Butch Cassidy the Lost Years

by William W. Johnstone

  “It sure is,” I agreed. “To tell you the truth, Randy, I’ll feel better about things knowin’ that somebody’s here.”

  “All right, then. I guess I can wish you luck in good conscience. You’re all my friends, after all.”

  “And I expect we’ll need all the luck we can get,” I told him.

  CHAPTER 27

  When I got a firsthand look at Cougar Pass, I realized just how dumb Steve Tate had been. It was a terrible place for a holdup. Derailing the train had really been the only way to stop it in that location. Tate was just lucky—if you could consider a fella who had long since been turned into coyote and buzzard droppings lucky—that the resulting death and destruction hadn’t been even worse.

  It was a good thing for Randy that he hadn’t stayed mixed up with Tate. Even if that holdup had been successful, the damn fool would have gotten them all killed sooner or later, including Randy.

  I looked at the flats stretching off to the west, toward the county seat, and asked Vince and Bert, “Is the country like this all the way on into town?”

  “Pretty much,” Vince replied.

  I turned my horse and said, “We’ve got to go back the other way, then. There’s nothing in this direction that’ll work.”

  I’d brought the two youngsters and Enoch with me to scout out the lay of the land. Randy and Gabe were holding down the fort back at the ranch. Santiago and his cousins had gone back to their little spread but would rejoin us later.

  We followed the tracks through the pass, such as it was, and headed east. In the distance I could see a series of shallow ridges, and even they looked a lot more promising than the area where Tate’s gang had hit the train.

  After a while I heard a rumble in the distance and pulled my horse to the left, away from the tracks. The other three followed suit. Bert asked, “Where are we going?”

  “Train’s comin’,” Enoch said. “We don’t want any of the passengers to remember seein’ us nosin’ around out here.”

  “Those trains go by pretty fast,” Vince said. “They wouldn’t be able to recognize us, would they?”

  “Probably not,” I said, “but there’s no point in takin’ chances. If you’re about to tackle a chore that’s risky to start with, you don’t want to do anything that might increase the odds against you even more.”

  Bert said, “You two, uh, sound like you might’ve done something like this before.” He seemed a little nervous as he glanced back and forth between me and Enoch.

  I gave him a disarming grin and said, “Naw, it’s just common sense, that’s all.”

  “Yeah,” Enoch said dryly. “Common sense.”

  We were a couple of hundred yards north of the tracks when the westbound train rumbled past with smoke and cinders spewing from the diamond-shaped stack on the big Baldwin locomotive. If any of the passengers spotted us through the windows, they would think we were just some punchers who had stopped to idly watch the train go by.

  When the caboose was dwindling down the tracks to the west, I hitched my horse into motion again. We returned to the railroad and continued scouting.

  A couple of miles further on we came to a place where the track had been laid in a narrow cut through one of those ridges, leaving banks of rock and red clay on both sides. Those banks were about fifteen feet tall, which made them a couple of feet taller than the top of a freight car.

  The cut was maybe fifty yards long. I cocked my head to the side as I studied it. Enoch smiled and said, “I reckon I know what you’re thinkin’, Jim.”

  “Well, I don’t,” Vince said.

  I pointed to the banks and said, “A man could jump from up there onto the top of a boxcar as it passed by.”

  “Sure he could,” Bert said. “If he was loco!”

  “No, you’d have to be careful, but you could do it.”

  Bert shook his head.

  “Not me,” he said. “I’d fall and break my neck, as sure as anything.”

  “He would,” Vince agreed. “But I might be able to do it.”

  “Neither one of you is gonna do it,” I said. “That’ll be my job. Once I’m on the train, I can go over the cars and the coal tender up to the engine. Then I’ll make the engineer stop where the rest of you boys are waitin’ for us. After that it’s just a matter of getting the fella in the express car to open up.”

  “What if the engineer won’t stop?” Bert asked.

  “Most of the time when a man’s lookin’ down the barrel of a gun, he don’t think about anything except keepin’ the fella on the other end of that gun happy.”

  “I don’t want any railroaders killed,” Vince said. “My dad was a railroad man, and he had a lot of friends on this line. He wouldn’t want any of them to be hurt.”

  “I know that. Nobody’s gonna get hurt. Not bad, anyway. I might have to clout a fella over the head or something like that to make him see reason.”

  “As long as nobody’s killed,” Vince insisted.

  I nodded and said, “You’ve got my word on that.”

  I would do my best to keep that promise, too. I took pride in the fact that nobody had ever been killed in the robberies I’d pulled as a younger man.

  We spent the rest of the day looking around the area, familiarizing ourselves with all the details of the terrain. There was a wash nearby where the rest of the bunch could wait out of sight with the horses while I stopped the train. I also explored both banks of the cut until I found just the right spot to make my jump.

  While I was doing that, Enoch asked me, “Are you sure you’re still spry enough to do this, Jim?”

  “Of course I am,” I answered without hesitation. “You’re not volunteerin’ to do it, are you? Hell, I’m at least ten years younger than you are. You’ve never told me how old you really are.”

  “No, I ain’t volunteerin’. And my age is my own business. But I was thinkin’ maybe Santiago ought to handle this part of the chore. I’ll bet he’d be willin’.”

