Fate had dealt us a cruel hand, or, as Shakespeare wrote in Julius Caesar Julius Caesar, we dealt it ourselves, choosing the bank in Northfield, leaving behind Bill Stiles-no sorrowful loss-and Clell Miller; Jesse and I felt mighty pained to lose a top hand like Clell. What's done is done, however, and there ain't no turning back. As Bob Younger, if he weren't so bad shot up, might say: "We played a good hand but we lost. Spilt milk. There are more pressing matters."
Staying alive.
So we rode, rode like hell, running some white-haired sodbuster off the road in his spring wagon. "Take the ditch, damn you!" Charlie Pitts screamed at him, and we didn't give the old farmer any choice.
We rode.
"Let's take a damned horse!" Cole cried out, him smarting some, bleeding bad, saddle, reins, and brother all shot to hell, but Jesse wouldn't listen, and I can't blame my brother at all.
"Too soon! Too soon!" he yelled. "We need to get past that little town first. Might have wired the law there."
They called that little town Dundas, on the Cannon River, three, four miles south of Northfield, and, sure as hell, if them damyankees in North-field had any sense they would have keyed off a telegraph in a hurry, and we'd be riding into a posse, us having forgotten to cut the wires on our way out of town.
Well, we hadn't forgotten. Didn't have time.
We rode.
Bill Stiles had told us he knew a few crossings, but the water roiled from recent storms, and Stiles was deader than Brutus. Only crossing that we knew of was the bridge at Dundas. We rode.
"Damn it all to hell, Dingus," Cole said, "we got to stop. Now."
Jesse listened, changed his mind, and we eased our horses off the road near the bridge and rode down to the Cannon River. Bob Younger practically fell off the horse, and Cole hobbled over beside him.
"Better reload your guns, boys," Jesse said. "We'll have soldiering to do. That posse will be waiting for sure now that we've stopped."
"Go to hell, Dingus!" Jim Younger bit back.
Mightily I wanted to slide down off the saddle on the big dun horse, pour some cool river water over my bleeding leg, but didn't feel overly confident I'd be able to climb back in the saddle again, so I just watched, tied a bandanna over the gash above my knee, keeping my eyes on the road. That's how come I saw the man coming from Dun-das in his wagon-a team of grays in harness- coming casual as you please, and it struck me that, since town lay just up the road and this man didn't have a care in the world, maybe those dumb Yankees hadn't thought to telegraph the first town. (Turns out I was wrong, that the Yanks weren't all as dumb as they looked, and they had got the wires humming, but the fool operator in Dundas was having his afternoon sit-down in the privy.) "Jesse." Thumbing back the Remington's hammer, I pointed the long barrel at the rider, who hadn't spotted us.
My brother grinned. "The Lord giveth. Looks like we got that horse for you, Bob," he said, and Jesse and I rode up to the road, meeting the fellow just as he crossed the bridge.
"We'll be borrowing one of your horses," I informed the man, showing him the business end of my .44.
"What's the meaning of...?"
"Just shut the hell up, you little son-of-a-bitch, and cut one of those grays from the harness," Jesse said. "Sass me, and I'll blow your damned head off."
He was hauling rails, and he got right to work on the horse, after Jesse split his scalp with his Schofield, realizing the seriousness of our moods. She was a right solid little mare. Lucky, Bob was, and we had the gray about rigged up for him when Charlie Pitts, now watching our back door, spotted two men riding down the road, riding, it looked like, on Clell Miller's and Bill Stiles's horses.
"Keep back, you damned curs!" Charlie shouted at them, and the spineless bastards did as they were told, respectful of us.
Cole and Jim, though both still hurting, helped Bob, his arm busted from that shot, onto the gray, then mounted their own horses. We rode through town, spurring our mounts, raising dust.
Dundas, thank God, was quiet, but we needed to put some miles between us and Northfield, and those two cowards trailing us. One drummer in a sack suit pointed at us when we galloped along, saying in his Yankee voice: "Friends, you ride like a cavalry regiment. But if Sitting Bull were after you, I warrant you might even ride faster."
