The Saga of Henry Starr

by Robert J Conley

  “I don’t want to go back to Colorado,” said Wilson.

  “I don’t have the fondest memories of the place, myself,” said Henry. “No, I think we’ll try our luck in New Mexico, maybe. But first we need to finance our trip. There’s a little town just across the line in Kansas.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It has a nice little bank.”

  27

  Along toward sundown the next day, Henry and Kid Wilson found themselves a short distance from the Kansas line and even closer to another farm. Their last stop at a farm had been successful, Henry thought, and there was no reason to ride on into Kansas during the evening hours. The little town he had in mind was just across the border.

  “Let’s check out the local hospitality,” he said to Kid Wilson. “If we can spend the night here, we can get an early start for the state line in the morning.”

  A few more minutes found them inside the farmhouse, trying their best not to appear as bored as they really were. The farmer and his wife had two rather drab daughters, and Henry and Wilson had happened in on an evening when a young man had come courting. The courted daughter was playing the piano, accompanied by her beau on the violin. The father was snugged down in an overstuffed chair, smoking his pipe and enjoying the music tremendously. The tune was “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes.” Off in the kitchen, the mother and the other daughter were preparing the supper. Henry staunchly tried not to wince each time he heard a sour note from either the piano or the violin, while Kid Wilson, who couldn’t tell a sour note from a sweet one, was simply suffering in general.

  Suddenly, with no warning, the mother called out from the kitchen in a shrill voice.

  “Soup’s on,” she said.

  The music came to a squawking halt with no attempt at a formal ending, and the family all rushed to the table. Nor was the gentleman caller shy in his approach to dinner. Henry and Wilson were the last ones to reach the table and to sit. There was a hurried grace, and an even bigger hurry to clean all the platters. When Kid Wilson perceived that there was nothing left to eat, he leaned back from the table.

  “That was a mighty fine meal, ladies,” he said.

  “And, I might add,” said Henry, “exceeded only by the fine hospitality of this entire family.”

  “Why, thank you, boys,” said the farmer. “We do pride ourselves on our Christian charity.”

  The farmer’s wife then stood up. She wiped her hands on her dirty apron, and flour dust flew.

  “Why don’t we all go on back in here to the easy chairs and just enjoy some more good music,” she said. “I do love to hear good music played.”

  Henry thought to himself that he, too, loved to hear good music played, but he doubted that he would hear any played in this house. Kid Wilson had a mild touch of panic. He didn’t think that he could stand much more of the duet and their particular brand of music, but Kid Wilson was not one to accept unpleasantness calmly. He quickly formulated a plan.

  “I don’t know much about it, myself,” he said with sudden inspiration, “but I’m sure that my friend here would like nothing better, since he’s something of a musician, himself.”

  Henry shot Wilson a threatening glance, but before he could do anything more, the farmer’s wife had picked up Wilson’s cue.

  “Oh, really?” she said excitedly. “What do you play?”

  “Oh,” said Henry, “I just fiddle around a bit.”

  “With what?” said the good wife.

  “Why, the fiddle, of course.”

  Henry’s little joke received a round of polite and good-natured laughter, followed by the insistence of all that he give them a sample of his musical skill. The young man rushed up to Henry and thrust the fiddle at him, so Henry gave in to the demands. He tested the unfamiliar instrument with a squawk or two, tightened a couple of strings, then charged right into a rousing rendition of “The Texas Quickstep.” Soon all were stomping feet and clapping hands. The young couple began to dance. The farmer and his wife joined them, and finally even Kid Wilson and the leftover daughter began to tromp the floorboards. Henry played four or five tunes before the farmer called a halt to the festivities on the grounds that the hour was late and he would have to rise early in the morning to get at his chores.

  “Boys,” he said, “I wish I could do you better than send you to the barn, but we just ain’t got the room in the house, what with four of us in here already.”

  As he spoke to Henry and Wilson, he gave a hard and meaningful stare to the young man who was courting his daughter. That swain moved to pick up his hat.

