Grat smirked and walked out the front door, and I collected Newcomb and the package loot, and then the whole Dalton gang was gone from the waiting room, there for barely three minutes, leaving behind us chaos and silence and the very first robbery of a depot in American history as far as I know. We stood on the board sidewalks or sat on benches and talked brief sentences to each other. The boy on the bike rattled up to the depot; then he turned his bike around. Mosquitoes whined in the air. I walked the railroad ties and saw a woman shooing her children into the house, her hand latched onto a boy’s wrist, while a crowd of elders stood under an elm tree, talking and gesticulating, and a man in slippers climbed down his porch steps loading a double-barreled shotgun. Don’t know what ever happened to him. I hooked my steamy raincoat over my pistol butt and walked back to the depot, theatrical as they come. I was sweating like sweat was my full-time job. Powers said, “Looks like we’re going to have an audience.”

Doolin said, “They won’t be around long.”

The station agent stopped his nose bleed with twisted railroad stationery and sat obediently with Broadwell on the front bench. Bob wavered a lit match over the schedule board until he found what he wanted and blew out the flame. “Comes at 9:22,” he said.

Passenger train Number 2 was then about three miles away and men who’d boasted after Pryor Creek about having repelled the Daltons and made us turn tail now sat stony on their cushioned green seats, swaying with the coach, sweating and smoking and letting the scares crawl all over them. A man vomited into his hat. Reports indicate that at least three of that crew walked out to piss and flung their rifles away, and the cowards crashed through coach doors to the rear of the train where they slid down into safer passenger seats with their badges in their pockets.

The engineer pulled the whistle cord twice and saw the Adair way signal flash red and he threw up the long throttle valve lever and turned the valve cutoffs that let air pressure escape from the drive cylinders. Steam rolled out white and unribboned in the air and the boiler gauge arrow swung left and fell while the air pressure gauge arrow climbed and they were coasting with the bell ringing loud and the engineer hanging an elbow out the cab window while the fireman drank the last of his vacuum bottle of coffee, what trainmen call crank, and fastened a sweaty suspender strap on his overalls. The engineer pushed the valve levers for the drive cylinder brakes and the steel tires screeched on the rails. The fireman said, “There’s two men in black raincoats at the depot. That would be the railroad guards, I suppose.”

“Oughta be more than two.”