Jesse aimed his Schofield. "Get inside, you son-of-a-bitch!"
The drummer got inside in a hurry.
We had to show a couple other gents our guns, which irked one of the bastards idling away his afternoon in front of some store. He took offense, telling Charlie: "Get off that horse and I'll whip you. I can whip any man points a revolver at me."
Charlie would have bashed that son-of-a-bitch's face in, but we had no time for fisticuffs.
We rode.
Now, Bob rode the gray bareback, and, with his arm so bad, we had to get him a saddle, so we appropriated one off some dumb farmer, telling him we were Rice County sheriff's deputies and chasing horse thieves. The man didn't say nothing, just bobbed his head and chewed a straw. Doubt if he believed us. Actually I don't rightly give a damn.
Our next stop came at another farm because Bob had started begging for water. I had a powerful thirst, too, and this time I eased my bad leg out of the saddle, once the farmer-man named Donaldson-said to help ourselves after Jesse told him that Cole had taken a spill from his horse and broke his leg.
"Bring him inside," Donaldson said.
"Oh, no, we'll just get him home."
Donaldson sprayed the ground with tobacco juice, his black eyes focusing on Jim as he helped Bob take a drink of cool well water.
"What happened to that fellow's arm?" he asked.
"Shot," Jesse said. "A blackleg shot him after we had this row in Northfield. We killed him."
Donaldson switched the chaw from one cheek to the other.
I pulled myself in the saddle, rubbing my leg, and thanked the farmer for his hospitality. As we eased our horses toward the Old Dodd Road, the farmer called out to our backs: "What was the name of that gambler you killed?"
"Stiles," Jesse answered with a grin before spurring his horse into a lope.
That's how things went pretty much that first day. We'd stop at a farm here and there to bath our wounds, look at some horses that we might steal, but nothing caught our fancy. We met up with a score of folks, farmers mostly, and they'd suspicion us considerable, but, hell, we told them we were chasing horse thieves or hauling a thief to jail.
One farmer told us we were taking the wrong road if we were heading for this-and-such town, but Jesse, still in jovial spirits, said: "Oh, no, we're taking the right road."
We wound up relieving one sodbuster of his horse a mile or so out of Millersburg, and Cole took the farmer's hat to replace the one he'd lost. Later we stole another saddle, kept riding. Long about dusk, the saddle girth snapped and sent Bob sailing into the ditch. The horse run off back toward Millersburg, and Jim and Charlie gave it a chase, but it was no use. Both of them boys had been shot in the shoulder-Jim's wound looked the worser- and our horses were pretty much played out. Cole knelt over his brother, who wailed in pain, but Cole gave Bob a stick to bite on, tightened the bandage on his busted arm, helped young Bob onto the back of his horse.
We rode.
That night, we camped in the woods. Cole took off his undergarments, which we tore into strips and used for bandages. No coffee, not even a camp-fire that night. No interesting debates with Cole. No fiddle playing by Jim. No sermons from Jesse. We licked our wounds.
I sat beside Cole, thinking maybe we should compare our leg wounds, but figured Cole would find no humor in this at the moment, but Charlie Pitts inquired about the money, and so I emptied my pockets.
"Where's that sack you took, Bob?" I asked. "From the till?"
"It's on the street," Bob answered with unusual bitterness when addressing Jesse or me (now his brothers...that was another matter). "Want to go back and fetch it?"
"Maybe they'll forward it to us," Jesse chimed in.
"Charlie?" I asked.
Pitts shook his head. "I didn't get none."
"Christ A'mighty," Cole said, and carved off some chawing tobacco from a twist one of the farmers had given him that afternoon.
Robbery is an interesting profession. From what all has been printed, a body would think the James and Younger boys lived high on the hog, eating off the best china, sipping Madeira from crystal wine glasses, richer and merrier than Robin Hood. Truth be told, most of the banks we chose were as poor as the rest of Missouri. Lots of time we didn't get enough for our troubles. Rich? Not hardly. And all that wealth Bill Stiles had promised...?
