“Time to hit the trail, boys!” the man with the shotgun yelled.
The first man, wearing a linen duster, ran past Crawford without a second glance. The next shoved him against the wall, cursed, and spit tobacco juice on the floor. The third tossed the saddlebags over his shoulder, walked past Crawford, then stopped and turned. “Don’t get no foolish notions, bub.”
“N-no . . . s-sir . . .” Crawford stammered.
The masked man slammed the barrel of his Remington revolver against Crawford’s head. He saw stars, then nothing at all.
Outside the bank, Stoney Post yelled, “It’s hot out here, Link!”
Those were his last words. A blast blew him through the plate-glass window as Link McCoy opened the door of the bank.
He cursed and sent a shotgun blast across the street. “I told you this was a mistake, Zane,” he told his partner, who checked on Stoney Post and then cut loose with his Winchester rifle.
“You told me!” Zane Maxwell yelled and began feeding cartridges from Stoney Post’s shell belt into the Winchester ’73. Post wouldn’t have need of those shells anymore.
“Get out!” McCoy yelled to the gang members. “We get separated, we’ll meet at the Salt Works.”
“Get killed,” Maxwell said, “we’ll meet in Hell.”
Even McCoy had to laugh at that, but he focused on business as soon as the boys bolted into the streets, trying for their horses tethered by the bank and funeral parlor. He fired the shotgun, levered another round, and fired again. He and Zane crouched at the shattered window, and Zane made his .44-40 rifle sing. As soon as McCoy’s sixth shot finished, he fell back from the window and began reloading the cut-down Winchester. He had only two shells in when he saw that fool teller, coming at him, a little brass-framed Sharps derringer waving wildly in his shaking hand.
“Don’t be a fool,” Maxwell yelled at the idiot, but did not wait for the teller to lower the four-shot, .30-caliber rimfire popgun with the fluted barrel group. That old relic, made before the War Between the States, might not even fire, but Link McCoy was not one to take chances or give fool bankers second chances.
The shotgun roared, and the teller went flying against the counter while the Sharps Model 2A sliced across the room, bounced off a desk, and fell into a wastebasket.
McCoy jacked the hammer and finished reloading the shotgun.
“Corey’s bought it,” Maxwell said, as he fell back and reloaded the Winchester. “And I think Tawlin got hit.”
“Rest of them?” McCoy levered a fresh load into the chamber of the ten-gauge.
“Hard to tell. Made it, maybe.”
“Let’s you and me make it, maybe.” Link pushed himself up and bolted through the open doorway, blasting away with the sawed-off shotgun.
Farmers mostly, in that part of the country, not that it was worth growing anything other than corn. Farmers and city folk, if you could call Greenville, Arkansas, a city. The people were full of grit. McCoy would give them that much, but not much when it came to brains. Too nice for their own good.
All they had to do was kill the outlaws’ horses, but the good folks of Greenville prized solid horseflesh, so McCoy swung into the saddle of his piebald mare, fired his last round from the Winchester, and waited until Maxwell found the saddle. Both men spurred their mounts and rode west toward Indian Territory, leaving two of their gang dead on the streets, poor old Stoney Post dead inside the bank, along with the corpse of a fool bank teller with a chest full of buckshot.
Mike Crawford’s head was splitting. The knot on his skull felt like it would split his scalp, at least the part of his scalp that hadn’t been split wide open by that buffaloing hoodlum in the wheat sack. He held a rag trying to stanch the flow of blood, trying to ease the agonizing pain in his head, and trying—and failing—to hear everything Grover Cleveland, president of the Greenville Independent Bank but no relation to the president of the United States, was saying.
“You opened the vault, you fool! How many times did I tell you that if robbers ever demanded money, you were to tell them that the safe is on a time lock? How many times? Those rascals have absconded with one thousand seven hundred and ninety-three dollars and sixty-seven cents! Because of you. A time lock, you fool. You were to tell them about the time lock.”
“I did,” Crawford moaned when Cleveland stopped to catch his breath. He wanted to tell that idiot that no intelligent robber would believe that time lock lie anyway. Safe on a time lock? How would the bankers get money out if they needed to cover a withdrawal? He wanted to tell Cleveland to drop dead, but his head ached too much. Why didn’t he send someone to fetch a doctor? Crawford was bleeding, for goodness sakes!
