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My horse was a fifteen-hand roan-colored stallion with orange mane and tail, called Red Buck. He nickered when I walked over and fed him a ration of oats in a canvas sack with leather ties sewed into it. Then I slapped the feed sack clean and folded it up under my vest and Broadwell asked, ‘Are we ready?’ and I climbed up into the saddle.
Bob sat on his dapple-gray gelding with a toothbrush in his hand, rinsing baking soda out of his mouth with night-cold canteen water. In his black holster he had a .45 caliber pearl-handled Colt with floral engravings on a blue metal frame. Snug und
er his vest in a left shoulder sling was a small .38 caliber Brisley Bulldog. They’re now in museum display.
Eugenia rode out of red and yellow trees in buckskin britches and a sheepskin coat and a dark brown stetson with her blond hair pinned underneath it. She looked like a boy of sixteen. Bob smiled at her. ‘You’re great.’
Then the Dalton gang jogged along Onion Creek at 8:15, thudding and clanking like cavalry. Broadwell put on his dust goggles. Powers was so quiet you’d forget he was there. Grat gouged out some earwax with a toothpick and said, ‘When I was crossing the desert rattlesnakes struck at my stirrups and spiders drank from my eyes as I slept. I pried a tooth out with a dinner fork. I don’t think I can be scared anymore.’
‘That happens,’ said Bob. ‘I saw a soldier who was scalped and left for dead by the Sioux. Nothing else could ever touch him after that. He walked around like he was asleep.’
I unbuckled my saddlebag and handed my binoculars in their leather case across to my brother Bob. He hung them over his neck and they were later claimed by the undertaker W.H. Lape. Black crows picked their steps in the yellow corn stubble, and freshly shocked corn stood shredding brown in the fields. I heard the hound’s groan of a windmill.
Just then James Brown’s ten-year-old daughter was riding a barebacked mare to the schoolhouse in Coffeyville, and she saw six horses and riders ladder up the bank under a rickety bridge of curled boards. She followed close after us with her books strapped in a belt but turned east when we missed the shortcut.
In Coffeyville, Charles Brown, a shoemaker of fifty-nine, rehung the big wooden boot on the signpost in front of his shop. Next to the sidewalk was a bare, twisted oak tree enclosed in a square picket fence that he swept around with a twig broom. The mechanic George Cubine, thirty-six years old, Brown’s partner, stood with his shoulder against the doorjamb, a coffee cup curling steam in his hands. He smiled. ‘See any evildoers?’
‘Nope,’ said Brown. ‘And ain’t that a cryin’ shame?’
Young T.C. Babb peered in the window of Mitchell’s restaurant and saw Charles M. Ball push an unfinished bowl of oatmeal away and put a dime on the table. Babb was crew-cut and twenty years old and worked only part-time at the Condon bank. Ball was the cashier. They walked across Walnut Street to the bank and Ball opened the southwest front door with two keys. ‘What was it again you had to get done?’
‘Oh, those government checks to the Indians. What a pain.’
Ball kept the shades drawn and walked to the vault room and stood there watching the hands on his pocket watch until the safe’s time lock clicked off at 8:30. Babb slammed record books down on the counter. ‘That time lock’s quite an invention,’ Ball said. He snapped his pocket watch closed.
A stout man with a handlebar mustache, Henry Isham, crossed the Santa Fe tracks at Tenth Street. He could see his clerks Louis A. Dietz and Arthur Reynolds standing with lunch boxes on the loading dock of the hardware store owned by himself and his brother and son-in-law. Dietz had a rusty monkey wrench he’d discovered by the tracks. He rubbed it on his pants and dropped it into his shirt pocket when Isham walked up the stairs to the dock. Isham shook out his keys. ‘Sun feels good, doesn’t it.’
At the country road two miles from town, we turned east on what is now Highway 166. The horses were skittish and surly and showed their long teeth over the mouth bits like they’d been gagged. Their tails swung at flies; their shoes skidded on pebbles. I could make out the scaling red paint on a barn a quarter mile to the right. In the shaded backyard of the house a woman was hanging bed sheets on a clothesline. They billowed suddenly white in the sun. To the left of the road I could only see a boy turned around on the seat of a mule-powered high-sided wagon while two farmers in straw hats and rolled shirtsleeves, one of them William Gilbert, quickly shucked husks of corn and tossed them against the bangboard.
