The detective paid little heed, relishing as he was the spectacular prospect of rounding up virtually all of the elusive James brothers in a single swoop. He and his men had their guns trained on William, Frank, and Jesse, and Henry, he reckoned, could hardly have gotten far. Beating James McDonough of the St. Louis Police Department to the punch, Pinkerton gloated to his security guards, would be a stunning coup that was bound to reverberate across the nation’s wires to the everlasting glory of the agency.
Unfortunately, William Pinkerton, unlike his rival Chief McDonough, was not a bona fide officer of the law. Having hit the James jackpot, the private eye was about to discover that there was little he could do to cash in his chips. Asa Hite, still under the impression that Professors Jessup and Franklin were no more than a couple of rowdy academics instead of the most wanted outlaws in the nation, was becoming adamant, with the savage petulance that only a thwarted millionaire could display. “Pinkerton!” he hollered. “I said get your sorry ass out of here!”
“You don’t understand, sir!” the detective pleaded. “These are the James boys!”
“I don’t care if they’re the goddamned Bloomer Girls!” Hite called back. “We’re going home!” With a death grip on Elena’s wrist, he began dragging her out of Eliot’s parlor over her vehement protestations. Reduced to a state of infantile rage, she was kicking frantically at her father’s shins and screaming, “But Daddy! I don’t want to go home!”
Asa Hite, who had never verbally acknowledged his dissolute daughter’s transgressions, now addressed her in the harshest possible terms: “Shut up, you little harlot!” he barked. “You’re not going home. You’re going to the asylum!” With that, he brought a beefy hand across Elena’s beautiful face with a solid smack that reverberated through the stricken parlor almost as shockingly as the report from Frank’s revolver a few moments earlier.
As a bright crimson weal rose on Elena’s cheek, mirroring President Eliot’s own, an infuriated William James lunged forward to intervene, only to be violently jerked back by the agency goons.
“Now move it, Pinkerton!” bellowed Mr. Hite.
Recognizing that the man was in no frame of mind to be crossed, the detective grudgingly acceded to his powerful client and ordered his guards to holster their weapons, pack up the gold, and start hauling it away. With his own gun trained on his captives as he backed out of the parlor, Pinkerton admonished the Jameses: “You bastards got real lucky this time, but don’t think you’ve seen the last of me!”
To which Frank, his injured foot still throbbing fiercely from the weight of the detective’s boot, retorted grimly: “Nor you of us, you son of a bitch!”
But Pinkerton was already beyond hearing range. As soon as the detective was out the door, Frank and Jesse retrieved their guns from the parlor floor and skedaddled after William along Henry’s route through the butler’s pantry, leaving President Eliot to survey the wreckage of his elegant soirée. Shaking his head and doubtless making a mental note to more carefully vet the visiting scholars’ program at Harvard, he was oblivious to the traumatized company scurrying past him in a hasty exodus, few even bothering to extend to their host so much as the courtesy of expressing their gratitude for a stimulating evening.
On the other side of Quincy Street, William, Frank, and Jesse regrouped in the parental abode. There they discovered Henry cringing in the attic, from whence they coaxed the severely spooked author downstairs for an urgent fraternal tête-à-tête-à-tête-à-tête. This marked the first time that all four James brothers had been together under the family roof since the halcyon days of their antebellum sojourn in Newport, a reunion that might have been the occasion for a round of jolly reminiscences had not Pinkerton’s warning still been ringing menacingly in their ears. As Frank cautioned his brothers, the moment the detective delivered the Hites safely home, he would undoubtedly turn straight around and mount a manhunt that would make the aftermath of the Northfield robbery look like a playground game of hide-and-seek.
Whatever peaceable fantasies Frank had fostered of trading his outlaw life for the merry tutelage of Francis Child had evaporated with Jesse’s conjecture that the jailed Younger brothers may have ratted him out. Moreover, the Pinkertons’ midnight firebombing of Castle James two years earlier still burned fresh in his memory, and the more recent affront of the detective having stomped on his bad foot had stirred in him a blind fury, just as Joseph Heywood’s slamming his hand in the vault door of the Northfield bank had unleashed his homicidal rage. Something had to be done to stop the Big Man, Frank insisted—and sooner rather than later.
William, recalling Asa Hite’s previous visits to Harvard, surmised that the detective’s immediate destination was most likely the Dewey Square station in Boston, where his client’s private railway car would be waiting to be coupled to a scheduled train to take them back down to Hartford.
At the mention of a railway car, Jesse, whose mastery of the art of train robbery far surpassed his command of poetic composition, perked up. Still dreaming of a “big score” to make up for the paltry take of the Northfield fiasco, he enthused, “Damn, that’s a shitload of gold there!”
The shitload, William tersely reminded his bandit brother, was rightfully the property of Harvard University, earmarked for the construction of his new laboratory.
“Fat chance now, Casanova,” Frank observed drily.
