Red Lands Outlaw: the Ballad of Henry Starr

by Phil Truman

  Stumpy stirred the half empty can of cold beans with his spoon. “Wish we could’ve provisioned up before we left Sweeney’s,” he said.

  “Don’t know how we could’ve done that,” Henry said. “We’d stayed any longer, and I’d uh had to tussle with one or both of them heifers. Didn’t much want to do that.”

  “Wull, why in a hell not?”

  “It’d been dangerous on a couple counts. I figure they would’ve told their daddy, or maybe that was all a part of their grand scheme. I don’t know. Anyway, there would’ve been a trumped up wedding with a shotgun aimed at my ass. Second, even without all that, the way them girls was built, and considering their eagerness, I could’ve been seriously injured.”

  Stumpy snorted out a mouthful of beans, and fell into a coughing fit alternating with gales of laughter. He grabbed his canteen and tried to wet the choke, but his whooping only made it worse.

  Henry looked at his partner in sober puzzlement. “Well, it ain’t funny, Stumpy. You seen the size of them girls.”

  Stumpy began to recover little by little. “Yeah, I expect what you said is true enough. It just struck me as funny.” He threw another stick on the fire.

  “You married, Henry?’

  “Yes, sir, I am. A good woman. Give me a fine boy, too. Only I doubt we’ll stay that way.”

  “You ain’t going back for her?”

  “Don’t reckon. We never did seem to have that… Oh, I guess I had a fondness for her, in a way. But there was another I knew who was someone really special. Don’t believe I’ll ever forget about her.”

  “She die on ya?”

  “Naw, just her love. While I was in prison up in Ohio, she found another.”

  “Hmmph, too bad,” Stumpy said. The fire crackled and the call of a hoot owl out in the night was all that could be heard for a while.

  “I sure hope we come across a farm tomorrow,” Stumpy said at last. “Don’t believe I can take another can of beans.”

  * * *

  They rode up to the shack at about nine in the morning. It looked to have originally been a one room affair where a small edition had later been tacked to one side. A tendril of white smoke rose from a tin flue on the roof. There was no barn, only an open stable of sorts with wooden hay and feed troughs on the back wall. The livestock, a plow horse, a milk cow, and a dozen chickens, wandered freely in the yard between the house and stable. The beginnings of a good sized garden stood off to the right of those structures.

  “Anyone home?” Henry yelled. The two men remained in their saddles.

  The door of the shack opened outward a crack, and a double shotgun barrel came out.

  “You vant vhat?” came the inquiry of a young boy.

  Henry assumed the role of spokesman for the duo. “We was looking to get some breakfast. We’d be willing to pay.”

  There was a pause. “Yust a minute,” the boy voice hollered out. Another pause. Henry and Stumpy could hear muffled talking inside the shack, not in English. After a minute of this, the disembodied voice said, “Vhat you pay?”

  “I figured a dollar a piece for us,” Henry answered.

  More discussion inside the shack, then, “My pa, he say two dollar piece.”

  Henry and Stumpy looked at each other. “You tell your pa,” Henry said. “We’ll pay a buck fifty, and that will include feed for our horses. If he don’t agree to that, we’ll head on out.”

  Another brief exchange between the boy and his unseen pa. “Yah, dat be okay. You comen ze. Mudder fix you brakfust.”

  Inside the dark shack a heavyset man sat at a wooden table in the center of the room. A graying beard with no mustache covered his face. Brown suspenders striped grimy red flannel long handles covering his round belly and chest. The homemade table and its three chairs appeared to be the only pieces of furniture in the room, unless you counted the small cast iron stove by one wall. The floor was dirt. A large woman, her grayish blonde hair pulled into a greasy bun, stood at the stove already frying up their eggs. The boy they’d dealt with, a gangly young teen and scrawny in comparison to his parents, sat on a small barrel over in one dark corner, still pointing the ancient shotgun in their general direction. The dusky room was heavy with the smell of wood smoke and unwashed bodies.

  Henry smiled and tipped his hat to the man and woman. “Much obliged on your hospitality. We been powerful hungry for some home-cooked eggs. What’s y’alls names?”

