Henry paused, but Mae didn’t respond, so he continued.
“I’m on the scout, Mae. They made me an outlaw.”
“Henry,” said Mae, “what have you done?”
“I got me a partner, and we stole two horses and robbed two stores. I’m going to get enough money together to get out of this country. There’s nothing here for me anymore. Nothing except you. If you’ll still have me.”
Mae turned and stared off toward the sunset.
“Will you go with me?” said Henry.
Mae turned back to Henry and put her arms around him, pulling him close to her. Henry thrilled at the closeness of her.
“You let me know when you’re ready,” she said, “and I’ll go with you.”
They kissed, a brief, tender kiss for fear of the parents’ eyes, and Henry went to his horse. He climbed into the saddle.
“I’ll be in touch,” he said, then he turned the horse and rode away.
He was on his way back to Frank Cheney’s house, having stayed late and then ridden the rest of the night away, and it was about midmorning. The road passed close by a ranch house, and Henry noticed several men standing around in front of the house as he approached it. One of the men suddenly pointed in his direction, and Henry heard him shout.
“Hell, that’s him right there,” said the man. “That’s the man you’re looking for.”
Two of the men in the crowd ran for their horses, mounted up and raced for the road. Henry had not yet come up beside the house, so the two riders, in effect, blocked his path. Then, without a word of warning, one of the riders drew a pistol and fired a shot at Henry. The shot went wild, and Henry dismounted. Pulling his pistol and taking careful aim, he fired. The slug from Henry’s .45 hit its mark, and the man was flung backward into the dirt. Henry’s horse neighed, shied, and ran off back down the road in the direction from which they had come. The second man, who had ridden out to the road to block Henry’s passage, dropped to his belly in the dirt and covered his head with both hands. Henry glanced back toward the ranch house. The rest of the men were just standing there, watching.
Henry kept his gun in hand and walked on down the road until he came to the two men in the dirt, their horses milling around their prostrate figures. He walked up first to the one playing possum, made an audible scoffing snort, then turned to the other. He shoved his six-gun into his waistband, took one of the loose horses by the reins, mounted up, and rode on his way. No one followed, and soon he had left the ranch house behind. No one followed, but he had killed a man. Now there would be no turning back. As he made his way on down the road, he wondered who the man was he had just killed. He had never before killed a man, and he didn’t particularly like the feeling. He figured that the two must have been lawmen, and he thought of all his previous experiences with that bunch. Well, he wasn’t going to lose any sleep over that fellow, whoever he was. The man had shot first and with no warning. He had gotten just what he asked for—just what he deserved. Henry hoped that the man was a deputy United States marshal.
12
The dead man was a railroad detective and a former deputy United States marshal. Although Henry had no way of knowing that at the time he killed the man, the incident certainly increased the desire of the authorities to apprehend the young Indian outlaw. A reward of twelve hundred dollars was offered for his capture. In turn, the killing and the reward further strengthened Henry’s own conviction that there could be no other life for him in this world than that of a hunted criminal.
He led Frank Cheney on a lightning raid of Chouteau. They rode into town, went into the general store and held it up, then, with guns still drawn, walked outside and across the street to a second store. They held it up, still with no interference from anyone, moved on to the M.K. & T. railroad depot, and cleaned that establishment out of cash on hand. Milo did not accompany Henry and Frank Cheney on that expedition. Henry thought that it was best for Milo to stay behind. He had become nervous. He wouldn’t be reliable. He was back at Cheney’s place, drunk.
Not long after the raid on Chouteau, Henry and Frank robbed a store at Inola. By this time deputies were riding in pairs throughout the Cherokee Nation in search of Henry Starr and whoever might be with him. He had become a high priority on their list. They wanted him badly. More significantly, Isaac Parker wanted him badly in his courtroom, and when Parker wanted someone, the pressure was on the deputies.
