Desperadoes Read online

  Bob stayed where he was and looked at Minnie who was jerking with tears and still fairly far away. The night made everything blue. He yelled, ‘I’m a deputy marshal. That bag there isn’t yours. Those clothes aren’t. Same with the horses and bridles. So you’re both thieves. I could shoot you in the face.’

  ‘Don’t,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  She shouted, ‘Please. Don’t make me scared, Bobby. Please don’t shoot me.’

  He left her there and whipped the team out of the ditch with a weed and lifted the heavy body of the man into the back of the gray board-wagon.

  Cousin Minnie was gone when he returned. So was the saddled horse. No one ever heard of her again.

  Bob stopped at the Dalton farm and stomped his boots on the porch and came back out of the house with me. I was buttoning up my long coat and shoving my pants inside my boots when I looked at Montgomery and saw the pockets of snow where his eyes were and a mustache white with ice. A blood-sopped scarf was stuffed around the man’s neck.

  ‘He’ll be heavy as a tree,’ I said.

  I slumped deep in my coat against the wind, my cheeks and nose stinging with cold, holding the reins as Bob sat stolid on the front box with me, his Winchester cradled in his mackinaw coat and snow on his hat brim, eyelashes, and shoulders. We’d been on the road to Coffeyville for ten minutes when Bob said, ‘Soon as I found out Frank was dead I swore I’d be the best dang marshal the West has ever seen, and I’ve really applied myself; you know that. But I never want to let myself get shot in the mouth for a lousy two dollar reward. I feel bad, Emmett. Miserable. But I’m not going to forget what I promised myself. I don’t want to die poor like Frank, and I don’t want to croup up in bed like Simon, and I’m never going to be so stupid in love that I can be bushwacked while I’m cinching a horse, like the corpse in the back of this wagon.’

  I just clucked the team and didn’t say anything, but then I saw that my brother was staring at me, waiting for some kind of reaction. I don’t think I had a single opinion in those days; I didn’t have a comment in me. I said, ‘I can’t improve on that at all, Bob. You took the words right out of my mouth.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  It was after midnight when we reached Coffeyville. Bob woke up undertaker Lape in his brick-basemented house on Ninth Street, and Lape crouched in the back not saying a thing as we rode down Walnut Street to the sign on the wooden awning that read: LANG & LAPE, FURNITURE DEALERS AND UNDERTAKERS.

  Lape said, ‘There are reports I’ll want to fill out. Questions I’ll have to ask.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ said Bob; then he and I unloaded the body and propped it to a slump on the board sidewalk while Lape dug out his keys. The undertaker bumped his way to the back of the store and lit a grimy lantern over his embalming table.

  My brother removed his gloves and brushed snow from the dead man’s face and coat; then he just squatted there, staring at him. He said, ‘He was caught burglarizing Seymour’s stable and house; then all of a sudden he was dead. I don’t know if I meant to kill him or not. I took myself by surprise.’

  I could see Lape in back in a rubber apron and gloves, limbering some hose. I said, ‘That’s the amazing thing about guns.’

  4

  Much of what I know I owe to the letters Eugenia Moore and I exchanged during my first years in prison. Mine to her were unsigned and brief as the notes on Christmas cards, all mailed to post offices in small towns I’m sure she never lived in. Her letters back were long, nine or ten pages of history and recollection that I marveled at. She wanted to know everything about my brother Bob before she met him in Silver City, New Mexico, and she supplied me with stories about him thereafter.

  I once wrote Miss Moore, ‘Horse stealing was how we occupied ourselves in 1889 and 1890,’ and then rambled with suspicious detail for seven pages of cramped pencil writing on prison stationery.

  She replied, ‘It seems rather headlong, doesn’t it.’

  Rustling, it was called, and it paid well. A brood mare might fetch forty dollars, a gelding fifteen, and we could stay in hotels with plumbing and spend on ourselves like faro dealers. So we kept on as pretty good lawmen but at night we picked the hated Indian ranchers to pieces. We’d rope a stray or hobble the last of a string of ponies and generally take what we could without risk. The more comfortable white ranchers we’d deprive in a larger way, opening up corral gates sometimes and simply stampeding the stock.

