The Return of Henry Starr, page 49
Newspapers and police reports weren’t enough. If Tilghman was going to put a name to the Outlaw, he needed to taste the dust in his trail and smell the air for his scent. So Tilghman now began to ride the loop in the Outlaw’s trace, talking again to witnesses and victims of the original robberies and the more recent bank jobs—bored witnesses, who had answered the same questions days or weeks or months ago for local police county sheriff state cops federal marshals reporters friends relatives, and so dealt snappishly, offhandedly with the old marshal sitting patiently, looking steadily at them with eyes so cold and gray—so cold that suddenly they felt a sharp chill off them and they’d reach down to come up with something new, something they’d held back or forgotten for the others, because it seemed trivial or a foolish thing to have noticed—but they told him, just to have something between Tilghman’s eyes and themselves, even if it was just noise:
“The leader, he walked like a cowboy, he might have been an Injun, he moved and talked young but his hands looked old. When he come in, before he pulled his gun he muttered something under his breath, and I said ‘What?’—and then he said, and pulled his six-gun, he said, ‘This is a robbery! Don’t move and you won’t get …’”
What was it he muttered before he pulled the gun?
“Something that sounded like ‘Something’s up’ or ‘Don’t gum it up …’”
Thumbs up.
“That’s right! That was it: ‘Thumbs up!’ was what he said, maybe just like you’d say something for good luck, or …”
Thumbs up, thought Tilghman, what he said was ‘Thumbs up and stand steady.’
Well, who else could it be?—that would leave the Cherokee Nation alone because it was his people, and because he had done the Nation in the old days with Cherokee Bill; that could organize things so completely and well, keep the gunplay low but twist a joke into your ribs that was sharp as a knife blade; that would hide and dodge and duck away but give you just the whiff of his scent, the flash of his face like a tip of his hat before he disappeared in the smoke and dust …
So now Tilghman had the name, and he went back to the loops on the map: he might start the next cycle spinning those loops of his backwards from north to south, but he’d been six times around and never done that. Tilghman reckoned he would start to the south again—not as far south as Coal County, because he’d been swinging his last loops tighter, no more than a morning on the train or a day’s hard ride out of Tulsa. Knowing that much, if you looked next for the towns with the fattest banks, a railroad line, and woodsy country to run away and hide in after, you could expect Henry Starr in any of half a dozen possible places between Stroud at one end of the range, and Okmulgee at the other.
The town of Bristow sat on the Frisco line just up the tracks between Tulsa and Stroud, with a telegraph link over to Okmulgee and a good straight road that way.
So Bill Tilghman took the train to Bristow, got himself rooms in the Frisco Hotel and arranged with the livery for a good horse to be kept saddled and ready for him every day. After breakfast he’d cross the street and sit in the telegraph office reading the papers and listening to the mechanical cricket clicking and chirping away. He was done figuring. He was just waiting like a buffalo hunter hidden in a blind made of nothing but distance and downwind.
On the afternoon of March 27, 1915, at 1:25 in the afternoon the steel cricket died. The clerk tapped away, trying to revive it, but it was no good. The line was down somewhere southwest of Bristow.
Tilghman got up and folded his paper. He asked the telegraph boy to wire Tulsa for some marshals to take the next train to Stroud. Then he crossed the street to the livery, mounted the horse that stood saddled and ready with a Winchester in the scabbard and rations and ammunition in the saddlebags, and rode out of town down the railroad line heading southwest for Depew, Stroud and however many towns southward he might have to search to find the man who was, by this time, stepping through the door of his chosen bank with his pistol in his hand saying, “Thumbs up, boys, and stand steady!”
STROUD
March 27, 1915
From the Stroud Democrat, April 2, 1915:
They came in a covered wagon from the jungles of the Osage Nation Country, north of Tulsa, and camped in the woods two miles east of town. They gave themselves out as hunters, and came frequently to our city to purchase supplies and ammunition.
