Through the Shadows with O'Henry

by Эл Дженнингс

  Not a rumor of the holdup reached the ranch. We lay around for days. Andy went off on his own hook. Bill slipped out a week later. Jake, Bob and I went up to the ranch house. A month had passed. We were not suspected. We decided to pull off another wad.

  I wanted to get the Santa Fe. That was the charge in the handbill my father had shown me. I was condemned on that score already. I might as well have the boodle.

  We were planning it one night at the ranch house. Harliss had gone to town. It was very late.

  "What's that?" Jack started up.

  Through the quiet, like heavy drumbeats pounding along the road, came the sound of a single galloping horse. We knew it must be a peeler. Possemen never travel alone.

  At the porch he drew up. It was Frank.

  I had not seen him since the news of the trial came. The old, bonny gladness was gone from his face.

  "They've freed them! You heard it?"

  Like a slap in the face, his haggard look struck me. He leaned forward, and lowered his voice.

  "Hush," he whispered. "I've got the goods. Get to your horse, quick. The lousy cutthroats have put up a deal. They'll stop at nothing. They've got a posse after you."

  CHAPTER VIII.

  Hunting the enemy; the convention at El Reno; drama in the town-hall ; flight of the conspirators ; pursuit to Guthrie ; failure of the quest; "the range or the pen."

  Relentless as the Corsican vendettas were these early feuds in the Oklahoma and Indian Territory. In the bad lands of the Southwest the roughest men in the country had their dugouts. They scattered all over the ranges. They killed. Other killers in the jury freed them. The dead man was finished why bother the living about it? The living had taken their chance. That was the Oklahoma logic of justice in the early nineties. The law went with one party or the other. It was a case of grab the John Doe warrants and go after your man.

  Houston and Love had doped it up with the marshals. They were out to get us before we had a chance to get them.

  "We're going to El Reno," Frank said. "They want blood. Let it be theirs. Change the brand. They've had enough of ours."

  I had not expected Frank to start things. He had an easy-going way that was full of disdainful contempt for the quick killers of the Houston and Love type.

  "Here's the odds," he explained at last. "They're going to hound us off the earth. The damn' cowards have been on the dodge from us ever since they finished Ed. They've got all the guns in Woodward cocked against us.

  "They've gone mad. They've plastered the country with handbills. They've got you down for the stickup of the Santa Fe. They've got a posse running up and down the country on the track of Al Jennings, the train-robber. They'll sock you off at sight!"

  He dashed the words out—sharp, vicious. The money in my pocket suddenly weighed heavy as though it were the $600,000 I had dreamed of.

  "They're a few days ahead of their guess—it was the M. K. T. I stuck." I wanted him to know. I didn't know how to tell it. I tried to make my voice indifferent and careless.

  "Pretty neat, wasn't it?" His tone was as casual as mine. "They never left a footprint after them. Must have been old hands at the game."

  "All but me," I answered. "Andy's gang are all vets."

  "Damn' humorous you're feeling; damn' funny layout, ain't it?" He gave a whistle of impatience that acted like a spur to his horse. What my father had so readily accepted as true Frank would not even consider.

  Even when I told him the whole affair he could scarcely credit it. "You really had nothing to do with it," he said. "You just went along. It was force of circumstances. Just a spectator, that's all. You had no right to take the money."

  He did not know that less than a fortnight later he would himself jump into the lead of the biggest stick-up job that had been pulled in the territory for years. His one thought was to get to El Reno for the opening of the Democratic convention, to get Houston and Love before they had a chance to railroad us to the penitentiary or to kill us.

  "Once they get us, they'll finish it proper. They'll take a final swipe at the old man and John."

  We got to El Reno in the afternoon ; the train was to bring the delegates in at 10 o'clock that night. We kept under cover until it was time to go down to the

  station. There were small groups standing around. Everybody in the town knew me. I had been county attorney there for two years.

  As we came along a dozen greeted us as friends. They knew why we came. They had seen the handbills. No one made any attempt to gather in the reward.

