Whereas, Believing these men too brave to be mean, too generous to be revengeful, and too gallant and honorable to betray a friend or break a promise … amnesty should be extended to all alike of both parties for all acts done or charged to have been done during the war …
* * * * *
“Jefferson Jones?” I said.
“Of Callaway County,” Frank told me.
“He sounds a lot like John Newman Edwards,” I said.
“He’s no John Edwards,” Jesse sang out, as he pulled a white mask from his saddlebag and began fitting it over his head.
“You think it stands a chance of passing?” I asked while tightening the cinch on my saddle.
“Wouldn’t that be something?” Frank said, snapping shut the loading gate on his Remington.
I swung into the saddle, drew my Smith & Wesson, and we rode into Huntington, West Virginia.
* * * * *
The Amnesty Bill died, of course. It might have died long before I even saw that newspaper Frank showed me when I met them in Nashville, before we rode to rob a bank in West Virginia. It might have ended when Jesse rode up to the house of his neighbor, walked to the door, and waited for Daniel Askew to answer it. As soon as he did, Jesse shot him in the chest, and when the man fell dead onto the floor, he put two more bullets in the back of Askew’s head.
“The sorry son of a bitch helped the Pinkertons kill Archie,” Jesse explained, “and maim my ma. You ask me, if I deserve amnesty for anything I’ve done in my life, it’s for ridding the world of that Judas.”
Maybe it wasn’t that good of a bill anyhow. It pardoned us of anything we might have done during the war, but stated that we would have to stand trial for anything we had been charged with since the surrender. And the way things kept being laid at our front door, we would have spent a thousand years in courthouses from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
We took $10,000 from the bank in Huntington. But Bud McDaniels caught a mortal bullet as we tried to get out of West Virginia. Tom Webb was arrested shortly afterward, and the judge sentenced him to twelve years at hard labor.
Finding men to ride with us had never proved difficult. Finding good men, however …
Jim Cummins had gotten fed up with Jesse. My brother Jim had settled down in California. John Jarrette had found a peaceful life on an Arizona sheep ranch. The Pence boys had quit their wild ways. Oll Shepherd was lying in his grave while his brother George, fresh out of the Kentucky prison, wanted to stay clear of any man named James or Younger.
By the summer of 1876, I was back in Missouri, back at the Rubicon. Clell Miller brought a solid hand named Charlie Pitts. I brought my brother Bob. Frank was already there, alone. And Jesse introduced us to a Yankee who called himself Bill Chadwell and the brown-eyed son of a schoolteacher named Hobbs Kerry.
The plan belonged to Frank.
“The Missouri Pacific is building a new bridge over the Lamine River. When the train comes to Rocky Cut, it’ll have to slow. We’ll wave the red lantern, and that’ll get the engineer to stop. Express cars should be carrying a nice little pay day … for us.”
“Good,” said Hobbs Kerry. He wasn’t much to look at—average height, no older than twenty-five. Too young to have fought in the war. He said his father had worked in the lead mines down in Granby, but I could tell when I shook the boy’s hand that he had never worked in a mine. I’m not sure he had ever worked anywhere. “I need a grubstake for a good poker game.”
“Bishop Cole,” Clell Miller said, “you sure you want to join us? You and Bob, I mean. That amnesty deal …”
“I think Dingus took care of that amnesty,” I said.
“Lay off Jesse!” my brother barked.
I did. I pointed at Frank and said: “If this is Buck’s idea, you can deal me in.”
* * * * *
Once we stopped the train, Frank, Clell, and I went to the express car while Jesse led his boys to fleece the passengers. We left Hobbs Kerry with the horses. A minister, fearing that we would murder everyone on the train, began leading his congregation of frightened passengers in singing hymns. Their singing sounded more like Rebel yells.
I took a pickaxe to the Adams Express Company safe, and punched out some of the metal, but my hands were too big to get much out of the safe. Clell Miller stepped forward, though, laughing as he said: “My hands will fit where those big paws of yours won’t.”
If only we had more soldiers like Clell Miller. And fewer like Hobbs Kerry.
