by Ron Hansen
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.
Grat asked Carpenter where he kept the gold and didn’t like the answer. So he pushed both bankers toward the vault room in the back, then saw T.C. Babb crouched down next to the purple bound ledgers. He swore and grabbed the bookkeeper by the shirtfront and swung him into a chair. Powers poked his rifle through the teller’s grill at Babb. ‘Now I want you obedient, boy.’
The Condon had a black, walk-in, two-door vault with gold leaf trim and a time lock on the safe that had clicked free at 8:30 that morning when Ball had opened up. The safe and its combination lock were guaranteed burglar-proof by the Hall Company, the manufacturers.
Carpenter dropped three canvas bags of silver coins, three thousand dollars total, into the grain sack. He was swallowing back his breakfast. ‘I’m sorry but I have to sit down.’
Grat pressed his rifle sight into the man’s cheek. ‘I want your safe opened.’
Carpenter sagged. ‘Ask Mr. Ball. I never handled those things.’
Grat pulled his rifle away. There was a red mark on Carpenter’s cheek. Grat glared at Ball, a sickly, disciplined man who couldn’t climb stairs without rests on the landings, who couldn’t take food much rougher than soup. Grat demanded that Ball open it.
‘Don’t I wish I could,’ said Ball. ‘It’s automatic, ya see. Operates off its own clock.’
Grat tried to read the cashier’s face but I guess he missed the lie. ‘What time does it open?’
‘9:45.’
Carpenter looked dumbfounded at Ball and then he looked down at his shoes.
My brother asked, ‘What time is it now?’
Ball opened up a steel pocket watch in his hand and snapped it shut. ‘9:38.’
Carpenter lightly tested the safe handle. It rattled but didn’t budge. ‘See there? It’s closed up tight as a drum.’
Grat squatted down opposite Carpenter. ‘We can wait seven minutes.’
Dick Broadwell knelt at the varnished southeast doors and sat back on his heels and stared through the plate glass at the hitching rack in front of Barndollar’s store. A man in long Johns and suspendered trousers heaved against the breast chains and traces until his horse team warily backed up and his flatbed wagon blocked Union Street. Then he yanked hard on the harnesses of another team and a lumber truck got in the way. The horses’ iron shoes grated on the bricks. The man ducked to run inside Isham’s where men with crowbars were wrenching open wooden crates. Broadwell took six rifle cartridges out of his left coat pocket and laid them down between his knees. He saw two boys at the front of the First National Bank: a boy at the railing who was squinting at Dick, kicking the bricks with his toe, and another crouched to peer under the green shades on the door. Dick saw me yank open the front door and yell for Boothby to come inside, and he saw the boy Jack Long dash into Rammel’s next door where a mustached man in a blue shirt and a leather apron revealed himself and a Winchester rifle for a second and then went back to hugging the door frame. Dick cocked his rifle to shoot the assassin but a porch post was in the way. He threw his hat down by the brass coat tree and wiped back his long thinning hair.
Meanwhile both heavy doors to the Isham Brothers and Mansur hardware store were opened and a dozen men who’d been on the street went in and crowded at the windows. Henry Isham used a claw hammer to break open the lid to a case of rifles shipped by Marshal Yoes. Isham’s clerks Louis A. Dietz and T. Arthur Reynolds loaded them and Read’s hardware store clerk Lucius Baldwin carried them front. Lucius slipped under his shirt the small Smith and Wesson revolver kept on a nail beneath the cash register.
At George Boswell’s store across the street the German John Joseph Kloehr, who was then thirty-four, sat on a keg of nails with a penknife, cutting an X into the lead of his cartridges so they’d split apart on impact. M.N. Anderson, the carpenter, lifted up Kloehr’s rifle. The silver housing was engraved with pictures of quail and turkey and turtledoves.
Kloehr said, ‘With that one I win the Kansas State Trapshoot Championship. You never seen anything like it.’