  “Well,” he said, “I reckon I oughta be heading on home. I guess it’s getting kind of late. Good night all.”

  He smiled sappily at his sweetheart, who followed him out the door to bid him good night. Henry laid aside the fiddle.

  “The barn will suit us just fine,” he said. “Don’t give it another thought.”

  “Well,” said the farmer, “good night, then.”

  Henry and Wilson made their way to the barn and found themselves each a pile of hay in which to build a nest for the night. It didn’t take them long to fall into a deep sleep. But a lengthy rest was not in the cards for Henry and Wilson that night. It had been only a couple of hours before each man felt a hand on his shoulder shaking him out of his slumber. They awoke gazing sleepily into the eyes of the two daughters, whose eyes were not at all sleepy.

  “What—what are you doing here?” asked Henry, rubbing his eyes.

  “Everyone’s asleep,” said the first daughter.

  “So were we,” said Henry.

  “We just thought that you all might like to have some company out here,” said the second daughter.

  “Well,” said Kid Wilson, and he pulled the one who was hanging over his face down to him, crushing her lips with his.

  “You two had better get back inside before your folks find out where you’ve gone to,” said Henry.

  “Oh, it’s all right,” said the one pushing herself at Henry. “They won’t wake up for a while. They’re sound sleepers.”

  “Ain’t no hurry, Henry,” said Wilson.

  Henry pushed the girl away from himself and pulled on his boots. He stood up.

  “Get your boots on, Kid,” he said. “We’ve got a long ride ahead of us this morning.”

  Kid Wilson didn’t respond, and Henry gave him a kick.

  “Come on, Kid,” he said, the tone of his voice and the expression on his face leaving no room for argument.

  The unexpected nocturnal visit resulted in Henry and Wilson’s finding themselves in Kansas and on the outskirts of their destination much earlier than they had planned. The town was not yet quite awake. They settled down on the side of a gradual slope with a good view of the main street to wait for the bank to open. Kid Wilson was sullen.

  28

  The bank job had been easy. Almost too easy, Henry thought. As soon as they had seen the first bank employee show up and unlock the door, they had headed on down into the still sleepy town. By the time they had arrived at the bank, a few others were at work. They had hitched their horses out front and calmly walked up to the front door. Then, with a glance at each other, they had drawn their pistols and burst through the front door almost simultaneously. Henry had shouted out his famous order.

  “Hands up and hands steady.”

  The people in the bank had been thoroughly terrified and totally cooperative, and Henry Starr and Kid Wilson had ridden away with a sackful of money. They had not ridden far from town when Kid Wilson called out to Henry.

  “Hold it,” he said.

  “What’s wrong, Kid?”

  “Ain’t nothing wrong, Henry,” said the Kid. “I just want my share of that money right here and now.”

  “Kid,” said Henry, “just because that bunch of bankers was such easy pickings doesn’t mean that they won’t send out a posse on our trail. We need to get farther away from this place before we slow down any. Come on.”

  “No,” s
aid the Kid. “Divide it now.”

  “What for?”

  “Because I ain’t going the same direction you are.”

  “What?”

  “It’s time we split up, Henry. I ain’t riding any farther with you. You’re on your own.”

  Henry thought, I’ve always been on my own. That’s just a fact of life. A man is always alone. But when he spoke again to Kid Wilson, it was not to offer him that bit of philosophy.

  “All right, Kid,” he said. “We’ll do it.”

  Henry climbed down out of the saddle, and Kid Wilson did the same. The Kid looked to Henry as if he were ready to spring into action. He had the look of a coiled rattlesnake. Henry pulled a bandanna out of his pocket and spread it on the ground, then dumped the money out of the sack onto the bandanna to count it.

  “This is kind of sudden, Kid,” he said. “Where will you go?”

  “You spoiled my night for me last night,” said Kid Wilson. “I aim to go back to that farm and get what I would have got last night if it hadn’t been for your damned holiness.”

