‘Get out!’ I pulled up onto my shoes and stood there with my hands quivering at the red velvet that covered the pistol, cocking back the hammer with both thumbs.
Then I was alone in the house except for my sleeping wife, and I sat at the foot of our bed in the dark, smoking down a Camel. I went into the bathroom and turned on the light and hung my suit and shirt on hangers. And I looked at my back in the long door-mirror, at the eighteen wicked scars of double-ought shot that were like cigarette burns on the skin, at the scar on my hip left by a rifle slug, that still registered rain and cold and too much time in my shoes with twinges sharp as cat bites. I peeled away a yellowed square of gauze taped to my festering right shoulder and squeezed a cream medicine from a silver tube into the ugly red eruption of skin, the result of a rifle shot that shattered the bone when I was twenty years old, that is still uncured forty-five years later. I tore the paper wrapper off a clean bandage and fixed it on. I buttoned on pajamas and tied my robe and with a glass of water swallowed three pills from three bottles, then carried my wife’s cup and saucer downstairs to the kitchen sink where I left them for the maid.
And I stood in the living room next to the movie projector with its motor switched to reverse. I lit another cigarette and waved out the match and squinted through smoke to see the film collect off of the take-up reel, but after several hundred feet I stopped the machine and flipped the switch from rewind to forward and turned on the projector lamp, so that I could view my nickelodeon film: Beyond the Law, a movie starring me and written by me, produced by myself and John B. Tackett, adapted from the reminiscence I serialized in Wide World magazine. Tackett and I toured the country with it in 1918 and made a boodle of money even though it was pretty awful. I’d stared down dangerous men in my time but I was scared in front of Tackett’s camera, the scowliest character ever on film. I flung my hands around, I slapped my shooting iron out of a polished black holster, I dressed like a buckaroo; and I was forty-six years old in that film, not the boy of my adventures; I looked ridiculous. Tackett was a fine showman, however, and he’d stand on movie-house stages in strange cities to deliver a stirring narrative about the Dalton gang, what trains we robbed and the way my brothers blazed to their deaths, ending with a list of the men we murdered:
&
nbsp; ‘Charlie Montgomery, bushwacked over a woman. Then a Wharton ticket agent. Bill Starmer, after stealing his horse. Marshal Ed Short in a railroad car. An innocent bystander named Dr. W. L. Goff. And on a sunny morning in October, Lucius Baldwin, Charles Brown, George Cubine, and City Marshal Connelly; all of Coffeyville, Kansas.’
And then as a surprise, an added attraction, I’d walk onto that stage with him and stare over the footlights to the farmers and clerks and secretaries who gasped or hushed or whispered to each other while the children slunk down in their seats like I was an ogre that feasted on noses and toes. Maybe I’d wave my white hat, maybe I’d autograph a program that was pushed at my fancy lizard-skin boots; then Tackett would signal the projection booth and I’d sit on a chair next to the curtain cables offstage, my back to the screen while three vicious, two-gunned bandits crouched out of the Condon bank and scurried across the bricked street to a dirt alley where two other glowering outlaws in frock coats fired pistols at clerks in a hardware store.
It was two in the morning in my Hollywood house and I saw myself with a boot in a stirrup and a money sack wrapped around the saddle horn, my damaged right arm hanging down in its sleeve as my eyes slid to take cues from the director behind a ratcheting camera. I jerked my skittering horse around and it balked at the artificial blue smoke and the hammering gunfire while actors with shotguns and sleeve garters stalked out into the street. I rode into a cross fire and I leaned down for my brother Bob without stopping my horse, bent as far as I could to pick him up, with blood dripping off of my fingers.
I stayed with that streaked, brown film to its slam-bang end and then the projector lamp flashed a square of white and I sat there hearing the film feed through the sprockets and onto the take-up reel.
Jesse James was shot in the back and Bob Younger died of tuberculosis and his brothers Cole and Jim were paroled from a Minnesota prison after twenty-five years on a life sentence. Jim took a job as a traveling salesman and committed suicide in 1902. Cole spent his last years with carnivals, lecturing on the evils of crime, and just before Frank James died of consumption in 1915, he was paid to stand by a theater door and tear children’s movie tickets in half.
And Emmett Dalton spent his last years in Hollywood, California, or walking the streets of Coffeyville, Kansas, with a crowd shoved around me, adults and children gaping at the picket fence with pea vines on it where getaway horses were once tied to a pipe, and then at peach crates stacked at the rear of a restaurant that had been the barn where my brother Bob lay dying.
