by Ron Hansen
After that, Bob and I returned to Wagoner where Grat was minding the stolen remuda. I wanted to bring the batch distinction before we sold it, so I convinced my brothers that we should raid Bob Rogers’s pastures for all his prime stock and racers. We saddled up at midnight and drove our winter haul of animals down a mud road in the rain. Young William McElhanie and Bitter Creek Newcomb had hired out to us by then and they kicked off with Bob and me to bring back what we could with lariats, while Grat squatted in his slicker with the twenty horses and made coffee for our return.
It was not a warm night. The rain hit our hats like pellets. But Bob managed to set fire to a cigar, which was merely occasional with him, and he sucked it down to a nub before we got to the loam where horses were walking in that absentminded way they have, like they didn’t notice the thundershowers. My brother and I herded them toward McElhanie and Newcomb with dangling lariats that we slapped now and then on their rumps.
The horses spraddled out and then they collected and threw conniptions when McElhanie noosed them. But we got them out of there somehow, separating the choicest from the swaybacked and lame, and drove them with whoops and ki-yi’s back to our other remuda.
But rustling Bob Rogers’s stock ruined us in the territories. He was an Indian thin as a pick handle and a man to scrimp and rage. He slept so little he never took off his clothes and usually just closed his eyes for three or four hours in a straightback Shaker chair in the dirt-floor living room. That night he woke up about three-thirty and stood in the kitchen doorway mixing piss with rain and gazing at his mower and walking plow and the horses that were standing asleep by the feed trough. That they’d wandered down seemed odd to him, but then he squinted hard and saw how many he was missing, pulled up his right suspender strap, and got the loaded cap-and-ball pistol from the pantry. He walked barefoot in high weeds to the fence and took hold of the tail of the one sprinter Newcomb had left him by mistake. Then he started tracking us.
Newcomb collected twenty dollars from Bob and shoved it into the bottom of his boot and galloped back to the Turkey Track ranch for chores. McElhanie tried to stick around but Grat kept glowering at him, so he rode to Annie Walker’s tent camp to free-lance under the name of ‘The Narrow Gauge Kid.’
We sold half the bunch in Columbus, Kansas, a dozen miles northwest of Baxter Springs, where we loitered like punks, whittling a café’s chair legs or sitting in the saloon throwing peanuts at farmers or just straddling our horses and pointing unloaded guns at all the children.
He didn’t need the bother of being a deputy marshal anymore, so Bob resigned from the Wichita court the next morning with a letter he wrote four drafts of, appending to it a list of grievances, of which most dealt with money. My heart sank when he gave the profession up since my job depended on his and I guess I’d always believed the rustling was just another form of prank that I could give up further on when paychecks became more regular.
So we were no longer peace officers when we urged our stolen remuda down the main street of Baxter Springs with bamboo fishing poles. We were grubby and unshaven horse thieves whose saddlery creaked from the rain. Grat was riding drag, Bob and I were middle and front, and we’d whipped the mustangs around a corner when we saw a posse of mixed bloods climbing out of their saddles. And carving his sprinter’s hoof with a pocketknife was Bob Rogers in his oily shirt and chaps and his hair rolled under a red neckerchief. He no sooner saw us than he snatched up his rifle and tried to blow off our foreheads. But I had shouted ‘Look out!’ and wheeled my horse, and Bob spun around stropping the stolen horses sharp and hard with his bamboo pole. They bolted and collided and pounded up on board sidewalks and Rogers’s shots only smashed windows.
Bob and I bent for the wheel-rutted road out of town, lashing our horses with leather reins. The mud flew up like shoes. Before we were out of range, though, one of Rogers’s vigilantes got off a shot and the bullet chipped off part of the right ear of my horse. The blood carried back like a streamer. We had no more than six miles’ distance from the town when my horse played out and all I could think of was a rustler who’d been caught by some Indians and cut up by squaws to the size of trout fillets. Then out of the blue came a farmer with a team of hairy Morgans and a wagon and I lost no time in lifting my heavy six-shooter in both hands.