  The man at the table gave Henry a stony stare, holding out his hand and gesturing with his fingers to indicate he wanted payment in advance. The woman continued to tend to her cooking without looking back.

  “Dey don’t sprechen no Anglich,” the boy said.

  Henry paid the man. The woman turned with the skillet and slid the smallish fried eggs into wooden bowls sitting on the table. The man grabbed the half loaf of rye bread next to him and sliced off two one-inch thick pieces. He tossed them across the table to his guests. The woman returned with a jar of corn syrup, then poured up two cups of coffee.

  Henry and Stumpy sat opposite their host, and began to eat with no further conversation. It didn’t take either man long to consume the fare, sopping up the egg yolk and corn syrup with the rye bread. The German family looked on in sullen silence.

  After he finished, Henry reached into his pants pocket and pulled out two silver dollars which he slapped onto the tabletop. Pointing at the bowl of brown and speckled eggs sitting at the end of the table, he said, “Boy, tell your ma to cook us up six more eggs apiece. We ain’t et near enough to fill us.”

  The boy relayed the message, which made the woman say “Ach!” with annoyed disapproval, but she grabbed the bowl of eggs and took them to the stove to fill the order.

  After the meal, Henry and Stumpy stood. “Appreciate the vittles,” Henry said to the fat pa, who remained sitting. He tipped his hat to the ma, and smiling warmly to her said, “Much obliged, ma’am.”

  “Ach,” she replied with an air of disgust.

  The boy stood from his barrel seat, keeping the shotgun at the ready. Henry and Stumpy left the shack, mounted up, and rode off, still heading north and west.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Henry remembered his friend lived near the town of Hooker, but he didn’t know exactly where. Once there, in that little wind-blown Panhandle town, one inquiry had sent them right to the man’s door. John Goforth was his name. As boyhood friends, he and Henry had roamed the woods, creeks and rivers around Fort Gibson. Now his friend had a small farm five miles west of that dusty little settlement of Hooker. He’d been glad to see Henry, and allowed him and his companion to stay for a week. It would’ve been longer, had Henry wanted, but he could tell the man’s missus was interested in doing more than cooking meals for him and his friend. The Panhandle of Oklahoma could become a wearisome and dull place with its flat, sun-bleached land and incessant wind. It could make a person desperate. That especially seemed true for the women folk; that seemed specifically true for the wife of John Goforth.

  The temptation was there, for the woman was not altogether uncomely, and Henry could taste the desire, but in the end he couldn’t betray a friend’s trust. So he and Stumpy moved on north before things got out of hand; first across the southwest corner of Kansas riding through little insignificant towns—Hugoton, Johnson City, Syracuse—where no one knew them, just two more drifting cowboys riding in through the wind and dust. From there they followed something of a road westward into Colorado, and by mid-afternoon came to the little nothing town of Amity.

  Looking into a bare sun, they let their horses walk down the middle of a flat street scarred by worn ruts. A small funnel of dirt swirled past them, as a reminder that rain had come there none too recent. Clapboard buildings sat scattered along each side of the street—a saloon with a small two story hotel next to it, a general mercantile across from those, a hardware and feed store next to the mercantile. A wooden water tower rose above a well house next to the hotel. Segregated about an eighth of a mile west
of the gathering of buildings, a small grain elevator stood alone. That day no one was visible on the street. One horse stood forlornly at the hitching rail outside the saloon. A slumbering dog on the boardwalk in front of the hardware store raised his head as they approached, and gave them a perfunctory bark. One other building, a squat red brick building, sat twenty paces off the end of the boardwalk that ran in front of the mercantile.

  Like the towns they’d passed through in Kansas and Oklahoma, there wasn’t much to look at in this one. But the small burg did have something Henry couldn’t ignore—that red brick building. Amity had a bank.

  As they rode by, Henry looked back at it. Then he turned to look at the other structures along the street. He tried to locate one other establishment—a lawman’s office; but couldn’t see one.

  “Stumpy,” he said quietly. “You say you’ve never robbed a bank?”

  “Nope. Nary a one.”

  “Well, how would you like to get one under your belt?”

  Stumpy turned in his saddle and looked back at the brick bank. He faced forward again and looked at Henry. “You mean that bank?” he asked.

