The stoker in the cab had tears in his eyes. The newspapers said he was fifty-two years old. His left cheek was as swollen as a balled-up woolen sock; his left eye was drooped and closing. He said, “What do you want us to do? Say something.”

“Get down from here,” said a masked man.

The stoker cautiously climbed down a ladder step and jumped.

Bryant was walking backwards past the passenger cars, limping like a man with a six-inch wooden shoe. He held his pistol straight out with both hands, lifting it from one window to the next. Faces ducked out of view.

After he heard Bryant’s gunshot, the Wharton ticket agent rushed out from behind the counter and suffocated the lamps. The train conductor took off his cap and sat down on his step stool, frozen. The mail car attendant, called in those days the messenger, jammed the bolt up into its seat at the top of the door and threw the double latch bolts above the handle. Then he removed the money of large denominations from the safe and stuffed the bills into a Franklin stove, where we missed them.

A tall deputy marshal in a dark, three-piece suit and waxed mustache walked down the aisle in the second class car, peering out at Bryant. He’d been reading some federal arrest warrants and he left these in his seat.

When the conductor saw the marshal’s badge he said, “My heart is about to erupt.”

“My name is Ransom Payne.” He leaned out the window and said, “It’s me they want, not the money.” He opened the door on the left side of the car and hung his large white hat on the handle and walked slow as a bridegroom into the sunflower stalks where he crouched down with his gun in his hand.

My brother and Newcomb had by then climbed the iron stairs to the green mail car, and Newcomb swung a fire axe into the door. It middled open on the second blow and Newcomb reached in to pull the bolts free.

The messenger cowered down in a far corner by a coat tree. There were varnished boxes along the right wall as they faced it, and stacked canvas bags and steamer trunks on the floor. In the center of the car was the small Franklin stove, used in the winter for heating. It was empty now except for the big money the messenger had just stuffed inside. Neither Bob nor Newcomb ever thought to look there and the messenger was later to receive a gold watch for his genius.

Bob glared at him and tapped the barrel of his pistol on the safe. “Open it,” he said.

“I can’t help you there,” the employee said. “I don’t know the combination.”

Bob kept tapping the safe to annoyance.

“The vaults are closed in Kansas City and the combinations wired down to Gainesville. I never hear a number.”