The granger was narrow and buttoned-up and he obeyed like a weakling pupil while Bob unhitched a Morgan and led it over to where I could cross over from my sagging horse. Then we put spurs to our horses and plodded heavily toward the trees and got away clean.
Grat was not so lucky. After Bob had stropped the horses with his bamboo pole, Grat took to a back alley at a gallop, kicking a garbage pail that rang and spilled behind him. He stopped his horse to hook a ladder that banged down and threw a pursuer’s horse on its neck. Then Grat pushed his mount through yellow weeds tall as its belly until he was on the cinder siding of the railroad tracks where he tied a rope lead to the two stolen horses that had trailed him and continued down the bank to a crooked stream that was swelled brown with spring rain.
It was not difficult tracking in the soft earth, and within minutes the vigilantes were close enough to hear the splashing of horses that were led by a rope. They intercepted him at a beaver dam. He was still up in his stirrups and looking around like a tourist when the town sheriff yelled, ‘Reach for the sky, Dalton!’
My brother Grat shaded his eyes to look at the posse. He smiled and said, ‘I never been so embarrassed.’
5
So Grat was arrested once again in territory under the purview of Hanging Judge Parker, his former boss, and my brother Bob and I went into hiding in the Ozarks near the Cookson hills. Reward posters were printed with faces not to our likeness but with the Dalton name bold enough, and newspapers carried slipshod accounts of Grat’s capture, characterizing us as ‘treacherous, renegade lawmen.’ What all the publicity meant, naturally, was that we had to disappear from the territories, and that we had no influence with the judicial branch anymore; if we wanted brother Grat released, we needed to collect a gang.
Newcomb was the first. George was his given name, but I rarely heard it spoken. His nickname came from the lines of a song that went, ‘I’m a lone wolf from Bitter Creek and tonight is my night to howl.’ He had an alias of ‘The Slaughter Kid,’ having assisted the popular ranger John Slaughter in Texas for a while. He was five-feet-two inches tall, the shortest cowboy I ever knew, and women thought him pretty. He had a sunburnt nose and a carrot-red mustache and goatee, and brown freckles everywhere. He usually kept a plug of tobacco big as a baseball in his cheek, and he’d broken his knuckles so often in fights he could hardly close his hands. Newcomb was unschooled but he could spell his name and he’d spend nights around the fire carving it into his belts and holster, little pig-tails of leather curling from his trench knife as he worked. Late in the evening he’d walk off into the wilderness where he’d close his eyes and stand with his hands behind his back, smelling the air. His best friend was the horse-racer Charlie Pierce, who was then dealing stock for Annie Walker but would sign on with us a little later and die with Newcomb on the Bee Dunn farm in 1895.
Also from the Turkey Track ranch was Blackface Charley Bryant, the victim of a freakish gunpowder burn that he explained in a varied way every time the question came up. A third of his face was pale and handsome but the rest was a mottled patch, blue as a bad tattoo, with dark hair emerging from it so that he had to shave clean up to his left eyelid. It made him keep to the night and the darker corners of a room; it made him standoffish and resentful. He wore his coat collar up and his slouch hat down and he rested his blistered cheek on his fist whenever he sat down at the table. He was mean and stubborn and possibly insane. He once snapped the little fingers of a prostitute just for entertainment. Except for Bob and Grat, I never met a man who wasn’t afraid of Blackface Charley Bryant. He hardly spoke at all to me. Maybe he knew all I’d do was stammer. Bryant rode three days to get to the Ozarks, pulling a mule with b
eans and flour and baking powder and cured ham folded up in a tarpaulin, and, at a windmill where he’d stopped to water his animals, he was joined by William McElhanie.
McElhanie was a loudmouthed straw-haired boy, one year younger than I was, who’d been working from a saddle since he was six and therefore limped a little, both legs. He considered himself successful with the ladies and bragged that he’d raped two Choctaw squaws and a Mexican nun and a nine-year-old colored girl, but that is likely bandit talk he’d encountered in magazines. He wouldn’t’ve had a chance of staying on with us except that he worshipped Bob Dalton and my brother was coaxed by the attention. Sometimes Bob was all McElhanie could talk about. He shifted his holster to duplicate Bob’s; he watched how Bob cut up his meat; he traded a box of bullets for one of Bob’s shirts and never took it off for a week. He once said to me, ‘You know what I just asked Bob? I asked him who was his most respected American—so I could read something about him? Bob said the American he respected most was Alexander Hamilton. That just illustrates how smart Bob is. I never even heard of Alexander Hamilton. Nothing gets by your brother.’