The rest of the bunch came in by ones and twos: the best of the men he had chosen so carefully in each different part of the state. All they had in common was the secret he trusted them with, which was his true name. For the rest of it, Brown was a preacher, while Romero (who had retired to Oklahoma for his health after four years with Pancho Villa) was a Catholic; Estes was a peckerwood ex-tenant and one time or another in his life most likely made one in a lynch mob, while Nat Shields was a black cropper with a warrant on him for shooting the sheriff who served his family their dispossess. Bergman (the ex-Wobbly oil rigger who had dynamited three wells and a storage tank after they busted the strike in Red Fork) was some kind of Hunky or maybe a Jew. Jack Shays was an old cowboy who had scraped enough off his wages to buy a small ranch, and he had it in for Jewbankers (it was one word to him) because of losing his place for debt—burnt it to the ground the day after the auction: house barns, corrals feed … and livestock too. When he remembered the horses screaming he liked to get hard drunk, but when he was sober he was a cool hand.
All they had in common was their grievance, their secret and their quality—and that they trusted Henry Starr enough so that when he said Come on, here they were: watching each other uneasily, waiting on Henry Starr to speak the word.
They were to go masked, but he was going in with his face open. Let them go after the money, that wasn’t what Henry Starr wanted in Stroud. What he wanted was to let the whole state of Oklahoma know it wasn’t any Oklahoma crime wave or red race-mixing anarchist revolution they had been looking at, but just the deeds of an outlaw named Henry Starr, who come from the Cherokee Nation but understood all the different kinds of justice there was and showed people how a man could ride out after it. And when he finished in Stroud he’d have a name that would be good in the Nations for as long as people had heart to remember, not for the things he hadn’t done like dying with Cherokee Bill, but for being the Outlaw who hoodwinked Robin Hood and out-Jesse’d the James brothers, who won where the Daltons lost, who knew the taste of justice and lived by it, and run the law ragged all over the Nations.
He couldn’t wait anymore for the people out there to read “Henry Starr” behind the mask of the great Outlaw in which he had covered himself. Things were getting out of hand. That poor kid and old man in Bub Houston’s country taking blame because nobody could put “Henry Starr” to the robberies there were just signs of what would come if he didn’t take ahold of things again.
It was hard enough trying to live up to Tom Starr and Jesse James. Now it was himself he had to climb over, or something he had made out of himself, which had got away and outgrown him, and become like some kind of know-all see-all be-all bare-hand-bear-killing giant—so big and heavy that its weight made you cramp yourself all humble, so strong that it could eat your ghost and shit your name on the ground.
Yet there was something in the situation that made him want to laugh, it was damn funny a man going out to climb over his own ghost. “Henry Starr—he was the smartest outlaw who ever lived, so smart that the only one who could ever really climb over him was Henry Starr himself.”
After the noon meal on the twenty-seventh, they were ready to go.
Preacher Brown, riding his old white gelding, pulled out two hours ahead of Henry Starr and Estes and Shays, who stayed behind to break up the camp. They would meet by the stockyards in Stroud, coming in from opposite directions, at 2:30 P.M. Romero, Bergman and Nat Shields rode with Brown, Shields leading the string of spare horses. Shields would wait with the horses in the blackjack thickets southeast of town—he didn’t like it, but Henry Starr had to keep his word to Bub Houston that nothing he did would point the law toward the colored people of Okfuskee and Lincoln counties. When they had dodged any close pursuers off their track in the tangles of deadfall and branch bars they would switch to fresh mounts, split up seven different ways, and meet again at Henry Starr’s place in Tulsa for the cut.
Shays and Estes worked with silent intensity burying the remnants of the fire, loading the gear back into the wagon even though they’d never use it again. “Bob,” said Henry Starr quietly, and held out his pocket watch. Estes dusted his hands, and with his eyes buried in the air before him walked blindly to his reddish-brown bay horse, mounted and trotted stiffly out of the clearing.
After an interval of five minutes Henry Starr and Shays followed him. When they stopped at the foot of the two telegraph poles and climbed to the crosspiece they could see Estes breasting the top of the hill between them and Stroud. Six miles off invisible to the southwest-ward but as clear and certain as anything in Henry Starr’s sight or thought, Brown and his men were doing the same to the lines from Stroud down to Oklahoma City. And maybe somewhere out there Bill Tilghman is waiting too, smelling my ghost even if he ain’t put the name to it yet, but after today I better look sharp for gray eyes. He smiled howdy to Bill Tilghman through the sky northeastward to Tulsa.