“Spencer Tillman lies dead,” the president roared. “He died a hero. Defended my money—the money of our depositors—defended it carrying the pistol I carried during the War for Southern Independence.”
Leaning beside him, County Sheriff Whit Marion turned his attention to the small derringer he held in his left hand, thinking you carried this during the war? And suddenly, he recognized Grover Cleveland for a liar, a fraud, and a blowhard.
Cleveland decided to turn his rage onto the law. “Sheriff, why are you here? Why aren’t you pursuing those murderous, scum-sucking thieves?”
Marion said calmly, “U.S. marshals will be goin’ after ’em, I expect.”
“Marshals? Why? Ain’t it your job?”
“For one, those bandits will be in the Nations, by now. My jurisdiction ends at the state line. For another, they didn’t just kill your teller, cashier, manager or whatever that boy was. They shot Don Purcell dead in the streets. Don wasn’t just my deputy. He had a commission as a deputy marshal. Judge Parker, well, he frowns upon folks killin’ his deputies. So we’ll get ’em. Rather, the marshals will.”
“How?” Cleveland spoke with contempt. “How can we even identify them? They wore masks, and you said none of the vile fiends killed in the raid had any identifying marks. Nothing. Nothing but bullets, gold watches, and horses they had stolen in Rogers.”
Whit Marion shoved the .30-caliber Sharps into his vest pocket, then realized he had no use for it, and handed it, butt forward, to the bank president, whose meaty hand swallowed the pocket gun.
“I know who they were,” Mike Crawford said at last.
The sheriff eyed him curiously.
Cleveland leaned closer to Crawford’s face. “Who were they, my good man?” he demanded, his breath reeking of cigarettes and brandy. “Who were they? How could you recognize any of them when they all wore hoods?”
“Let him speak, Grover,” the sheriff said.
Cleveland stiffened at such a rebuke.
“One of them had a shotgun, a sawed-off Winchester lever-action with a pistol grip. I remember reading about such a weapon in . . . a newspaper.” The latter part was a lie. It had actually been in a dime novel he had picked up over in Flint when he was with the Cherokee soiled dove.
Some truth must have been in that piece of fiction, because Sheriff Whit Marion leaned backwards and whistled.
“What is it?” Cleveland demanded.
“Congratulations, Grover,” the sheriff said, “you just made history. Your bank got robbed by the McCoy-Maxwell Gang.”
Mackey’s Salt Works, Cherokee Nation
Folks had been producing salt there for longer than Link McCoy could remember, likely before he was even born. Indians had been going there before the Cherokees had been kicked out of Tennessee and Carolina or wherever they hailed from.
McCoy stood by the campfire, watching with interest at the commotion below the hillside. Old Sam Mackey and his boys had had a good business. Pay a lease to the Cherokees and then send salty water from the springs into hollow logs, dump the water into giant brass kettles, boil the water until there wasn’t anything left but salt, pack up the salt, and sell it. ’Course, with the Katy railroad coming through the Nations for the past twenty or so years, a body could buy his salt elsewhere. Link wasn’t sure how muc
h longer old Mackey could stay in business. Nobody went there anymore for salt, and Mackey had only a handful of hired men to mine the works.
That was why Link McCoy, Zane Maxwell, and the boys met there.
“Not much of a take, was it, Zane?” Jeff White said.
Maxwell shrugged. “Would’ve been better, but some sodbuster killed Clete McBee on the way out of town and I couldn’t catch his horse.” He spit into the fire, frowning at the bad memory. Clete had wrapped his war bag heavy with gold coins around the saddle horn.
Maxwell’s dark hair had lightened over the years and was streaked with gray. His girth had widened, too, and no longer could he mount a horse as quick as his slim, balding partner, Link McCoy. Yes, age had begun to show on both men. Outlawing wasn’t getting any easier.
“Clete McBee,” Jeff White muttered. “Stoney Post. Pottawatomie Jake. Three good men. Dead.”
“More money for you, Jeff,” McCoy pointed out.
White let out a mirthless chuckle and brought a bottle of rye to his lips.
