“Swede,” I said. “Or some foreigner. The one shot…in the street. He died…day or so ago. Mister Shaubut told me.”
Sighing, the man sagged against his cane.
“You all right, Capt’n?” the one behind me asked.
“Hell.” He sighed again.
The bearded man tapped the pistol barrel on the side of my head that he hadn’t clubbed. “The banker wouldn’t open the safe for us. That’s why he died. He would be alive if he had done as directed. So we scattered his brains across the wall. So you know what I reckon…? I didn’t catch your name.…”
“Jeff. Jeff Dunning.”
“Well, Jeff Dunning, I reckon the next time we rob a bank, the cashier won’t be so damned stubborn. Won’t play the hero or play the fool. He’ll be thinking about that dead man in Northfield. You reckon that’s right, Jeff Dunning?”
“Yes, sir.”
“So if you don’t get us to Mankato and across the river, then I guess we’ll blow your brains out so the next fool we come across won’t be after no reward. But if you do as we say….” He lowered the hammer slowly, his eyes never leaving mine, and slammed the revolver in his holster.
“Now let’s go to the farm. And remember what I said, Jeff Dunning. Remember it well.”
They wolfed down the corn pone and potatoes in Mr. Shaubut’s home, looked around for powder and ball, or even a weapon, but Mr. Shaubut didn’t own nothing but an old muzzleloading shotgun and he had taken that with him to town. They did find Mr. Shaubut’s brown clay jug, which he kept hidden under his bed, but didn’t drink it, not then. They made me milk the heifer, and they gulped it down, relishing it like they was eating in some fancy restaurant in St. Paul, only making a big mess. They washed their wounds—I think every damned one of them had a bullet hole in him, if not more—and then the big mean one who hadn’t said a word but looked like a red nigger, only one with a mustache and beard stubble, he forced me outside and had me dig a hole. First I thought it was my grave, yet soon I realized they was just burying the bloody rags they had been using for bandages.
Once they was all filled and refreshed, the bearded one with the big pistol said: “Jeff Dunning…‘A hundred thousand welcomes. I could weep, and I could laugh. I am light and heavy. Welcome.’” That ain’t no stretcher. That’s what he said, and he was smiling when he spoke them words. Reckon food and shelter will do that to a body that has been suffering so. Ain’t got the slightest notion what he meant.
Groaning, the tall man stood up, and put his right hand on the butt of the revolver, the friendliness gone from his eyes. “Which way?” he asked.
“Bluff Road, I reckon,” I said.
“Lead the way.”
When we got near town, they decided to have a little parley in the woods. I trembled as I walked, fearing this was their pretense, that they’d kill me here and leave me to the worms, but they all sat down and passed the jug of sipping liquor they had stole from Mr. Shaubut.
“Can we swim the river, Jeff Dunning?” another one asked. If you was to question me on the subject, I’d say he looked like the bearded man’s brother, only shorter, but both had them same cold eyes, and this one packed three big-caliber pistols on his belt, showing them off cavalierly. He struck me as a peacock, only peacocks never killed no man in cold blood.
“No,” I said, which was the Lord’s truth. “Water’s too high. Minnesota and the Blue Earth, both. Current’s mighty swift. You fellows would all drown, in your condition.”
“How about stealing a boat?”
“I reckon that’s a good notion,” I said. “Only I don’t know where we’d find one.”
“Where else can we cross?”
“Dingus,” the man with the cane said, “this ain’t worth a tinker’s damn.”
“What do you mean?”
“Turn this farmer loose. He got us to Mankato. We can find a way through town, sneak in after dark.”
“The idea, Bud,” the man called Dingus said haughtily, “was to find a guide to get us past Mankato. Over the river. Maybe to….” He shut up, and cast me a cold, disdainful eye.
“The idea,” the one known as Bud said, “was we’d be richer than Midas, the way you and Stiles talked, but it didn’t turn out that way. The farmer got us this far. I think we can go the rest without him.”
“That’s fine,” said Dingus’s brother, hand on his weapon.
My mouth went drier than a Mormon’s icebox.
“You going soft because of that Swede?” Dingus asked Bud.
