moore arrived and seven beaming men stood with their hats in their hands and white shirts and neckties on and their hair slicked down with rose oil.
Bob picked her up and swirled her around and they kissed for two or three minutes while the gang whistled and made noises. I ducked inside to stoke the stove and I could hear Bob making introductions again in case she’d forgotten names. After that she came inside and gave me a hug and a sisterly kiss. I think she wanted to tousle my hair but I had too much size for it.
I fried plank steaks of deer meat and Doolin cooked the rest of the meal with underwear tied on his head like a chef’s hat. Then we sat outside in the cool breeze and Miss Moore discussed Leliaetta and the farmhouse she’d just rented in Woodward for the winter. Bob dealt out cards to indicate who would do what on the job and Powers got out his fiddle and bow. Bob clapped his hands and did the calling for ‘Turkey in the Straw’ and some Virginia reels and Broad well and Pierce danced with each other, interweaving with Newcomb and Eugenia.
Then Bob and his woman retired to spend the night indoors with two bunks pushed together while six men slept on bedrolls under the white moon. It was near autumn but what we heard were summer noises: frogs at the river and crickets in the grass and cicadas rattling out of shells that looked like brown blisters on the trees. Night birds dived and swooped.
Newcomb said, ‘Bob’s a lucky devil, ain’t he.’
Powers rolled away to his side.
