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Bob frowned. ‘Is that all?’
‘You don’t want the gold, do ya Bob?’
‘Heck yes, Tom. Every cent.’
Ayres opened the strongbox again and carried out gold coins in his shirt. They jangled when he walked and some got loose and rang across the floor when he poured them into the feed sack.
‘Is that everything?’ Bob asked.
I called from the front, ‘Let’s go, Bob!’
Bob displayed his rifle to Ayres. ‘I want to know if that’s everything.’
Ayres said, ‘You bet.’
Bob slammed him against the frosted glass. I could see the white imprint of Tom’s shirt, then shadow again, and I heard Bob bang open the strongbox. Ayres stood by the swinging door of the counter and shrugged at Sheppard as if it had been a noble effort. Sheppard smiled back. Hollingsworth had his eyes shut. Knott was frowning at me, his hands still high.
‘How do your arms feel, Abe?’
‘I’d have to say they’re pretty sore.’
‘It won’t be long now,’ I said.
I could see south on Union Street where one of the teamsters was teaching his horses to back up. He got a flatbed wagon and a lumber truck into the middle of the street, barricading it; then he snuck back into Isham’s hardware. Bob came out of the office with two packs of bank notes worth five thousand dollars apiece. ‘What’s this, Tom? Huh? Why’d you lie to me?’
It was 9:40.
Bob stood at the depository and angrily dumped a bag of silver coins on the floor. He lifted a box of gold watches but Sheppard told him it was merely fiduciary papers and I told my brother we’d better leave, so Bob left the box and he wrestled Bert Ayres back through the swinging door to stand next to Sheppard, and told the two of them to stay put. Meanwhile, Tom Ayres, Boothby, and the three customers stood at the front door with their hands raised while I took up the feed sack of money. It was heavy as a milk can and my fingers went white with the strain. Bob turned the porcelain knob and pushed open the screen and the five men walked on out like schoolchildren.
The mechanic George Cubine was hunkered down with a Winchester in the doorway of Rammel’s with the boy Jack Long and Mr. C.S. Cox, who had a Dance Brothers percussion revolver. Soon as Bob took a step out onto the bank porch there was a whang and the door casing splintered. Bob sprang back inside and grinned sheepishly at me. ‘Who was that, Cubine?’ He peered through a gap in the shade to see the three bank customers crawling away on the bricks. ‘He?
??s a shabby marksman, isn’t he. Spose he could hit me with a banjo?’
I set the sack down and regripped it and picked it up again. ‘Can we get out the back?’
‘I think so.’
But instead he cocked his rifle and walked out onto the sidewalk as calmly as a man looking for a newspaper and a chair. Neither Cubine nor Cox showed themselves but Bob swiveled to see Charley Gump next to the horse collar that hung on Isham’s awning post. Gump was bringing back the hammer on a ten-gauge when all at once there was a blast from Bob’s rifle and Charley’s hand tore apart and the wood stock splintered off at the shotgun’s pinion and Charley cried out with pain that stung clear to his teeth. Then Bob was inside the bank again, shoving past me for the rear. I yanked Sheppard out of his chair as hostage, leaving Bert Ayres behind, and Bob held the iron-grated door for me and then the three of us left the cool of the bank for the heat and dust of the alley.
As I said, Grat slung his rifle on his arm and spit his tobacco and walked inside the C.M. Condon and Company bank and the yellow shade slapped the window glass when he closed the door. Bill Powers leaned on an outside awning post while Dick Broadwell walked the board porch and then the two of them opened the two pairs of doors, Bill at the southwest, Dick the southeast. Sunlight sprawled across the floor and the bankers wrote in their ledgers and there was the clack of typewriter keys in the office. The bank counter was larger and more ornate than that at the First National. It had pegs instead of nails, the wood was carved walnut made dark with linseed oil, and it cost more than a small farm. Over the teller’s grill was a sign that read: PROTECTED BY NORTH BRITISH AND MERCANTILE INSURANCE CO. OF LONDON AND EDINBURGH, ESTABLISHED 1890.
T.C. Babb stood at a desk on the east side of the front room, writing out government checks, when he saw Broadwell on the board porch lift up the blue bandana on his face. He picked out Grat as soon as my brother shut the door and Babb snuck into a back room where he hid behind a ceiling-high rack of ledgers and journals. Vice-president Charles T. Carpenter wore a cardboard collar and a striped blue tie and he had a counter drawer open and the spring clasps up, counting twenties and tens when the three robbers entered.
My brother Grat walked forward like he was five men, like he weighed nine hundred pounds. Carpenter backed away from the counter. Grat yelled, ‘We got you now, God damn it! Hold up your hands!’
Charles M. Ball sat in his yellow office at the rear, unwrapping a throat lozenge as he read half a letter to the Wells Fargo Company that was rolled into his typewriter. He had the side door onto Walnut Street open for the breeze. He heard noise in the front of the bank and pushed himself up from his chair and walked out into the front room where Powers quickly shouldered his rifle. ‘You can just get your hands in the air.’
‘Is this a robbery?’
Powers said, ‘Yes sir, it is.’
Grat got behind the counter through Carpenter’s office on the right. He jerked open all the counter drawers and saw Ball standing there and pitched him a seamless two-bushel grain sack. ‘You hold this while your boss fills it.’
Carpenter pushed packets of bills still wrapped in paper tapes into the bottom of the grain sack and Grat sat up on the counter, swinging his legs. In Carpenter’s office was a wall clock with three vials of mercury in the pendulum. The clock read 9:36.
Carpenter lifted the money to Ball, the bills flapping together. ‘Look how my hands are shaking.’
Mr. Ball held the sack out and stared at my brother until he was sure the burly man under the muttonchop whiskers was the oldest of the notorious Dalton boys. He remembered what speed Grat’s brain was.