As I tossed a two-cent penny onto the pile, I announced: "Twenty-six dollars and forty cents."
Jesse laughed. "You can have my share, Bob," he said, and pulled his dirty duster over him like a sheet, adjusted his hat, and, gripping his Colt, his Schofield and Smith & Wesson close by, went to sleep.
Things got quiet. Charlie Pitts announced that he'd take first watch, asked Jim to spell him in three hours, and he walked off into the woods and found a spot. Jim started snoring softly, and Bob tossed about in a fitful sleep.
Cole spit. "What happened in the bank, Buck?"
I shrugged, packing my leg wound with finely ground gunpowder and tightening the bandanna around it, then stretched out and asked to partake of Cole's twist.
When I had the tobacco good and moist and comfortable, I got around to answering Cole's question. "We were trying to make the cashier open the safe. One of the other bankers took off running out the back door. Charlie give him chase, but he got away, though Charlie said he hit the son-of-a-bitch. Anyway, it was no good from the get-go."
"Damn' right, Buck," Cole said. "You saw how crowded town was. Never should have gone in the bank in the first place."
"'If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall in the ditch,'" I said.
Cole spit. "Guess we all fell in the ditch."
"Least we climbed out. For now. All except Stiles and Clell."
"What else happened in there?"
"I killed the cashier. Shot him as I took my leave." There, I'd said it.
"God, Buck, God. I told you-all in the woods that there wasn't to be no killing. Why'd you kill him? Think he was going for a gun?"
I couldn't answer that. Still can't. I don't have one notion as to why I shot that bastard. Rage? Did I think he was a threat? Just my plain old cussedness? Maybe Cole had the answer.
"Just how drunk were you?" he asked.
I spit, turned to face my old friend. "How drunk was you, Bud, when you shot that unarmed fellow out on the street?"
Cole didn't have an answer, either, and I felt bad for him, knowing how much he had wanted to avoid killing. So I said: "Maybe you just give him a headache. Doubt if that little Thirty-Two would have killed him. I bet he'll just have a scar and a story to tell his grandkids."
"Maybe," Cole said hopefully.
We didn't say much after that, finished our chaws in silence, tried to catch some sleep in the woods, figuring the next day would be a hell of a time.
It rained that Friday. A cold, mean, soaking rain that had some blessing, as it cooled off the fever Bob had taken during the night, and it made tracking us a damned sight harder for any posse that might be out sloshing through southern Minnesota. We met the first posse at the Little Cannon. Well, it was more of a picket than a posse, and I had to give the Minnesota laws some credit. They had a bunch of men chasing us, and guarding the fords of the creeks and rivers was a good chess move. Might have worked if even a quarter of the men they had on our trail was worth snuff.
These three idiots fired at us without so much as a warning. Raining like it was, coming down in sheets at the time, we could have been the Rice County sheriff and Governor Ames himself. They couldn't shoot worth a damn, either, so we just turned back, waited in the woods. A few minutes later, those three heroes of Minnesota give us chase, only they rode right past us. We waited a couple of minutes, returned to the road, and forded the river without any trouble.
Word was out by then, all across Minnesota, about the Northfield robbery and murders, and already they laid the blame on the James-Younger Gang. This we learned from a farmer who had heard the news in Janesville.
"You are ubiquitous," I told Jesse, a little running joke betwixt us. My brother liked to say that himself, vainglory being one of his foibles.
"Who else would have the gumption to rob a Yankee bank in Minnesota," Jesse said, defending himself.
We rode.
"Hell, we can't see shit in this rain," Charlie Pitts snapped later that day. "We need us a damned guide."
Which is how come Jesse borrowed the first kid from the farm. The kid got us past Janesville, where we turned him loose and gave him a dollar from our Northfield plunder for his trouble. At the next farm, we borrowed two more little yellow-haired boys, and they got us to the swamps just shy of Elysian. Those kids we paid a dollar each, too, then wound up borrowing some horses from the next two farms we come across.