  “Kid,” said Henry, “that farmer fed us and put us up. We owe him better than to do him dirt.”

  “Well, if you feel like you owe him something, you pay him. Me, I feel like I owe them two anxious gals something, and I’m going to give it to them.”

  Henry studied Kid Wilson’s face. It was cold—determined. It was probably senseless to argue further with the Kid, but Henry didn’t want to give it up just yet.

  “If that old man catches you with his daughters, he’ll likely kill you,” he said.

  “He might die trying,” said Kid Wilson.

  Henry stood up slowly, keeping his eyes on the Kid. Kid Wilson stepped back a couple of paces and pushed his coattail back out of the way of his six-gun.

  “Kid,” said Henry, “you’re not going back there.”

  Kid Wilson reached for his gun, but he fumbled an instant too long. Henry’s .45 was out first, and the blast of the shot seemed to echo over the expansive Kansas prairie. Kid Wilson was thrown backward into the dust, a gaping hole in his chest. He wasn’t quite dead. Henry could hear the rasping of his breath. He wouldn’t last long, though, and he didn’t appear to be conscious of anything around him. He was probably in shock. Henry gathered up the money in the bandanna and stuffed it back into the bag. He had killed his second man, and this time it was a man who had been his friend, at least as close to a friend as Henry had ever had. He wondered briefly if the farmer’s daughters had been worth it. Then the ragged breaths of Kid Wilson suddenly ceased. A man is always alone, Henry thought. He climbed on his horse and rode away.

  In spite of his earlier misgivings, he found himself riding toward Colorado. He rode a good part of the morning away and had just topped a small rise when he heard the baying of hounds. He stopped his horse and surveyed the landscape all around. Off in the distance and moving in his direction, he could make out the figures of two riders with dogs on leashes. There wasn’t much in the way of cover, so Henry led his horse down the far side of the rise and trailed the reins. He went back up on top on foot and crouched down low to await the riders. It seemed like a long wait, but Henry had cultivated patience over the years. The riders made the foot of the rise without spotting Henry. He stood up, gun in hand.

  “What do you fellows want?” he demanded.

  The riders pulled up hard.

  “We’re just out hunting,” said one.

  Henry walked down the rise toward the riders, keeping his .45 leveled at them.

  “Shut those dogs up,” he said.

  With some difficulty the two men managed to do as they were told.

  “I think you’re trailing me,” said Henry.

  “No,” said the second of the two. “No, we ain’t.”

  “Throw your guns down there,” said Henry.

  The two again did as they were told.

  “Now back up.”

  As the two men with their horses and dogs backed away from where they had dropped their guns, until he felt there was enough space between them, Henry moved forward. He holstered his .45 and picked up their guns, one at a time, and emptied the shells out of them. Then he threw the guns back down. He pulled his own gun back out and looked again at the riders.

  “Say,” he said to one of them, “don’t I know you?”

  The rider grew even more nervous. He had been a Colorado Springs policeman a few years back. Henry Starr did, indeed, know him. He had helped to arrest Henry in the Colorado Springs all-night café. He thought about lying, trying to deny that he had ever seen Henry Starr, but he knew that he would never get away with that.

  “Well,” he said, “you might.”

  “Yeah,” said Henry. “It’s been a while. I ought to kill you.”

  “You can’t do that,” said the man. “I don’t have a gun.”

  Henry bent down to pick up a gun from the ground. He tossed it at the man. The man caught it, fumbled with it for a moment, then held it more or less steady.

  “It ain’t loaded,” he said.

  “You got shells in your belt,” said Henry. “Load it.”

  “No. Wait. Please.”

  Henry looked at the man. He was shaking from fear. A typical lawman, he thought. They act brave when they’ve slipped up on a man unexpected and got him covered, but face up to them and they’ll crawfish every time. Suddenly the man didn’t seem worth killing. It would make as much sense to kill the dogs—maybe more.