But Henry had his supporters as well. Inside a barn not far from Nowata, a country band of locals was making music. The band, like the crowd out on the “dance floor,” was a mixture of Indian and white. An old-fashioned barn dance or country hoedown was in progress. People came and went on their own time to and from these affairs, so a late arrival was nothing to marvel at, but when the door opened and a young Indian man came in with a young white girl, the music stopped. Ail eyes turned toward the latecomers. It was not the fact that one was white and the other was Indian. There were several such couples already in attendance, and that was a common enough occurrence in the Cherokee Nation in those times, though many would have been more comfortable had the sex roles been reversed. No, it was something else that astonished the merrymakers. The silence was finally broken by a white farmer.
“It’s Henry Starr,” he shouted.
That announcement was followed by another brief moment of awkward silence.
“There’s twelve hundred dollars on his head,” said another, though not quite as loudly as the first had spoken. This comment, too, was followed by strained silence. Then an old woman stepped boldly out toward the center of the room.
“Well,” she said in a confident and commanding voice, “some of you boys go on outside and keep a watch so’s Henry and his girl can have a good time here and not have to be aworrying about is the laws coming.”
Two husky young country ruffians obeyed, and Henry gave the lady a nod.
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said. Then he addressed the whole crowd. “Well, don’t let my entrance stop the music.”
The fiddler, an Indian, struck up a lively reel and was quickly joined by the rest of the band. Several couples began to dance as Henry led Mae to the refreshment table. A few moved to greet Henry Starr and shake his hand while others clustered in small groups to whisper about the celebrity in their midst.
A white farmer leaned over confidentially to an old Indian man standing next to him back against the wall.
“They say he wears a steel breastplate to stop bullets,” he said.
The old Indian responded, a twinkle in his eye, but his expression otherwise totally somber.
“I know he does for a fact,” he said. “I seen it once.”
There was a third man standing by who could no longer keep himself out of this conversation. He stepped in between the other two, as the white farmer was still nodding, happy to have had his Information confirmed.
“A dead shot, too,” said the newcomer. “I once seen him cut a fence wire with one shot from thirty yards off.”
Before the evening was done and Henry had to take Mae home, he had not only danced with Mae, but also with nearly every other female present, both young and old, and he had stepped up onto the bales of hay that served as a bandstand and played a few tunes on the fiddle. All in all it had turned out to be a very satisfactory evening, and Henry was sorry to see it come to an end.
Out in the woods and on the prairies the deputy marshals continued their search.
It was in the early hours of the morning, after the dance had ended and Henry Starr had taken Mae Morrison safely home to her parents, that he was riding alone back toward the shack of Frank Cheney, which had begun to serve as his outlaw headquarters. He thought about his new role of outlaw celebrity, and he liked it. He liked the attention and the admiration of the country folks, both Indian and white, and he despised the deputy marshals and was enjoying making fools of them. He also thought about Mae and his claim that he was only getting enough money together to take them out of this part of th
e country to someplace where they could start over together. Henry was walking his horse casually down a country road and thinking these thoughts when he heard the distinct sound of a buggy approaching from up ahead. He moved over to the side of the road, halted his pony, and dismounted. Letting the reins trail on the ground, he drew his pistols and waited. When the buggy came closer, he could see two men riding in it. There were no badges showing, but to Henry, the men had the look of deputies. They hadn’t spotted him yet when he called out from the darkness there beside the road.
“Hold up there,” he said.
The startled driver jerked the reins and stopped the buggy. Both men froze.
“Laws, is it?” said Henry. “You fellows must be looking for me.”
“Why,” said the buggy’s passenger in a quavering voice, “who are you?”
Henry stepped out farther into the road, holding his six-guns out prominently.
“Now, that’s a terrible blow to my ego, mister,” he said, “but I’ll just figure that it’s on account of the darkness that you couldn’t recognize such a famous guy as I am.”
The buggy driver, without turning his head, leaned slightly toward his partner.
“It’s Henry Starr,” he said in a low voice.
The other spoke up loudly.
“Hey, don’t kill us,” he said. “We ain’t even after you. Honest.”