Bud looked riled, and his grip tightened on the cane, but he spoke calm. “We can turn him loose, give him a chance to get back to his farm before his boss. That way they’ll be no suspicion, and I got a strong feeling this lad’ll keep his trap shut. Ain’t that right, Jeff?”
“Yes, sir.” Those words flied out of my throat.
“Maybe so,” Dingus’s brother said, “but I have a recollection of us deciding on another way to keep his trap shut.” He drew his revolver, already cocked.
Right then and there, I fell to the ground, right on my knees, clasping my hands in front of my chest. Almost at that moment, rain started drizzling, and I won’t lie to you. I cried. I begged. I didn’t want to die, especially not here alone, not now. Do that make me a coward? I don’t think so. You tell me how you’d just stand up and face a killer like that and tell him to shoot and shoot true. Tell me. Tell me that to my face and I’ll call you a damned liar or a damned fool or both.
“Shut up!” Dingus snapped at me, kicked at me. “Buck up there, boy. Be a man, damn you.”
“I don’t want to die. Oh, please, God, please don’t kill me. I won’t tell a soul. I promise. I swear on my dead mama’s grave. Just please, please let me live.” I couldn’t shut up, probably wouldn’t have never shut up if Dingus hadn’t buffaloed me with one of his pistols.
Down I went, aching but still living. I prayed, prayed with the rain coming down harder, drenching my face, mixing with the blood and mud and leaves in my hair, prayed—and I hadn’t prayed in so long. Prayed while killers debated over my life.
“Killing him won’t help us,” the decent one named Bud said. Well, I’m calling him decent since he hadn’t hit my head or abused me none and was arguing for my life.
“And letting him live will?” Dingus said. “We let this yellow bastard go and every man jack son-of-a-bitch in Mankato and beyond will be on our ass. Kill him!”
Dingus’s brother leveled his pistol. I closed my eyes, expecting to hear the gunshot—if I heard anything at all—but instead Bud’s voice reached my ears.
“No, we will not kill him.”
“Like hell, Bud. It’s the only way.”
“It’s no good. We let him go, he keeps quiet, and he will, or we’ll come back and slit the son-of-a-bitch’s throat from ear to ear. You hear me, Jeff?” I opened my eyes, saw Bud’s face inches from my own. Dirty water dripped from his reddish-colored mustache and goatee. “You won’t say a word, will you?”
I sputtered out something. Reckon I agreed to what he was saying.
“Well.…” I don’t know which one said that. My eyes was blinded again by tears and rain, but some men jerked me to my feet and shoved me against a tree.
Dingus’s brother holstered his revolver, shaking his head as he said: “We are at a crossroads. The Rubicon. I say this, let Bob decide this bloke’s fate. Bob’s hurt the worst amongst us.”
Bob stepped forward, sweating, or maybe that was just the rain water, holding his right arm close to his chest. Dingus’s brother wasn’t lying none, that boy was hurting. Hurting bad.
“You’re the judge, dear Brother,” Bud said, and we waited.
I figured I was dead for sure, but Bob shook his head, finally hung it, and muttered something that I could just barely make out. “If he joins pursuit, there’ll be time enough for shooting. I say…I say, hell, I’d rather be shot dead than to have that man killed for fear he might put a hundred men after us.”
“Am
en,” the Indian-looking savage said, which surprised me. “What’s another hundred when they got a thousand chasing us already?”
The kind man shoved me past the tree, toward the road, right into Dingus’s brother’s arms, and I started blubbering again, bawling like a newborn baby, knowing they was bound to murder me no matter what Bob and Bud and the mean-looking one said. Sure enough, Dingus’s brother rammed the barrel of his revolver into my Adam’s apple.
“‘Luck is a mighty queer thing. All you know about it for certain is that it’s bound to change.’ You know who wrote that, Jeff Dunning?”
“Shakespeare? Jesus Christ?”
“Bret Harte, you ignorant son-of-a-bitch. Now get back to Mister Shitbutt’s farm, and, remember, if you sell us up the river, I’ll be back. If I get killed, I’ll send one of my pals, and we got many, many pals. We’ll slit your throat in your own damned bed, but, before you die, we’ll cut off your pecker and shove it down your throat. Remember that, Jeff Dunning. Remember it well.”