The cut telegraph and telephone wires fell to the roadside, they clambered down, Henry Starr bent and began rapidly wrapping the fallen wire into a loop. “Go on,” he said to Shays, who mounted his black horse and took off at a jerky trot, hitching in his saddle as if he had caught the jitter spark from the cut wire. Henry Starr tossed the roll of wire into the brush. He mounted and set his horse in Shays’s track at an easy walk, letting the ex-cowboy disappear over the hill toward Stroud.
Henry Starr kept his interval, three minutes behind Shays, so he was the last of the three to pass up the main street of Stroud, the Appaloosa nodding her spooky black-and-white head and jingling her bridle as if on parade, his eyes checking one last time to see where sheriff and deputies, businessmen and customers, locals and visitors were standing or sitting, playing pool or sipping whiskey or licking ice-cream cones in Balcomb’s or buying groceries from Baum or Brogan or Galloway—fixing every thing and person in Stroud in his mind so that he was dead-sure certain, because it was all on him and that was how he wanted it, because until he had said his word he and his men were simply hunters in town to buy supplies, and Stroud was a nowhere village calling itself a city and nobody listening, and nothing had happened there and probably nothing ever would.
Paul Curry looked out the front door of Brogan’s store, northward past the hanging sign of the First National Bank, up the street toward the Opera House. Except for a farmer on a bay horse jogging past him heading for the stockyards the street was empty. He wondered was that the man who had ordered the hogs, but from the look of him he didn’t have cash enough to buy a slab of bacon let alone four big hogs killed, hung and butchered out. Curry leaned the hog-killing rifle against the doorpost—a big-bore Winchester with a cut-down barrel. It was a clumsy-looking gun, a dirt farmer’s gun, a butcher boy’s gun, and he hated it. Bad enough his father had lost the store to Brogan, bad enough working as boy where he should have been coming into the property, but Brogan had to have him killing hogs like a butcher—stand just far enough off so the head snot and blood don’t spray on you and blow their piggy brains out. There was men out in the woods hunting deer, with rifles long and lean and clean-looking. This gun was more a kind of club, beat a critter’s brains out with it instead of piercing its heart with one clean long shot across a big empty distance full of morning light.
He envied Matt Taylor, who couldn’t run the football on the same field with Paul Curry when they played at the high school, but who had a beauty of a Remington and let Paul Curry try it one night, shining rats’ eyes on the big garbage dump east of town and popping their heads off with single shots. Paul had tried the same thing with the hog gun in daylight, but you had to come in too close for shooting anything as little as a rat. He’d tried barking squirrels out of a cottonwood tree near the stockyards, chipping bark aplenty but never hitting fine enough to knock the critter off his branch.
It was the slack of the day. He could look forward to sweeping out till
Mr. Titus delivered the hogs; then the rest of the day shooting ’em, skinning and dropping the guts out, and hanging the carcasses up to drip and stink. He’d be dripping and stinking himself. He’d have flies in his eyes and nose and hair. Buck that pigskin through the line, Curry, said the coach. Now I know where the pigskin come from.
Mr. Penniman hitched his wagon in front of the Stroud Opera House, right in front of the big sign that showed how The Birth of a Nation was still playing there, and he said, “See now, I told you it would still be here” to the little girl sitting next to him on the buckboard seat.
“We’ll see it now,” she told him.
“No,” he said (he had said this before and before and before), “they won’t be starting till five. We have to see Mr. Shaffer first about Mother’s pictures, then we—”
“I don’t want to see Mother’s pictures,” she said, “I want to see the ones that move.”
Mother is dead, he thought, Mother is dead and neither she nor her pictures will ever move again, but he said, “Later, we’ll come see how they move later.” A man rode up the street as he lifted his daughter down, just a cowboy trotting his black horse to get through town as quick as possible, horse’s shoes making a rapid clackclackclackclack on the pavement, heartbeat quick, heading nowhere. When Mr. Penniman had been a cowboy he had never just drifted, but was always pointing directly toward the ranch he would someday buy, always heading somewhere. He had got this far, that the bank had notes on his ranch and his wife was dead and all he was going to have of her was pictures and a little rattle-head kid that every time he saw her smile it made his wife come alive and die for him all over again. Enjoy the ride, cowboy, he thought after the passing rider, it will beat whatever you find at the end of it.