Bob had his horse in a swinging trot and his woman was riding next to him, with wisps of long hair squiggling out over her eyes in the breeze. I rode up beside her but she didn’t look in my direction. I said, ‘Autumn is my favorite season; because the colors are so radiant and the air smells like apples and you can reap the bounty of the hot weather’s toils. If there was a country where it was autumn all the time, I believe that’s where I’d go.’
Eugenia said, ‘It’s autumn every day in Argentina. That’s why so many Germans inhabit the place.’
I said, ‘I don’t like Germans and they don’t like me.’
My brother complained, ‘Why don’t you two go over what we’re about to do instead of prattling about foreign countries? Do you know what your jobs are, and where and when they have to be done? Ask yourselves those questions.’
Eugenia smiled at me. ‘Do you feel chastened?’
The gang passed a dairy barn of mortar and stone and the cheese factory where a boy was shrugged under the weight of two sloshing milk cans. Soon thereafter I could see white church spires over trees piled with colored leaves and rattling under them was a maroon carriage with fancy gold trim containing Mr. and Mrs. R.H. Hollingsworth, who later swore that we were six, not five, that our appearance was peculiar, and that we were heavily armed. Grat and Broadwell swept off their hats for the missus and bowed low on their steeds. Two brothers,. J.M. and J.L. Seldomridge, approached in a weathered gray wagon with crates of white hominy and onion they were trucking to Sedan. J.M. was blowing his nose in a brown handkerchief and did not recognize me because of my beard. He stuffed the hankerchief in his pocket and knelt on the box seat to stare backwards at us. He shouted, ‘Hey, which posse you with?’
Powers turned in his saddle and glared and J.M. sat down in his seat facing front.
They too claimed there were six.
It was only when we got to what was known as the Hickman property on Eighth Street that Eugenia kissed Bob on the cheek and wished us good luck and skirted her horse south through yellow bars of light in the trees. The sixth man has ever since been a mystery, becoming at various times Bill Doolin, whose horse at the last minute came up lame, or a Coffeyville hoodlum named Alley, Ogee, or a gabby liar named Buckskin Ike, or Caleb Padgett, who made that confession from his deathbed in 1934. The sixth man was a woman named Eugenia Moore, who stood her horse at my brother Frank’s grave in the Elmwood Cemetery and walked down the rows reading headstones with her hands in the pockets of a man’s sheepskin coat.
20
The Dalton gang loped our horses along Eighth Street with our gear slapping and clanking and the road loud as wood under the horseshoes. There were houses to the right and left of us with women in aprons at the screen doors, shading their eyes, and a man in suspenders in a backyard with a wheelbarrow and a shovel, and a small boy in short pants and a lunch box, kicking a tomato can down the sidewalk. We were still two and three in formation, with Bob and me to the front, as we crossed the street where the limestone Episcopal church was. A girl sat on the board sidewalk in a yellow dress, staring at us as she yanked up her stockings. Our coats skirted up off our holsters and the Dalton gang was riding hard to Walnut Street when Bob pulled his horse to such a stop it almost sat down. The four of us stopped with him or circled our horses around until they quit and road dust drifted over us.
Three black workmen were prying loose the bricks of the plaza where they’d buckled up in front of the Opera House and the Eldridge House, and the hitching rack was torn down in a mess of disrepair.
‘Ain’t this a pisser,’ said Grat.
One of the black men leaned on his pick. I said, ‘I guess we call it a day and go home, huh Bob?’ But my brother was already wheeling around and he kicked his horse back to Maple Street and swung south and our horses jostled to follow him. Left on Maple was the office of the Long-Bell Lumber Company and the Davis blacksmith shop where a man was banging iron on an anvil. He did not look up as we jogged our horses past. We turned left into a wide alley of cinder and dirt that ran east and west between Maple and Walnut streets, with the Long-Bell lumberyard along it quite a ways. An oil tank wagon with a dark brown workhorse team belonging to the Consolidated Company, later Standard Oil, was parked up ahead in the alley and near the city jail halfway up there was a stonecutter who was tilting a rock curb up, examining it, and cracking it back down. Otherwise the alley was empty and it was 9:30 on an autumn Wednesday morning in 1892. The sun was yellow and warm, and leaves were burning not far away.
Bob tied his horse to the pipe that was the top railing of the hitching rack at the rear of Police Judge Munn’s lot, which was brown with cornstalks and braced tomato plants that had burnt up in the sun. The rest of us got down too and the horses cropped grass as we strode east in the alley, not speaking; Grat, Dick Broadwell, and Bill Powers in front, Bob and me after, five Winchester rifles loose in our arms and the gang dressed in black hats and silk-trimmed black coats and trousers as fine as you wear with tuxedos.