In Slosson’s drugstore, two doors north, stood Aleck McKenna and Cyrus Lee and the assistant pharmacist Frank Benson. They knelt at the lettered windows with rifles, scrutinizing the banks. John B. Tackett, a young amateur photographer then, walked in through the back with a tripod and a small wooden box that was a primitive Edison movie camera. McKenna frowned.
Tackett said, ‘I’m going to get it on film.’
‘What are you talking about?’
Tackett said, ‘Stay out of my way. That’s all I ask. Just don’t get in front of the lens.’
The barber Carey Seaman had just driven a buckboard back from the Indian Territory where he’d shot three quail and ten rabbits. They were his only meat for the month. He slid the stable door and pulled his horses in and leaned his shotgun against an old piano covered with blankets. He was a block and a half away.
City Marshal Charles T. Connelly was having morning coffee with Dr. W.H. Wells in the Masonic Hall on Ninth Street. Connelly was a thin, quiet man with a mustache and long chin beard, a professor of rhetoric and classical languages then on sabbatical. The city job was only temporary. The same yellow-haired boy whose head is in some of Tackett’s pictures’ of the dead ran up on the back porch of the hall and told Connelly about us through the screen door. Connelly set his coffee cup down and looked at the doctor. ‘Do you have a gun?’
Wells shook his head. ‘I’m sorry.’
Connelly crossed through the backyard toward some houses.
At the cemetery, Eugenia Moore got a pencil and paper out of her saddlebags and knelt in front of Frank’s monument copying down my mother’s sentiment: ‘Thou art gone to the grave but we shall not deplore thee. Whose God was thy ransom, thy guardian and guide, He gave thee; He took thee; and He will restore thee. And death has no sting for the Savior has died.’
She folded the paper into her coat pocket and stood up, She could hear dogs barking in the town.
Grat was stomping his boots on the floor. Ball sagged against the rolltop desk and swallowed two pills without water.
Grat said, ‘You used to faint in church all the time.’
‘I’m no better now.’
‘You oughta try New Mexico. They say the climate there’s pretty special. What time you got now?’
Ball opened his watch and snapped it shut. ‘9:41.’
Grat said, ‘I believe you’re lyin’, Mr. Ball. I’ve a mind to put a bullet through your eye.’ Grat thought hard. Vice-president Carpenter wiped his mouth with a handkerchief. Ball unbuttoned
his collar and peeled it off. Grat asked, ‘How much cash did your books show last night?’
‘Four thousand dollars. One thousand dollars currency and three thousand dollars in silver. It’s all in your sack. Nothing in the safe except some nickels and pennies and deeds to squatter’s farms. There’s money on order from the Denver mint but the express office hasn’t delivered it yet.’
Bill Powers listened to that, then pulled his rifle from the cashier’s cage and sidled to the southwest casement when he heard boots on the Walnut Street sidewalk. It was John D. Levan, the moneylender, and D.E. James, a dry goods salesman, come to warn the bank about the Daltons. I guess that sounds comical now but it was dang brave under the circumstances. I truly admire those men. Levan opened and shut the door and still had a hand on the inside doorknob when Powers clutched his coat sleeve and kicked him in the ankle so hard the old man fell to the floor like boxes. He split open his lip somehow. Blood spattered on his white shirt. The dry goods clerk sat down with his hands high and a bowler hat cocked on his head and he looked across at a wild-looking bank robber with a blue bandana over his nose.
Broadwell grinned. ‘Did you wake up this morning thinking this was your lucky day?’
The sound of a rifle climbed over a pistol shot and Broadwell looked over to the First National Bank where a string of pale businessmen stood on the bricks with their hands up while Cox and Cubine cowered in the drugstore and gun smoke rolled under the porch roof where a door casing had been splintered. Broadwell saw Bob walk out and fix north, then swing around and fast as that break apart Gump’s shotgun and his hand. Then Bob was in the green dark of the bank again and the hostages scurried away.