  “Hell,” he said, “take your dogs and get out of here. Go on.”

  The two men wasted no time obeying this last order. They were soon out of sight, riding back in the direction from which they had come. And not long after that, Henry Starr crossed the border into the state of Colorado.

  29

  He spent a few days alone, riding and camping, existing on his trail food and on small game. It was 1908, and Henry Starr was thirty-five years old. The Cherokee Nation, though powerless, still existed on paper to allow the federal government and the new state of Oklahoma to continue the long and arduous task of legalizing land transfers. William C. Rogers was nominal Principal Chief. It was the year that Wayne Brazil assassinated the killer of Billy the Kid, former sheriff Pat Garrett, near Las Cruces, New Mexico. Henry Starr could see the world that he had known changing around him. Those days alone in Colorado, he remembered his boyhood days in the Cherokee Nation. He recalled the times when the only white people he saw were poor whites moving west or the land renters in the Cherokee Nation—the times when the Cherokees looked down on whites as members of a less fortunate race. The Cherokee Nation had been a thriving little republic, with its own school system, its own capital city, its voting districts and legal system. The Nation had, in those days, a national council elected by popular vote, and a national budget with education as the top-line-item priority. It had no national debt, but its budget had been largely supported by the rent money from white ranchers and farmers who settled among the Cherokees. The renters had been at once the mainstay and the downfall of those golden years. For when the numbers of whites in the Cherokee Nation became great, the federal government moved to protect their interests by beginning to erode the powers of the small Nation. The end result was Oklahoma.

  Henry looked back on all this with a strange mixture of bitterness and resignation, and when he came upon the small town of Amity, Colorado, though he had money in his pockets from the last bank robbery, money which, after all, he had not even had to divide with the late, unfortunate Kid Wilson and had not found any place yet to spend, he, therefore, robbed its bank.

  A posse rode out from Amity, but Henry eluded them easily. It was another day when he spotted a windmill and rode toward it for water. When he got closer, he saw that there were three men there already. They were filling water barrels. Henry rode on over to them.

  “Can I water here?” he asked.

  “Sure. Help yourself,” answered one of the men.

  Henry watered his horse, got himself a d
rink, and refilled his canteen.

  “Would there be a place around here where I might spend the night?” he said.

  A big black-bearded man, carrying a shotgun, stepped forward.

  “I live about a mile north,” he said. “You’re welcome to stop there for the night.”

  Henry helped the men load their water barrels into a wagon. One man climbed aboard and drove the wagon off. The other two began walking, leading their horses. Henry followed them along. Soon they were moving beside a prairie dog town, and the man with the shotgun spied one dog beside its hole. He raised the gun and fired. The prairie dog scurried for its hole.

  “Here,” said Henry, “let me have that dog gun.”

  By the time they had walked the mile to the homestead, Henry had killed eight prairie dogs and had returned the shotgun to its owner. The two homesteaders sat down outside their sod house to clean their prairie dogs, tossing the skins to two skinny curs, who pounced on them hungrily. Henry chuckled.

  “Now, there’s nothing an Indian likes better than a genuine dog stew,” he said, “but I believe that a couple of these ancient pups stood on their hind legs and barked defiance at the buffalo before the days of the Santa Fe Trail.”

  The black-bearded prairie dog skinner looked up from his task briefly.

  “Young man,” he said, “I’ve traveled the world over carrying the gospel to the heathen, and I’ve always seen fit to eat what the good Lord sends my way.”

  Henry smiled, but he kept to himself his thought that it had been he, not the good Lord, who had sent this batch of prairie dogs the old man’s way. The stew was prepared by two women who appeared from inside the soddy, and Henry did his part in emptying the pot. He settled back for some casual conversation before time to hit the hay, but the black-bearded missionary surprised him.

  “Well,” he said, “we had better be started if we’re to be on time for church. You’ll be joining us, of course?”

  The question had been directed at Henry, who immediately stood up and put on his hat.

  “Of course,” he said.