Westward four blocks on Main Street, Mr. Patrick, the teller at the Stroud State Bank, and Dr. Vincent bumped into each other in the doorway of Burton’s drugstore. Dr. Vincent’s offices occupied the second story above the Stroud Bank’s competitor, the. First National, which sat on the corner just two doors down. They each said “Excuse me” at the same time. Maybe that and bumping into each other accounted for the embarrassment each saw in the other, as if they had committed an imprudent intimacy instead of just bumping into each other.
Patrick walked stiff-legged away, and stopped in front of Brogan’s grocery, between Burton’s and the First National Bank. He watched a man on horseback coming at a nervous jerky trot and decided to cross after he had passed. From the deeps of the store he heard the whisk whisk of a broom, and Brogan calling to his boy Paul Curry from the pens in back, The hogs is here … the hogs is here. He paused and popped a mint into his mouth and coughed experimentally. The mint was a lozenge for his throat, always bad in the blowing dust and pollen of spring, and also a mask for the whiskey-sweet smell of his breath after a quick sniff at Carlock’s saloon. When the man had passed (a stranger on a black horse, looked like a cowboy), he crossed without going to the corner of 5th and Main, avoiding the line of sight from the doors and windows of the First National Bank looking out on Main Street. The bank clerks in this little town were all out to better themselves at each other’s expense, and there were two who had already applied for Patrick’s own job at the Stroud State Bank. His job had sides to it that made a quick trip to Carlock’s worth the risks, but it was his, as good as anything he was likely to get, and he wasn’t about to let it be tattletaled away.
As he walked up the street toward the Stroud State Bank at the corner of Main and 4th streets, he saw Mr. Penniman and his little girl standing in front of Shaffer’s Photographic Studio and touched his hat, but Penniman was too absorbed in the child to notice another adult. “Please,” he was saying, “it really isn’t too much to expect, now is it, Emmy?” as if the kid was a henpecking old wife instead of a six-year-old spoiled brat. The little girl flounced and put out her lip. Big man like that making a fool of himself over a kid, thought Patrick contemptuously, and his hand rose unconsciously to finger the diamond stickpin that held his tie to his shirt—a gift from his mother, it had been her father’s, given to him on his promotion. It would take more than mints to fool her, he thought grimly.
Up the street came another lone rider, and Patrick recognized him by the Appaloosa he was riding as one of the hunters camping out at the Bradford place—“Mr. Howard,” he called, tipping his hat as the man rode by, loose in the saddle and not a care in the world likely—face all brown from living out of doors, that was the life, and Mr. Howard had property too, had been into the bank inquiring about arrangements for a transfer of funds—some men had it all, thought Patrick, as he opened the glassed door of the bank and nodded to the tellers behind the brass bars of their cages.
Two blocks away Dr. Vincent left Burton’s drugstore with a wrapped parcel of arsenic powder. The arsenic was medicinal, but he felt a little ashamed of his taste for tipping a little bit into his glass of whiskey before bedtime, so he held it close to his side, concealing it from the lone rider who came jogging easily up the street: part Indian by his physiognomy, Vincent guessed—his horse was an odd one, like a white horse that had been dipped headfirst in oil-mottled water, then weirdly splotched and dashed with black paint on the rump. The rider turned the corner of 4th Street, likely headed for the stockyards. Probably a delivery of cattle on the 2:55 from Tulsa.
Henry Starr passed the yellow brick and brownstone-arched windows of the Stroud State on the right and then the store-front First National on the left, and as he came up to the brick facade and W-notched roofline of the telephone company building he saw the line crews—two of them—clucking their teams out of the alleyway, heading out of town in opposite directions. Henry Starr smiled, something must be wrong with the wires. The rapid clickclick of his horse’s shoes on the pavement was suddenly deadened as he turned off Main Street onto packed dirt.