  “It don’t matter if he’s willin’ or not,” I said. “This is my job. I’ve got experience at it.”

  “What if you miss?”

  “Then the train won’t stop, and the rest of you boys can turn around and go home. We’ll have tried to settle the score with the railroad, and that’ll have to be good enough.”

  “Well, I know how stubborn you are,” Enoch said with a shrug. “I don’t reckon it’ll do any good to argue with you.”

  “Nary a bit,” I told him.

  Santiago and the Gallardo brothers met us at the ranch that evening when we got back from our little expedition. All of us sat around the table to go over the plan, except for Randy. He was out in the bunkhouse. I trusted him, but if things went wrong and the sheriff ever questioned him, I wanted him to be able to say that he didn’t know what the rest of us were doing. That would be stretching the truth a little, but at least he wouldn’t know any of the details.

  “Vince, you and Bert are gonna stay in the wash with the horses,” I started off by saying.

  “We’re only doing this because of what happened to my father. I ought to run the same risks as the rest of you.”

  “Somebody’s got to be responsible for those horses,” I told him. “If they got loose and ran off, we’d be in a mighty bad fix. Not only that, but the two of you worked at the station in town, which means there’s a better chance the members of that train crew might recognize you, even with your hats pulled down and bandannas over your faces. If we get in a tight spot and need help, you’ll be close by. Otherwise, you stay out of sight.”

  “He’s right that they might be able to tell who we are, Vince,” Bert said.

  “All right, all right,” Vince said. “I guess we can do it that way.”

  I went on, “Once I’ve got the train stopped, Gabe, you’ll come to the engine and climb into the cab. It’ll be your job to keep an eye on the engineer and fireman and make sure they don’t cause any trouble.”

  Gabe nodded and said, “I can do that.�
��

  “Santiago, you and your cousins will be responsible for the passenger cars. Just keep everybody quiet and settled down while Enoch and I deal with the express car.”

  “Do we take their valuables?” Santiago asked.

  I looked at Vince, who shook his head. I was willing to let him make that decision. I said, “No, we’re not going to rob the passengers. We’re only taking what we find in the express car, because the railroad will have to make those losses good, and it’s the railroad we’re trying to hurt. Now, let’s talk about the schedule. You two worked for the railroad. You ought to know when the trains run.”

  “There are two westbound and two eastbound every day,” Vince said. “Does it matter?”

  “The terrain’s better if we hit a westbound.”

  Vince nodded.

  “In that case, there’s one that comes through about two o’clock in the afternoon and another about midnight.”

  I shook my head and said, “I’m not makin’ that jump in the dark. I’ve got to see what I’m jumpin’ on.”

  “So we’re going to hold up the train in broad daylight?” Bert asked.

  I chuckled.

  “Wouldn’t be the first holdup that’s ever been pulled in broad daylight,” I said, remembering a few eventful occasions in the past.

  “Well, it’ll be the first one one for me and Vince. But you seem to know what you’re doing, Mr. Strickland. You’re the boss.”

  “That’s right, I am. And that brings up an important point.” I looked around the table at them to reinforce what I was about to say. “Once things start poppin’, I’m in charge out there. I give an order, you do what I tell you, without any hesitation, without any questions. Got that?”

  They all nodded, and Santiago said, “Sí, señor.”

  “All right. We’ll wait a couple of days, just to let the plan percolate in our minds. If any of you think of anything else we need to talk about, anything that might go wrong we need to figure out ahead of time, you come to me right away and tell me about it. You’ll all be riskin’ your lives, or at least your freedom, so don’t hesitate to speak up.”

  Once again they all nodded in understanding, and then Bert said, “You know, this sounds like one of those old-time train robberies people used to read about in dime novels or the Police Gazette. You know, like something that Jesse James would do. Or Butch Cassidy.”

  “Jesse James is dead,” I said without thinking. It wasn’t until later, as I recalled the speculative look Enoch gave me when I said that, that I thought about how somebody might take it.

  But it was too late to worry about such things. In two more days, we would be ready to make our move.

  CHAPTER 28

  I lay stretched out beside a greasewood bush on top of the ridge, with the edge of the bank about four feet in front of me. The sun was high in the brassy sky above me, and even though the season hadn’t turned to summer yet, that big blazing ball packed plenty of heat. I wouldn’t have wanted to lay out here all day.

  Luckily, I didn’t have to. The train was coming. I could already hear its faint rumble in the distance.

  In the two days just past, we had gone over the plan more than a dozen times, talking it through until everybody knew exactly where he was supposed to be and what he was supposed to do. Enoch and Gabe were cool as they could be about the whole thing, making me more convinced than ever that they had done things like this before. I knew they were convinced that the same was true about me.

  Santiago, Javier, and Fernando were pretty calm, too. I doubted if they had ever robbed a train before, but they might have driven some wet cattle across from Mexico. I hadn’t asked Santiago how they had stocked their ranch, and he hadn’t told me. For all I knew they had rustled some of Abner Tillotson’s beeves, although I sort of doubted that.