Frank went through the letterbox, and while Clell filled the wheat sack with plunder from the safe, I discovered the newsboy’s chest, and broke it open, too. This was what we needed. Not gold. Not bullion. Not silver and thousands of banknotes. Little pies, chocolate candy, peppermint sticks, lemon cookies, cakes, apples, oranges.
It had been a long time since we had eaten that well.
“Should we save some for the other boys?” Clell asked as I tossed him a pie and an apple.
“Hell, no,” Frank said, and we laughed.
Not counting the food we plundered, or the bellyaches we had the next day, we left Rocky Cut with $15,000.
“Tell Allan Pinkerton!” Jesse yelled before putting spurs to his mount, “and all his detectives to look for us in hell.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Gray hair is a crown of splendor; it is attained in the way of righteousness.
Proverbs 16:31
I was thirty-two years old, and I envied men with gray hair. Or any hair. Mine began thinning out at a right fast clip, which I jokingly blamed on my brothers. I blamed Jesse, too, but that really was no joke. After the robbery at Rocky Cut, I lost a great deal more of that fine sandy head of hair, but I kept a mustache and goatee to make up for my loss on top.
Some of our boys—Bud McDaniels, George Shepherd, Tom Webb—had been sent to hard time. Each convicted felon had been promised a pardon if he would name his accomplices. Men like those boys do not betray their comrades. But Hobbs Kerry, who was arrested first, did. He talked. Hell, he wouldn’t shut up.
It was definite. We would find no amnesty after Hobbs Kerry confessed. And I did not want to risk a trial with a traitor like Kerry testifying against me as the state’s star witness. Missouri no longer felt like such a good place to be in at that time, and I thought about returning to Florida. Frank kept mentioning Virginia. And Jesse had been living for a spell in Nashville, Tennessee. Then Bill Chadwell brought up Minnesota. He hailed from those parts, bragged about the banks being filled with greenbacks for the taking. He said he could guide us out of the state after we robbed a rich bank, and told us there would be nothing to worry about. Only hayseeds and Swedes lived in Minnesota.
Bob, my brother, was all for it. He acted like a puppy dog the way he followed Jesse around.
“Bob,” I argued, “Jesse James is not Mephistopheles.”
“And,” my kid brother barked right back at me, “you ain’t Dick.”
That I had heard enough since my older brother had died, but Bob’s words never hurt so much. Sometimes I wished I’d been an only child. Is that a sin, Parson? So I curbed my tongue, unclenched my fist. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that. Perhaps I should have given Bob the whipping he deserved. I needed help. Thought I did, anyhow, so I sent a telegraph to Jim in California.
Come home. Bob needs you.
* * * * *
Once he arrived, even Jim could not talk sense into Bob.
“We take our war to the Yankees,” Jesse said. “Like we did in Iowa and West Virginia.”
Frank let out a mirthless laugh. “Dingus, this is not a war. It hasn’t been a war for a long time. It’s just because you and Bud and me are too lazy to work for a living …”
Jesse shot back: “Because we can’t get a job, can’t go to church without being persecuted …”
Frank went right on. “And we don’t have
the guts to turn ourselves in and stand trial.”
“You siding with Bud?” Jesse’s eyes had that mean look.
Frank spit tobacco juice and shook his head. “I’ve been sick of what we’re doing for some time now. I have to sneak in to see my wife, Dingus, or pretend to be someone, some thing, I’m not.”
“You won’t go with me?” Jesse backed up in shock.
Frank had a look in his eyes, too, but not of death, not of defiance. It was that deep pain, a sadness. His head shook.
“You’re my brother, Jesse.” He called him by his real name, not Dingus. “ ‘Let brotherly love continue.’ ”
Hebrews 13:1.
Now, the boys turned to me. Frank had done it. Brotherly love. That bond that tied us together. John was dead. Bob was going to Minnesota with Jesse, who, in a rare instance of placation, said softly: “Hell, Bud, we might not even find a bank worth robbing up there. Could just be a vacation, till this Hobbs Kerry news dies down. And Colonel Chinn’s in Saint Paul. He could get us some fine horses, and he runs a gambling parlor in town.”
