I saw the brakeman’s lantern on a second-class coach as it rolled past. I said, “I bet they’re so danged embarrassed already they’ll shoot ya soon as you walk into town.”

“Naw! Do you think so? Naw. They know the conditions. It’s like a prizefight, Emmett. You don’t go slamming the other guy around after he’s out of the ring.”

“I forget: we’re gentlemen.”

He looked at me like I was simple.

Johnson, Kinney, and LeFlore had struggled up the stairs of the smoking parlor car and sat down bleeding onto newspapers in the aisle. The ticket agent had ducked inside the depot and bolted shut the doors and was probably at that moment signaling yet another posse. And the Dalton gang backed down the main street of the quiet town of Adair, taking some last shots from the caboose without reply.

I was sick of trains and the mulish routine of robbing them and I was frankly a little scared of being shot at, scared enough to make my stomach hurt. Pierce drove the wagon ahead to where the horses were hitched and we walked through town as we had entered it, seven slimy men in noisy raincoats, striding out of Adair under elm trees, except now we were alone in the town, every lamp was extinguished, the doors were shut, and children were crouched down in closets like we were boogey-men. I was as hot as I’ve ever been, and I had to keep slapping at mosquitoes that swarmed at my face and hands. I took the boardwalk in front of the drugstore and saw a shattered window with the two doctors flat on their backs in shards of glass.

My brother Bob and I stood there, struck mute and motionless by what we saw, which was Dr. W. L. Goff, who’d suffered the freakish accident of a wild pistol shot that exploded his left eye. Blood covered all of one half of his face and slid away from his head with the slope of the floor. He’d die within the hour. The other doctor, who was named Youngblood (according to the newspaper clippings), had been struck in the throat with a ricochet. His fingers curled and uncurled. He saw me staring and turned his head and blood and food surged out of his mouth like he’d spilled a soup pan onto a table. “Help me,” he said. “Please help me.” And I ran away as fast as I could while my brother Bob looked on, fascinated, his hands deep in his raincoat pockets.

17

THE DALTON GANG RODE northwest toward Kansas and into the Dog Creek hills, while three posses of over a hundred city boys, each a clanking arsenal, strove after us in several wrong directions. At four in the morning, the spoils of Adair were apportioned, Bob doing the mathematics as always, at which he was baffling, fast as a gambler with cards.