He pushed me toward the road. Then the clouds burst.
I swear to God, I had no intention of telling nobody what had happened. That’s right. I was scared. I run all the way back to Mr. Shaubut’s farm, and I was there in my little room beside the barn when he come home the following morn. He come charging inside, yelling that I was a lying, worthless little weasel, that the cow hadn’t been milked, his house was a shambles, the eggs hadn’t been gathered, his corn whiskey was stole, and the cattle not been moved to the pasture.
He seen me just shivering, just praying. Every damned time I closed my eyes, I seen Dingus’s brother, smiling, quoting Scripture or whatever he was reciting, him or his brother splitting my head open with their pistols, and I seen him in my dreams, with a big knife, cutting me, seen me gurgling on my own blood and that knife going down low in my britches. Hell, when Mr. Shaubut come charging in there, I fell to my knees, begging him—on account I thought he was one of those brigands—to spare my miserable life.
Suddenly Mr. Shaubut was holding me, good man that he is, comforting me, begging me to tell him what had happened. So I broke my vow to those outlaws. Is a word to a killer worth a damn? Tell me you’d do otherwise. Tell me.
I told Mr. Shaubut that I had been taken by Jesse James and his black-hearts. I told him that those boys wasn’t out of the state, not by a damned sight, told him they was past Mankato by now, heading toward Dakota.
Felt better once I’d confessed, too, but I’ll be drawing my time from Mr. Shaubut and lighting a shuck for somewhere else just as fast as I can.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
JESSE JAMES
Personally I would have killed the yellow bastard, but Frank was right to leave his fate in Bob Younger’s hands, and Bob granted the sodbuster a stay of execution, a pardon, so we sent him on his merry way Not that we believed he’d keep his mouth shut. Our only hope was that the son-of-a-bitch ran back to his farm, not to the nearest law in Mankato. Trust him? Hell, I trust in the mercy of God.
God has been merciful. Waiting in the pouring rain that evening, waiting in the mud and muck, trying to determine our chances of sneaking through that city, I heard the train whistle in the distance. I wondered what would have happened had we robbed the bank here, instead of the one in Northfield. Well, we cannot change history. The train sang out its night song again.
“Mercy,” I said softly. “A train.”
“You want to take the train back home, Dingus?” said Jim, in one of his moods. “Or rob it?”
“Trains can’t swim the river. There’s gotta be a bridge down yonder somewhere.”
Jim leaned forward, suddenly ashamed of mouthing me so. “There’ll be guards.”
“Not as many as we’re liable to meet up with in Mankato.”
So we started walking, moving south a bit, skirting around the city, and then along the banks of the Blue Earth River, which hooked up with the big Minnesota River just a ways from us. And, sure enough, long about two in the morning, we come to the bridge.
Sentries had been posted, all right, two men and a teen-age boy, all of whom looked as miserable as we did, so we walked right up to them, hallooing the camp, where they had coffee brewing over a stove that had been made out of a rusty old barrel.
“We’re from Freeborn County,” I lied. “Been chasing those killers from Northfield. Coffee smells inviting.”
“Help yourself,” said a fat man with a handlebar mustache.
Didn’t have to tell us twice.
“You come a long way,” the boy said as we gulped down coffee and warmed ourselves by the fire.
“That we have.”
“Where’s your horses?”
“Livery.”
“You walked that far?”
“Mind your manners, Lars,” the mustached man scolded the boy but I caught him looking for his shotgun, which stood leaning against a tree out of the rain.
“I’d sure like to get a gander at them outlaws,” the boy said.
I showed him my Schofield. “You’re looking at them now,” I said.
“When’s the next train due?” Cole asked the leader, and, when we learned not until dawn or thereabouts, we tied the two men up and the boy, finished our coffee, hating to leave the fire, and crossed the railroad bridge over the Blue Earth River.
Didn’t matter now that we had let the spineless sodbuster go. Whether or not he opened his trap, these three guards would sound the alarm once they were freed or found. Such is fate.