  For example, once on a bitter February morning, the three of us rode up to a ranch before daybreak. Bob stayed in his saddle on the road, like a general, hunched out of the wind in a white slicker and blowing on his fingers. Grat broke through crusts of drifted snow as he walked through a skimpy wind-break of fall-planted trees: apricot, apple, and pear. It was a plank house with mud mortar and a sod roof. There were yellow stains in the snow where the woman had thrown out a slop pan. Grat pressed his bare hand to the frosted window till the glass was glass again and spied through it. Red burnt logs were fizzing in the fireplace. Man and wife were asleep in twin beds. He waved his left arm up and down and I scurried out of the barn with rope halters and a feed bag of oats, my hat squashed down with a wool scarf for my ears.

  The corral was made of tree limbs that were almost straight. I lifted the poles of the gate and shoved them away and walked inside with the oats in the palm of my glove. The older horses were sleeping on three hooves with their heads hung out of the wind. Two mares blew air hard and clopped away from me on frozen ground, but a gelding came up to sniff my hand and raise his lips for the oats. Then another horse nosed him away and the gelding balked and made believe there was grass in the snow. A three-year-old with a blaze on its face took what I had in my hand while Grat climbed the fence behind the other horses. They were insulted and shied away but by then I had the lead horse walking forward to shovel at the feed bag. I backed outside the corral and wiped my nose on my sleeve and shook the bag. The horse looked at me like I was stupid and it had better things to do, but some others in the corral were smelling the air and murmuring and pushing each other out of the way, and the leader consented to walk into the feed bag and a bridle. Grat slipped a bit on a filly and we pulled them out to the road as the sun rose.

  Bob was hunkered up in his coat on the road. ‘My feet have turned into stones,’ he said.

  The two of us waited for Grat who came riding up last, having propped a spade against the front door; then we ran up the road in a racket.

  We galloped toward the river and broke through the ice and waded the stolen horses east to the bowl of a dry creek bed that was all yellow leaves and snow. There we built a roaring fire and warmed up under blankets and I tampered with the brands where I needed to, burning new letters through a wet towel.

  By afternoon, Grat and Bob were riding into Annie Walker’s tent camp where rustlers and buyers congregated. A dog slept in the breath of some tied-up horses. A blood-smeared man was ripping his knife through a milk cow, butchering. Her stomachs fell out like laundry and steam rose up in the cold. A man stood under a tent flap in long brown bear hides, smoking a pipe. He was the middleman for the transactions, and he acknowledged Bob by backing inside.

  As peace officers, we covered ourselves by bringing in minor offenders for trial at Fort Smith and Fort Scott, even garnered some reputation as enforcers, but we didn’t worry much about petty crime, so except for Grat, who waded into brawls with a stocking full of lug nuts, we mostly retired and let the Osage deputies administer law in their nation. I got bored diddling with paperwork and spent more time around the bunkhouse of the Bar X Bar ranch, pitching pennies with Dick Broadwell and Bill Doolin, while Grat and Bob rode their horses on fake patrols with scowls on their faces. But soon they got just as tired of the sham as I did, and they spent their afternoons in porch chairs with their boots on a bannister, waiting to be fired. It would take more than a year.

  The territories then were in the midst of the Homestead Run of April 22, 1889, which allowed sixt
y thousand settlers strung along a hundred miles of Kansas border to swarm across into newly opened Indian land at the sound of cavalry bugles. The price to those claiming land at the federal offices in Guthrie, Kingfisher, and Oklahoma Cty, was merely $1.50 per acre with an assessor’s fee of $14.00 for entering 160 acres. Property within the city limits of Guthrie that cost $258.00 at the time of the run was four years later worth from one hundred thousand to a quarter of a million dollars. When I hired on as a cowhand, Guthrie had two wooden buildings, the land claim office and the stagecoach depot, and that was about it; after the run it had a population of thirty thousand people in a city of white tents spread out as far as you could see.