Tulip Bells came out of the tent and took the bottle from White. “Vann’s done fer.”
White let out a curse. “Four men dead. Killed in some hayseed town by a bunch of square heads. Give me that bottle, Tulip. I need to get good and drunk.”
“Ain’t that redundant?” Tulip Bells asked.
“Huh?”
Tulip pushed back his bell crown hat and sniggered. “I’s too intellectual fer yer way tiny brain, White.”
“Shut up.”
Tulip Bells laughed again and sat beside McCoy. “He’s right, though, Link.”
Bells was a lithe man with a crooked nose, pockmarked face, and graying droopy mustache and underlip beard. Two fingers on his left hand had been shot off during a robbery in Kansas back in ’89, and he had been walking with a limp since taking a slug in the hip in Creek Country two years back. Tulip had been riding with Link and Zane as long as either could remember. He carried an Arkansas toothpick sheathed on his left hip, a double-action Starr Army revolver in .44 caliber on his right hip, a pearl-handled, nickel-plated Smith & Wesson No. 3 stuck in his waistband to the left of the buckle on his gun belt, and a Remington over-and-under. 41-caliber rimfire derringer in the pocket of his linen duster. He was a man that took few chances.
“Rode in to Greenville with ten men.” Tulip drank, and then tossed the bottle to Link. “I count four left. You, me, Zane, and Mr. White.”
McCoy did not drink. He cleaned the cut-down Winchester shotgun. “Smith and Greene got out of town, too.”
“Yeah.” Tulip’s lean head bobbed. “But they’ve seen the light. Won’t be seein’ ’em weasels no more.”
“Good riddance to them,” Maxwell said from across the fire.
“Four men ain’t much of a gang,” Tulip Bells said. “Law ’ll be ridin’ after us pretty soon.”
“Imagine so.” McCoy worked the action of the empty shotgun then wiped the case-hardened steel with an oily cloth.
“We can pick up some new boys,” Maxwell said. “Territory’s full of eager beavers.”
“Like Smith and Greene,” Tulip said, shaking his head.
“They left their cut for us,” Maxwell said.
“Yeah.” White kicked at the saddlebags McCoy had escaped with. “Instead of six ways, four ways. To split four hundred dollars.”
“Makes the cipherin’ easier,” Tulip Bells said.
“Shut up,” White snapped.
A minute passed then he spoke again. “We can’t stay here.”
“Why not?” Bells said with a chuckle. “Make it easier on the law. They can use the salt to help preserve our corpses for the trip back to Fort Smith.”
“Shut up,” White said again.
Tulip Bells morosely laughed.
“Where to?” White asked.
McCoy had been doing some thinking. “South. We’ll change our duds, become respectable cattle buyers. Buy our tickets in Muskogee and ride down to Texas. Law won’t expect us to ride a train out in the open. Anybody can lose himself in Denison.”
Tulip Bells cackled again.
“What’s so funny?” Maxwell demanded.
Bells shook his ugly head. “Buy a train ticket?” He howled harder.
Link McCoy, Zane Maxwell—and even Jeff White—joined in.
CHAPTER FOUR
Randall County
As soon as the coyotes began their singsong chatter, James Mann sat up in the straw-tick mattress and held his breath when Jacob rolled over and muttered something. It was too hot for covers, and Jacob said something again. James breathed easier, understanding that his brother was merely talking in his sleep. A short distance away, Kris slept like a rock.
He rose, moving cautiously through the darkness, found his hat, and the sack he had been hiding for a week. Carefully, he peeked through the slit in the rug. It was too dark to see anything in the kitchen, but he didn’t need to see anything. He could hear his father’s snores through the rug divider. Still, he took a deep breath, held it, and finally exhaled before he slipped into the kitchen and made his way to the open door—open to let in air, not rattlesnakes or skunks—and found the Winchester ’86 leaning against the wall. Even empty, that rifle weighed a ton.
He leaped onto the ground and waited, listening. Nothing. Everyone remained asleep. He took a step then stopped.
Regret paralyzed him. Fear. Uncertainty of what awaited him. At seventeen years old, he was too old to run away from home, something he hadn’t done since he was seven. Then, he had wanted to find somebody with a pony he might ride.