Yet God blessed us again when Charlie and Frank caught some chickens at a farm on the far side of the Blue Earth, and this time we managed to cook and eat them before some law dogs came to chase us away. Morning found us on the north bank of Rush Lake, and we rested again.
“Lord, show me the way,” I whispered. Earlier, Frank had said we had come to the Rubicon, but I thought now we faced that figurative river, that now we had to make a decision, one that would affect our lives, perhaps decide which among us would live and which would die. Jim’s shoulder had taken a bad turn, and Bob had never been much good, though always game as a rooster, with his arm busted and shot to pieces. While the two desperately wounded brothers tossed about, delirious, fevers high, I poured the last of the corn liquor we had stolen from the Shaubut farm over their wounds, allowing Charlie Pitts to go to work with his knife and drain the pus and blood, rid some of the infection.
As Charlie commenced with his doctoring, I took a few steps back, and turned my head. The sight of blood often sickens me.
“It’s no good,” Frank told me.
Cole came over to join our parley. Cole Younger never cared much for me, and I can’t say I liked him much, but he was a good man, damned fine pistol fighter, and we’d been together for years. I hated for things to end this way, but the Lord had whispered the way in my ears. The only way.
“By now,” Frank said, “that farm hand and those inept guards at the railroad trestle have spilled their guts.”
“Most likely,” Cole said.
I loved Bob Younger as if he were my own brother, and wanted Jim at my side in a fight. We Missouri bushwhackers do not kill our own, and we damned sure don’t leave them to die, lessen we have to.
“I’m thinking the best deal for us is to split up,” I said. “We’ll steal horses, but that farm we passed down the pike didn’t have but two. Those on horses can ride like hell for the Dakotas. I’m betting the laws’ll take notice of them. That’ll make it easier for the ones afoot to sneak out of Minnesota.”
“I suspect you’re right, Jesse,” Cole said, and he never called me Jesse. Always Dingus.
“Can you ride, Cole?” I always called him Bud.
“No, you put somebody else on a horse. My leg’s swole up. Hard enough for me to walk, but I got a good cane. I’ll stay.”
Charlie Pitts had joined us, wiping his knife blade against his thigh.
“I’ll stay, too,” he said.
“Ain’t no need,” Cole began, but Charlie shook his
head.
“Mind’s made up, Capt’n. If you stay, I’ll play out my hand with you.”
Charlie Pitts walked back to Bob and Jim, now awake, sitting up, faces ashen and weak.
“Then it’s settled,” I said. “Frank and Bob will take the horses. I’ll stay with you-all.”
I turned to embrace my brother, but Cole put his hand on my shoulder, and I looked back at him.
“Appreciate the offer, but Bob can’t sit a saddle. Jim…I don’t reckon he’s in no condition to ride right now, neither. No, you ride with your brother. Maybe you’re right. Maybe the posses will take after y’all.”
I half expected my brother to quote something from the bard—“parting is such sweet sorrow”— that kind of thing, but he just hung his head, shuffled his feet in the mud, and I shook Thomas Coleman Younger’s hand and walked over to his brothers. I didn’t have to tell them the plan. I could tell they knew this was good bye. Charlie stood up and made room for me, and I knelt beside those solid soldiers of the Lord, took off my hat, pulled them close, and, as we embraced for that final time, I began:
“‘The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he lead-eth me beside the still waters….’”
Afterward, I kissed Bob’s cheeks, shook Jim’s feeble hand, and, wiping tears from my eyes, I followed my brother out of the woods.
Jim Younger called out to our backs: “Die game, boys!”
Frank started to speak, but, for once, my brother could find no words, none to recite, none to create.
The next time we’d meet up with the Youngers and loyal Charlie Pitts, one way or the other, would be on the streets of Glory.
Our journey home would not be pretty. We stole a horse from the farm we had spied—the other damned nag was lame—and rode double. Almost didn’t make it through that night because somehow we rode right close to one of the picket camps at this bridge around this place called Lake Crystal. Foul luck. All the guards had fallen asleep except one.
“Who are you?” he yelled. “Halt and identify yourselves!”
“Go to hell,” I said, but damned if that son-of-a-bitch almost didn’t send me in that direction.
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