The psychologist had yet to fathom the full implications of the evening’s events, being, as he was, preoccupied with the fate of Elena Hite. With “the asylum,” William knew, Asa Hite had been threatening to commit his daughter to the Hartford Retreat for the Insane, Connecticut’s oldest mental institution (today known by the gentler appellation the Hartford Institute of Living). The Retreat was far from the worst of snake pits—indeed, its establishment in 1824 had been predicated on the humane principle of providing “moral” treatment that stressed dignity and respect for the mentally ill. But as historian Lawrence B. Goodheart of the University of Connecticut at Hartford has noted, in the years following the Civil War, “less was heard about ‘the law of kindness’ and moral treatment of patients and more about moral unfitness and the benefits of eugenics.” Having been intimately acquainted with similar institutions in his medical school days, William had no illusions about conditions in such establishments. He would have feared that confinement in the Retreat might destroy Elena—at the very least branding her a madwoman for life and perhaps even driving that spirited young woman truly insane: a stiff penalty indeed for a single aborted blow job.
Over a lifetime of wrestling with the problem of good and evil, William always desired to come down on the side of the former, yet there was in his character a persistent fascination with the latter, which he often argued was an inevitable—and even desirable—aspect of genuine reality. “I personally gave up the Absolute,” he once wrote. “I fully believe in taking moral holidays.” As his biographer Robert D. Richardson observed, William “could be reckless, even cruel,” and “[a] part of James doubtless enjoyed the fray.” This abiding appetite for transgression was apparent when, years later, after lecturing to an adoring audience of schoolteachers at Chautauqua, he wrote that he would have been “glad to get into something less blameless but more admiration-worthy. The flash of a pistol, a dagger, or a devilish eye, anything to break the unlovely level of 10,000 good people—a crime, a murder, rape, elopement, anything would do.”
What would do on this snowy night was not yet entirely clear, though when it came to Billy Pinkerton, “the man of two minds” was of one with Frank’s and Jesse’s.
Of the gathered Jameses, Henry alone was reluctant to tangle again with the flagitious lawman. He was still shaken from his encounter with the private eye in Paris and naturally inclined never to run toward trouble. Not having been present for the gunplay at President Eliot’s soirée, he failed to grasp the extent to which the gloves were off in the war between the Pinkertons and the Jameses. Discretion, he contended, might well be the bet
ter part of valor.
Frank laid out the counterargument plainly for his literary brother: “Do you understand what ‘dead or alive’ means, Harry?” he asked. “Do you want to hang?”
At that, Henry scrambled up the stairs to the bedroom he had been occupying since his return from France. While he was there rummaging through his steamer trunk to recover the pair of Colt revolvers he had salvaged from Flaubert’s floor, downstairs the front door swung abruptly open. Frank and Jesse reflexively whipped out their own six-shooters and dropped to their knees behind a pair of bookcases in the living room, ready to do battle. The assumptive aggressors, however, turned out to be the benignant elder Jameses and their daughter, Alice.
“Now what in heaven’s name was all that about?” Mrs. James demanded of William, with a nod back over her shoulder. Then, registering the presence of the gunmen kneeling behind the bookshelves, she pointed to Frank and Jesse. “And who in the world are these gentlemen?”
The gentlemen in question emerged from their makeshift battle stations, politely pocketed their pistols, and greeted the proper residents of the house with a couple of crisp bows, introducing themselves as Professors Franklin and Jessup.
Uncharitably dismissed by Henry’s biographer Lyndall Gordon as “small-minded” and “that ordinary woman,” who “had not a thought in her head beyond maternal nursing,” Mary James could in fact be a shrewd observer of the human scene. She scrutinized the gunmen skeptically. “But then what could that dreadful policeman have meant when he said that you were the James boys?” she asked.
This salient query elicited utter silence on the part of the brothers, each of whom looked anxiously to the others to account for Pinkerton’s proclamation. They were spared having to come up with an answer by the fortuitous appearance of Henry James, who descended the staircase with a loaded revolver in each hand.
“Angel!” Mrs. James exclaimed. “My Lord, what’s gotten into you?”
Henry responded with a bashful tilt of his big balding head and a smile that was at once self-satisfied and diabolic—an expression often colorfully described in the vernacular as a “shit-eating grin.”
At that moment—perhaps prompted by the sight of all four brothers together, or perhaps by Pinkerton’s remark about the younger pair being Jameses—Mary James’s much denigrated maternal instincts came springing to the fore: With a mother’s uncanny sense of consanguinity, she recognized the gun-toting interlopers in her living room as the issue of her very own loins. Clutching her bosom and nearly swooning, she cried, “Rob! Wilky!”
“Oh my God!” exclaimed Alice James. “Of course!”
Henry Sr. failed to share in the familial epiphany. “What? What?” he asked.
“These men, darling,” Mary breathlessly explained, “are our boys Wilky and Rob.”
The elder Henry’s eyes, already owlishly magnified by the lenses of his pince-nez, appeared to grow even larger as he inspected the outlaw pair. “Bobbins? Wilkums? But those angelic spirits have consummated their union with the Almighty.”