Yes, the same Black Jack Chinn who had ridden with Quantrill, but I’m not altogether certain who had promoted him to colonel. But he did know horses. Chinn had stolen plenty during the war and, the last I had heard, was raising thoroughbreds.
I could find great horses at Maise Walker’s place, but I only had two brothers living, and when Jim shook his head and said, “I’ll ride with you, Bob, but I don’t like this one damned bit,” I knew I could not ride away. Not from Bob and Jim. Hell, not from Clell or Frank. Maybe not even from Jesse.
Besides, after ten years, what was I good at? Robbing banks. Robbing trains. I knew I could not go back to Florida where the mosquitoes grew larger than crows, and alligators and snakes preyed on cattle.
“Deal me in,” I said.
We were going to Minnesota. I was making a bad mistake. I knew it. In the back of my mind, I heard Lizzie Daniel’s voice. That lively song I had heard her sing had become a dirge. I was sailing on “the ship that never returned.”
* * * * *
As the train rocked its way north, Frank and I buried our noses in books. Frank frowned, nodded, and remained intent as he devoured Shakespeare: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art by some Irishman named Edward Dowden.
I kept grinning as I read a book I had bought from a newsboy in the smoking car.
“How can you read that … on a train?” asked a feminine voice.
I closed the book, keeping a finger on the page so as not to lose my place, and looked up at the woman on the aisle seat just ahead of me. She was a handsome lady in her sixties, in a peach calico dress and blue bonnet, holding a basket on her lap that contained sandwiches and sardines and apples she had brought to eat.
“Ma’am?” I said.
Glancing up from his book, Frank grinned.
“I could not read a book such as that,” the woman said. “Every time the train stopped for water or wood, I would jump out of my skin, fearing those cutthroats would be here to rob and ravage.”
I nodded. “They do seem like desperate characters, ma’am, but we are out of Missouri. I think we should be safe.”
“I pray so.” She smiled, reached in her basket, and offered me an apple.
I accepted, thanked her kindly as she turned around to face the front. She took out a sandwich for herself, and began eating.
“You ever rode a train before, Bud?” Frank asked, closing his book, reaching over, and taking my apple for himself.
With a laugh, I found my place in the book, and continued to read The Guerillas of the West; or the Life, Character, and Daring Exploits of the Young Brothers by Augustus C. Appler, a Yank by birth, who claimed to have settled in Osceola. Though parts of it read fairly truthful, a bunch proved to be as accurate as penny dreadfuls and Yankee newspapers. Hell, this book even told that lie about me lining up ten bluecoats to see how many bodies an Enfield bullet would go through.
Reading Appler’s account made me feel … well … famous, but that’s not why I was reading it on that train. Jesse sat a few rows behind me. It burned the bitter hell out of him, because no books had been published about him, though soon they would flood the market.
* * * * *
We took in the sights in Minnesota. Had us a regular vacation.
Never had I seen so many folks crowd into a place to cheer and curse a bunch of grown men dressed in what looked like jodhpurs held up with belts, wearing funny caps with brims on their heads, trying to hit a ball with a stick.
“They’re seats all over this park, so why is everyone standing?” I yelled at Bob—and I had to yell so my brother could hear me, even though he stood right next to where I was sitting. I had paid seventy-five cents for this seat. Damned if I was going to stand up for hours.
Jim and Clell Miller had joined us at Red Cap Park in St. Paul to watch the Red Caps play a bunch of “ballists” who called themselves the Clippers of Winona. There must have been a thousand people there that afternoon, crowding into the amphitheater in a park maybe five hundred by three hundred sixty feet surrounded by a ten-foot wooden wall. We had seats, not that anyone used them.
“Come on, Bud,” Bob said back to me. “You’re missing a good game.”
I lighted my cigar. That was one good thing about this baseball contest. The concession stand sold cigars, and fruit, and drinks—but no liquor.
“Yeah!” Even Clell seemed impressed.