“What else would you be doing out in these parts tonight?” demanded Henry, and he thought what a bunch of cowards these deputies were.
“Uh, whiskey warrants, Mr. Starr,” stammered the driver, revealing to Henry that, indeed, the two were deputy marshals. “Whiskey warrants. That’s all. I swear it.”
Henry took another step forward and addressed his next question to the passenger.
“Is that right?”
“Yes, sir. That’s all we’re doing. We wasn’t even thinking of you.”
Henry’s experience with deputies had taught him to despise all of their kind, and the groveling, the apparent cowardliness of these two made him despise them all the more. They were brave enough when they encountered an unarmed and unsuspecting boy, but out here in the dark, facing his guns, they showed their true colors, he thought. Still, he could not shoot down helpless men. It just was not in his nature.
“You know,” he said, “it was one of you dirty skunks with a whiskey warrant that railroaded me when I was an innocent, law-abiding citizen and set me on the path to this life of crime. I ought to blow both of you off of that wagon, but you’re not worth the price of the bullets. Now get out of here before I change my mind and decide to do it anyway.”
He fired a shot over their heads, and the buggy bolted forward as if the shot had started it. Henry didn’t have to stand and watch after it for long. It was soon out of sight. He shoved his pistols back into his waistband and went back to his horse. Mounting up, he continued on his way.
Not far down the road, in the light of a dim moon in the west, Henry saw ahead of him the outlines of a small village. It was one of those out-of-the-way Cherokee settlements that somehow never show up on the maps. Henry knew the place, but he rode cautiously down the road. A dog barked. Soon others joined him. There were no other sounds than the barking. Henry urged his horse on through the jumble of log cabins and frame shacks. Suddenly an old woman seemed to materialize in a doorway just to Henry’s left. Her appearance seemingly out of nowhere startled him just a bit.
“ ’Siyo,” she said, her gravelly voice seeming uncommonly loud in the still night.
“Osiyo,” said Henry, returning her greeting. “Tohiju?”
“Osd’,” said the old one. Then shifting to English, she continued, “Be careful where you ride tonight. They are all over the damn place.”
Henry smiled and tipped his hat.
“Wado, little grandmother,” he said, and the woman seemed to vanish as mysteriously as she had appeared.
The dogs continued to bark as Henry nudged his pony into a slow forward gait. When he reached the edge of the settlement, Henry stopped. He saw nothing ahead of him, but he had an unexplainable sense of foreboding, fed by the old woman’s eerie warning. A few dogs still barked occasionally behind him. Henry dismounted and pulled his Winchester out of its saddle carriage. He cranked a shell into the chamber, and the noise of the lever action seemed to resound in the stillness. He sat motionless in the saddle for a moment, the rifle ready, and surveyed the scene ahead of him. Not too far from where he waited, a lane wound in to the road from the right just ahead of a small farmhouse. To the left of the road was nothing but open prairie. The thing that captured Henry’s attention was the lane. He led his horse off the road and tied it to a small tree, then eased himself on foot on down closer to the lane.
Within about ten feet of the intersection, he stopped and waited. For a few seconds more, the silence reigned, then he heard the sound of approaching horses. Soon two riders came into his view on the lane, riding toward the road. As they were about to enter the road, and so were nearly abreast of Henry, he made his presence known to them.
“Keep riding straight ahead,” he commanded, “or I’ll blast your souls into eternal damnation.”
Almost as a unit, the two horses and two riders hesitated an instant, then shot forward across the road and into the prairie on the other side. Henry stepped into the road and shouted after them.
“I’m Henry Starr, and I’m a dead shot.”
He watched them disappear into the darkness and listened as the noise of their horses’ hooves faded away in the distance, then he went back to where he had left his own pony. Once more he mounted up and headed on his way. He had ridden another mile or so when he saw three riders come up out of a gulley in the distance ahead. It was too far for a pistol shot. This time the riders and Henry spotted each other almost simultaneously. Knowing that he had been seen, Henry jerked the rifle from its scabbard as he dismounted, then dropped to the ground flat on his belly. Looking forward, he saw the three riders dismount and stand by their horses. He waited for them to make a move, but they made none. He finally decided to break the silence.