There was a dead silence for about a minute; then with the suddenness of rain, gunfire cracked off the Condon porch posts and bricks and metal roof, and a front window near Powers that was lettered BANK in gold paint crashed into pieces big as a carpenter’s square.
The men in the front room flattened themselves and Powers scooched to the brick wall where he slapped broken glass from the casement and put his gloved hand down on the windowsill for a rifle prop. He fired his Winchester six times, moving from left to right, then swiveled away from the window to load and hear the rifles from Isham’s chop at the wood sash and boardwalk.
Broadwell knelt by the southeast bank doors and saw Parker L. Williams stooped low on the porch roof of Barndollar’s two hundred yards away. The man was in his white stocking feet loading a Colt .44. Broadwell shot a half-dollar hole through the plate glass but the bullet strayed wild of the man on the roof and shattered some queensware stored on the shelves in Barndollar’s clothing department. Broadwell’s second shot broke a shingle in half; then Williams lowered his Colt in both hands and the revolver bucked up and the shot ripped through Broadwell’s right arm as if it was a long pipe. He tore his sleeve with his teeth and looked at blood and a tatter of shirt and the flat blue slug that split the bone. His shoulder screamed when his fingers moved. ‘I’m shot, darn it. I can’t use my arm.’
Powers looked across the room. Broadwell’s eyes were scared and his right hand dripped blood from the fingers. ‘It’s no use, Bill. I can’t shoot anymore.’
Powers had nothing to say.
My brother Grat hunched at the teller’s window but couldn’t see much for the gun smoke. Powers would fire up whole magazines, then sit with his legs crossed and load while bullets smacked the window shades. Broadwell was slumped against the brick wall with his eyes closed and his mask pulled down and his arm bloody and loose in his lap.
Grat went into the back room where Carpenter and Ball now sat on the floor out of harm’s way, flinching whenever a bullet peeled the wallpaper or punched a hole in the floor. Ball’s shirt was so soaked with sweat you could see through it. The skin of his chest looked yellow.
Grat asked, ‘Is there a back door to Eighth Street?’
Ball answered no.
There was.
Grat asked, ‘That time clock about to go off, is it?’
‘Nope,’ said Ball. ‘You’ve got a couple of minutes yet.’
My brother couldn’t manage it. He dropped to his knees and his hands squeaked on the rifle as they slid. Each shot from the street was loud as planks slapping together and his brain wasn’t giving him anything. He pushed the two-bushel sack between Carpenter and Ball. ‘You two grab that and carry it to the door.’
The two men bent with the weight of it and Grat walked behind them to the front. The room was blue with gun smoke and lead was flying every which way. Powers slumped by the southwest doors where the glass wasn’t busted out yet, loading a rifle that hung in the crook of his arm. Broadwell hefted up his single-action pistol and it picked up when he fired it south. His right sleeve was slick with blood and he could hear the bones grate in his arm when he used it. He shot T. Arthur Reynolds in the right foot. The doctors removed a toe.
A shot knocked a chair off one of its legs; a shot hit a fountain pen and blue ink spidered the walls.
The bankers lugged the sack and then dropped it. Powers said it looked too cumbersome, so Grat had Mr. Ball cut the twine with a penknife and haul all the silver out. The coins clinked and rolled on the floor. Ball refolded the paper money and pushed it deep and twisted the neck of the sack. Broadwell stared at the cashier’s work and rubbed the blood from his hands with a white hankerchief. ‘How much is there?’
‘A thousand dollars,’ said Ball.
‘I think you’ve been honkered, Grat.’
My brother didn’t say anything. He squinted through the blue haze in the plaza where the citizens were firing still, then took the grain sack from Ball and shoved it down in his pants and grinned. ‘I can’t wait to see their faces when we get away with the loot, can you?’