Bob is dead; that’s what I’m sorry about. Sometimes it seems I return for him over and over again.
2
All the notorious Dalton boys served as peace officers in the Indian Territories at some time. The best of us was my brother Frank who was murdered by whiskey runners on a Sunday morning in November of 1887. He was a marshal working for Judge Isaac Parker in the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations of what would become Oklahoma, and he was paid a paltry two dollars for every criminal he hauled into the federal court at Fort Smith, Arkansas, with any necessary burials being deducted from his paycheck. So he could not have been anticipating much extra spending money when he and Deputy Jim Cole got word that the Bill Smith bunch were selling hard liquor to the Indians out of a nester camp in the Arkansas River bottoms.
They rode through canebrake from three in the morning till five. Marsh fog splashed away from the horses’ shoes. Then the sun lifted and they saw in the green morass a white tent with walls of mud and hickory logs. My brother Frank and Deputy Cole picketed their horses and crept up so close to the camp they could burn their hands on the cooking embers, and there espied the bootlegger Lee Dixon in a sleeping bag and Baldy Smith himself, in a black suit on a stained mattress with a chub whore out of Tupelo who called herself Mrs. Smith. The officers did not notice young Bill Towerly squatted down near the horse tie-ups drinking a cup of grainy coffee.
Frank stood up and walked toward the tent with a warrant in his hand that charged Smith with larceny and introducing. He stomped his boot heel on the board floor and Smith raised up his head from sleep and the two men talked for a minute and Lee Dixon got up on his elbow and rubbed his eyes and stared at Jim Cole.
Then Smith fired a derringer at my brother’s stomach. Frank groaned and dropped down to his knees, holding the front of his coat, and he cocked his Peacemaker and shot Smith in the neck, and cocked it again and shot Smith’s whore in the heart and Deputy Cole shot the man in the sleeping bag as he was hunting for the Dragoon he kept hidden under his pillow.
Blue gun smoke hung in the trees and Dixon was writhing with pain in his sleeping bag and Cole walked up to the tent with his pistol hanging by his leg, and out of nowhere that teenaged kid, Towerly, shot a hole in the deputy’s chest just above his right nipple, knocking Cole backwards over a tent rope. Cole bellied through sump mud into the trees and slumped against his saddle. My brother Frank was on his knees and so bent over in his agony that his face was in the dirt and Cole thought Frank was dead until Towerly walked up to the tent in his gray long Johns and hip waders and pushed Frank over to his back.
My brother had tears in his eyes as he rasped, ‘Don’t. Please don’t shoot. Let me be.’ But Towerly cocked his pistol and shot Frank in the mouth, and he cocked his pistol again and blew the top of my brother’s head off.
I mention that miserable episode because it meant a lot to my brother Bob. He was seventeen years old at the time and he’d just been hired as a Cherokee policeman under the half-breed John W. Jordan, and it was Bob who escorted the body home in that mahogany box filled with ice.
He hunkered down out of the cold next to my brother’s coffin, which was transported in a slat-sided cattle car. Bob wore a sheepskin coat and a broad hat that was pulled down and tied close to his ears with a wool scarf, but he didn’t have gloves so when the train stopped for water and coal somewhere south of Chelsea, my brother got off and poured a brakeman’s coffee on his fingers to take the bite away. And when he returned a railroad inspector had the coffin lid unlatched and leaned against a slat wall, and the man gazed at Frank’s corrupted remains with a cheek of tobacco that he was spitting on the floor. ‘Lookit the fearsome holes in this man,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it pitiful?’
So my brother stared at the body of a man with no more face than a plate of food and he puked into the straw and swore God’s own vengeance on the wicked, much like a boy steeped in the romantic adventures of The Wide Awake Library and Beadle’s Half-Dime novels. But I think he also made some other resolutions because he was very different after that.
I can recall very little about Bob from childhood when he and I slept in the same white iron bed. I’d see him call sooey at the pig trough with a basket of black apples and table garbage; see him combing his hair in the speckled mirror in the kitchen, experimenting with parts; see him in a wool shirt and knickers at the front of a one-room schoolhouse, parsing sentences on the blackboard. I remember him sitting on a milk pail stabbing a bowie knife at a plank between his boots. I remember him trying to stand on his hands and older brother Frank squinting from tobacco smoke and holding Bob’s feet, saying, ‘Up! Up!’ I remember that he pissed against the barn in the cold and the gray steam floated up like seaweed. Those must not seem very special recollections of the Dalton who was to become the most famous, but Bob was the brother next to me, barely two years older than I was, and I envied him too much to pay close attention to his various attainments.