“Hey, over there,” he shouted. “I’m Henry Starr. I just ran off your two buddies down the road there.”
He waited for a response, but none came. The three men stood silently beside their horses in the moonlight.
“If you’re looking for that twelve hundred that’s on my head,” he called out to them, “I’m ready to fight you to the end.”
He could see the three move their heads, looking at one another. Still they made no reply.
“If you don’t have the stomach for a fight,” shouted Henry, running out of patience, “then back off now while you have the chance. Otherwise I’ll blow you off the prairie.”
The three silhouettes began to mill around some, then, apparently accepting the offer Henry had made, they began to back away slowly, leading their horses. After a few backward steps they mounted up and rode off at a fast clip. Henry heaved a sigh of relief and got to his feet. Satisfied that these latest three minions of the law at Fort Smith had left, he resumed his journey. This time, however, he decided to leave the road. He trotted his pony a space across the prairie until he came to a wire fence, reached into his saddlebags for a pair of wire cutters, snipped the wires, and rode out across a wheat field at a gallop. He had seen enough deputy United States marshals for one night.
“Little grandmother was right,” he said. “They are all over the damn place.”
13
Back at Cheney’s farmhouse, Henry found Cheney and Milo sitting on the porch. Milo was sagging in a cane-bottom chair and looked to be in pretty bad shape. He had been drinking hard and steadily for some time but had recently run out of liquor. His clothes were dirty and rumpled, and his hair was tousled. As Henry rode up to the house, Cheney came down off the porch to meet him.
“They’re all over the countryside,” said Henry. “I ran five of them off last night without firing a shot.”
“They’re a
bunch of cowards” said Frank. “They won’t fight a man fair. I ain’t never heard of one of them fighting a man fair. Only if they can ambush you.”
Milo stirred in his chair and moaned.
“There’s too many of them,” he said, his voice a high-pitched whine.
“Yeah,” Frank agreed. “They’ve even been nosing around here.”
“Henry, I think you better get out of the country,” said Milo. “Your trail’s getting too hot.”
Henry pulled the saddle off his horse and heaved it over the porch rail. He put one foot up on the porch and leaned with his elbow on his knee.
“Well, Milo,” he said, “if my trail’s getting too hot for you, maybe you better go where you can cool your heels. I’m staying right here.”
“There won’t be no hard feelings?” whimpered Milo.
“No hard feelings” said Henry, leading his horse around to the small corral beside the house. “We’ll be seeing you around, Milo.”
“Yeah, well, so long, boys,” said Milo, getting up off his chair. He hurried inside and reappeared a moment later with a saddle roll. On his way to the corral, he passed Henry, who was returning to the house. As he did, he walked sideways so he could keep his eyes on Henry. Apparently Milo wasn’t quite certain that Henry had told him the truth when he had said that there’d be no hard feelings. Milo took his own saddle off the fence rail and saddled his horse. He mounted up clumsily and rode off without another word.
Henry Starr took the dipper off its hook on the porch and dipped it into the water barrel. He took a long drink and spat. The water was stale. He leaned on a post and stared after the fleeing Milo. Cheney had returned to his chair. Henry wondered if Milo would go back to being an honest cowboy or continue on the outlaw trail somewhere else, on his own or with someone else. It didn’t really matter. He didn’t belong in this Cherokee country anyway.
As Milo disappeared, Henry’s thoughts returned to the deputies he had encountered the night before. They must really want him bad, he thought, and for what? Robbing a few country stores? Killing that coward who had shot first and with no warning? That, as Henry saw it, had been self-defense. It didn’t seem worth it somehow. That is, what he had done didn’t seem to him to merit all the attention he was getting from the deputies. Things were all out of proportion—out of balance. Well, he would fix that.
The Saga of Henry Starr Page 6
