Eugenia had been told otherwise, so Bob splintered the coat tree with a bullet. A wood chip flew into the messenger’s eye. The eye turned red immediately.

“He thinks you’re fibbing,” Newcomb said.

The man reached for a chair back and pulled himself up and held a handkerchief at his eye socket. Newcomb unbuttoned his shirt front and unfolded a burlap sack he’d stuffed under his belt and he stood to the left of the messenger as the man moved the safe’s dial numbers around. The mechanisms dropped and the man pulled the handle down and offered Bob a large wrapped package which my brother took to be the big money but was actually waybills and canceled telegrams and newspapers torn to pieces. We would not discover the ruse until morning.

My brother pitched the bundle into the burlap sack, as he did the smaller package which was the one and two-dollar bills we eventually divvied up. Newcomb kept the heavy bag wrapped around his hand, letting the bulk of it hang by his knee.

Outside, Bryant kept the stoker and the engineer shoved down into the cinders while I tended to the getaway horses. “Pretend you’re snails,” he said. He fired his pistol randomly anywhere it wanted to go. He said, “Your passengers are fouling themselves by now.”

I was low ranny on the job so I had to sprint down the street to the stockyard where I unwrapped the reins from the fence and pulled the horses long-necked and into a trot. Bob and tiny Newcomb were banging down the mail car stairs when I neared, Newcomb holding the filled sack aloft and grinning under his mask. The two of them swung up onto their mounts at a run, not even using the stirrups. They pushed their horses up a short cliff and over onto a road that they pounded down.

I stayed behind on my horse with my scabbard rifle shouldered, scanning the area as Bryant released the stoker and engineer and limped on over toward me.

“Go on,” he yelled. “I’ll stand the cowards off.”

“You sure?”

Bryant spit tobacco. The scar on his face looked purple.

I kicked my horse up to the road and caught up with my brother and Newcomb in a dark farmyard among apple trees. “What’s taking Bryant so long?” Bob asked.

I shrugged. “When Charley’s definite about something I don’t like to interfere.”

Bob frowned at me. “Where’d you learn words like that?”

The horses shifted and stamped and rubbed their chins on the stirrups as the three of us counted nickels and dimes and quarters from the canvas currency bag.