Then Bob drew his pistol and crouched under a baggage car to see how many were the shooters, and he saw men he recognized: LeFlore sitting down on an abandoned shuttle car that was poked through with weeds, cupping his left elbow, blood bulging out of his coat sleeve. Kinney had been downed by us too. His white shirt was twisted out of his trousers and his pale belly showed, so that he resembled a workingman napping in the grass at lunch hour. Sid Johnson knelt in a coal pile, his right arm out stiff and the pistol smoking out of its muzzle and chamber. The pistol kicked up when he pulled the trigger and then he let his arm stiffen again.

My brother Bob waddled underneath the carriage until he wasn’t twenty feet from the shed. And he said, “Sid Johnson! You old scalawag!” And the deputy marshal swiveled and then one of his five or six best friends, the one who could turn the pages of a Bible with a bent-sight .22, put a .45 caliber slug into Johnson’s shoulder and knocked him onto his seat in the coal. There were black circles on his trouser knees. (I heard when the doctors pulled off Sid’s shirt, his shoulder flapped loose like a stocking cap. “Boy oh boy,” said Johnson. “Bob’ll never let me live this down.”)

Two or three special deputies were firing from the smoking parlor car, a foot-long blaze with each report, but they didn’t have much for targets. About six volunteers braced themselves at the rail of the smoker trying to muster up courage with their guns in their belts and their brains as slow as cattle and sheep and mud hens. They saw my brother Bob stand from under the baggage car and two of them had the wherewithal to yank pistols from their holsters at least, but Bob potted just one gas lamp over their heads and they withdrew back into the dark of the car like slugs.

With the shooting from the coal shed stopped, Grat and I clambered out of the engine cab with the hoghead and the stoker, who carried a coal pick over his shoulder. Dick Broadwell grabbed it from him and chopped the pick into the sliding door, wood barking and yelping and flying away in splinters. We heard a key and the padlock clicked open and the door rumbled as it rolled wide. Oven air rushed on us and the messenger trembled there with his hands high and his blue shirt black with perspiration, sweat trickling down off his nose.

Bob couldn’t figure out why the attendant had opened a door that was secured, so he stood back and asked, “Is it just you in there? Are you alone?”

The messenger swallowed and shook his head from side to side.

I could hear the Texas badman sit down hard on the mail-bags. “Shee-oot, Williams! Real flaming smart!”