McElhanie and Bryant rode into the Ozarks until they saw a fat woman with her hair pinned tight, slopping a pen of shoat pigs. She told them she’d seen two strangers yonder on higher ground, and that they had a string of ponies with them.
McElhanie winked at Bryant and they scrabbled up the mountain for an hour, arriving at our camp in a rain. Our tents were in a green clearing in a greener forest. There was moss on all the trees. Bitter Creek Newcomb had already come and was off somewhere with the horses; I was squatted down at a fire that was mostly blue smoke from the weather, an oil slicker draped over my head and an ancient Colt braced on my knee to point in their direction until I recognized them. Then I rose up and holstered my pistol and said, ‘You two are slow as the mail.’
The two men covered their saddles with a tarp and slapped their animals into clover. McElhanie fired three shots into the air and I grudgingly put a can of water in the fire for coffee. Soon Newcomb clopped out of the woods on my stolen Morgan horse, a currycomb still in his hand. He was grinning and hallooing. He slid from his mount and shook their hands and the four of us joshed and heckled and carried on around the smoulderings. The rain fell thin and straight as fish line. Bob rode in after sundown, doubled on his horse with a half-reformed whore and spiritualist named Kate Bender who hugged him under his coat. He grinned at everybody and Bryant cooked a slab of ham that we ate with refried beans and pan bread.
Then we washed out our mouths with moonshine from a jug while the woman talked about how she communicated with Jesse James in the murky other world. She looked at our palms and felt the lumps on our heads and predicted ailments and satisfactions; and she dangled a witch’s thimble over our hands to see if we’d become rich and if we’d get Grat out of jail.
Bryant wrapped a scarf around his face and came over to watch her work on Newcomb while my brother crouched close to peer at the thimble and thread. Bob said, ‘I bet I’ve met a hundred witches in my travels. Chickasaw woman I knew could throw her hair on a dead lake and largemouth bass would jump for it. Saw a gypsy down in Tulsa who could drop hailstones in her mouth at dawn and spit ’em out unmelted after noon. Walked into a tent at the Bailey circus in Joplin, Missouri, once and walked out with memories I never had: mumps in Rhode Island, white sailboats in Norfolk, Virginia; a fat Cree squaw nursing a striped coral snake at her breast. Returned me to Scripture, that did.’
Bryant said, ‘It’s the devil’s work, sorcery is. I’m not surprised at anything.’
Kate foretold that soon every brand of highwayman and tyro would be begging to join us but that we should keep the gang to a governable size. Then Bob sat on a three-legged milk stool while Kate read the fortune in his hand. She said, ‘You will be successful in whatever you undertake. You have been disappointed in love but a better woman will replace her. You are a born leader of men.’
‘Not very exceptional, is it.’
The woman shrugged.
‘How about Emmett?’
I was about as close to Bob as his clothes in those days; I sat cross-legged by his milk stool and shook my head, my fists behind my back. ‘I believe I’ll forego the pleasure,’ I said. ‘I like a little mystery regarding the hereafter.’
She said, ‘You’re the kind that becomes prosperous.’
Bob grinned. ‘This your full-time occupation, ma’am?’
Bob massaged her breasts by the fire, and during the night Bryant, then McElhanie, stole into the tent and used her under the blankets, and the five members of the Dalton gang argued into the small hours about where to go after we got my brother free from the Fort Smith jail. Options were New Orleans and California and Eureka Springs, Arkansas, where there were hot medicinal baths. But my brother Bob wooed us into deciding on the gambling town of Silver City, which was located in an unpopulated section of the country that would become New Mexico in 1912. There a former neighbor of ours named Ben Canty was now the city marshal. He lived on bribes and was mostly tolerant of rustlers.