Bob was as handsome as Hamlet was when played by an actress (which was the fashion in those days), and he got tapped for Lady’s Choice every time it occurred at hoedowns. His brown hair was cut very short and his sideburns were shaved off at the top of his ear. He had blue eyes that slanted a bit and white teeth that he took good care of, brushing them with baking soda four or five times a day. He remembered whatever he read and he could multiply like a banker and spell any word backwards, and one of the schoolmarms had it in her head that he’d attend Cornell Medical School. He paid attention to what women said; he listened so hard he frowned; and if he couldn’t think of a proper answer he’d come up with something charming. He was six feet tall and maybe one hundred sixty pounds in his boots, all hard sinew and skeleton under his clothes, with skin as white as library paste. He was considered under the standards of that day to be friendly and suave and dashing. You cannot tell it from John Tackett’s authentic photograph of Bob Dalton bootless and dead.
Soon after Frank’s funeral my older brother Grattan was named to replace the bereaved hero. Grat was glorified in legend for a while because a rustler named Felix Griffin shot him in the stomach as Grat attempted an arrest, but my brother kept walking at him unvexed and used his hat to slap the man down to his knees. The bullet had split a wooden button on his shirt and Grat squeezed the slug out of his belly like a cinder. Some people claimed Grat had it in him to become as great a lawman as Heck Thomas and the talk about him became so exaggerated that when the Osage Indians created a tribal police force, they selected the great man’s younger brother, Robert Renick Dalton, then eighteen, to be the new police chief, the youngest in the history of the West.
That year I was a cowpuncher at the Bar X Bar ranch near Pawnee where I mixed with bad company in the bunkhouse—Dick Broadwell, Bill Powers, Bill Doolin—and my brother Bob soon got the inspiration to save my soul by hiring me as his posseman.
I was the ninth son in the brood of fifteen kids who were Lewis and Adeline Dalton’s, and when I left that measly, cramped, hardscrabble farm for sixteen-hour days on a horse, kicking cattle into pens, I was as happy as I’ll ever be, like I’d been released from sufferance and began my life all over again.
But there was a pull to be with my brothers again that lured me away from that ranch. And I can recall the grin on the face of the sixteen-year-old Emmett Dalton who stood on the steps of the Methodist church for his official swearing-in. I was six-feet-two inches tall and long for my clothes and twenty pounds to the better of Bob, wearing a cardboard collar and a paisley tie and big-roweled spurs on my boots. My hair was slicked back with rose oil and cut close about my ears with a bowl so that the white of my scalp showed through. And my
father, who was then seventy-three, sat on a split-bottom chair in a knee-long velvet-trimmed coat he wore over the scrubbed gray top of his long underwear, staring at me and smoking a corncob pipe, trying to place me among his children while the wind blew his white hair around.
Grat stayed on in the Cherokee legislative territory with an office in Tahlequah, and Bob worked the northern Osage nations out of an office in Pawhuska, the capital, with his warrants originating from the federal court in Wichita, Kansas. He hired twenty Osage men as peace enforcers; murderous, brown-looking men with black-looking hands, who wore greasy buckskins and feathered black hats and smelled worse than city sewers. I had rank over them and a desk job for a couple of weeks, but I got tired of that and soon I was riding with Bob, taking schooner wagons of criminals up to the federal court.
Bob and I walked down the mud alleys of boom towns with serious faces and hands on our pistol butts and older men sat on onion crates smoking pipes outside of their tents, snickering at us like we were children, like we ought to be wearing short pants. Bob stopped a lumber truck on a main street to check the driver’s bill-of-sale and the carpenters hammering up the storefronts quit work to nudge each other or straddle a roof peak and shout jokes down at the brand-new marshal. But there was never a nineteen-year-old as sure of himself as Bob was. He seemed to think he already had Wyatt Earp’s mean reputation. He pushed giant men out of his way on the streets; he shut down a saloon on a Saturday night because there was gambling going on; he was a stickler for licenses and paid-up fees. He arrested every drunk he saw; he’d handcuff a woman for stealing potatoes; he’d walk against a man’s drawn gun and twist it out of his fist like nothing bad could happen to him. He was as unscared as a lawman can be.