But Doolin broke away and whooped and hollered and flourished his pistol and fired it. He galloped his horse straight at the frozen passengers, his raincoat sailing, the front of his hat flopped back. The men scurried out of his way. At the caboose he pulled his reins left and turned his horse around and charged down the train again, jousting. The fat man in the checkered vest sat down in the cinders and covered his face with his elbows, and Doolin kicked off the man’s hat with a stirrup. Then he stopped his horse next to Powers, grinning and breathing hard. “Scattered like hens, didn’t they.”

Powers had the heavy money sack on his shoulder. When he tied it to Doolin’s saddle horn, the saddle canted to the side. “Bob’s a trifle displeased with you. He said you should carry this.”

“Does he think that’s the dunce cap or something? Carrying away all the swag?”

“I don’t know,” said Powers. “I didn’t think to ask.”

Coming from the rear my horse stalled and stepped across the tracks like a sissy, so I was late getting in front of the locomotive. But I managed to raise my rifle up as Bob hustled the engine crew up to the cab. Broadwell heaved the sliding express door closed and Pierce brought Powers’s horse up by the reins.

Bob said to the engineer, “I calculate the MK&T lost about five minutes so you’d better hurry out of here if you want to hit Dallas on time.” He stepped off the train onto the depot’s loading platform. “Oh, and when you get to the gantlet, slow up and have your firemen shovel off some coal. And don’t be too stingy about it or I might introduce you to serious trouble.”

Steam hushed and I saw the wheel eccentrics drop and then the five-foot drive wheels started to spin, the couplings gripped in a succession of clanks, and the coaches howled into sway.

Newcomb climbed onto the depot roof from his saddle and jinked along the peak until he found the porcelain insulators and the depot telegraph lines. Don’t know why he bothered about them. Maybe it was just meanness. The wires sprang away from his snippers and Newcomb hung by a gutter and dropped back onto his saddle; then he and Bob spurred their horses down the wooden stairs and along the creosote-painted ties behind the rolling train. The fat man in the checkered vest was shaking his fist from the last coach; the old black woman was stooped over at the siding dropping coal into a pail. It was as sweet a picture as you’d ever want to see, and it did us no harm at all in that country to rob from the rich and give to the poor. That shovel of coal kept many on our side unto the very end.