Shaking out the match, I sighed. The cheering had stopped, and now the crowd was groaning, so I knew something bad must have happened … though damned if I could see it. “I don’t see much sense in trying to hit a ball with a stick,” I said.
Someone punched my shoulder. I figured it might be a woman who found the stench of a nickel cigar offensive, but when I turned, I stared into the wide brown eyes of a boy.
“Mister,” the tyke said as his ma and pa smiled, “that’s Dory Dean coming to the plate.”
If you should be in Rome … I stood.
Dory Dean, who had played for the National League’s Cincinnati Red Stockings in ’75 and had been doing the “hurling” for St. Paul’s ballists, came to the plate. He scratched his groin, spit into his hands, and hefted a big round stick before giving the fellow holding the ball the mean eye and sending out another waterfall of brown juice.
The hurler for the Clippers struck Dory Dean out on three pitches. The kid behind me burst out crying at the same time as just about every adult in the crowd moaned or cursed. Out on the dirt and grass, all the gents in the white caps started jumping and pointing fingers as they laughed at the boys in the red caps. Folks started filing out of Red Cap Park, and, finally, Jim, Bob, and Clell sat down beside me.
“That’s a shame,” Bob said.
“Pretty excitin’, though,” Clell said.
“I’ll have to take your word for it,” I said, sucking on the cheap cigar.
This was our vacation from the Missouri law and the Pinkerton scoundrels. I never cottoned to baseball. Nor did Jim. Clell wouldn’t see another game, for he would soon be lying dead in Northfield. The sport won Bob over, though. And Dory Dean? He quit baseball, but I hear he found a lot more success swinging a tennis racket. You ask me, that’s just as silly as hitting balls with sticks on a perfectly fine summer afternoon.
* * * * *
Oh, we found other excursions. We got some fine horses from Colonel Chinn in St. Paul and raced them up and down the streets, winning a right smart of greenbacks. We lost most of that money at the poker tables and faro layouts in some of Chinn’s saloons, and at Mollie Ellsworth’s brothel. We read newspapers, clipping out a few articles about certain banks and vaults, and studying the advertisements in those newspapers.
You want to know how rich a town is? You look at what is being advertised in that burg’s newspaper, or how many ads are being
bought and published in that paper. Our coffers kept decreasing—thanks to Chinn’s cardsharpers—but we might have forgotten all about Chadwell’s promises of fat Yankee banks when we stepped out of the Nicolette House one evening.
“Hey, Chadwell!” a voice called out.
We turned and froze as our eyes set on a city policeman tapping his nightstick in a beefy hand and scowling at our Minnesota guide.
“Pat Kenny,” Chadwell said, and shoved his hands in his pants pockets.
“How are you, Chadwell?” the copper spoke in an Irish brogue.
“Dandy, Pat. And you?”
The policeman did not answer, did not even look at Chadwell, but studied our faces. “What are you doing in town?”
“Planning to strike out for the Black Hills,” Chadwell said. “Make myself a pile in some gold mine.” He grinned. “Wanna grubstake me?”
“Enjoy Dakota Territory, Chadwell. You and your … pals.”
Still slapping that club, the policemen walked away.
“Friend of yours?” Jesse asked.
Chadwell did not detect the sarcasm. “Not hardly. Bastard arrested me last time I was here.”
Figuring that to be a sign that we should move on, Jesse came up with a plan. We would split up, check out the banks, find a likely candidate from which we would make a handsome withdrawal, and ride out.
Jim, Clell, Frank, and Jesse rode out for Red Wing. Chadwell and Bob headed for St. Peter. Charlie Pitts and I went to Madelia. We agreed to meet in Mankato by the first of September.
* * * * *
Mankato looked like a fine town, but the farmland along the Minnesota River was something straight out of the Old Testament. Frank and I rode past a tent revival meeting, and we stopped, took our hats off, sang a few hymns, before chatting with a couple of sodbusters. We learned from them that locusts had been stripping the fields the past few years. We left a few greenbacks when the preacher passed the hat, and returned to town.
Hard Way Out of Hell Page 17