  The federal government hadn’t prepared for any of that, nor for the passions that come from bargain land, and there were too few peace officers to stop the claim jumpers and thieves and murderers, so most of those lawmen assigned to the territories stayed loose of the wars just like we did, until Congress established a United States Court for the Oklahoma Territory with the organic act of 1890.

  My brothers and I pooled our money and claimed a fine section of land for our mother, and the Dalton family, lacking my father, packed up and moved southwest, which seemed a change of luck to Mom. Ben was prosperous, Charles and Henry were getting a little ahead, and the girls all took beaus. Only my brothers Bill and Littleton were still in California, and Bill was on his way to owning a wheat farm and about to stand for the California Assembly. The divorce action was brought before the courts that year and my father, who was by all accounts insane, stayed behind in Coffeyville where he died in a woodshed, banging from wall to wall in the night, spewing vomit and blood. Mice got to him before the neighbors did.

  That was summer 1889. And it was summer too when Grat was caught by a rancher named McLelland, moving among his bunched horses with rope leads and tack and the squint of a stock show judge. McLelland and two hired hands tried to take Grat into jail but they found he was hard to wrestle as a piano and lashed him to a McCormick reaper until they collected more company. They then tied Grat face down on a shaggy, swaybacked mare and he spit at the men and hollered like Satan and one of the Cherokee dropped off along the trail, he was so spooked.

  ‘I’m going to put an end to this rustling,’ McLelland said. ‘And a deputy marshal! I can’t believe it! What I ought to do is take an ice pick and scar your face like Cain.’

  ‘I’d catch your children skipping home from school and break off their teeth with a chisel.’

  The rancher looked so horrified my brother smiled and rubbed his nose on the horse’s hide. ‘Never mind what I say, McLelland. It’s just talk.’

  When Grat didn’t return with the animals to our morning fire, Bob and I took off after him and caught up with the McLelland party while they were still a few miles out of town. They were too many for our guns, however, and we weren’t yet too inclined that way, so we hung back like wolves and skulked around the jail house the whole three months Grat was locked up.

  Grat would sway at the bars, grating his belt buckle against them until the jailer had to hold his ears, and Bob and I would plunk ourselves down in the hard wooden chairs of the office and shine our badges on our pants legs, ‘I’d write in a ledger the name of every man who walked through the sheriff’s door. If they sat around drinking coffee, Bob would say, ‘Isn’t there something you could be doing?’ like he was a government inspector. He got a letter from Marshal Jacob Yoes, Grat’s superior, asking, ‘What’s going on over there?’ And Bob sent back a long document stressing constitutional guarantees.

  Soon after that Grat was set free without a trial and with the prosecutor maintaining that no one had mustered real evidence that theft had been intended. It would seem that we had survived the arrest, but it cast suspicion on the Dalton brothers and resulted in the dismissal of Bob and me from the Osage Tribal Police Force by the scrupulous merchants of Pawhuska.

  That wasn’t much of a blow because the federal government was still anxious for trained deputy marshals in the territories, so Bob simply transferred operations to Claremore in the Cherokee nation. There my brother and myself tried to make good and clean up our besmirched reputations, but Bob set out after a drunken Indian named Alex Cochran, who’d gutshot a deputy marshal, and accidentally fired his rifle at Alex Cochran’s son, striking him so hard in the back at two hundred yards, it looked like the boy had been hit with a shovel.

  We gingerly walked our horses to the body while the boy’s mare looked down at her rider and then began chewing ditch grass. Then my brother discovered that the violent man he’d been pursuing had no more size to him than a smallish paper-boy, and Bob moaned, ‘Oh my God,’ and jumped down from his saddle. The bullet had nearly degutted the boy. Bob tore off his shirt to pack him in and rolled a saddle blanket in under the boy to heft him up. The boy was puking blood on Bob all the way in to town, and soon every Cherokee there knew about it.