  The train rolled in. Some one brushed past me.

  "They've slipped," he said. "Bill Tillman saw you. Tipped them off."

  The bourbons, old cowboys, ex-outlaws, nesters and a sprinkling of respectable citizens got off the train. Houston and Love were not among them. Two days later I met Tob Oden, sheriff of Woodward county.

  "They've sneaked in," he said. "They're at the session now.

  I didn't wait to get Frank.

  The town-hall was crowded. An old friend of mine, Leslie Ross, was acting as chairman. I stood in the doorway waiting my chance to saunter in unobserved. A fellow in the middle of the room interrupted the speaker. Somebody else yelled for him to shut up ; a man behind tried to jam him back in his chair there was just enough of a ruckus.

  I walked down the aisle, not missing a face. I was so intent I did not notice the breathless quiet that suddenly held the spectators. I glanced to the plat-

  form. Ross was standing with his hand upraised, his eyes riveted on me, his face ashen like a man on the verge of collapse. His look held the audience as a ghost might have.

  "Gentlemen, a moment, keep your seats." He started walking down the steps and toward the aisle. "Just a moment," he repeated, rushing up to me. "I see a dear friend of mine."

  "They're not here, Al," he whispered to me. "I swear to God, they haven't shown a face around. Don't start anything. Calm down."

  He was more excited than I. He seemed to think I was ready to shoot up the place. Houston and Love were not there. They had skipped to Guthrie. Frank and I followed them.

  We had come to the edge of the city. A man on horseback rode up to us. It was Ed Nicks, United States marshal.

  "Don't go in, boys," he said. "They're laying for you. They've got warrants. They'll get you on that frameup. The trap is all set. They know you're coming. Half the men in Guthrie are armed against you. They'll harvest you the moment you set foot inside the town."

  I had known Ed Nicks for 10 years. He was on the square.

  We didn't get Houston and Love. They got us. They got us to the tune of a life term in prison and 10 years in addition. We'd be there yet if President McKinley had not commuted our sentence. They'd have brought us back on other charges if Theodore Roosevelt had not granted us a full pardon.

  Nicks rode with us a mile.

  "They've bought up the county, boys," he said. "You haven't a chance. Take your choice the range or the pen."

  CHAPTER IX.

  Frank turns outlaw; the stickup of the Santa Fe; the threat of dynamite; crudity of bloodshed ; the lure of easy money.

  Fate had more than half a hand in the chance that turned Frank into a train-robber.

  Ruffled and angry that our plan had failed, he turned on me when Nicks left. "I don't believe him," he said. "We should have gone on. We did not work it right. I'd like to see their posse.

  He did not have long to wait. We stopped off for a bite with Nigger Amos. Amos was a giant with a face as black as pitch and a soul as white as snow. He had married the prettiest little mulatto in the country. Their home was a jaunty yellow cottage that sat in the midst of the cornfields. Amos and Collie were smiles from the heart out.

  Whatever he had was ours. Collie was proud of her dishes and her cooking. Amos sat on the porch while she fried chicken and waited on us. We had come in just as the two were about to eat, and there was Amos, big, hard-working farmer, slinking into the background until after the white folk had their dinn
er.

  "Let's call him in," I said to Frank. He dropped his fork in surprise, looking at me as though I were demented.

  "Why not? Here's me, a highwayman a train-robber; there's Amos, black skin, clean soul why not? It's his grub anyway

  "Amos, come in and have dinner with us," I shouted to him. Poor Amos was more startled than Frank.

  "What, sah? No, sah; no, sah; 'lowed I ain't forgot my manners."

  Amos' manners probably saved our lives.

  "Yo' boys done been up to mischief?" The whites of his eyes seemed ready to pop loose from the black when he looked into the room a second later. "What you done?" he panted. "Possemen a-comin'!"

  Without waiting for an answer he ran to our horses and raced them into the cornfields.

  "Yo' boys git down thar, too."