  “Only one I see. Don’t look like there’d be much to it. No lawman in town that I can spot. Even if there is one, I doubt he could catch us.”

  Stumpy remained quiet, thoughtful. Henry looked over at him, a little puzzled.

  “Whadda you say, Stump?”

  “Well, you know, I done some wrong things in my life, but I ain’t never took another man’s money. My pa was a mean sumbitch, but one thing he taught me was that stealing was a powerful sin.”

  Henry snorted at Stumpy’s hypocrisy. “Hell, Stumpy, how’s stealing money any different than stealing beeves or horses?”

  “Yeah, I done some of that, and I always carried some guilt about those. It was mainly the boys I run with, Indin boys. And the beeves and horses we stole, was two or three cut out of big herds from men with lots of money. What was stole was used to feed hungry women and kids. ’Sides, if I didn’t join ’em, they’d uh scourged me, driven me from their gang, maybe worser. Guilt aside, it was more a matter of my survival. But I drawed the line on money. Stealing money just seems to me unforgivable.”

  He looked up and down the street some more. “It looks to me like this is a farm town. It don’t look much different than the place I come from as a boy. Farmers got a tough life. What little money they do have is hard to come by. So, no sir, I don’t want to be no part of stealing it from them.”

  “Well, seems to me stealing is stealing. Law don’t draw a line on it neither. Robbing banks just cuts out the middle man,” Henry said. He spurred his horse into a trot, and they rode on out of town, well past the grain elevator. They had no further conversation, as all seemed to have been said. At a spot where a small wooden bridge crossed a rocky creek, Henry reined his horse down to the water, stopping to let him drink. Despite the dry land around them, the creek ran swift with clear gurgling water.

  Stumpy brought his horse next to Henry’s. While the animals drank, Stumpy said, “Must be snow melt from off them mountains yonder.”

  Henry looked to the west. The mountains Stumpy spoke of were a distant blue outline on the horizon. “Doubt snow melt would travel this far. Crik must be spring-fed up around that butte.” Henry indicated the geologic feature some mile or two north of them.

  Nothing more was said as they let their horses drink. Presently, Henry spoke. “Believe I’ll camp here tonight. I’m going back to that town tomorrow.”

  Stumpy didn’t respond for a few seconds. “You aim to rob that bank, don’t you?”

  “Reckon I do, Stumpy. It’s too easy to pass up. Figure there’s at least a thousand in there. I’ll do it with or without you, it’s your choice.”

  “I already told you how I feel about that, Henry,” Stumpy said. “I’ll camp with you tonight, then in the morning I believe I’ll move on.”

  They didn’t talk much that evening at their campfire, both preferring to turn in early. Henry wanted to say something, to have a parting talk of some kind. Stumpy had been a good partner to ride with, and Henry had grown quite fond of him. But it all went unsaid. The next morning, as they packed their separate gear, Henry finally said, “What’s your plans from here?” It was all he could think to say.

  Stumpy paused at strapping on his saddlebags, and gazed out to the west. “Going to make my way to them mountains. Comanches I used to run with told me about their Shoshone cousins up there. Always thought that’d be a good place to live. I’d like to try to meet up with some of them, see if they’ll let me settle in with them. Getting too old to roam. I’d like to find me a nice fat Shoshone woman to live out my time with.”

  “That sounds like a good plan, awright,” Henry said as he tightened his saddle cinch. “Only be sure you get a woman you won’t lose no fingers over.”

  That brought a hearty laugh out of Stumpy. He turned to face his riding partner, offering his hand in a shake. “Henry, you’re a thievin’ sumbitch, but I truly do like you. I hope you don’t get your redskin ass shot off.”

  They shook hands, then Stumpy embraced him, and Henry embraced back. Then they broke apart, a little embarrassed.

  “Well, so long, Stumpy,” Henry said as he mounted up.

  “So long, Henry Starr,” Stumpy returned.

  Henry spurred his horse and rode into the rising sun.

  * * *

  The town looked pretty much the way Henry had left it the day before. A horse stood hitched outside the saloon, and the old dog still lounged on the boardwalk, scratching his ear. A wagon now sat in front of the hardware store with a boy of about ten standing beside it throwing dirt clods back up the street. The boy stopped to watch Starr as he rode by.