  That left Vince and Bert, and those two were nervous as cats but trying to control it. I was confident that once everything got started they would be all right, but there was no way of knowing that until the time came.

  Randy was back at the Fishhook. If anybody showed up looking for me or any of the others, he would tell them that we were out on the range and that he didn’t know exactly where to find us. Of course, if somebody wanted to search the whole spread they could do it, but I doubted if anybody would go to that much trouble. Besides, I wasn’t expecting visitors.

  The rails down in the cut began to hum. I could hear the sound even on top of the bank. The hum grew louder, and so did the rumble of the locomotive.

  I kept my head down. I didn’t think the engineer was likely to spot me on the other side of the greasewood bush, but I wore brown trousers and a tan shirt to help me blend into the ground. A low-crowned brown hat lay beside me.

  The ground vibrated under me as the train entered the cut. It was easy to tell when the engine passed my position because of the terrible racket and the shaking. The clattering of the wheels on the rails was almost deafening.

  I counted off a couple of beats before I lifted my head. The engine and the coal tender were past me. The first of a long string of boxcars rattled by. Behind the boxcars were three passenger cars, then the express car, and finally the caboose.

  I came up on hands and knees, grabbed the hat, jammed it on my head, and tightened the chin strap. Then I pulled up the gray bandanna I wore so that it covered the lower half of my face and made sure the knot was tight on it, too.

  There were still half a dozen boxcars to go when I surged to my feet. The blood pounding in my head sounded almost as loud as the train. It had been a long time since I’d done something like this. Too damned long, I told myself.

  There are certain things in life that each man is cut out for, and they’re different for everyone.

  This was one of the things I’d been born to do.

  Timing my jump, I waited for the next gap between cars to roll past below and in front of me. I took a deep breath as it did so, then launched into a short running jump that took me off the edge of the bank and sent me flying out over the cut. Once I was in midair, the top of the boxcar suddenly looked a lot narrower than it ought to. For a bad split-second I thought I had jumped too hard and was going to overshoot the car and fall into the deadly gap between it and the cutbank.

  I didn’t, of course. An instant later my feet hit smack-dab in the middle of the boxcar roof.

  I twisted my body as I fell to my knees so that I would stay roughly in the center of the roof. I let myself go all the way to my belly and spread my arms. For a moment I just laid there stretched out on top of the boxcar, letting the rhythm of its rocking motion seep up into my body. When I climbed to my feet, I had adjusted to that motion and it didn’t throw me off balance.

  A quick slap of my hand against my right hip told me the Remington was still in its holster. The strap I’d rigged on it had kept the gun in place. I left the strap fastened for the moment since I still had some more jumping to do.

  With their flatter roofs, boxcars were easier to move around on than passenger cars, although I’d done that, too, in the past. I trotted toward the front of this one and built up some speed so it wasn’t too difficult to jump from it to the next car in line. When I landed on it I didn’t go to my knees or even crouch, just kept moving instead.

  They say that once you learn how to ride a bicycle, you never forget. I guess that robbing trains is something like that, because it all came back to me in a hurry. I didn’t waste any time getting to the front of the train. On a long straight stretch like this, still well out of town, the brakies wouldn’t have any reason to climb up where they could spot me, but you never knew when the engineer or fireman might take it into his head to look around.

  The trickiest part was when I got to the coal tender and had to climb down the grab bars on the front of the first boxcar and swing over to the little ledge that ran along the outside of the tender. The engine and the boxcars were out of the cut by then, although the passenger cars, express car, and caboose were still rolling along betw
een the banks.

  I held my breath while I made the switch to the tender. The ledge was only about six inches wide, but that was enough. I reached up, grasped the top of the side wall, and started edging toward the front. I wanted to get to the engine cab before we passed the wash where the rest of the bunch was waiting, but I supposed if I didn’t, it wouldn’t matter too much. They could catch up to us.

  When I reached the front of the tender, it was easy enough to swing around the corner and step into the cab. Just as I did that, the fireman was about to reach through the door with his shovel and dig it into the coal. Instead, when he saw me he reacted fast, not even stopping to gape at me for a second before he swung the shovel at my head.

  I ducked and let it go over me. While I was crouched like that, I flicked the strap off the Remington with my thumb and drew the long-barreled revolver. The fireman was going to try for me again with the backswing, but he froze when he saw me angling the gun up toward him.

  “Drop it!” I ordered, shouting over the noise of the engine. That was the first warning the engineer had that his cab had been invaded. His head jerked around toward me. I was far enough away from both of them that I could cover them at the same time.

  Disgustedly, the fireman threw his shovel to the floor with a clatter and glared at me.

  “You can’t be robbing this train!” he said. “People don’t rob trains anymore!”

  I had to smile under the bandanna.

  “You’re wrong about that, old son,” I told him. “That’s exactly what I’m doin’.” I nodded to the engineer and went on, “Go ahead and stop the train.”

  “I won’t do it!” he said. In fact, he lunged for the throttle to make it go faster.

  I fired from the hip, sending the bullet between them. It smashed one of the gauges. That was a lucky break, because I’d intended to bust up all the gauges anyway before we rode off. That was one I wouldn’t have to break with my gun butt.