  Not a moment too soon, for seven men galloped over the brow of the hill and drew rein at the porch. The innocence of Amos would have made an angel blush. He had seen no one. No, sah, no gemmen stopped at his door. Not one of them would dare to ride down to the cornfield in search of quarry. They cursed and browbeat him. Amos stood firm.

  "What do you make of it?" Frank's impulsive, open face was blanched with anger. He was like a cornered beast, ready to strike at anything.

  "What do you make of it?" he demanded again. "Well, I'll tell you. They've made the Santa Fe believe you robbed them. The Santa Fe is behind this."

  It was probably a wild supposition. It seemed credible to us. Houston was attorney for the railroad. From the time we left the negro's cottage until we arrived at the Harliss ranch a few days later the posse was on our trail. It didn't worry me much. There was a tang of adventure in it that appealed. To Frank it was hell's torment. He didn't like being hunted. He seemed to feel there was all the shame of cowardice in the attempt to escape. It lashed him into a seething rage that made him want to turn and strike back at his pursuers.

  They had been to the ranch house in our absence. They had left their mark in a few bullet holes in the walls.

  "What are you going to do?" Frank asked. I was neither angry nor unhappy. Just then, outlawry as a business suited me.

  "Finish up the deal Jake and I were planning when you came," I said.

  "I'm with you."

  And from that moment until the night of the hold-up he was like a man possessed. He had the resolution of an army behind him. Almost single-handed he pulled off the stickup of the Santa Fe. He had worked one vacation on the railroad. He knew all about engines, he said, because he had ridden the goat around the yards. He insisted on bringing up the train.

  The Santa Fe stopped at Berwyn in the Chickasha. Frank and Bill were to get on the blind baggage as she drew out, climb over the coal tender and get the engineer and fireman. They were to bring the train about three-quarters of a mile into the timber where Jake, Little Dick and I were waiting. We would finish the transaction.

  There was nothing spectacular about the job except the haul. It came off just as we planned it. A six-shooter is a commander that few men dare to question. When Frank jabbed it in the neck of the engineer he was master of the train. I stood on the track and waved my hand. Frank gave the order. The engineer stopped.

  Little Dick and Jake ran up and down quieting the passengers with a big show of gun fire and much shattered glass. Few men are ever killed in a holdup. Veterans consider bloodshed bad form. Whenever I read of a conductor or messenger fatally shot I know that a new hand is in the game. It's easy to buffalo the crew. The passengers are a cinch to handle. They know the holdup has the drop on them.

  Nobody wants to take the chance of starting things. If they ever did break loose at the same moment there'd be a stampede that would turn the odds the other way. I never saw one.

  Frank took care of the engineer and the fireman. Bill and I went for the express.

  "Open up!" I yelled.

  No answer.

  "Bill, take some dynamite, and put it on the trucks and blow the damn' tightwad out."

  "No, no! Don't do it! For God's sake, gentlemen. I'll open." The messenger pushed the door to, bowing and shaking, and invited us in as though it were his private den and we were about to have a finger and a smoke. The courtesy of express messengers at such times is a bit pathetic. This one had either thrown the key of the safe away or he had never had it.

  The boodle was in a regular Wells Fargo steel chest. The lid closed over the top. I took a stick of dynamite, put it in the crack just under the lock.

  The explosion sprung the sides and smashed the lock. There was $25,000 inside and not a note injured. We each drew $5,000 from that evening's pleasure.

  I told the story to a quiet, homebody sort of woman once. Her eyes lit up with amazement and the keenest delight. That look gave me a large gob of joy. She wasn't so different from me, although she had never taken a cent in her life.

  "You looked as if you wouldn't mind running your hand into a chest like that," I said.

  "It's all in the point of view, at that," she answered.

  Another time, a skilled musician, a respected citizen, the father of three chilldren, took me aside. "On the level, did you get a rakeoff like that?" he wanted to know. "Well, what would it be worth to teach me the game?" I thought he was jesting until he had come three different times with the same proposition.

  I didn't teach him. It is a game that always ends in a loss. The money goes. Happiness goes. Life goes.