That was May of 1890 and the five of us decamped and rode through the spectacular Ozarks to Fort Smith, staying in our saddles as McElhanie—who wouldn’t be recognized as a criminal—walked bandy-legged into the office of the Fort Smith Elevator and moseyed up to a man in visor and sleeves who was setting type. We could see the man talk and point directions; then McElhanie came out with the names of the jury and judge and prosecutor listed on a blank newspaper page.
Then we set about making fools of ourselves. We delivered to every prospective member of the jury a letter that had a crude skull and crossbones drawn over script that read: ‘There is no evidence implicating Grattan Dalton in the horse-stealing business. He is a respected former deputy marshal and a victim of circumstances.’
Bitter Creek and Blackface Charley and I then visited Judge Isaac Parker, riding up so close to his house that the horses potholed his spaded flower garden.
His fat daughter came out, drying her hands on a tea towel and said her father wasn’t home, what did we want?
I elbowed Newcomb and he said, ‘We’re associates of a prisoner of your papa.’
‘The innocent Grattan Dalton,’ I said.
‘Ah,’ said the girl. ‘You’ve come to intimidate us.’
Bryant stood in his saddle, opening up his coat. Inside it a white hen ticked her head. Bryant yanked her out and wildly wrung her around, the chicken flapping and squawking until the neck broke off and the body flew up on the porch. The chicken walked around spurting blood while Bryant pitched her head on the roof. It rattled down on the shingles.
The Parker girl merely picked the chicken up by a white wing and walked into the house, locking the screen door behind her, and we walked our horses back to the street through the yard pansies.
I said, ‘That didn’t work worth beans, did it.’
Bryant said, ‘It stunk, is what it did.’
And Bob rode his horse up the porch steps of the federal prosecutor’s white house in the middle of town. He opened the screen and ducked low to ride in under the lintel. The animal knocked over a porcelain candle stand and a lamp of dangling prisms and then thudded over the woven rug to the kitchen. A little girl turned in her chair like a spinster. ‘What on earth!’ she said. The attorney was getting out of his chair, a napkin around his neck, when Bob ducked under the doorway. They were having a supper of liver and onions. The wife was gone. Two daughters were at the oak table and the man was saying things like, ‘See here!’ and ‘This is an outrage!’
Bob slapped his pistol up from his boot holster, just like he’d practiced. ‘My name is Robert Dalton. You have a warrant for my arrest and you have my brother Grat in jail.’
The attorney sat back down, wiped his mouth with a napkin, and tossed it. ‘That’s so.’
‘You can persuade a grand jury to no-bill him.’
‘That’s exactly what I intend to do.’
That stymied
Bob. ‘You’re letting him off? Just like that?’
The attorney had eaten of the liver. He was chewing. ‘Aren’t you going to thank me?’
The horse stepped from one shoe to the next. Its tail swished flour on the counter. The girls were looking at that. My brother said, ‘Excuse me but I’m just the least bit pixilated by all this. Can you explain why you’re letting him go free?’
‘The evidence inspires it. He was arrested on the suspicion he stole Bob Rogers’s horses, but none of those mustangs carried the Rogers brand. Plus there’s a problem with the arresting officer abetting a vigilante group. And your brother’s defense attorney was going to call on Judge Isaac Parker as a character witness. That might have been humiliating. It’s a complicated case. I’ve got plenty to do just pleading the easy ones.’
My brother hung onto those words like he could listen forever. ‘Well, shucks,’ he said. ‘Now you got me sorry I mussed up your house.’
The older girl said, ‘Just don’t tarry,’ and Bob walked his horse down the back stairs and through the staked vegetable garden.
My brother Grat was released from jail the next morning and the Elevator for May 8th used our language, explaining that there was ‘no evidence implicating him in the horse-stealing business.’
Grat walked out of town with his hands in his pockets. He could stand incarceration better than any man I’ve ever known. Parker had executed many rustlers in his past but Grat never suspected evil until he saw it plain, and all the time he was in jail he’d make gurgling, strangling noises whenever one of his keepers walked past, and he fashioned a hangman’s noose out of torn strips of his bedding and wore it under his collar like a necktie. And it was closing his collar still when I clambered up from under the bridge with a horse and a mule on a leash.