“They haven’t consummated anything, dear,” Mary assured her husband. “They’re right here.”
Henry Sr. stepped forward and awkwardly embraced his long-lost sons, possibly less to express paternal affection than to convince himself that they weren’t apparitions. “Do you fellows believe in God?” he asked.
But Jesse was in no mood for either a windy theology tutorial or a touching family reunion. “Come on!” he ordered his brothers. “Let’s get the hell out of here!”
As they all followed the younger outlaw out to the stable to hitch a team of two up to the family sleigh, William paused in the mudroom to inhale yet another hit of amyl nitrite before charging out into the frosty night.
“Don’t forget your galoshes, boys!” Mary James called out after her rapidly departing brood.
Careening over the frozen streets of Cambridge at a dangerous gallop, the Jameses’ sleigh flew past the plodding horsecars on Massachusetts Avenue, its iron runners striking up bright plumes of sparks as they scraped over patches of exposed cobblestone. Jesse cracked the whip mercilessly over the team. He was now cold sober—or at least less intoxicated with the fading effects of President Eliot’s punch than with the prospect of once again robbing a train.
As William had predicted, they discovered Hite’s coach berthed on an otherwise deserted siding in the Dewey Square rail yard. Such luxurious cars, known as “private varnish” in the railroading jargon of the era, were the perquisites of investors like Asa Hite, who had become an officer of the newly formed New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad when the Hartford & New Haven merged with the New York & New Haven in 1872, more than doubling the company’s total track mileage and augmenting his personal fortune proportionately. He had spared no expense in the construction and furnishing of his “mansion on rails,” as the noted railroad historian Lucius Beebe called such ostentatious conveyances. Mr. Hite’s custom-made Pullman Palace boasted a kitchen with a large range and icebox, a dining room with an extension table and sideboard, a spacious lounge and smoking area, an observation parlor with a library and desk, and four commodious staterooms. The interior of the coach was richly appointed with all the characteristic accoutrements of Gilded Age conspicuous consumption: ornate inlaid woodwork of olive wood, hand-rubbed satinwood, Circassian walnut, and curly maple; looped and fringed damask drapes; and delicate silk portieres. Illumination was provided throughout the coach by Pintsch gas lamps mounted in etched and frosted glass sconces set on finely wrought and polished brass fixtures.
Asa Hite had initially dubbed his lavish land yacht The Charter Oak, in honor of the most famous tree in Hartford history, but so pleased had he been with his daughter’s demeanor upon her return from Europe that he had joyfully rechristened it Elena—a decision he must now have regretted, even as the gilded lettering of her name was barely dry on the coach’s external cladding.
Approaching the opulent carriage on foot, the James brothers had a clear view of its occupants through its lighted windows. In the smoking section of the central lounge area, the men—Hite, Pinkerton, and his pair of security guards—were already ensconced in handsomely upholstered plush armchairs, contentedly puffing cigars, sipping brandy, and partaking of a congenial game of cards. Elena Hite, still in her party finery, sat writing by gaslight at the mahogany rolltop desk in the library section of the observation parlor, her solitary figure softened by the gently falling snow and framed by the embrasure of the parlor’s plate-glass window like a Sargent portrait.
As they stole quietly across the icy rail yard toward the coach, Henry tapped William on the shoulder and offered his brother one of the Colt revolvers, commenting with an unmistakable soupçon of condescension, “I trust you know how to handle a six-gun.”
William did not. No sooner had he received the weapon from Henry’s hand than, in a kind of pistolic premature ejaculation, the thing went off with a loud report that rang through the deserted rail yard like the roar of a cannon.
If the Jameses had any plan of attack at all, it became moot. Alerted to the presence of armed men outside, the two Pinkerton security guards leaped up from their card game, drew their pistols, and took positions on the front observation platform, from which they began firing at the intruders. With no place to take cover in the open rail yard, the Jameses had no choice but to storm the coach. Jesse took the lead, conspicuously thrilled to have his brothers falling in behind him and to hear the yard echo with the bloodcurdling whoop of his rebel yell. Guns blazing, the brothers rushed the car from the back, scrambling over the filigreed brass railings on the rear observation platform and gaining entrance to the coach through the kitchen and dining room.
The ensuing gun battle was a melee. With the Jameses firing through the coach from the rear and the Pinkertons shooting from the front, many of the elegant gas lamps along the car’s walls were soon blasted out. The pungent aroma of volatile Pintsch gas mingled with the acrid, metallic stench of gunpowder, as th
e silk portieres and damask drapes started going up in smoke. In the fuliginous atmosphere of the coach, it became nearly impossible for the combatants to discern who was shooting at whom, or even where the shots were coming from. Shadowy figures popped up, firing virtually at random, their pistols flashing in the dark. At each report, Henry, harking back to the lessons of Castle James, kept jumping vigorously to his left.
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