His father and mother hadn’t whipped him when they caught up with him a half-mile from wherever they were living back then. They had merely laughed and walked him back to their house, or tent, or whatever they had been calling a home.
James looked back at the outline of the boxcar. His memory wasn’t that good, but he was pretty sure they hadn’t lived in something like that when he was seven.
Uncle Jimmy gave me his badge, he told himself. For a reason. The rifle he could explain. James had wanted a rifle, a Winchester ’86. Maybe not the particular rifle in his hand, but his uncle had promised that he would get a rifle for him and it was what he had found. And paid for. With his life. And the life of Uncle Borden.
But the badge?
The way James saw it, his uncle had seen that look, that wanderlust, in James’s eyes and knew that James was not cut from the same cloth as his father. Millard could spend his years working for the railroad, living in boxcars, bossing gangs, laying track, moving from place to place across an endless prairie of nothing. James needed more. He needed to find a purpose in his life.
Like being a lawman.
A deputy marshal, just like Jimmy. He owed his uncle that much.
His right foot stepped forward, followed by his left.
With each step, he breathed easier, listening to the coyotes, hearing the night birds, and feeling the wind on his back. He kept up a quiet conversation with himself. “Move south to the railroad, but not to McAdam. Too close. That’s all you have to do. Go south. Pa knows when all the trains will be rolling through or at least scheduled to roll through. You’ve studied those maps he always pores over, burning coal oil.
“Pick up the southbound at the water stop near the North Fork. Find an open boxcar, and slip in. Make yourself as comfortable as possible. When the train reaches Fort Worth, just jump off. A little before the train reaches the town. Pa says that’s what the railroad bums do to avoid getting clubbed with a nightstick carried by some yard boss or railroad dick.
“After that?” James stopped walking and frowned. He looked around, shrugged, and kept going.
“Well, that’s where things might get a little peculiar. Pa works for the recently rechartered Fort Worth–Denver City Railroad, and that line doesn’t go to Fort Smith, Arkansas. Green as I am, I know many railroads go to Fort Worth. Surely one of them will head northeast for Fort Smith.”
It took him two h
ours to make his way to the tracks. Once, he heard a rattlesnake’s whirl, making him stop—almost scaring him out of a year’s growth, as Ma might say, but he figured, at seventeen, he was as big as he was going to get. He gave the serpent a wide berth and moved on toward the tracks—and almost missed that train.
The whistle screamed, startling him, and his heart quickened as he heard an Irish voice call out, “Let’s get this thing rollin’, Quint. We’re behind schedule!”
James had no idea what time it was. Had he misread the timetable? Had it taken him longer to make it there? He didn’t have the answers, and none mattered at that point anyway.
He came up out of the wash to find the train pulling away from the water tank. Moving south. Definitely, it was the train he wanted to catch, so he began hoofing it, leaping over the prickly pear and shrubs, moving desperately toward the train. Smoke from the big locomotive burned his eyes, but he reached the grading, feeling the gravel crunch underneath his boots. There was no moon—perhaps that had slowed him, too—and the only light came from the caboose and the Baldwin engine. He was between those two, but the train was picking up speed.
He saw the boxcar—reminded him briefly of home—and the open door. That was a bit of luck. Never would he have been able to open the door as the train sped away. Coming up to it, he hurled the Winchester through the doorway, followed by his bag. He stumbled, barely caught his feet, and had to find some extra effort to make up the ground he had lost. Not until much later did he think about how things could have turned out. He could have fallen underneath the train. His father had worked on railroads long enough to tell stories of men who had died those grisly deaths.
Reaching up, he grabbed the iron handle, grunted, and felt himself slipping. “No!” he screamed, thinking he would fall. Be left alone. Wouldn’t even have Uncle Jimmy’s badge—in the sack—or that Model ’86 rifle—somewhere in the boxcar. And he would have to face his father, his mother . . . if he wasn’t killed.
Something grabbed his arm, almost crushing his forearm, just as he let go. The toes of his boots dragged along for a brief moment, and then he felt himself being pulled upward, heard a massive grunt, and suddenly felt himself landing inside the car on ancient hay and horse apples.
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