  Henry dismounted in front of the brick bank, and loosely hitched his horse. No other horses or wagons were about. He looked up and down the street, and adjusted his gun belt and holster. The boy at the wagon still watched him. Henry entered the bank, deciding he would size up the situation before drawing his pistol.

  Inside, a middle-aged woman stood at the one teller’s window as the teller counted out some money. When the door opened, the woman, with a pleasant smile on her face, turned to see who had come in, no doubt expecting an acquaintance. At seeing Henry, her smile faded some and froze. Henry touched his hat brim and said genially, “Mornin’, ma’am.” She nodded back, keeping her frozen smile. The teller didn’t even glance up, continuing his counting. The woman turned her attention back to the teller to watch him count.

  The bank was a one room affair with a six-foot-tall safe at the back in one corner directly behind the teller. The safe’s door stood open into the room. An empty desk sat off to one side opposite the teller’s cage. So far as Henry could tell, the teller and the woman were the only people in the building. He drew out his pistol, and pointed it above the teller’s head.

  “Mister,” Henry said, again in an amicable tone. “I’d like for you to stop counting and just hand all that money over to me.”

  The woman turned to look again at Henry. Gasping, she put her hand to her mouth, her eyes wide as saucers. The teller, a short man with thinning hair and a large mustache, froze for an instant, then moved his right hand below the counter.

  “I wouldn’t do that, pard,” Henry said calmly, lowering the pistol barrel, cocking back the hammer, and sighting it to the man’s nose. “I’d put a hole through your head before you could cock and fire.”

  The teller froze again, but kept his hand below the counter.

  “Now bring your hand slowly up where I can see it and raise both of them over your head,” Henry instructed. The man complied. Henry walked to the window.

  “Ma’am, would you be so kind as to move over to that corner” He said to the woman indicating an area where the cage met the outside wall. “I’d be obliged if you’d raise your hands, too.”

  “Certainly,” the woman said, promptly obeying the orders.

  “Take all that money you been cou
nting and put it in that bag behind you,” Henry told the teller. “Then all the money in your cash drawer.”

  After the teller finished those tasks, Henry asked him, “Got any money in that safe?”

  The teller hesitated a few seconds until Henry pushed the gun barrel onto the man’s forehead. He nodded once.

  “Then let’s fetch it,” Henry said.

  After all the money had been bagged up and handed to Henry, he gave them one last order. “You folks have been real cooperative,” he said. “And I want you to know I appreciate it. Less people get hurt that way. Now, before I go, I want both of you to lie face down on the floor over there by that desk.”

  After they were in place on the floor, Henry added, “You two stay right there until you hear me ride away, so’s I won’t have to come back in and shoot you.”

  At the door, Henry turned back to them and said. “Someday when you’re telling your grandchildren about the time you was robbed, you can mention that it was done by the outlaw Henry Starr.”

  Outside Henry looked up and down the street, but nothing had changed. The boy at the wagon was still there throwing clods and looking at him. Henry holstered his gun and mounted up. Before he spurred his horse he reached inside the money bag and pulled out a silver dollar, then he urged his horse into a gallop toward the western end of the street. When he rode past the boy, he tossed him the silver dollar.

  * * *

  There’d been no pursuit so far as Henry could tell, so he slowed his horse to an easy gait. He traveled on west, crossing the Arkansas River. After about four hours he passed a sign by the road which read:

  Welcome to La Junta

  Elev. 4,078 ft.

  Welcome, yessir, Henry thought. If this town, which looked to be a fair-sized place, had a hotel and a bath he was going to stop and partake for a night. Maybe get re-outfitted a little, and decide where he wanted to go next. He seriously doubted there’d be any posse trailing him.

  Earlier, still in the saddle trotting along, Henry had done a preliminary count, and it looked like he done pretty much as he’d expected; a little better, in fact. First count was over eleven hundred dollars. That’d be enough to get him some new clothes, a shave and haircut, get his horse re-shod and fed good, and take a few days to relax and recreate. There was bound to be a poker game in La Junta, and maybe a girl or two.