  Frank was the first to learn it. He turned the trick that sent us sneaking into Honduras in full dress suits and battered up hats.

  He fell in love.

  CHAPTER X.

  In the Panhandle; a starving hostess; theft and chivalry; $35,000 clear; dawning of romance; two plucky girls; the escape in the tramp.

  We had been in the game nearly two years. Two hundred and some odd thousands had passed through our hands. It had passed quickly.

  Our partnership was capitalized at $10,000 one particular evening when we struck across the panhandle of Texas after a hurried departure from New Mexico.

  We had gone there on the trail of Houston and Love. We had never given up the hope of evening up our score with them. But by that time our business connections had become generally known. It became increasingly difficult to gain an entree into any law-abiding city. Marshals in New Mexico fogged us a cargo of lead in the streets as a sort of salvo of welcome. We let it go as a farewell tribute and made a quick getaway.

  The panhandle of Texas was forgotten of God Himself in those days. It was the bleakest, poorest, loneliest tongue of mesquite grass in all the South-west. Deserted dugouts with their dingy chimneys sticking above the ground marked the spots where men had settled, struggled and failed.

  The lobo wolves hid in the abandoned adobe holes. At the sound of the horses they would leap to the grass, their eyes, timid and frightened as a coyote's one lope and they were gone. There was a breath of fear and desertion and unbearable quiet about those miles of prairie. It seemed isolated like an outlaw.

  Perhaps that ride had something to do with quickening Frank's susceptibilities. For when we saw a ripple of smoke coming from a chimney about half a mile distant it seemed like a flag of life waving us back from a graveyard. Both of us laughed and spurred our horses to the dugout.

  As we rode up a girl and a little fellow about five came out to meet us, as though they had expected our arrival. She was a tall, slender, bright-eyed bit of calico, with a kind of pathetic smile that went straight to Frank's heart. Her husband had gone to town a week before to buy the dinner, she said. He had forgotten to return.

  Frank and I had not eaten for two days. Neither had the lady nor her little son. It was 12 miles to the nearest neighbor. I made the trip and brought back grub for the family. Frank and the girl were talking like old chums, the kid sitting on that train-robber's lap and running his small fingers over Frank's face in a trusting way that made my brother foolish with pride and happiness.

  The lady cooked up the tastiest meal we had eaten in many mon
ths. She served with the grace of a duchess. Frank sat back and watched her, his eyes lighting with pleasure at every trifling word she said. This glimpse of home life was the first real adventure we had known in two years.

  "The banker down there skinned that poor little mite out of $5,000," Frank whispered to me. "Tricked her into signing some papers and then foreclosed on the mortgage. I'm going after the damn' thief and bring the boodle back to her."

  The bank was in the little desert town in West Texas, where the husband had gone for provisions.

  We arrived there just before closing time the next day. With the help of our six-shooters in lieu of a checkbook we induced the cashier to turn over the lady's $5,000 and about $35,000 additional.

  Idlers standing in the street, marshals and the sheriff made our exit difficult. They sent a hail of lead after us to coax the money back.

  It would have been a brilliant getaway but for the lady's husband. He had been in town when the robbery was pulled off. As soon as he came to the dug-out he sized us up and tipped off the posse. In the shooting that followed he was killed. We escaped, returned later and took the lady and her little fellow with us.

  It was a long trip across Oklahoma and the Indian Territory into Arkansas. When it was over Frank was finished as far as our former business was concerned. He was in love with the girl. He could think of nothing else. For the first time he sat down to figure out the reasons that had made him turn bandit. He could not find any. He was full of self-reproach. He kept wondering why he had ever gone

  into the game and figuring out how long it would take him to get back.

  "I'm going to quit." It did not surprise me.

  "They won't let you quit," I warned him.

  "Bunk," he answered; "nothing can stop me."

  He was full of plans. We would go to New Orleans and then to the South Sea Islands. We had $35,000. It seemed enough to help us in jarring loose. I was ready for the adventure.