  Bob sat gloomily on the stairs up to the doctor’s office while I watched the surgery and handed the old man his sponges and clamps and silver tools. In the streets people talked among themselves and pointed at my brother, and twenty Indians stood on the porch across the street from Bob, staring and threatening and keeping their hands on their pistol grips. A girl in a gingham dress stood on the sidewalk and said, ‘A man paid me a nickel to ask you a question.’

  Bob hardly lifted his eyes.

  ‘He said to ask if you were the same Bob Dalton who gave Charlie Montgomery not the chance of a suck-egg dog.’

  Nevertheless, we stayed on in Claremore for the winter, pitching a Confederate tent outside of town. Grat had ceased being a deputy marshal after a letter of reprimand signed by Judge Isaac Parker was mailed to Grat’s office in Tahlequah, and he frittered away his time while Bob and I kept the peace. He bought a pint bottle of whiskey every moaning and leaned on a pool cue most of the afternoon and every night about ten you could hear a ponk as he smashed his empty against a headstone in the graveyard. Bob would rent a surrey to take the quarter-breed girls to a slow river where he catfished, or down the road to the shanty of a squaw who told fortunes by burning hair. And I composed two pages of love letter with each noon dinner, mailing the envelopes off to Miss Julia Johnson with the address spelled in a careful hand of brown ink. The snows came and we hunted quail and jackrabbit. Grat chopped wood for a laundry in town and I was a regular at the feed store pitch games, the only one of us three that the locals accepted. Bob read the newspaper in the barber shop as well as the weekly Police Gazette. He wrote an eight-page letter to brother Bill in California and got one back of sixteen.

  ‘Come west, young man,’ my brother Bill wrote. ‘The women here are flaxen-haired; the fields are gold with ambrosia. You can smell the eucalyptus trees and watch the sun extinguish itself in the ocean.’

  Our quiet served to distract the citizens from the true Dalton occupations; for we were stealing ponies piecemeal from the Cherokees and mixed-bloods, collecting another tidy remuda that we’d already tagged for Kansas. We prowled at night in the snow and had some twenty good horses by spring when everything that was called Indian Territory—except for the reservations of the Five Civilized Tribes—became Oklahoma Territory.

  That was in April of the year 1890. There were exploding anvils and barbecues and prayer groups giving thanks for hard-won civilization, and Bob and I visited a bordello run by our second cousin Pearl Younger, daughter of Cole Younger and Belle Starr, who took Bob upstairs for free because of the kinship while I stayed in the sewing room with a prostitute of fourteen who sat in my lap in a chintz rocking chair and listened to me talk about Julia Johnson. That is not me being fanciful either.

  ‘How does she wear her hair?’ she asked. ‘Does she have ivory barrettes? That’s what I’m saving for. A man promised me two but then he got the lumbago and it kilt him.’

  My brother stayed in bed with Pearl for most of the afternoon and he said afterwards he unfolded a newspaper on the floor and scraped the mud off his boot
s with a coffee spoon and his second cousin walked naked in the room with Bob’s pistol and holster slung low on her hips.

  He asked her, ‘Suppose I put an outfit together like your daddy Cole did. How would it be if I was the foreman?’

  She stooped to look in a bureau mirror and brush wisps of hair from her cheeks. ‘I don’t know anything about it.’

  ‘Poor old Grat, he’s dumb as a salt lick and knows it. He can’t even count to ten on his fingers. Emmett isn’t but eighteen and he’s always watching to see what I’ll do next; he’s not all that independent. I think I have to be the top candidate, and that’s without boasting. I’ve got the brains and I don’t get rattled and I don’t have hardly a vice except for stealing horses and this. Down deep a man knows what he’s best at.’

  Pearl unbuckled the holster and tied on a robe. She pulled a brush through her hair. ‘Do you think I’m pretty, Bobby?’

  He looked at her. ‘Sort of.’

  ‘I don’t consider this sinful at all. This is what I was raised up to do.’