"Hell, Dingus," Jim said. "We keep kidnapping little kids and stealing horses, rain or no rain, we'll be leaving a trail any fool can follow."
"You got a better idea? You know where we are? You know how to get us home, James Younger?"
"West and southwest," Cole said, acting the peacekeeper for once. "The posse ain't gonna be able to follow us worth a damn through these swamps."
So we made camp that night in the thickets between Elysian and what one of them tots said was German Lake.
That's where we got the notion to leave all of our horses. Jim Younger was right. If we kept stealing horses and borrowing youthful guides, the laws would find us certain sure, but it also came to Jesse that the posse would be chasing six men on horses. One of the horses we had borrowed was a fancy bright gelding. "Yaller horse," Charlie called it, and it was sure to attract attention. 'Course, we could have simply left that horse, but we figured on making better time afoot in the brambles and sloughs and woods. We'd sneak on past the posses.
That's what we done.
This is the life of an outlaw, worse than being chased by Pinkertons or Redlegs, worse than anything I'd experienced in Missouri during our war for liberty. We made four miles the first day afoot. When the rain stopped, the mosquitoes came out, and Jim's shoulder wound started festering. I figured Bob-in fever, delirious, breaking sticks in his mouth the pain was so fierce-would wind up losing that arm, or the rot would set in and kill him. After the mosquitoes had damned near sucked us dry, the rains would start again, damned torrents.
We ate watermelons till we grew sick of them. Green corn that laid some of us low with bowel complaints. I cussed Jesse and his idea to abandon the horses, not so much for not having anything to ride, but I figured I could always cut a sliver off the saddle strings and chew on it like jerky.
We walked, trudging along through mud, fording sloughs when we had to, soaked to the skin, about to catch our deaths.
The worst came after Jesse and Charlie snuck up to this farm, and caught us chickens and a turkey and, after wringing their necks, brought us back supper. Fresh meat at last. Charlie even had some lucifers that wasn't soaked and ruined, and we decided to risk a fire. Cole and I rigged up Bob's blanket over a tree branch, hoping that would catch most of the smoke and keep the rain off our cook fire. Jim cleaned the turkey while Charlie and Jesse plucked the chickens, and soon we had them birds roasting over our small fire.
Hell, I was so starved, I could have eaten them all raw.
Which is what maybe we should have done.
When you look back, it was a damned poor idea, because, sure enough, somebody either smelled the smoke or seen it or smelled the fowls cooking, 'cause here came some Minnesota sons-of-bitches sloshing through the woods, making more noise than a regiment of Yankee cavalry.
We had to run, leaving behind those birds, still roasting under the soaked blanket. Painful. What a tragic waste.
Next day was Wednesday. Almost one week since we'd robbed the damned bank in Northfield, and what did we have to show for it? Starving bellies. Ruined clothes, boots, hats. Two infecting wounds tormenting Jim and Bob, and the rest of us shot up and ailing considerable. Even Jesse had caught a flesh wound back in Northfield, though, Jesse being Jesse, he never let on till I spied it one evening when he was trying to doctor himself with a strip of his own underwear. Almost a week, and, damn it all to hell, we were still in Minnesota. Not even to Mankato.
"We got to find us a guide," I finally said.
"We've discussed that," Cole began. "The risk...."
"The hell with the risk, Bud!" I was wet, cold, hurting from a bullet that had torn my leg up bad. I missed my mother and my wife, and I just wanted to get out of these damned woods, get out of the rain. Noose or a bullet looked a far sight prettier than rooting in them wilds like some feral hog. "They got a thousand men chasing us, if you believe that farmer Charlie saw the other day when he was scavenging."
"But they haven't caught us," Cole argued.
"Yet. They will. Look at that damned tree over yonder, Bud. You see it? You remember it? You should, with that double fork and the deer's skull at the base. Ain't likely to be another like that from here to Eden. But that's the third damned time I've seen it."
"Lord have mercy," Jesse said. "We're going in circles."
Thunder rolled. The wind picked up. They all stared at me as I hadn't finished my stumping.