Broadwell let his right arm hang with a pistol and lifted his bandana up on his nose. Powers stood with his hand on the doorknob and nothing at all in his face. ‘Ready?’
Tackett got it all on film that is now orange and disintegrating.
When Bob and I left the First National Bank, guns were going off everywhere and Lucius Baldwin, who’d played baseball with Bob, was standing in the rear doorway of Isham’s facing us soberly like we were the sheriff’s men. I pushed W.H. Sheppard and he sprinted free across the railroad tracks, but Lucius stepped off the threshold and walked up the alley, no doubt to warn us about the Daltons. A lady’s pistol hung in his right hand.
I yelled, ‘Whoa, partner,’ but Baldwin was nearsighted and pretty confused and he continued walking with that pistol by his side.
‘What’s he doing?’ said Bob. He shouted, ‘Better hold up there, Lucius.’
Baldwin didn’t hear. He wore a clerk’s apron and he was working at the tie string as he walked. Again Bob warned him to stop but to no avail, and then he shot Baldwin in the chest and staggered him. By then Baldwin was so close that gunpowder sparks burned his apron. Baldwin sagged against the brick wall, slid down, and coughed blood into his fist and wiped it on his pants leg. It took him twenty minutes to die.
My brother took off and I ran after him to Eighth Street where the sun was yellow and hot and men in dark suits stood in shops with folded arms, talking. They slammed the doors when they saw us. A grocer in a white apron stood across the street on the sidewalk with his hands cupped at his mouth, shouting, ‘You are killing innocent people!’
I lifted my rifle and he walked back into his store.
Bob stopped when he got to the pried-up bricks of Union Street. The plate glass of the Condon bank had shattered like hardware and Broadwell placed his rifle against the door window and shot out a half-dollar hole and gun after gun was going off south of the plaza. Horse teams skittered at their tie-ups and some saddle horses ran wild and dogs were still barking at the noise. A little girl knelt at an upstairs window holding her ears.
Bob sprinted across Union Street to the brick pile at the front of the Opera House where the horses should’ve been hitched. He stood in the shade of an overhang with his
back pressed against the wall while I clutched the heavy mail sack under my coat and ran in boots heavy as twenty pounds.
George Cubine stood on the board sidewalk in front of Rammel’s and next to him was the cobbler Charles T. Brown, unarmed. I could see the black shoe polish on his hands. Bob and I walked into the street and Bob shot Cubine twice: left ankle, left thigh. He started to keel when Bob shot him again. The slug stopped his heart and tore off his left shoulder blade. His face smacked so hard on the pavement his dead eyes blinked and blood came out of his nose.
Brown couldn’t believe we’d kill as heedlessly as that. He didn’t know whether to bluster or cry. ‘Why, you bastards!’ he shouted. ‘You sons a bitches! We made boots for you boys!’
Brown got off the sidewalk one leg at a time and picked up Cubine’s rifle and my brother aimed at the old man’s shirt pocket. A pencil broke in half when Bob fired and Brown sprawled backwards clutching his heart like an actor. The boy Jack Long stood transfixed on the porch and Bob fired close to him in warning. The boy ducked inside Rammel’s again.
I started to clomp away in my heavy boots but Bob stayed where he was in the street, his rifle still lifted up. I looked down the sidewalk a hundred yards and saw Tom Ayres, the First National Bank’s cashier, jamming cartridges into a government rifle at Isham’s. He had his sleeve garters off. Bob’s shot smashed the bone under the cashier’s eye and broke out through the back of his skull. It ruined half his face but Tom lived for years afterwards and when he died I sent a sympathy card to his widow. She graciously replied.
A dozen hotel residents were crouched in a coal pile behind a board fence, and housewives hustled their children down into the cellars where the rifles sounded like the popping of corn in a skillet; a scared deputy sheriff crawled under the plows at Read’s hardware store and when a bullet screamed off one of the blades, shouted, ‘Pile on more plows!’